Maerlant in French (almost) Language, Verse, and Cultural Traffic in Late Medieval Bruges

Maerlant in French (almost)

Language, Verse, and Cultural Traffic
in Late Medieval Bruges

In the late medieval Low Countries, translations from French into Dutch far outnumber those in the reverse direction1. A rare example of Dutch-French translation – and the only known example of verse translation in this direction – is Harau Martin, a French version of Jacob van Maerlant’s Martijn poems. The text survives in fragments from an edition produced in Bruges around 1477, by the francophone printer Jean Brito2. It has long been acknowledged that Harau Martin 304is not the work of a native French speaker: form and syntax are heavily influenced by Dutch3. But why would a small-scale printer bring out a Dutch literary classic in a manifestly inadequate translation? More importantly, what does this bizarre publishing venture reveal about the transcultural and cross-linguistic character of the region’s literary culture?

I propose three complementary perspectives on Harau Martin. The first is book-historical: Brito’s edition reflects a wider publishing strategy that involves seeking out unexpected new audiences, including speakers of Dutch as well as French. The second draws on translation theory: as an instance of “foreignizing translation”, the French text extends the boundaries of the target literary system. The third uses recent research in sociolinguistics, to suggest that the translation is a performance of “stylized Dutch French”. As well as compelling a re-evaluation of an underrated printer, these perspectives reshape our understanding of what literary translation could achieve in the Burgundian Low Countries.

Harau Martin: a failed translation?

Maerlant’s Martijn poems, composed in the late thirteenth century, are stanzaic dialogues on ethical subjects between the eponymous Martijn and a figure named Jacob, commonly believed to represent the poet. The first dialogue, often known as Wapene Martijn [Alas, Martijn!] after its incipit, comprises 75 stanzas and ranges over topics from human salvation and redemption to the physical location of love. Dander Martijn [The Second Martijn] focuses solely on love in its 26 stanzas, while a commonly used title for the third poem – Van der Drievoudecheide [On the Trinity] – encapsulates the preoccupations of its 39 stanzas4. The stanzaic form used 305in all three poems was distinctive, and was closely associated thereafter with Maerlant: thirteen lines rhyming aabaabaabaabb, with four stresses in the a-rhymed and three in the b-rhymed lines. Their formal virtuosity doubtless contributed to their widespread and durable success: fourteen manuscript witnesses and two editions are known, alongside various vernacular imitations and a Latin translation by Johannes Bukelare5.

Harau Martin seems to have been composed in the mid-fifteenth century; its edition marks the first known appearance of any Maerlant work in print, and fittingly appeared in a city where Maerlant enjoyed high cultural standing6. Yet its printer had no such standing in his own sphere: Jean Brito, a Breton who had previously worked as a copyist, operated on a far smaller scale than the other Bruges printers of the period, Colard Mansion and William Caxton7. His publications were relatively small in size (quarto), and their content was often utilitarian and/or ephemeral. The remaining fragments of Harau Martin comprise stanzas of the same length and rhyme scheme as their sources, corresponding to v. 1-520 of Wapene Martijn (40 stanzas), v. 66-273 and 326-338 of Dander Martijn (17 stanzas), and v. 1-143 of Van der Drievoudecheide (11 stanzas)8.

If the translator had aimed to produce well-formed French language and verse, Harau Martin must be considered a failure. While its vocabulary includes no obvious Middle Dutch loans, its syntax bears obvious 306traces of the source language. Adjectives and participles are often not inflected when used predicatively: hence formulations such as “Au feu d’infer soient livré” [may they be consigned to the flames of hell] (M1, v. 130), and “Celle que j’aime, je te dis, / Ne seroit jà par moy occis” [I assure you, the woman I love would never be slain by me] (M2, v. 129-130)9. Syllable counts are erratic, as witness the opening stanza:

Harau, Martin! Pour Dieu, di moy 

Se ce monde en tel desroy

Pourra longuement durer.

Verité, Raison, Justice et Foy

Se partent dolant; et, je croy,

Si tost ne doivent retourner.

Il n’est conte, duc ne roy

Qui ne honneure, comme je voy,

Les faulx qui les sevent flater.

On fait aux bons quiat annoy:

On les repute au banes, hors loy;

On les voit batre et fouler,

Leurs biens tolir, d’honneur priver. (M1, v. 1-13)

[“Alas, Martin! Tell me, for God’s sake, if this world can long remain in such disorder. Truth, Reason, Justice, and Faith are leaving in sorrow, and I don’t think they’re likely to come back any time soon. I can see that there isn’t a count, duke, or king who doesn’t honour the hypocrites who know how to praise them. Good people suffer great wrongs; they’re considered exiles and outlaws; we see them beaten and trampled on, stripped of their wealth and dishonoured.”]

While most lines are octosyllabic, others contain seven or nine syllables (v. 2, 3, 7, 12; 4, 11). Variation is not at all consistent across stanzas: in other words, the dialogues are not composed in regular heterometric stanzas, but simply contain numerous hypo- and hypermetric lines10. Some can easily be regularized by supposing common phenomena in late medieval French verse, hiatus (“ce mondë”, “longüement”) or elision (“Verté”); inserting or removing elements where syntax permits; or simply correcting apparent typos (“ban(es)”). But such emendations are not always possible, nor easily defensible. To suppose that v. 7, 9, and 30712 must read, say, “[nul] conte”, “sevent [bien]”, and “[tous] batre” may generate reassuringly familiar octosyllables, but is not at all necessary to complete the sense of those lines. In any case, to correct the obviously unacceptable “quiat” to “grant” would produce a heptasyllable in need of re-regularization. Hence there are no grounds for ascribing Harau Martin’s formal inconsistency, any more than its linguistic deficiencies, to poor workshop practice. Rather, the conjunction of haphazard metre and morphosyntactical confusion strongly supports the conclusion that Gédéon Huet reached in 1900: that the translator was a native speaker of Dutch, not French.

Some of Huet’s other assessments are less compelling. He dismisses the possibility that the translator adopted a stress-based approach to verse; I consider this below. He also deplores the frequently approximate rendering of content, which clearly emerges from a comparison of the first French stanza with its source:

“Wapene, Martijn! hoe salt gaen?

Sal die werelt iet langhe staen

In dus cranken love?

So moet vrouwe ver Ere saen

Sonder twifel ende waen

Rumen heren hove.

Ic sie den valschen wel ontfaen,

Die de heren connen dwaen

Ende plucken van den stove;

Ende ic sie den rechten slaen,

Bede bespotten ende vaen

Alse die mese in de clove,

Recht offene God verscrove.” (Wapene Martijn, v. 1-13)

[“Alas, Martin! What’s going to happen? Will the world remain long in such ill repute? If so, then Lady Honour must certainly leave the noble court right away. I see dishonest men, who can flatter lords and curry their favour, being warmly welcomed; and I see good people struck down, not only mocked but imprisoned like a mouse in a trap, just as if God has forsaken them11.”]

For aesthetic reasons we may regret, among other things, the absence of Maerlant’s striking mousetrap simile from the French poem; but simply to deplore such losses is to misrecognize how translators handled verse 308in the Burgundian Low Countries12. The sizeable corpus of Dutch verse based on French sources shows clearly that translators prioritized verse’s formal features – seeking to conserve or indeed refine them – and/or its affective and connotative value, rather than its exact content; not so much what verse said as what it did13. There is no reason to suppose that a translator working from Dutch to French, particularly one who was evidently much more familiar with the source language and culture, would approach the task differently.

Be that as it may, the translation would be a poor substitute for anyone who knew or could read Maerlant’s work in Dutch. Its linguistic shortcomings also limit its value for Dutch-speakers who might need to learn French14. Brito may have envisaged some potential buyers in these categories, but it is very likely that his public would mainly have been French-speaking. Precisely the public, in other words, which would immediately notice Harau Martin’s inadequacies. What, then, does its publication mean?

Jean Brito’s publishing strategies

A partial answer is suggested by Brito’s other printed output. His one datable publication is an anonymous work of political propaganda, normally designated La Défense de monsieur le duc et madame la duchesse d’Autriche et de Bourgogne, and published between late August 1477 and late April 147815. Other editions appeared within a timespan of seven 309years at most, between 1475 and 148116. Two are bilingual editions of the Disticha Catonis, an ancient collection of sententious couplets widely used as an educational text in the Middle Ages; one edition includes both the Latin text and a Dutch translation, while the other combines the Latin with the fourteenth-century French verse translation of Jean Le Fèvre de Ressons17. A second school text accompanied by a versified Le Fèvre translation is probably Brito’s final known publication. The Ecloga Theoduli, a tenth-century verse dialogue between a pagan shepherd representing falsehood and a Christian shepherdess representing truth, figures alongside the French text – commonly known as the Theodelet – in an edition whose watermarks permit dating to 1480-148118. The only edition to survive in a complete copy, apart from the Défense, is the French redaction of Jean Gerson’s Opus tripartitum19, three edifying religious texts of which Gerson composed both Latin and French versions: Le Livre des dix commandemens, L’Examen de conscience, and La Science de bien morir. Each of these editions points, however incompletely, towards particular forms of reception.

The Défense is a quite substantial prose work (77 quarto pages), produced in the wake of the events that followed Charles the Bold’s death at Nancy in January 1477: French conquests of various Burgundian territories, and the marriage of Charles’s daughter Mary of Burgundy to the Hapsburg prince Maximilian of Austria. Its author provides an overview of Franco-Burgundian relations over recent decades, refuting Louis xi’s territorial claims and promoting the authority of Mary and her new husband. He also seeks to prevent defections, warning against French blandishments and justifying whatever expenditure might be needed to prepare for a resumption of hostilities. The work was evidently an official commission; its author had been granted access to various chancery documents, which he reproduces wholly or partly20. His prose is elaborate, and he quotes a number of documents in Latin. All this 310suggests that we might qualify the claims of Émile Picot and Henri Stein, the Défense’s first editors, that the edition would have been printed in large numbers for dissemination across the whole region21. Certainly print was very convenient for rapidly disseminating material of this kind in times of crisis. Yet the Défense’s detailed historical argument, weighty style, and untranslated Latin imply a target audience with a certain level of education and cultural experience: opinion-formers, rather than a general public22. What is more, while its political message would resonate throughout the Burgundian Low Countries, since troops and resources needed to be raised from across the region, it was most urgently needed in the most vulnerable areas: Hainaut, south-western Flanders, and those parts of Artois not already under French control. There is, then, strong justification for identifying Brito’s market as comprising aristocratic and municipal élites across the region, but particularly in areas lying south of Bruges.

Gerson’s Opus tripartitum also leads us south (or more precisely south-west) of Bruges, albeit for a very different reason. Gerson had significant associations with Bruges: he became dean of St Donatian’s in 1393, though he spent little time in the city and was eventually stripped of his benefice in 141123. It therefore makes sense for a local printer to publish a relatively mass-market work by a figure of such high ecclesiastical standing. In fact two local printers had the same idea: Colard Mansion brought out his own edition of the Opus tripartitum between 1477 and 148424. The two Bruges editions are independent of each other: their 311readings are quite different, and Mansion’s includes two further works25. Both printers advertise Gerson’s name; Mansion on the final page in an explicit, and Brito on the first page in a heading that introduces the Livre des dix commandemens. But Brito’s heading, visually emphasized by display type and red ink, contains much more information than this:

C’est cy la coppie des deux grans tableaus esquelx tout le contenu de ce livre est en escript, qui sont atachiez au dehors du cœur de l’eglise Nostre Dame de Terewane, au costé devers midi, pour l’instruction et doctrine de tous chrestiens et chrestiennes de quelconque estat qu’ilz soient. La quelle doctrine et instruction fut composée en l’universite de Paris, par très saige et très discret homme et maistre en divinité maistre Jehan Jarson, chancelier de Nostre Dame de Paris; et ce à la requeste et priere de nostre reverend père en Dieu monseigneur l’evesque de Terewane, nommé maistre Mahieu Regnault, dont nostre seigneur Jhesucrist veulle avoir l’ame. (USTC 71095, fol. [a]1r)

“This is the copy of the two great panels on which the entire contents of this book are written, which hang on the south side of the chancel of Notre-Dame in Thérouanne to instruct and educate all Christian men and women of whatever condition. These lessons and teaching were composed in the University of Paris by Master Jean Gerson, Chancellor of Notre-Dame in Paris26, a man of great wisdom and prudence, and a Master of Theology. He was asked and entreated to do so by our Reverend Father the Bishop of Thérouanne, whose name was Master Mathieu Regnault; may God rest his soul.”

Readers’ attention is immediately drawn to a regional landmark, where either the Livre des dix commandemens or the whole Opus tripartitum is claimed to be on public display27. Details cannot be verified, not least because in 1533 the whole city of Thérouanne, including its cathedral, was literally razed to the ground on the orders of Charles v28. Yet the 312heading’s effect is clear: it not only emphasizes Gerson’s authority, but also promotes a major cathedral in the region. It may, indeed, have encouraged pious readers to pay a visit, though this would have been no small enterprise if the starting point were Bruges: Thérouanne was some three days’ ride away, and lay in hostile territory after its capture by French forces in March 147729. In any case, the heading strongly suggests that the edition was aimed at a wide regional market, notably the large diocese of Thérouanne and perhaps neighbouring areas.

Standard school texts, such as the Disticha Catonis and Ecloga Theoduli, could in principle be disseminated very widely; though in practice they would most likely be printed to meet local demand30. The inclusion of vernacular translations makes Brito’s editions particularly suitable for those learning basic Latin, which was the primary though not the sole educational purpose of both books (and there is definite evidence that various schools in late medieval Bruges used both Dutch- and French-language materials)31. But the translations also mean that these 313editions could be used by readers who already knew Latin and sought to develop their competence in the other vernacular, either within or outside a formal educational context32. For this purpose the Latin/French Disticha and Ecloga would be more useful to Dutch-speaking learners of French than Harau Martin, an approximate translation into poor French not physically accompanied by the original. Brito’s editions adopt an alternating layout, which had already become common in manuscripts of Le Fèvre’s translations: in the Disticha each Latin distich is followed by a corresponding vernacular quatrain, while in the Ecloga one or more lines of Latin are followed by one or two quatrains of the Theodelet33.

The Dutch translation of the Disticha is attested nowhere else34. By contrast, Le Fèvre’s version was widely disseminated, and Colard Mansion printed his own bilingual edition around 147635. The two Bruges texts resemble each other quite closely, though the Brito fragments are too small to provide clear evidence of any filiation between the two36. What can be established with some certainty is a direct relationship, not identified in previous research, between the French and Dutch translations. The evidence lies in a rare and idiosyncratic mistranslation by Le Fèvre:

Quod potes id tempta: nam litus carpere remis

tutius est multo quam velum tendere in altum37.

“Attempt only what you can do; for it is much safer to row close to the shore than to spread sail on the high seas.”

Tempte sanz plus ce que tu pourras faire.

Se tu sens que ta nef a vent contraire,

Plus sëur vas par aviron sanz voile

Que ne atendre en hault tes corde[s] ne ta toile. (v. 631-634)

“Attempt what you will be able to do, and no more. If you realize that your ship is heading into the wind, you’ll travel more safely by furling your sails and rowing than by stretching your rigging and your canvas up high.”

Based on a misunderstanding of the nautical term “in altum”, the confused rendering is not preserved in the Latin/French Brito fragment38. However, the corresponding passage does figure in the Latin/Dutch fragment; it contains exactly the same misreading, some obvious French/Dutch cognates, and a very similar structure:

Tempteir niet meer danstu muechs herden.

Wil wijnt dijn scepe contrarie warden,

Maer biden lande zulstu bet[er varen]

Dan hooghe dijn coorde ghetrocken waren. (p. 279, v. 16-19)

“Attempt no more than what you can sustain. If the wind wishes to blow against your ship, you’ll have a smoother journey by simply staying close to the shore than if your ropes were pulled up high.”

Clearly the Dutch Disticha is based not (or not solely) on the Latin source, but rather on Le Fèvre’s translation39. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the Dutch version was produced especially for Brito’s edition, on the basis of his French text40.

These fragments are hugely important for our understanding of Brito’s activity. In the first place, and as previous studies have been peculiarly reluctant to mention, the Dutch Disticha is the only book containing Dutch text that is known to have been printed in Bruges before the second decade of the sixteenth century. This in itself makes Brito unique: a printer with a monopoly, however limited and temporary, on local readers who spoke no vernacular language other than 315Dutch. In the second place, the relationship between the Dutch and the French Disticha reminds us that in the relatively polyglot environment of Bruges, an interplay of vernaculars was a daily reality and a vital resource for many cultural agents: scribes, printers, and indeed teachers, as well as authors and translators. Brito’s Dutch Disticha is on a continuum with Caxton’s translations from French, and indeed with his own Harau Martin. In the third place, the existence of a pair of vernacular editions, doubtless printed in quick succession with the Latin type left standing, is a very early example of a tendency that developed in sixteenth-century Antwerp: the simultaneous publication of parallel Dutch and French versions, particularly of ephemeral works41. In this sense Brito was something of a pioneer.

It is also worth noting that when Brito and Mansion print the same text, the physical presentation of Brito’s editions is rather more sophisticated than that of Mansion’s. The better-known printer uses neither red ink nor display type for his Opus tripartitum; Brito systematically employs textura for headings and other display purposes, while the body of the text is printed in his standard bastard type. Both editions contain a table of contents for the Livre des dix commandemens, but only Brito’s table includes folio references. Mansion’s Latin/French Disticha again uses a single typeface throughout, while Brito distinguishes between Latin and vernacular in his editions by printing the former in textura and the latter in bastard42. Brito’s editions may have been smaller than those of his local rivals – Mansion’s Bruges editions were almost exclusively, and Caxton’s primarily, folio volumes – but in some respects at least he offered readers a richer visual experience.

Brito’s commercial orientation, towards new or otherwise overlooked audiences that might extend some way beyond Bruges, enables us to make more sense of Harau Martin’s publication. To geographically diffuse but predominantly southern élites, devout readers in the hinterland 316of Thérouanne, and formal or informal learners and teachers of both Latin and vernacular languages, we may add a French-speaking literary public with a taste for more novelty than other publishers could provide, willing to discover classic local poetry that they could not read in its original language.

Foreignizing Maerlant

The question of novelty, indeed, underpins my second perspective on Harau Martin. Recent theories of translation have increasingly reflected on the ways in which translations intervene in the target literary culture, to endorse or challenge its values and assumptions. Lawrence Venuti’s distinction between “domestication” and “foreignization” has proved especially productive. Domesticating translations minimize the alterity of their source texts, assimilating them to target cultural norms, while foreignizing translations challenge readers’ cultural assumptions by resisting easy processing, particularly though not exclusively by retaining discursively unfamiliar aspects of their source texts43. By introducing new forms of expression in this way, foreignizing translations can enrich the literary system of the target culture. As a translation whose language and form are clearly at variance with accepted target cultural practice, Harau Martin is an obvious result of foreignization, whether or not that process was deliberate. However, morphosyntax is more appropriately considered from my third perspective, for reasons that will become apparent. My treatment of foreignization focuses instead on two formal features: stanzaic form and metre.

For Middle French poets, innovative stanzas and rhyme schemes were a way of developing and exhibiting technical mastery, often in competition with predecessors and contemporaries. The same tendency is apparent in several Dutch translations of Middle French verse, which adopt more 317complex stanzas than their models, as well as in the form of the original Martijn poems: Maerlant’s stanza is unusually elaborate in the context of his work as a whole, and Joost van Driel has suggested that it is a competitive response to contemporary Flemish narrative poetry44. Harau Martin reproduces the source poems’ form, though not Maerlant’s alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, which the translator may not have noticed or may have considered too difficult to incorporate. In any case, the form has no precedent in Middle French, and therefore makes an innovative intervention into the target poetic field45. Paradoxically, of course, by adopting a foreignizing form the translator is adhering to target cultural poetic norms, which value innovation; however, this innovation is demonstrably connected to the source culture, which leaves an obvious mark on the poems’ metre and language.

Harau Martin’s metre is more radically foreignizing than its other formal features. As noted above, syllable counts are inconsistent in ways that no well-informed literary public would consider acceptable. Gédéon Huet considers whether the translator had tried to reproduce Maerlant’s stress-based verse; he rejects the notion on the grounds that too many lines bear either too many or too few stresses46. However, if Harau Martin is re-examined on the basis of more recent and linguistically informed findings on accent and metre in French, its stresses correlate much more closely with the pattern of the source poems. The most useful model for this purpose has been developed by Roger Pensom, who identifies “structured alternation of accent” as a transhistorical linguistic phenomenon in French, and proposes a model for establishing accent-distribution in verse:

Applying this model to Harau Martin’s opening stanza yields the following results, with stresses marked by 1 and unstressed syllables by 0:

Seven of the eight a-rhymed lines bear four or even more accents, while three of the five b-rhymed lines bear three. As in other stanzas, various lines cannot be assimilated to the source poems’ prosody without emendation; nevertheless, a clear overall pattern emerges. The a-rhymed lines consistently bear more accents than the b-rhymed lines, so much so as to compel the conclusion that the translator recognized and sought to replicate Maerlant’s use of stresses50. Unlike the poem’s stanzaic form, this can hardly be accepted as good poetic practice in the target culture. Yet a hybrid product of this kind is just what we might expect to find in a “contact zone” where new forms arise from interactions between different cultures51. The use of accentual rather than syllabic metre, indeed, had been typical in another contact zone where poetry was composed in a variety of French: the Anglo-Norman culture of post-Conquest England52.

Stylized Dutch French

Like its metre, Harau Martin’s morphosyntax conveys traces of Dutch which, in a culture where speakers of different vernaculars interacted frequently if not always with significant interlingual competence, would doubtless be recognizable as such. This suggests a third perspective on the translation, informed by the recent sociolinguistic work of Gaëlle Planchenault on what happens when a given language is staged (literally 320or in writing) through the medium of another language53. The dialogue of French-speaking characters in anglophone films and TV shows, for instance, typically displays a stylized alterity based on “favoured linguistic tokens”, such as untranslated lexemes or syntactic structures that are ostensibly characteristic of French. These tokens appeal to monolingual audiences’ assumptions about how bilinguals speak54.

For Harau Martin’s French-speaking readers, the numerous uninflected predicative adjectives and participles surely worked in this way, conveying a flavour of Dutchness to those largely unfamiliar with the language, just as Hercule Poirot’s expression conveys Frenchness in British TV dramas. Planchenault refers to Poirot’s dialogue as “stylized French English”; we might therefore describe Harau Martin’s language, irrespective of the intention behind it, as “stylized Dutch French”55. It is much less conventional than most medieval literary stagings of foreign languages, where the tokens are typically lexemes and/or graphic representations of mispronunciation56. Nevertheless, it remains a case of stylization: a single syntactic feature synecdochically represents Dutchness to the audience. As with any such stylization, however, what is really at stake is the target audience’s own norms. In recognizing deviations from these norms, viewers or readers are reassured about their linguistic and cultural competence. Stylized performances, then, ultimately reinforce stereotypes, and thereby also the audience’s collective solidarity57. Hence Harau Martin’s Bruges readers, even as they gain access to an alternative local literary heritage, simultaneously gain security in their existing values.

Conclusion

What, then, does Harau Martin reveal? It enables us, firstly, to develop a much fuller and clearer picture of Jean Brito’s activity. He emerges as an innovative and enterprising publisher, who acts as a mediator in various ways: between Dutch literary culture and French-speaking audiences, between Latin and local vernaculars, between the ducal régime and the regional élites on whose support it depended, between different locations associated with Gerson. Further, Harau Martin demonstrates that in the Burgundian Low Countries, verse is just as capable of crossing borders between vernaculars as prose; but that the mobility of verse need not entail its assimilation to target cultural norms. Foreignizing translations do exist at this time, and can be a provocation to target cultural aesthetics, notwithstanding the reassurance vouchsafed by their linguistic stylization. Most importantly, perhaps, the Harau Martin reminds us that no translation can ever be fully domesticating or foreignizing; and in doing so, it prompts us to reconsider our views of other vernacular translations in the region. These have often been considered essentially domesticating, since they are apt to reshape ideological motifs from courtly to bourgeois contexts58. Yet they contain foreignizing elements too – often including non-linguistic source cultural features, such as versification or material presentation – which analysis has often dismissed, tried to explain away, or simply ignored. We could usefully stop looking past these elements, and start looking at them.

Adrian Armstrong

Queen Mary University of London