Jack Ross: Opinions

James Ko: "Jack" (c.1996)

So I've started another blog. You may have noticed that it's crept unobtrusively into the sidebar over there, listed under "Bibliography Sites." This particular one is devoted to providing consistent, accurate texts of all of my published essays, introductions and reviews, together with full details of the journals and books they originally appeared in. Thrilling, no? It's called (for what I suspect will be fairly obvious reasons): Jack Ross: Opinions. NINO: Nothing If Not Opinionated, as they say ...

I suppose that it sounds like a pretty egotistical thing to do (hence reproducing above that caricature of me by my ex-Language School student, James Ko). There have been previous suggestions, from time to time, that I should collect some of these essays - the poetry ones, in particular - in book form, but I have to say that I've always resisted it. It isn't that I don't enjoy reading collections of essays: just that my own ones, on examination, always seemed too clearly connected to particular arguments or controversies (or publishing contexts), and I found it hard to imagine them making much sense in isolation.

I have devoted a good deal of time to working in this form, though. Poetry and fiction remain my areas of predilection, but you don't always find poems and stories to hand when you want them - and editors do often seem to prefer commissioning essays and reviews. Academic committees like them, too.

Anyway, while the site is not yet complete (I've put up a bit over half of the essays I'd like to include on it eventually), I find that there are 125 pieces there already, covering the period from 1987 (when I published my first review, in Scotland) to a piece which appeared in the latest issue of brief [49 (2013): 129-45].

For further details on precisely how to navigate between these various sites, you could do worse than consult the post called Crossroads (listed on the side bar opposite under "Site-map"). It'll give you some idea of the extent of this web-based madness of mine.

I won't say, either, that I haven't blushed from time to time at the silliness and general effrontery of some of the opinions included on the site. But then, you have to start somewhere, and the only way to learn is to fail: again and again, repeatedly. My original plan was to suppress some of the more embarrassing ones (and - who knows - the links may not function quite so well to those ones) ... But I decided finally to throw them all up and let anyone who can be bothered to read them sort them out.

That isn't really the point, anyway: "You can't know where you're going until you know where you've been," as Laurence Olivier sagely informs his big-screen son in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. There are a lot of repetitions, tics of phrasing, favourite quotes which I've begun to notice now I've been forced to trawl through all of these pieces again. I'd like to avoid as many as possible of those in future.

Finally, though, the whole project has been (and continues to be) redolent of the same kind of schadenfreude Kendrick Smithyman so accurately describes in his 1968 poem "Research Project":

I fossick among very minor novelists
of our nineteenth century, ours, by God,
peculiarly by virtue of whatever was
held in common with other colonies.
Or, what held them.
I have picked pockets
of several shrouds and more than one
fashion of shroud, for crummiest of crumbs,
driest fragments, dust of droppings, bone
flakes. A shard flint-sharp at the edges,
that was prematurely aspiring red muscle,
a heart. Pick, and pocket.
Someone knew
an impulse to act, entertained a dream
of action

That "ours, by God" phrase rather sums it up for me: good or bad, these reviews and essays are mine, by God. They were the best I could do at the time, and - with all their obvious imperfections - I simply can't disown them, however much I'd like to sometimes.

Neil Diamond: The Jazz Singer (1980)

Hawkes Bay Poetry Conference (November 1-3)

My trusty steed

I had hoped to have a complete pictorial record of the conference, but unfortunately the camera died on me shortly after my arrival in Hastings, so you'll just have to put up with these few atmosphere shots of the journey down, rather than the complete rogues' gallery which might otherwise have been possible:

Morning: Distant View of the Hauraki Plains

Once upon a time these drives were as easy as pie for me. Now Auckland to Havelock North, 540 kilometres-odd, 6-hours-on-the-road, leaves me as weak as a kitten. Still, never mind, there were some treats on the way. This medley of images from Taupo, for instance:

Taupo: the lake

Taupo: the town

Margaret Sweeney's Great Feat

Go Margaret! And then there was my brief stop-over in Napier looking for second-hand bookshops (though actually the best one I found was in Hastings, just down Heretaunga St., near the city centre):

Napier: the sea

Napier: the town

And then there was the fact that my room in the (aptly-named) Angus Inn Hotel was full of Rita Angus prints (together with one by Frances Hodgkins):

Rita Angus: Fog, Hawkes Bay (1966-8)

Rita Angus: Boats, Island Bay (1961-2)

Frances Hodgkins: The Pleasure Garden (1933)

But what of the conference itself? Well, it seems invidious to single out particular participants and readers from so many: four full plenary poetry readings, each with 12 ten-minute slots; four discussion panels, each with four speakers and a chair; a brilliantly inspiring opening reading by the poet laureate, Vincent O'Sullivan, together with a fine speech at the Saturday "working lunch" by Harry Ricketts ... I also enjoyed the trip to John Buck's Te Mata winery, so long associated with the poet laureateship (in fact, it might be said to have begun there).

It was a banquet, a feast, of all sorts of poetry: performance, personal, professional and perfunctory. I felt myself flagging at times, but as time went on it began to feel as if something was actually happening here, as if the sheer experience of immersion was having some cumulative effect.

Thanks to the organisers, Bill Sutton in particular, but also his able lieutenants from the Hawke's Bay Live POetry Society: Marie Dunningham, Trish Lambert, Dave Sharp, Carole Stewart and all the others who helped with the small groups sessions and the lunchtime discussion on Saturday (apologies for anyone I've left out).

It was wonderful to run into so many old friends: Rosetta Allan, Fiona Farrell, Bridget Freeman-Rock, Siobhan Harvey, Janet Newman, Sugu Pillay, Vivienne Plumb, Helen Rickerby, Barry Smith, and (of course) Alistair Paterson. Also to make some new ones (many of them people I'd corresponded with but never met): Doc Drumheller, Benita Kape, Maris O'Rourke, Nicholas Reid, Gus Simonovic, Pat White, Niel Wright ... together with many others.

Havelock North

I'll conclude, then, with a little verse I found myself scribbling during one of the sessions (I won't say which one):

The Counterfeiters


All New Zealand poetry
is crap
said David Howard's pal
on our ritual roadtrip north
to the Unicorn Bookshop
Warkworth

Oh I don't knowThere's Smithyman
Curnow
He wasn't impressed
Most
of you are trying to be as good
as Jenny or Billnot Homer or

Virgil
I had to admit he had
a pointbut what street-cred did
he have?
He'd spent the whole journey
wanking on
about André Gheed ...

[2/11/13]

I have to say that that remark from David's friend has stayed with me, which is the main reason I saw fit to share it with the assembled poets at the conference. What's wrong with setting our sites a little higher than the norms we've become accustomed to?

If these kinds of meetings become more common among New Zealand poets, who's to say what we mightn't achieve in the future? Right now my hopes are particularly high.

André Gide: The Counterfeiters [Les faux-monnayeurs] (1925)

•

Postscript (23/11/13):

Here are some pictures of the event, taken (for the most part) by photographer and poet Carole A. Steward, and posted on facebook by the irrepressible Gus Simonovic:

Janet Newman introduces the panel on
Form and Content in Contemporary Poetry:
r-to-l: Ben Fagan, Niel Wright, Jack Ross, Mary-Jane Duffy & Gail Romano.

Jack spouts on

The redoubtable Alistair Paterson

On the road to the Te Mata winery:
(note Gus Simonovic on the left, & Jack talking to Nicholas Reid in the middle distance)

John Buck shows us round the winery

The True Story of the Novel (4): The Medieval and Renaissance Romance

Steven Moore: The Novel: An Alternative History. Beginnings to 1600 (2010)

Well, an interesting thing has happened. Since I set out to write my own version of the "True Story of the Novel," I've discovered that the job has actually already been done: in a manner far more comprehensive than Margaret Anne Doody's somewhat idiosyncratic account, too:

Steven Moore: The Novel: An Alternative History. 1600-1800 (2013)

So who is this Steven Moore, and what is the nature of his "alternative history" of the novel?

Steven Moore (1951- )

Well, clearly he likes pictures of naked girls lying round reading books (more on this subject here); he's also (apparently) an authority on the works of Ronald Firbank and William Gaddis, and has published extensively on both authors. The views on the novel and prose fiction in general he outlines in his introduction to volume one of his massive masterwork are certainly pretty congenial to me, at any rate:

"Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate," the narrator is advised in Vikram Chandra's fabulous Red Earth and Pouring Rain. "Forsake grim shortness and hustle. Let us luxuriate in your curlicues" ... Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot, the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in woodcuts, a novel in first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology, Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors' notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms, sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality at loose in the world ... [p.19]

So is there any real need for me to persevere with my own series of posts on the subject? Possibly not, but there is a certain encyclopedic exhaustiveness about Moore's approach to the subject which might encourage more pointed discussions of particular parts of the story ("all the novels described in the preceding paragraph are real, by the way," he explains in a footnote to the passage quoted above).

In any case, with Moore as one's bedrock, it all of a sudden becomes much easier to substantiate the claim that there really are a lot of interesting and often exceedingly tricksy pre-modern fictions out there which are certainly hard to characterise as anything but "novels" - in the various ways we have learned to interpret that portmanteau word over the past couple of centuries of reading and producing them on an industrial scale ...

•


Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

... in a discussion of the digressive nature of French prose romance, [Eugène] Vinaver characterises it in terms of "the technique of tapestry. Just as in a tapestry each thread alternates with an endless variety of others, so in the early prose romances of the Arthurian group numerous seemingly independent episodes or 'motifs' are interwoven in a manner which makes it possible for each episode to be set aside at any moment and resumed later" (1990, 1: lxvi). Vinaver goes on to explain that the most convenient way of representing this interweaving is to designate each strand or motif by a letter, giving various examples in the discussion of the "Tale of King Arthur" in his introduction (1990, 1: lxviii-lxi).

By comparison with the French romancers, then [according to Vinaver], in Malory’s version of the story "The order of events is not a1 b c1 a2 c2 , but a1 a2 b c1 c2; the three threads of the narrative are unravelled and straightened out so as to form in each case a consistent and self-contained set of adventures" (Vinaver, 1990, 1:lxx). Vinaver sees this as "closely approximating to the conventional modern technique of exposition" (1990, 1: lxxi).

- Jack Ross, Malory and Scheherazade: A Study in Narrative Method (1992)

Leaving to one side, for the moment, the question of what exactly is the "conventional modern technique of exposition," it's probably useful here to start off with some remarks on the subject matter of most of the medieval - and even Renaissance - writers we'll be discussing.

The 12th-century French poet Jean Bodel remarked, in his Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,
De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

There are only 3 subjects ["matters"] which no man should lack:
That of France, of Britain, and of Rome the Great.

Or, as Wikipedia explains it:

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the body of literature and legendary material associated with Great Britain and its legendary kings, particularly King Arthur. Together with the Matter of France, which concerned the legends of Charlemagne, and the Matter of Rome, which included material derived from or inspired by classical mythology, it was one of the three great literary cycles recalled repeatedly in medieval literature.

(I guess, parenthetically, this was what made it difficult for me to understand why the Landfall Online reviewer of my recent book Celanie: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan (2012: with artist Emma Smith), Andrew Paul Wood, should question my translation of the title of Celan's poem "Matière de Bretagne" as "Matter of Britain." It's hard for me to think of any more obvious way of drawing attention to the poem's indebtedness to, in particular, the Tristan legend. I suppose that I could have left it in French, as he suggests, but that seemed a bit of a cop-out - as well as unnecessary. Why not leave the whole poem in its original language, for that matter? Any translation is an interpretation: even so obvious a substitution as this).

I've arranged the romances and novels of chivalry I own myself under the nationalities of their various authors, but you'll note that there's a gradual temporal shift from works about the courts of King Arthur and Charlemagne into the more learned and eccentric novels of Renaissance figures such as François Rabelais and Francesco Colonna. One could choose any of these great proto-Cervantine figures as the centre of this post, but I have decided to stay with the mysterious Sir Thomas Malory, partly because Moore is content to see him more as a translator and transmitter of the Arthurian legend than a pioneer of the modern novel.

•


Malory

English

1. Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1100–1155)
2. Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–1471)
3. William Caxton (c.1415/22–1492)
4. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Geoffrey of Monmouth [Galfridus Monemutensis] (c.1100–1155)


1. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–1471)


2. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. Ed. William Caxton. 1485. Introduction by Sir John Rhys. 1906. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 45 & 46. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1953.


3. Vinaver, Eugène, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 3 vols. 1947. 3rd ed. rev. P. J. C. Field. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.


4. Malory, Sir Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 1954. Second ed. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.


5. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. 1485. Ed. Janet Cowan. Introduction by John Lawlor. 1969. 2 vols. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.


6. The Romance of Lancelot & Guinevere, Taken from Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. Illustrated by Lettice Sandford. London: The Folio Society, 1953.


7. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. 1894. Ware, Hertfordshire: Omega Books., 1988.


8. Pollard, Alfred W., ed. The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Abridged from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. 1917. New York: Weathervane Books, n.d.


William Caxton (c.1415/22–1492)


9. Caxton, William, trans. The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten Prynce Charles the Grete. The English Charlemagne Romances, Parts III & IV. Ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage. 1880-1881. Early English Text Society, Extra Series Nos 36 & 37. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


10. Caxton, William, trans. The History of Reynard the Fox. Ed. N. F. Blake. Early English Text Society, No. 263. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.


11. Blake, N. F., ed. Caxton's Own Prose. The Language Library. Ed. Eric Partridge & Simeon Potter. London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1973.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


12. Ashe, Geoffrey. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.


13. Ashe, Geoffrey. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.


14. Ashe, Geoffrey. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.


15. Ashe, Geoffrey, Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. Ed. Geoffrey Ashe. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.


16. Ashe, Geoffrey. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.


17. Ashe, Geoffrey. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.


18. Ashe, Geoffrey. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.


19. Ashe, Geoffrey, in association with Debrett’s Peerage. The Discovery of King Arthur. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.


20. Ashe, Geoffrey. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.


21. Ashe, Geoffrey. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.


22. Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, & Henry Lincoln. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. 1982. London: Corgi Books, 1988.


23. Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend. 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.


24. Stewart, R. J. & John Matthews, ed. Merlin through the Ages: A Chronological Anthology and Source Book. Foreword by David Spangler. A Blandford Book. London: Cassell plc, 1995.


25. Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. 1967. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1975.


26. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.

I've been reading Arthurian romances, ancient and modern, for most of my life. I'm not quite sure what the fascination is, but certainly - when it comes to Malory's Morte d'Arthur, I think it has a lot to do with the sheer precision and elegance of his writing. The discovery of the Winchester Ms. of his "works" in the 1930s revolutionised study of his book (certain parenthetical marks make it probable that this was the actual copy used by Caxton for printing his own edited version in the 1480s). The editor of the standard edition, Eugène Vinaver, made no secret of his preference for the "inter-laced" compexity of Malory's French sources, however.

Steven Moore seconds him in this. They do have the advantage of having read far more widely than I have in French romance, but I feel that this may have the effect of blinding them to some of the more interesting innovations in Malory's work. Whether or not he himself saw his translations as constituting a single book of the adventures of King Arthur and his principal knights, Caxton certainly had no great difficulty in editing the various parts of his manuscript into precisely that.

That could be coincidental, but given the heroic efforts made by the French chroniclers to cobble together a complete version of the whole story in the early 13th century (the so-called "prose vulgate"), it doesn't seem too implausible to attribute a similar ambition to their English follower. Malory's disentanglement of the start-stop, tapestry thread method of narration employed by his French originals is also unlikely to be coincidental. Vinaver sees this as a disastrous over-simplification of the splendid originals, but the intensely readable nature of Malory's book - even for modern readers - does suggest that the appetite for such complex fictions was in decline (not to mention the ruinous expense of finding copies of each separate manuscript section of the massive French vulgate).

Malory's book was also one of the first secular texts to be printed in England, and its compactness and affordability meant that it set a pattern for most of the prose romances which would follow it. The French, it is true, maintained an appetite for monstrous novels of a couple of thousand pages each well into the seventeenth century, but in England the single-volumed masterwork was to dominate: Malory (1485), Sidney's Arcadia (1593), Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) - Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), for that matter ...

•


Rabelais

French

1. François Rabelais (c.1494–1553)
2. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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François Rabelais (c.1494–1553)


1. Rabelais, François. Œuvres: Les Cinq Livres de F. Rabelais, avec notes et glossaire. 2 vols. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur, 1909.


2. Rabelais, François. Oeuvres Complètes: Tome illustrée. Ed. Pierre Jourda. 1962. 2 vols. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1967.


3. Rabelais, François. The Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick. Containing Five Books of the Lives, Heroick Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Sonne Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart & Peter Anthony Motteux. 1653-94. Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. 1931. London: the Navarre Society, 1948.


4. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. 1564. Trans. J. M. Cohen. 1955. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


5. Bédier, Joseph. Tristan and Iseult. Trans. Hilaire Belloc. 1913. Unwin Books. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.


6. Bédier, Joseph. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Trans. Hilaire Belloc & Paul Rosenfeld. 1945. Vintage Books. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. / Random House, Inc., 1965.


7. Béroul. The Romance of Tristan & The Tale of Tristan’s Madness. Translated together for the First Time. Trans. Alan S. Fedrick. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


8. Bryant, Nigel, trans. The High Book of the Grail: A Translation of the Thirteenth Century Romance of Perlesvaus. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, Ltd. / Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.


9. Cable, James, trans. The Death of King Arthur (Le Mort du Roi Artus). 1971. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


10. Corless, Corin, trans. Lancelot of the Lake. Introduction by Elspeth Kennedy. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.


11. Einhard, & Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


12. Evans, Sebastian, trans. The High History of the Holy Graal. 1898. Everyman’s Library, 445. 1910. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1936.


13. Krailsheimer, A. J., ed. Three Sixteenth-Century Conteurs. Clarendon French Series. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.


14. Lacroix, Daniel, & Philippe Walter, trans. Tristan et Iseut: Les poèmes français / La saga norroise. Lettres gothiques. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989.


15. Louis, René. Tristan et Iseult: Renouvelé en français moderne d’après les textes du XIIe et XIIIe siècle. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972.


16. Mason, Eugene, trans. Aucassin & Nicolette & Other Medieval Romances and Legends. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., n.d.


17. Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. 1969. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


18. Mosès, François, trans. Lancelot du Lac. Roman français du XIIIe siècle: d’après l’édition d’Elspeth Kennedy. Préface de Michel Zink. Lettres gothiques. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1991.


19. Périers, Bonaventure des, Noel du Fail, Marguerite d’Angoulême. Contes. Ed. Paul Porteau. Conteurs du XVIe Siècle. Cent Romans Français, 12. Paris: Éditions Stock, Delamain & Boutelleau, 1948.


20. Robbins, Russell Hope, trans. The Hundred Tales: Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Illustrated by Alexander Dobkin. New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1960.


21. Sayers, Dorothy L., trans. The Song of Roland. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.


22. Skeels, Dell. The Romance of Perceval in Prose: A Translation of the E Manuscript of the Didot Perceval. 1961. Washington Paperbacks WP-10. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1966.


23. Sommer, H. Oskar, ed. The Vulgate Version of The Arthurian Romances, Edited from Manuscripts in the British Museum. 8 vols. Washington, D. C., 1909-1916.


24. Whitehead, F., ed. La Chanson de Roland. 1942. Blackwell’s French Texts. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957.

The distinction between "English" and "French" literature is a difficult one to make in this period. As late as the fourteenth century, a poet such as John Gower could write with equal facility in English, French and Latin, bequeathing us a long poem in each language. "Bretagne" - which can mean either Brittany or Britain in French (though the latter is generally referred to as Grand Bretagne) - is the central region of the Arthurian tales, but the overlap with Celtic, especially Welsh, traditions does make the precise geography of these stories exceptionally hard to pin down.

With the advent of Rabelais in the early sixteenth century, though, a distinctly new and wholly French voice begins to be heard in European writing. Rabelais is a satirist and a polymath. His works, repeatedly condemned for their obscenity and criminal facetiousness, have delighted non-pompous readers ever since (all the way down to H. G. Wells's Mr Polly in 1910 and Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels in 1981). While strictly impossible to translate, the classic version made by Urquhart & Motteux in the seventeenth century was itself a great influence on writers such as Smollett and Sterne. There have been numerous attempts since, some better than others.

•


Boccaccio

Italian

1. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
2. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)
3. Francesco Colonna (c.1433-1527)
4. Gianfrancesco Straparola (c.1480-c.1557)
5. Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)
6. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)


1. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron / Filocolo / Ameto / Fiammetta. Ed. Enrico Bianchi, Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e Testi, 8. Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952.


2. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Decameron. 1350-53. Ed. Carlo Salinari. 1963. 2 vols. Universale Laterza, 26-27. 1966. Torino: Editori Laterza, 1975.


3. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. 1350-53. Trans. J. M. Rigg. 1903. Introduction and Illustrations by Louis Chalon. 1921. 2 vols. London: Privately Printed for the Navarre Society Limited, n.d.


4. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. 1350-53. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Penguin Classics. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


5. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Elegia de Madonna Fiammetta. Ed. Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. 1952. Classici Ricciardi 10. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1976.


6. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Amorous Fiammetta: Revised from the Only English Translation. 1343-44. Trans. Bartholomew Yong. 1587. Introduction by Edward Hutton. London: Privately Printed for the Navarre Society, 1926.


7. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Filocolo: Scelta. Ed. Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. 1952. Classici Ricciardi 27. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1976.


8. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Corbaccio. Ed. Giorgio Ricci. Introduzione di Natalino Sapegno. 1952 & 1965. Classici Ricciardi 44. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1977.


Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)


9. Poggio Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco. The Facetiae. Translated by Bernhardt J. Hurwood. New York & London; Award Books & Tandem Books, 1968.


Francesco Colonna (c.1433-1527)


10. Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream. The Entire Text Translated for the First Time into English with an Introduction by Joscelyn Godwin with the Original Woodcut Illustrations. 1499. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.


11. Caldwell, Ian, & Dustin Thomason. The Rule of Four. New York: The Dial Press, 2004.


12. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Real Rule of Four. 2004. London: Arrow Books, 2005.


Giovanni Francesco [Gianfrancesco] Straparola [Caravaggio] (c.1480-c.1557)


13. Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Most Delectable Nights of Straparola. London: Richard K. Champion / Luxor Press, 1965.


14. Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Merry Nights of Straparola. Trans. W. G. Waters. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2004.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)


15. Aretino, Pietro. Sisters, Wives and Courtesans: Unexpurgated. Trans. Robert Eglesfield. New York: Belmont Books, 1967.


16. Rosenthal, Raymond, trans. Aretino’s Dialogues. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972.


17. Romano, Giulio, Marc-Antonio Raimondi, Pietro Aretino, & Count Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures. An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance. Ed. & trans. Lynne Lawler. 1984. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1988.


18. Aretino, Pietro. Selected Letters. Trans. George Bull. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


19. Swan, Charles, trans. Gesta Romanorum. 1824. Ed. Wynnard Hooper. The York Library. London: George Bell & Sons, 1905.


20. Komroff, Manuel, ed. Tales of the Monks from the Gesta Romanorum. 1928. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1947

I suppose that Boccaccio must continue to be celebrated as the founder of Italian fiction (in verse and prose), and - indeed - one of the principal architects of the European narrative tradition. And he is great, and he is still very readable. Margaret Doody casts him as the hero of her entire story.

One of the things I like most about Steven Moore, though, is his inclination to snout around for obscurer and stranger men of letters. He celebrates Francesco Colonna's mad Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (1499) with unmistakable enthusiasm, and even goes so far as to point out the greatness of Pietro Aretino as a stylist as well as a smut-merchant. I first read Aretino in a scruffy little paperback abridgement of his classic Dialogues of Sisters, Wives and Courtesans, and was struck at once by his complete unflappability as a narrator - not to mention the modernity of his imagination.

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Ramon Llull (c.1232-1315)

Spanish

1. Joanot Martorell (1413-1468)
2. Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (c.1450–1504)
3. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Joanot Martorell (1413-1468) &
Martí Joan de Galba (d.1490)


1. Martorell, Joanot, & Martí Joan de Galba. Tirant lo Blanc. Trans. David H. Rosenthal. 1984. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1985.


Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo [Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo] (c.1450–1504)


2. Amadís de Gaula. 1508. Introducción de Arturo Souto. 1969. “Sepan Cuantos …”, 131. Ciudad de México: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1975.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


3. Alpert, Michael, trans. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes (Anon.) / The Swindler (El Buscón), Francisco de Quevedo. 1554 & 1626. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


4. Kennedy, Judith M., ed. A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana [1559]& Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana [1564]. 1598. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.


5. Yates, Frances A. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays, Volume 1. 3 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

I have to confess to not having read widely in the Spanish part of the medieval narrative tradition. Even Ramon Llull is known to me principally through the various essays and attempts at interpretation of Frances Yates.

Judging by the famous inquisition held over Don Quixote's library of romances in chapter 6 of Cervantes' novel, though, I haven't missed all that much:

“No,” said the niece, “there’s no reason to pardon any of them because all of them have done damage. It’d be best to toss them all out the window onto the patio and make a pile of them there, and set fire to them; or take them to the corral and make a fire there so the smoke won’t bother anyone.”

Once again, however, Steven Moore has been there and done that. He's well up in the field, and is equipped to give length plot summaries of even the most turgid descendants of the Amadis tradition. It's a Herculean task he's undertaken, and my hat is off to him ...

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Gustave Doré: Illustrations to Don Quixote