The Alexandreis : a twelfth-century epic

314 Pages·2007·1.36 MB·English

THE ALEXANDREIS
A Twelfth-Century Epic
Walter of Châtillon
a verse translation by David Townsend
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© 2007 David Townsend
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gautier, de Châtillon, fl. 1170–1180.
The Alexandreis / Walter of Châtillon ; a verse translation by David Townsend.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 13: 978-1-55111-676-1
ISBN 10: 1-55111-676-6
1. Alexander, the Great, 356–323 B.C.—Romances. 2. Epic poetry, Latin (Medieval and
modern)—Translations into English. I. Townsend, David, 1955– II. Title.
PA8310.G3A713 2006 873′.03 C2006-903840-6
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Alexandreis
Prologue
The Headings of the First Book
Book One
The Headings of the Second Book
Book Two
The Headings of the Third Book
Book Three
The Headings of the Fourth Book
Book Four
The Headings of the Fifth Book
Book Five
The Headings of the Sixth Book
Book Six
The Headings of the Seventh Book
Book Seven
The Headings of the Eighth Book
Book Eight
The Headings of the Ninth Book
Book Nine
The Headings of the Tenth Book
Book Ten
Appendix A: Other Works by Walter of Châtillon
1. Satirical and Moral Poems
2. A Treatise Against the Jews (Tractatus contra Judaeos)
3. The Rhythmical Life of Thomas Becket
Appendix B: Latin Epic of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
1. Bernard Silvestris, Cosmographia
2. Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature (De planctu Naturae)
3. John of Hauville, The Arch-Lamenter (Architrenius)
4. Joseph of Exeter, The Ylias of Dares Phrygius
5. Henry of Avranches, The Metrical Life of St. Francis (Vita sancti
Francisci)
Appendix C: The Medieval Alexander Tradition
1. Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander the Great (Historiae
Alexandri Magni)
2. The History of Alexander’s Battles (Historia de preliis)
3. The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
4. Anecdotes of Alexander from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus
Appendix D: Twelfth-Century Images of the Foreign, Strange, and Exotic
1. William of Tyre, A History of Things Done in the Territories across the
Sea (Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum)
2. Gerald of Wales, The Description of Wales (Descriptio Cambriae)
3. From Wonders of the East (De rebus in Oriente mirabilibus)
Select Bibliography
For Talestris, Queen of the Amazons;
for the Scythian messenger;
para los Zapatistas:
the heroes at the margins
Acknowledgements
My debts of gratitude are many and various: to A.G. Rigg, most
congenial of colleagues, for sustained enthusiasm and support; to Claire
Fanger, an accomplished translator and a keen critic; to Lois Kuznets, for
ideas exchanged over the years, mostly in the kitchen; to Catherine
Conybeare, Carla deSantis, Rob Moody, Carin Ruff, and Sylvia Parsons,
medieval Latinists with whom I shared readings of Walter that
significantly shaped my understanding of his work; to Maura Lafferty,
who made suggestions for the notes; and to Marvin Colker, whose review
of the first edition offered helpful and specific criticisms. The University
of Toronto Office of Research Services in 1990 supported my work with
manuscripts of the Alexandreis now held in British libraries, facilitating
insights into medieval receptions of the poem that otherwise would have
come, if at all, only later and less vividly. My partner Rob Norquay
offered support and patience at times when the project encroached on
what was then our common life. Finally, I owe my most profound
gratitude to Scott Westrem, whose erudition is matched only by his
generosity, and whose meticulous comments made the translation both
more accurate and more graceful than it would otherwise have been,
although many flaws remain despite his good offices.
Introduction
The Poem and Its Author
Walter of Châtillon’s ten-book epic on the life of Alexander the Great is
one of the high achievements of twelfth-century literature. It ranks
among the finest Latin works in the century that also produced Bernard
Silvestris, Nigel of Canterbury, the Ysengrimus poet, Alan of Lille, Walter
Map, and Joseph of Exeter. In artistry and intelligence it loses nothing
by comparison to the first flowerings of the European vernaculars. Yet
Walter’s work, while today better known and more widely read than it
was before the appearance of Marvin Colker’s critical edition in 1978,
remains largely an object of specialist scrutiny. Most undergraduate
students and committed amateurs of medieval literature have never read
it. Scholars of vernacular literature, with some notable exceptions, refer
to it more or less cursorily as a work of ancillary interest.
But in Walter’s own generation and for several centuries following, the
Alexandreis enjoyed undisputed pre-eminence. Over two hundred
manuscripts survive, most of them dating from the thirteenth century,
but significant numbers representing the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries as well.1 The poem was printed in 1487 (Rouen), and again in
1513 (Strasbourg), 1541 (Ingolstadt), and 1558 (Lyons). Few works of
medieval literature survive in such a copious transmission: the Roman de
la Rose and Dante’s Divine Comedy come down to us in roughly
comparable numbers of manuscripts, while Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is
extant in fewer than one hundred. Literary quality and influence cannot
of course be so easily measured as this; but Walter’s poem certainly
loomed as large in the literary milieux of Jean de Meun, Boccaccio,
Dante, Chaucer, and Gower as do works by Chaucer, Milton, and even
Shakespeare in ours. Its disappearance from the canon after a sustained
popularity might suggest instead an analogy to Orlando Furioso. Nor was
Walter’s poem simply copied and read widely: it was studied intensively
as a standard text of the literary curriculum, as copious glosses in many
surviving manuscripts attest.2
If the poem were of only historical interest—if it were simply a
curious monument to the otherness of tastes that modern readers cannot
share—its neglect today might be allowed to continue without
intervention. But shifts in literary expectation have not rendered the
signal qualities of the Alexandreis inaccessible. Readers today can still
find in the poem an extraordinary subtlety, a keen intelligence, a beauty
in turns lyrical and outlandish—and at times even an uncanny
postmodernity. It rewards the reader as richly as do many of the better-
known texts we consider the essential core of medieval European
literature. It deserves to be read alongside the medieval authors we
receive as canonical, and to be read, by those without access to the
original Latin, in a translation that allows the reader an experience of
the work as poetry.
We know less than we might wish of Walter’s life and the
circumstances of the poem’s composition. Walter was probably born
around 1135. Various biographical notices survive in the accessus
(introductions) included among the glosses of some manuscripts,3 but
the details they record are mutually contradictory. Walter seems to have
been born in Lille. After studies in Paris and Reims, and after directing
the school of Laon, he headed a school at one of the several towns of
Châtillon in northeastern France—Châtillon-sur-Marne is the prime
candidate. It is by his association with Châtillon that he is usually
known. At Châtillon he composed quedam ludicra, “light verses,” which
presumably included love lyrics and moral satires in rhyming accentual
meters, a form in which he also excelled.4 Subsequent to a realization
that the liberal arts don’t pay, he may have gone on to study law in
Bologna. Thereafter he entered the service of Guillaume des Blanches
Mains (William of the White Hands), brother-in-law of Louis VII of
France, uncle of Philip Augustus, archbishop of Sens and subsequently of
Reims.5 The Alexandreis is dedicated to William, as the opening of Book
One and the close of Books Five and Ten attest. The initial letters of the
poem’s ten books spell out GUILLERMUS, his patron’s Latin name. One
thirteenth-century biographical gloss from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale,
MS lat. 8358, fol. 91v suggests that Walter composed the poem to regain
William’s favor. According to the anecdote, Walter was jealous of
William’s sexual liaison with a cleric named Berterus, himself a poet of
some reputation;6 he took his revenge by contriving the recitation of a