The Fabliaux - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871403579 ISBN 13: 9780871403575

Publisher: Liveright, 2013

Synopsis

Winner • Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation

Bawdier than The Canterbury Tales, The Fabliaux is the first major English translation of the most scandalous and irreverent poetry in Western literature.

Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking even by today’s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old French text, The Fabliaux comes to life in a way that has never been done in nearly eight hundred years.

About this title

About the Authors

Nathaniel E. Dubin is a professor emeritus of modern classical languages at the College of Saint Benedict and St. John’s University in Minnesota.

R. Howard Bloch is the Sterling Professor of French and Humanities at Yale University. The author of numerous award-winning books on French literature and art, he lives in New York.

Reviews

A fabliau is an “Old French comic tale in verse,” explains R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French at Yale University, in his informative, tantalizing introduction to the first modern anthology of these little-known, devilishly bawdy and irreverent works. The 69 fabliaux presented here in their original French and translated into rascally, buoyant English by Nathaniel E. Dubin, are relentlessly scabrous, egregiously misogynistic, and exuberantly oppositional to “bourgeois respectability” and the church. With such mischievous titles as “The Cleric behind the Chest,” “Black Balls,” and “The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk,” the rollicking fabliaux were composed during the Middle Ages to be performed aloud, forgotten for more than two centuries, then gingerly resurrected by scholars. Vivid, funny, robustly grotesque, and drolly outrageous, these satirical tales of lust, revenge, and folly feature lecherous peasants, fornicating priests, scoundrels, fools, and women wily and tough, castigated and abused. Though their leering focus is on the body and its appetites, the fabliaux do reflect their world, one both alien to us and undeniably familiar. An historic literary achievement bound to arouse vociferous discussion. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871403579
• ISBN 13: 9780871403575
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1024