【英文原著类】Aucassin and Nicolete(奥加西恩和尼古里特).pdf

Aucassin and Nicolete
Aucassin and Nicolete
1
Aucassin and Nicolete
INTRODUCTION
There is nothing in artistic poetry quite akin to "Aucassin and
Nicolete."
By a rare piece of good fortune the one manuscript of the Song-Story
has escaped those waves of time, which have wrecked the bark of
Menander, and left of Sappho but a few floating fragments. The very
form of the tale is peculiar; we have nothing else from the twelfth or
thirteenth century in the alternate prose and verse of the cante- fable. {1}
We have fabliaux in verse, and prose Arthurian romances. We have
Chansons de Geste, heroic poems like "Roland," unrhymed assonant
laisses, but we have not the alternations of prose with laisses in seven-
syllabled lines. It cannot be certainly known whether the form of
"Aucassin and Nicolete" was a familiar form-- used by many jogleors, or
wandering minstrels and story-tellers such as Nicolete, in the tale, feigned
herself to be,--or whether this is a solitary experiment by "the old captive"
its author, a contemporary, as M. Gaston Paris thinks him, of Louis VII
(1130). He was original enough to have invented, or adopted from popular
tradition, a form for himself; his originality declares itself everywhere in
his one surviving masterpiece. True, he uses certain traditional formulae,
that have survived in his time, as they survived in Homer's, from the
manner of purely popular poetry, of Volkslieder. Thus he repeats
snatches of conversation always in the same, or very nearly the same
words. He has a stereotyped form, like Homer, for saying that one
person addressed another, "ains traist au visconte de la vile si l'apela"
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] . . . Like Homer, and like popular
song, he deals in recurrent epithets, and changeless courtesies. To
Aucassin the hideous plough-man is "Biax frere," "fair brother," just as the
treacherous Aegisthus is [Greek text] in Homer; these plimentary
terms, with no moral sense in partic