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Title: Cliges: A Romance

Author: Chretien de Troyes

Translator: L. J. Gardiner

Posting Date: March 23, 2009 [EBook #2414]
Release Date: November, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLIGES: A ROMANCE ***

Produced by T. Camp. HTML version by Al Haines.

Cliges: A Romance

by

Chretien de Troyes

Trans. L. J. Gardiner.

This translation was published with no copyright notice in 1966.
"T. Camp" <campt miralink.com>

CLIGES: A ROMANCE

NOW TRANSLATED BY L. J. GARDINER, M.A.
FROM THE OLD FRENCH OF CHRETIEN DE TROYES

COOPER SQUARE PUBLISHERS, INC.
NEW YORK 1966

Published 1966 by Cooper Square Publishers, Inc.
59 Fourth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10003
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-23315
Printed in the United States of America
By Noble Offset Printers, Inc., New York, N. Y. 10003

INTRODUCTION

IT is six hundred and fifty years since Chretien de Troyes wrote
his Cliges. And yet he is wonderfully near us, whereas he is
separated by a great gulf from the rude trouveres of the Chansons
de Gestes and from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was still
dragging out its weary length in his early days. Chretien is as
refined, as civilised, as composite as we are ourselves; his
ladies are as full of whims, impulses, sudden reserves,
self-debate as M. Paul Bourget's heroines; while the problems of
conscience and of emotion which confront them are as complex as
those presented on the modern stage. Indeed, there is no break
between the Breton romance and the psychological-analytical novel
of our own day.

Whence comes this amazing modernity and complexity? From many
sources:--Provencal love-lore, Oriental subtlety, and Celtic
mysticism--all blended by that marvellous dexterity, style,
malice, and measure which are so utterly French that English has
no adequate words for them. We said "Celtic mysticism," but there
is something else about Chretien which is also Celtic, though
very far from being "mystic". We talk a great deal nowadays about
Celtic melanc