Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
PARZIVAL
WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH was the greatest of the medieval German narrative poets. Very little is known about his life, but it is generally accepted that he belonged to a Bavarian family of the lower nobility, that he may have served a Franconian lord and that for the better part of his creative period he enjoyed the patronage of the great medieval German maecenas Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia. He probably died between 1220 and 1230.
Although Wolfram left some brilliant lyric poems, chiefly dawn songs of his youth, it is in his narrative poems – Parzival, the unfinished Willehalm and so-called Titurel fragments – that his claim to be a poet of world stature lies. Parzival, on which Richard Wagner based his music-drama Parsifal, is a romance of self-perfection in knighthood, in which both the chivalric and the spiritual receive their due; Titurel relates in an elegaic measure the story of Sigune and Schionatulander prior to their appearances in Parzival; Willehalm is a crusading poem with epic qualities which tells the story of the famous William of Toulouse.
ARTHUR THOMAS HATTO was Head of the Department of German, Queen Mary College, University of London, from 1938 until his retirement in 1977, and was Professor of German Language and Literature at the same university from 1953 to 1977. He is now Professor Emeritus in German in the University of London. He was assistant for English at the University of Berne (1932–5), and during the Second World War worked in the Foreign Office (1939-45). He was a Governor of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from 1960-77; in 1970 he gave the Foundation Lecture, with the title ‘Shamanism and Epic Poetry in Northern Asia’. Since 1978 he has been an Associate Member, Seminar für Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft Zentralasiens, University of Bonn, and since 1991 a Senior Fellow, The British Academy.
His other publications include The Memorial Feast of Kökötöykhan – a Kirghiz epic, edited, translated and with a commentary. His translations for Penguin Classics are Gottfried’s Tristan and the fragments of Thomas’s Tristran (together in one volume) and Nibelungenlied, and with this, his third volume for the series, he has made available to the English-reading public a substantial portion of the finest narrative poetry of the medieval German Golden Age. His most recent publication is The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo-Kutavêre.
Professor Hatto is now living in retirement. For many years he enjoyed a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in support of his studies of epic poetry in Central Asia and Siberia, which he is continuing. He is a widower and has one daughter.
Parzival
Translated by
A. T. HATTO
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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This translation first published 1980
Reprinted 2004
27
Translation and editorial matter copyright © A. T. Hatto, 1980
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 9781101489987
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Wolfram’s Apology
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
An Introduction to a Second Reading
A Glossary of Personal Names
A List of Works in English for Further Reading
Foreword
Parzival is the retelling and ending by one genius, Wolfram von Eschenbach (fl. c. 1195-1225), of the unfinished romance of another, the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, a poem otherwise known from its prologue as Li contes del graal or ‘The story of the Grail’. Chrétien’s poem is the earliest extant narrative of the Grail, though he tells us that his patron Philip, Count of Flanders, had lent him its ‘book’, presumably in one or other respect a source, but a work of absolutely unknown content.
Wolfram, whose great stature as a poet is known independently from his earlier love-poetry and his later epic Willehalm and elegiac Titurel, rose magnificently to the challenge of retelling and completing Chrétien’s mystery story, achieving it in a very different and indeed inimitable style.
If, glimpsing the title ‘Parzival’, the reader picks up this book in the hope of finding the Story of the Grail, he will not find it. He will find instead the Story of a Grail, together with everything else he is entitled to expect of a story told by one of the world’s great narrative poets and humorists. There never was a Story of the Grail, and never could be. On the other hand there were stories of as many different Grails as there were writers or syndicates exploiting the potent name.
Chrétien himself first speaks of a ‘graal’, and it is clear from the best (though not all) manuscripts of Perceval that he intended a vessel, some sort of dish like the one named ‘gradalis’ in Medieval Latin, from which the Old French ‘gra(d)al’ took its rise. After introducing a graal into his narrative, Chrétien logically refers to it as the graal when he has occasion to mention it again. In the present state of our knowledge the notion cannot be disproved that Chrétien, the originator of Arthurian romance in the higher courtly mode, also launched the subsidiary genre of Grail Romances in his Perceval of post 1181 A.D.; which is not the same as saying that there were no narratives or cults centred on esoteric vessels or other objects before Perceval, for if one chooses to take the matter loosely one can go far beyond Byzantium in space and, if licentiously, as far back in time as the Pharaohs.
How open a question the physical nature of ‘the Grail’ still was in c. 1200, when Wolfram embarked on his Parzival, is shown by the fact that his Grail – he calls it ‘Grâl’ – was a Stone, and that although it had the loftiest spiritual connections it also had some very earthy aspects, since it served up meats hot or cold, wild or tame, and a whole variety of alcoholic beverages to individual taste, so that, as has been wittily observed, it also functioned as ‘un buffet ambulant’. Since the French scribes of some of the surviving manuscripts of the Perceval show themselves unaware that Chrétien’s Graal was a vessel, the German Wolfram, with a knowledge of French that left something to be desired, could readily be forgiven for being unaware of it. On the other hand, Wolfram was sufficiently strong-minded to set aside any prior knowledge he might have had that Chrétien’s Graal was a vessel and choose a Stone as apter to his purpose. At the other extreme, Robert de Boron in his Joseph d’Arimathic, composed some time between Perceval and 1199, not only has the Graal as a vessel – the Chalice of th
All that the Grails of medieval romance have in common is the function of indicating a goal worth striving for or preserving, and in content at least a modicum of sanctity.
These preliminary remarks on ‘the Grail’ are intended to free the reader’s thoughts from any distorting impressions or expectations he may have gained from Malory, or from nineteenth-century poetry or music drama, so that he can take as they come the many and varied scenes from medieval courtly life as Wolfram paints them – scenes which despite their Arthurian setting are of course based upon the style of life which Wolfram knew at the German courts of the very brilliant Hohenstauffen period.
Thanks to the food-producing powers of the Gral, peasants are dispensed with by the Gral Community, and even outside in the world at large they are rarely mentioned, while because of the Gral’s direct link with Heaven both for the annual regeneration of its powers and the decisive news-flashes it receives, priests are required only for the odd baptism and marriage, which is again reflected in what is narrated of the world outside. In this way, Wolfram freed his noble listeners from all memory of bad conscience towards the peasantry and of humiliation at the hands of the clergy, whether from the pulpit or in the confessional, in order to focus their attention entirely on the problems of knights and ladies whilst entertaining them, that is, on loyalty in love real or ritualized, on loyalty within family or feudal bonds, on fighting and bloodshed, and on a proper relationship with God.
At one point in his poem Wolfram humorously wonders how it is possible for so impecunious a knight as himself to describe such wealth and luxury as he unfolds. We in our turn wonder, with no humour but on the contrary with much bitterness, how it was possible for a knight of such humble station and education to enshrine in his poetry an understanding of the Christian message deeper and truer than that of all the popes and most of the saints of his day, touching not only Christendom but also Heathendom, after a century of Crusades. Comprehend this miracle we cannot, but gratefully accept it we can – and are indeed compelled so to do, as under Wolfram’s virile and gentle guidance we read how God loved knights and ladies as well as He loved peasants and clergy, and perhaps all the more indulgently because in many ways they were morally more exposed.
Wolfram von Eschenbach was a ministerialis or technically ‘unfree’ knight bound to the service of a lord, though qua knight he was free to defend his honour anywhere and evidently also able to change his patron, finding his main bene factor in this respect not in the neighbourhood of his native Eschenbach but in Thuringia with its famous maecenas, the Landgrave Hermann. Although Eschenbach is in Franconia, Wolfram alludes to himself as a Bavarian, and it is permissible to see Eschenbach as the mid-point of a series of concentric circles linking localities at ever-increasing distances -with a proportionate increase in vagueness and fantastic charm – from the tourneying-ground of Klein-Amberg, only a few miles east of Eschenbach, to furthermost Asia where the sky comes down. Such knights ministerial as Wolfram were the main bearers of the great efflorescence of secular poetry in Germany in the first half of the Hohenstauffen period, when poetry became emancipated from clerical domination. Bright boys of the subservient nobility were picked out and sent to monastery schools to learn the Three R’s so that their lords could administer at least their territories for themselves while their consciences remained in clerical hands.
Like Wolfram’s statement that he was following a Grail romance not by Chrétien but by the otherwise unknown ‘Kyot the Provençal’,* his claim not to know his A B C must be discounted as one of his many tactical jokes. In his Apology, inserted between the second and third chapters, Wolfram takes his stand not as a poet but as a knight, and in such bold and definite terms that he would have been howled down by the roughnecks of Thuringia had he not been a crack-jouster. In this proud stance he roundly disclaims that his story can be a book. This is clearly mockery of his senior, the poet Hartmann von Aue, who introduced and excused his masterpieces Der arme Heinrich and Iwein as the fruits of a scholar’s leisure. With his Erec and Iwein, Hartmann was the unassailable Arthurian narrator – until Wolfram von Eschenbach flung down his gauntlet (p. 83), a challenge which the great Gottfried von Strassburg rebutted with much parody and persiflage in the Literary Excursus of his Tristan (Penguin Classics, p. 105). All that we can safely glean from these exchanges to the present purpose is that Wolfram neither was nor claimed to be learned (notably in Latin), as both Hartmann and Gottfried clearly were. Some who take Wolfram’s assertion of analphabetism seriously point to strange transmogrifications in his riot of exotic names, and infer oral transmission. Yet this born bard-improvisator, only half-submerged by his conventional ‘literary’ persona, absorbed information about the world vastly from any available source, and at least one scholar who cites the transmogrifications goes on to speak of Wolfram’s unbounded delight in manipulating language somewhat in the manner of J. R. R. Tolkien, though of course with less real freedom. The view of the present writer is that Wolfram had a practical grasp of letters and numbers adequate to supervising, say, his lord’s falconers, his general stores, gold plate, cavalry horses, uniforms, munitions of war and other logistical affairs for the field of battle, under the Marshal – all matters with which he betrays an uncommon technical familiarity.
Some scattered topical references, as well as polemical exchanges embedded in the text, enable us to date Wolfram’s Parzival between the years approaching 1200 and those following 1210, the richest years in the history of medieval German poetry; for they also saw the appearance of the Nibelungenlied, Iwein, Tristan, and the superlative political poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide, not to mention his love-lyrics and those of several other fine poets.
There is evidence that after finishing Parzival, which he assembled according to a loose-leaf system – some pages sent flying round Germany never caught up with the main sheaf -Wolfram returned to it to patch and touch it up. One minor strand of narrative in Parzival, derived from a single short scene of Chrétien’s, that of the tragic young lovers Sigune and Schionatulander, so obsessed him and his audience that after the four scenes given them in Parzival he told the prior history of the pair in elegiac strophes of his own devising in the miscalled Titurel. Whether before, during or after the making of Titurel, Wolfram retold almost to the end the Old French La bataille d’Aliscans in his epic Willehalm, soon to be published in English from other hands in this same series. Willehalm was based upon a chanson de geste and deals with the double clash of two great armies, the Frankish and the Saracenic, who seek a, crucial decision amid vast carnage undreamt of in the sporting Parzival. In Willehalm, Wolfram again rose superbly to the challenge, which of its nature took him to greater heights.
Writing in a dense, sententious and at times consciously gnomic style, Wolfram makes heavy demands on his audiences. As a faithful translator I have in the main passed his demands on to my readers. Many passages of the original have virtually no syntactical structure – Parzival is definitely no book – and so the bare act of translation has inevitably tidied them up. Thus the reader must imagine Wolfram to be in one sense rougher and less tidy than he appears in these pages. In another sense he is tidier than I could possibly render him, in that his compelling thought derives much structure from his sappy and vigorous use of medieval German courtly couplets. Most characteristic of his style is a succession of verse-sprung statements in which he leaves it to his audience to supply the logical nexus, as we often do in living speech. In my translation I have left to the reader as much of this work required of him by Wolfram as I safely could, chiefly by means of innumerable dashes and colons. If my pages tend to look a little odd, then so does my original. I offer no apology, since otherwise I should have had to apologize to Wolfram for watering him down more than was absolutely necessary. For to translate this extraordinary poet, more than an
For the further guidance of the reader I have furnished an Introduction to a Second Reading after my translation. Here I can truthfully say – and it is a tribute to Wolfram’s supercharged utterance – that my Introduction to a Second Reading could have been many times its length without diffuseness or repetition. When that insight dawned on me I stopped it.
I am indebted to so many scholars at home and abroad over the half century during which I have been at grips with Parzival that, contrary to usage, I make no specific Acknowledgements here bar one. To have done otherwise would have been invidious, since many would inevitably have been overlooked. I have thanked them all privately in any case and I now thank them again in my heart. For very recent and expert advice, however, in a field that is virtually all his own, I thank my old friend and colleague F. P. Pickering, Professor Emeritus of the University of Reading, who made it possible for me to identify the area within which my enlightened publishers should seek and find the illustration on the outer cover. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague Dr Marion Gibbs for her vigilant and perspicacious reading of the proofs when as a teacher she was already fully engaged.
A. T. HATTO
Chapter 1
IF vacillation dwell with the heart the soul will rue it. Shame and honour clash where the courage of a steadfast man is motley like the magpie. But such a man may yet make merry, for Heaven and Hell have equal part in him. Infidelity’s friend is black all over and takes on a murky hue, while the man of loyal temper holds to the white.
This winged comparison is too swift for unripe wits. They lack the power to grasp it. For it will wrench past them like a startled hare! So it is with a dull mirror or a blind man’s dream. These reveal faces in dim outline: but the dark image does not abide, it gives but a moment’s joy. Who tweaks my palm where never a hair did grow? He would have learnt close grips indeed! Were I to cry ‘Oh I’ in fear of that it would mark me as a fool. Shall I find loyalty where it must vanish, like fire in a well or dew in the sun?