Notes and Translations on Chivalry?

Hi all, first post, i was wondering if there are any editions of Chivalry which where published with annotations?
All the occitan, latin etc. just became too much for me. I'm assuming the answer to the above question is No otherwise i've just been wasting a lot of time ;) cause i snapped and started trying to translate everything myself.
I'm going to post each chapter notes separately under this topic. I'm still in the midst of reading this book through so i don't have everything done yet. It would be great to have a permanent home for these notes when i finish them but this forum will have to do for the time being.
Here's chapter one for now:

“AINSI À VOUS, MADAME, À MA TRÈS HAULTE ET
TRÈS NOBLE DAME, À QUI J'AYME À DEVOIR
ATTACHEMENT ET OBÉISSANCE,
J'ENVOYE CE LIVRET."
SO TO YOU, MADAME, TO MY VERY LOFTY AND
VERY NOBLE LADY, TO WHOM I HAVE A DUTY
ATTACHMENT AND OBEDIENCE,
I AM SENDING THIS BOOKLET. "

Precautional
imprimis
In the first place

ab ovo
From the egg, ie from the very beginning

Prologue
"Afin que les entreprises honorables et les nobles aventures
et faicts d'armes soyent noblement enregistrés et conservés,
je vais traiter et raconter et inventer ung galimatias."
"So that honorable enterprises and noble adventures
and feats of arms are nobly registered and preserved,
I am going to treat and tell and invent a gibberish. "

À sa Dame
To his Lady

farre pio et salente mica
If a pure hand has touched the altar, the pious offering of a small cake and a few grains of salt will appease the offended gods more effectually than costly sacrifices.
- Horace, Od., iii. 23, 17.

Quo fugis? ah demons! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque
Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor.
Where are you going, O, mad one? There’s no escape:
though you head out to Tanais, Love will follow you there.
- Sextus Propertius, The Love Elegies
Tanaim aka Tanais is a city in Russia, equivalent to saying Timbuctoo.

Defenda me, Dios, de me!
Lord save me from my self!

I
Story of the Sestina
Sestina
Elaborate form of poetry with repeated elements designed to highlight an idea.

Armatz de fuste de fere d'acier,
Mos ostal seran bosc, fregz, e semdier,
E mas cansos sestinas e descortz,
E mantenrai los frevols contra 'ls fortz.
armed with iron, with wood and with steel,
and woods and roads shall be my lodgings
and many songs shall be strident satires
and I shall uphold the weak against the strong.
- Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Ges, si tot ma don' et amors (Now, albeit my lady, and Love)

Vox et praeterea nihil
Sound without substance

pro caris amicis
for dear friends

Omnia incerta ratione!
All without reason.

Omnis amans, amens
Every lover is mad

timidus perire
afraid to die

nihil ad Andromachen
This is nothing to Andromache, i.e., nothing to the purpose. Beside the question.

ohimé!
Oh my!

Malebolge
The eight circle of hell in Dantes Inferno

"Ouais, messire; mon mary faict les chançons—
"Yeah, sir; my husband is acting out-

"Laissez les aller, laissez les aller, laissez les aller, les bons combatants!"
"Let them go, let them go, let them go, good fighters!"

à outrance
excessive, ie to the death

Signor, saciez, ki or ne s'en ira
Take him, O Lord, who shall go,
. . .
Et vos, par qui je n'oi onques aïe,
Descendez tuit en infer le par font
But ye, by whom I had never aid,
Down shall ye sink into the deep of hell.
- Thibaut de Champagne, Seignor, Sachiez

Majores majora sonent.
Greats make a greater song.

I for one appreciate this

>2 ChrisRiesbeck: I do as well. Having no French, and only two years of High School Latin, I have generally just quickly passed over those portions of the text. I may have briefly looked at the Latin in a half-hearted attempt to decipher some of it, but it was mostly beyond me.

>1 wreade1872:
This is great! I'm not aware of any annotations of Chivalry, at least not in any systematic way. I can't swear that no one has ever offered a translation of a phrase or two in some critical work --- Van Doren? Davis? Canary? MacDonald? but if so I can't put my finger on one.

This a fine place to post your labors. I wonder if we may not be able to find a place for them on there Silver Stallion website....

Thanks guys! Some of the hardest stuff to decipher where the 10 initial chapter quotes, those are all in occitan/old french from various troubadour poems. I was able to find several translated together in a googlescan of the work A Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe, vol.1 by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismond (1846).
All other pieces i had to get one at a time from various locations, resorting to word by word conversion at the worst places using online old french dictionaries. Anyway heres chap2.

II
Story of the Tenson
Tenson
A form of poem in which two voices present different sides of an argument, in alternate stanzas.

"Plagues à Dieu ja la nueitz non falhis,
Ni 'l mieus amicx lonc de mi no s partis,
Ni la gayta jorn ni alba ne vis.
Oy Dieus! oy Dieus! de l' alba tan tost ve!"
{may it} Please to God already the night not ending,
nor my lovers alongside from me not parting
nor the watchman day nor dawn didn’t see,
O alas God ! O alas God ! {how} the dawn very soon comes.
- Unknown, En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi

Saint Peter ad Vincula
Saint Peter in Chains, bible story

ohé
oy , interjection used to get someones attention

cap-à-pie
head-to-foot, fully dressed, in context meaning fully prepared

Termagaunt
Imaginary Muslim deity portrayed as a violent and overbearing character in medieval mystery plays

haro
alas

Horselberg
- aka Venusberg, a hill/mountain under which the goddess Venus lives from german folklore.

“Dame, je n'ose,
Flors d'aiglentier et lis et rose,
En qui li filz Diex se repose,"
Dearest Lady, {hear Thy son!}
Flower of eglantine, red rose,
Lily fair, glad life is done,
- Rutebeuf, Miracle of Theophilus

I've not got around to Chivalry yet, but also welcome your efforts!

III
The Story of the Rat-Trap

"Leixant a part le stil dels trobados,
Dos grans dezigs han combatut ma pensa,
Mas lo voler vers un seguir dispensa;
Yo l'vos publich, amar dretament vos."
“Abandoning the Troubadours’ false verse,
Who trespass o’er the modest bounds of truth;
I must repress the wishes of my youth;
Since words are vain thy virtues to rehearse.”
- Ausias March, Lleixant a part l’estil dels trobadors

“Sots amoureux, sots privez, sots sauvages,
Sots vieux, nouveaux, et sots de tous âges.”
Fools amorous, fools private, savage fools,
Fools old and new, and fools of every age,
- Pierre Gringore, Cry of the Prince of Fools

Mort de Dieu
God is dead, in context simply a curse against badluck or fate

O deus certè!
Sure he was God!, meaning that this is proof of Gods existence and/or that it is God taking this action

Viviaine Implacable
Life inevitable ie Unavoidable part of life

Mort de ma Vie!
Death of my life!, exclamation probably equivalent to Not on your life!

Tergiversation
Evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement; equivocation.

IV
The Story of the Choices

"Sest fable es en aquest mon
Semblans al homes que i son;
Que el mager sen qu'om pot aver
So es amar Dieu et sa mer,
E gardar sos comendamens."
This fable is very applicable to the world at large.
This present age represents the city
which possesses so many madmen.
The highest wisdom of man is to love God and his mother
and to keep his commandments.
- Peire Cardenal, La faula de la pluya aka Una ciutat fo, no say quals

Dompnedex!
Exclamation possibly portmanteau latin for ‘by the right hand of god!’

Le Desir du Cuer
The Heart’s Desire

Planh
A dirge or song for the dead

benedicite!
Bless you!

Tarshish
aka Tartessus, ancient town of the Guadalquivir River valley in southwestern Spain.

"Dame Ysabeau, la prophécie
Que li sage dit ne ment mie,
Que la royne sut ceus grever
Qui tantost laquais sot aymer—"
Lady Ysabeau, the prophecies tell
Who the wise say do not lie,
That the queen would heaven grieve
Who soon lackeys would foolishly love—
*See below

"Ma voix mocque, mon cuer gémit—
Peu pense à ce que la voix dit,
Car me membre du temps jadis
Et d'ung garson, d'amour surpris,
Et d'une fille—et la vois si—
Et grandement suis esbahi."
"My voice mocks, my heart moans—
Little thinks what the voice says,
Because I have a memory of the past
And of a boy, surprised by love,
And a girl — and I see her there—
And I'm greatly amazed."
*These two translations are my own pieced together by looking up words individually in occitan dictionaries and therefore involve considerable guesswork.

When we read works like Chivalry, we understand how bad our educations were.

But of course when Cabell wrote for the slicks and pulps (?) he expected most readers to glide by the foreign language phrases and passages and focus on the stories themselves. The epigraphs and and other artifacts of his William and Mary education serve as adornments, lending an ambiance, not as crucial to the stories, in most cases.

Remember that most Americans, today, enter high school at age 14 — when Cabell went to college. I know that standards in my public high school were low — but were considered quite high by government school standards. Little was expected of me, academically, other than get good grades as I passed from class to class, grade to grade.

This explains a great deal about our time.

V
The Story of the Housewife

"Selh que m blasma vostr' amor ni m defen
Non podon far en re mon cor mellor,
Ni'l dous dezir qu'ieu ai de vos major,
Ni l'enveya' ni'l dezir, ni'l talen."
“He who blames or forbids my loving you
Cannot in any way amend my heart,
Nor increase the sweet desire I have for you,
Nor the wish, nor the desiring, nor the yearning.”
- Clara d'Anduza

envoi
a short stanza at the end of a ballad used to comment on the preceding body of the poem.

my très beau sire
my very good lord

>9 wirkman: I agree that its not entirely necessary to understand this stuff, it never bothered me in other Cabell works but there was just so much of it here it started to grate.

I'm not sure i'd look at issues parsing Cabell's works as a poor reflection on anyone's education though ;) . I mean i havn't had a classical education either but i don't really think learning Latin, Greek myth or Occitan would have really served me all that well in daily life :P .

I only started reading a lot in 2008 FYI (at age 28) . But with about 30 books a year until 2014 then 60+ books a year since i feel like i can appreciate even the toughest of authors now.

I think today its up to the student to continue their own education beyond what can be provided by the state but also i think maybe that's how its always worked.
I'm not convinced that the education systems of the past have been appreciably better, but they've certainly been appreciably fewer.

VI
The Story of the Satraps

"Je suis voix au désert criant
Que chascun soyt rectifiant
La voye de Sauveur; non suis,
Et accomplir je ne le puis."
Altered from historical original, by Cabell himself i assume, additions in italics below.
A voice, a solitary cry
In the desert paths am I!
Smooth the paths, and make them meet,
For the great Redeemers feet; not I,
And I dare not try it.
- Mystery of the Passion by unknown

Agentes uno animo
We act as one

Est caeli in palatio!
This palace a heaven!

Et carmen unum facio:
"Mater, ora filium,
Ut post hoc exilium
Nobis donet gaudium
Beatorum omnium!"
And i make but one song:
“Mother, pray thy Son,
that, after his exile,
he may grant us the joy
of all the blessed ones”.
- The quoted section is from the medieval carol Mater ora filium by unknown

villein
A type of serf

In extremis
at the point of death

Trygaeus
Character from the ancient play Peace by Aristophanes

Ixion
A man tricked by Zeus into making love to a cloud in the shape of Hera

Depardieux!
In gods name!

pismires
ants

A solis ortus cardine!
Qui natus est de virgine,
'Gloria Tibi, Domine!'
Enixa est puerpera;
Qui regnat super aethera,
'Gloria Tibi, Domine!"
Christ save us all, as well He can,
Arisen from the quarter of the sun!
For He is both God and man,
Who is born of a virgin,
And we but part of His wide plan
That sing, and heartily sing we,
‘Glory to Thee, O Lord!'
"Between a heifer and an ass
The woman in childbed is delivered;;
In ragged woollen clad He was
Who reigns in Heaven,
And patiently may we then pass
That sing, and heartily sing we,
‘Glory to Thee, O Lord!'"
- Slight variation of the english christmas carol Christ Keep Us All, As He Well Can, which incorporated latin from the hymn A solis ortus cardine by Caelius Sedulius

VII
The Story of the Heritage

"Pour vous je suis en prison mise,
En ceste chambre à voulte grise,
Et traineray ma triste vie
Sans que jamais mon cueur varie,
Car toujours seray vostre amye."
“For you i am made a prisoner,
In this gray vaulted cell,
And waste away my life,
For my heart never changes,
It will always be your friend.”
- Aucassin and Nicolette by unknown

Belphegor
Demon prince who seduces people by suggesting to them ingenious inventions that will make them rich.

Asmodeus
Demon prince of lust.

Wycliffite!
A supporter of John Wycliffe, an influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood. He is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism.

VIII
The Story of the Scabbard

"Ainsi il avoit trouvé sa mie
Si belle qu'on put souhaiter.
N'avoit cure d'ailleurs plaider,
Fors qu'avec lui manoir et estre.
Bien est Amour puissant et maistre."
For he found his love so fair,
Past his hopes, that his desire
Never after mounted higher,
Than with her to live in bliss.
Love a powerful master is.
- Henry d’Audely, Lay of Aristotle

Owain Glyndwyr
Welsh rebel, his association with the dark arts is probably due to his phantom like appearances and disappearances, ie he used guerilla warfare tactics against the english.

Isle of Taprobane
Sri Lanka, its mountains of gold guarded by giant ants, are mentioned in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

robe of Padarn Beisrudd
Magic coat said to perfectly fit any well-born nobleman but will not fit a commoner.

he likened the boy to Dionysos at Naxos, and could find no blame for Ariadne.
Dionysos found Ariadne at Naxos after she was abandoned by Theseus, and married her.

cenatory
Of or pertaining to dinner or supper, in context meaning he only responded because he had so much to eat and drink that he was easily influenced.

birds of Rhiannon
Three magical birds, whose song can "wake the dead and lull the living to sleep" .

IX
The Story of the Navarrese

Nararrese
A native of Navarre, a basque kingdom on the french/spainish border

"J'ay en mon cueur joyeusement
Escript, afin que ne l'oublie,
Ce refrain qu'ayme chierement,
C'estes vous de qui suis amye."
I have it in my heart happily
Written, so as not to forget it,
This refrain that I deeply cherish,
You are my friend.
- Charles d’Orléans, Ballad XLVII Vous, soyés la tresbien venue

joculatrix
female jester

Samarcand and Baldach
city in modern day Uzbekistan and another name for Babylon respectively

Sir Hengist
Richard Hengist Horne, obscure 19th century writer of an epic poem ‘Orion’

saltatrice and a jongleur
dancing girl and a minstrel

purlieus
the area near or surrounding a place

Martinmas
St. Martins Day, aka the Funeral of Saint Martin, aka Old Halloween, 11th of November.

Belial
Demon prince of lies

anemone
a genus of flowering plants in the buttercup family

Sedebis apud angelos,
Quia amavisti!'
You will sit with the angels
Because you loved!

So here is chapter 10 and the epilogue. My first plan was to print the notes as a booklet but i changed my mind and switched to an epub with notes as i'm not sure yet whether i'll buy a physical copy.
Then i decided that while i was here, since in order to find the translations i mostly had to find the entire original source, i decided it might be good to have a file with those extended sources in it.
By the way if any version of this ends up being hosted by SilverStallion that would be awesome, in the mean time HERE https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cjYxcSyUNJZwZsUsVCN6Xpm5yQ64aZv4 you'll find, pdf and epub of the notes and the same for the extended poetry sources file. Note i havn't actually tried printing the pdfs, i think they're fine... but havn't been able to confirm that.
Edit: Also the epub is the gutenberg version with pictures, it seems to work fine on my old sony-505 but maybe someone could check it on a kindle or something. There are no backlinks FYI, you'll just need to use the back button on the ereader.

X
The Story of the Fox-Brush
"Dame serez de mon cueur, sans debat,
Entierement, jusques mort me consume.
Laurier souëf qui pour mon droit combat,
Olivier franc, m'ostant toute amertume."
Deep will you be, dear lady, in my heart,
Entire, unquestioned, till my dying day,
Laurel who sweetly combats for my right,
Olive that takes all bitterness away.
- François Villon, Ballad for Robert d’Estouteville

Armagnacs
Parisian supporters of the nobles and Charles Duke of Orléans. Named for his father-in-law, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac.

decollation
decapitation

green-calyxed
The usually green part of a flower that surrounds and holds the coloured petals

Agrapard and Angoulaffre
Both very large men from tales of the legendary knight Roland.

"El tems amoreus plein de joie,
El tems où tote riens s'esgaie,—"
"In time of love and jollity,
That all things ginneth waxen gay,—"
- Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose

Presbyter John
Prester John, a mythical Christian king. In the middle-ages he was widely believed to exist and rule some kingdom in africa or the middle-east.

wen
a boil

Tarpeia and Pisidice and Rahab... Judith's nobler guilt
Three legendary women known for betraying their people to invaders... Judith seduced the invading armies general and decapitated him while he slept.

parricide
A person who kills a parent or other close relative

"Adieu de fois plus de cent mile!
Aillors vois oïr l'Evangile,
Car chi fors mentir on ne sait...."
“Farewell, more than a hundred thousand times!
Now will i go and listen to the gospel,
For here they know nought but to lie...”
- Adam de la Halle, Congé to Arras

Epilogue
“Et je fais sçavoir à tous lecteurs de ce Livret que les
chases que je dis avoir vues et sues sont enregistrés icy, afin
que vous pouviez les regarder selon vostre ban sens, s'il vous
plaist.”
And I let all readers of this Booklet know that the
pursuits that I say I saw and knew are recorded here,
so that you may look at them however you wish, if it
pleases you.

A son Livret
To his Booklet

Et quid Pandoniae
And what of Parthenos

quid Pandoniae restat nisi nomen Athenae
what remains of Parthenos but the name Athena
references to the famous lost sculpture once housed in the Parthenon

Non mi aurum posco, nec mi pretium
I seek not gold, nor am I to be bought

EXPLICIT DECAS REGINARUM
Here ends the decade of Queens

>15 wreade1872: Sir Hengist
Richard Hengist Horne, obscure 19th century writer of an epic poem ‘Orion’

I have to disagree with this identification. Cabell dropped this reference in the Storisende edition, making me think I was blind and senile while looking for it (some truth there).

There is no reason for Antoine Riczi to be referring to an obscure author centuries in the future. This is obviously Hengist of Hengist and Horsa from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of England. Hengist, with Horsa his brother, leaders of the Saxon settlers, repeatedly bamboozled the Britons until he reached a point when he could not talk his way out of a situation and was killed. The peace conference between the Britons and the Saxons at the Cloister of Ambrius, where the Saxons were secretly armed and on a signal killed all the Briton leaders except two, is the clear source of Game of Thrones' "Blood Wedding."

Cabell was likely aware of new theories that Hengist and Horsa were completely ahistorical and were actually twin germanic horse-gods, similar to the Ashwins of Hinduism. This theory seems to be currently the majority opinion among scholars.

Ok! cool... how about i just change it to

Sir Hengist
mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of England

>18 wreade1872: Did I mention his death was prophesied by Merlin Ambrosius?

Looking at your work again, I was marveling at how concise you managed to keep your entries. I tend to blather my way around a topic, dropping trivial nuggets while trying to think of what to say next. Now, again I am smiling and marveling.

I would have found it difficult not to mention that Richard Hengist Horne also published children's books under the pseudonym Mrs. Fairstar or that he edited an anthology in which he published work by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett before the two had met.

Well your knowledge exceeds mine considerably :) . In any case there weren't really supposed to be any notes. I just set out to find the translations for all the medieval french/latin bits.
Along the way since i was googling a lot of things anyway i looked up some other non-translation stuff, but i wanted to keep the notes pretty minimal.

Thats good info though!

>20 wreade1872: I hope you don't think I knew who Richard Hengist Horne was before you mentioned him here. I did not remember the context of the Hengist reference in Chivalry and was frustrated I couldn't find it. After I figured that out, I looked up Horne and Orion on Archive.org, and found a bunch of stuff. It turned out he had very a interesting life and body of work. Thank you for bringing him to my attention.

You used Google Translate for Occitan ?! I was wondering where you found a Provencal/English dictionary and grammar. Again, good job.

oh.. i thought i had included citations on both files but looks like i only have them on the extended poetrysources file i made.
Those files are in a separate folder within the Chivalry folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cjYxcSyUNJZwZsUsVCN6Xpm5yQ64aZv4

but here's a copy. Googlebooks helped more than google translate ;) . I used googletranslate a bit, translating into both French and Galacian gives a better idea of things, there are some Occitan dictionaries online aswell to try some words. But i tried to avoid such educated guesswork and wherever possible found someone else's translation.

Citations
Sextus Propertius, The Love Elegies:
Book II.30:1-40 No escape from Love translated by A.S.Kline
http://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/3110/Propertius.htm

Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Canso 8 Ges, si tot ma don' et amors
http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/raimbaut_de_vaqueiras/raimbaut_de_vaqueiras_08...

Thibaut de Champagne, Seignor, sachiez
Early French Poets (1846), Edited by Rev.Henry Cary Jr., Translated by Rev.Henry Francis Cary

Unknown, En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi
Occitane alba for Alto and Bass Throat-singing Duet, translated by Edward Caine and Robin Bier, University of York
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/4782/

Rutebeuf, The Miracle of Theophilus
History of French Literature by Henri van Laun (1882)

Ausiás March, Abandoning the Troubadours’ false verse
A Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe, vol.1 by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismond (1846)

Pierre Gringoire, Cry of the Prince of Fools
History of French Literature by Henri van Laun (1882)

Peire Cardenal, The Fable of the Rain; La faula de la pluya (Una ciutat fo, no say quals)
A Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe, vol.1 by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismond (1846)

Clara d'Anduza, En greu esmai et en greu pessamen
Songs of the Women Troubadours by Bruckner, Shepard, White (2000)

unknown, Mystery of the Passion
A Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe, vol.1 by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismond (1846)

unknown, Mater ora filium
Service-sheet, Trinity College Cambridge, Choral Evensong, Sunday 29 April 2018

Coelius Sedulius, A solis ortus cardine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_solis_ortus_cardine

unknown, Christ Keep Us All, As He Well Can
Ancient English Christmas Carols: 1400-1700 by Martha Edith Rickert (1910)

unknown, Aucassin and Nicolette
My own translation, with help from googletranslate, after finding none of the many other translations close enough for my liking.

Henri de Valenciennes, Lay of Aristotle
A Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe, vol.1 by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismond (1846)

Charles d’Orléans, Vous, soyés la tresbien venue
Extract: My own translation with help from google.

François Villon, Ballad for Robert d’Estouteville
The Testament and Other Poems by Anthony Mortimer (2013)

Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose
History of French Literature by Henri van Laun (1882)

Adam de la Halle, The Leave Taking (Le Congé)
History of French Literature by Henri van Laun (1882)

>22 wreade1872:

That is an admirably academic project you undertook there. Your description makes it sound "simple" (perhaps not intentionally), but the painstaking effort is more impressive to me than the idea behind it. Like many academic efforts I admire!