A Note on the Translation
My aim here for Rabelais (as for my Penguin Montaigne) is to turn him loyally into readable and enjoyable English. Here too I have not found that meaning is more loyally conveyed by clinging to French syntax and constructions. French and English often achieve similar effects by different means; they very often fall naturally into different word-orders. Rabelais deliberately employs many rare words, words which would have baffled most of his contemporaries. That is a conscious stylistic device. His vocabulary is vast, drawing upon dialects and loan-words as well as on French at its richest. Italian, Dutch, German and even English and Scottish words may jostle with Greek, Latin or Hebrew terms. To translate him always by common-or-garden English terms would be to traduce him. Some of his words should fox readers and others challenge them. Their very rarity is their appeal. Their general meanings (if we need to know them) are normally adumbrated by their contexts. Save for made-up comic words and nonce-words, I try to pour Rabelais’ riches into the ample lexical mould of the Oxford (New English) Dictionary. It was a joy to do so. There is nothing cramping about that dictionary! Rabelais uses more different words than any other French author. In that, and not only in that, he is like Shakespeare, to whom the same applies in English. Rabelais enjoys punning and elaborately playing with words. Puns may be comic. They may also be deadly serious. Plays on words rarely pass easily from one tongue to another, yet they must be rendered. Occasionally they are best transposed into English equivalents. If so, a more literal version is tucked away somewhere in an introduction or note.
There is no desire to bowdlerize Rabelais, but it is not always best to translate his grosser words by their apparently direct English equivalents. A stronger or weaker word may serve better. Taboo words are far from identical in both languages. Shit in English is far more arresting than merde in French (one of the words picked up on a first trip to France). Shit is by no means always the best translation of merde. Pooh or some other word may often serve better. The same applies to words such as cunt and con: conneries (‘cunteries’) is a word accepted in elegant French parliamentary debates or in a polished broadcast. Conversely cul may sometimes be better rendered by arse than by bottom or bum. It is not a regular taboo word, though it can be.
When the ‘rude’ English word is the right one it is of course used. Rabelais is not addressed to the verbally bashful. Yet he is less bold than may be thought. In his own days he was much read aloud: when François I wanted to judge whether Rabelais was orthodox he did not ask the Bishop of Sens, the ‘best reader in France’, what he thought of him: he ordered him to read him his Rabelais so that he could judge for himself. There is no word he read, no theme, no bawdy, which could not be decently read aloud by a bishop to his king, in the presence of his attendant lords and ladies.
Contemporaries were, however, struck by the scatology. The symbol of the physician was the urine bottle and the clyster (or enema), but Rabelais was not just being a doctor. He also associated faeces with error and sometimes with the Devil: piddling is a source of simple laughter; faeces, of laughter more complex and often fully condemnatory.
In the Fourth Book Rabelais (perhaps with death in view) ties up his knots. He confronts the comedy of cruelty of which he was a master but which had come to trouble him. Before the end he also reminds readers that scatology is to be found in refined Latin poets and elegant Italian conteurs. (Rabelais cites them in the original tongues and leaves you to make what you can of them. Here they are all translated.) Emphasis on the bodiliness of human beings is part of the stock-in-trade of the satirist.
There is laughing at and laughing with. Rabelais is an adept at catching us out: first trapping us into laughing at, when we are about to be led to veneration and awe; or making us laugh with, when we are soon to be led to laughing at. It is a translator’s task to bring that out. Laughter often lies in the names Rabelais gave to his characters. Some of the names are appropriate whilst others very much are not: so names too may trip us up.
Here the names are mainly kept in French. That reminds readers that these are French books anchored in French Renaissance culture.
All Souls College, Oxford
*
This edited translation of Rabelais is dedicated to those
students who read Rabelais with me at home and abroad, and
especially to those in the University of Birmingham, 1951–61;
at University College London and the Warburg Institute,
1961–84; and at All Souls College and Wolfson College,
Oxford, from 1984 onwards.
PANTAGRUEL
Introduction to Pantagruel
The text as translated here is that of the first edition, which dates from 1531 or 1532.
The present text includes selected variants from the definitive edition of 1542. The variants are shown in two main ways: I) interpolations are shown in the text and are enclosed within square brackets; 2) eliminations and modifications are given in the notes. Thus, to read the text of the first edition, ignore the interpolations inside square brackets and the variants listed in the notes. To read the definitive text of 1542, read everything.
The first edition of Pantagruel (by Claude Nourry of Lyons) is undated, though was probably published in 1532. In A New Rabelais Bibliography (NRB)1 it is numbered I. Since the Edition Critique the definitive text is taken to be Pantagruel, Roy des Dipsodes published by François Juste of Lyons in 1542 (NRB 12).
The text used as the basis for the translation is that edited by V.-L. Saulnier.2 The Edition Critique3 is consulted, as is the Pléiade edition of Rabelais edited by Mireille Huchon4 and the parallel text version of Guy Demerson,5 which gives a modern French translation.
PANTAGRUEL
The horrifying and dreadful
DEEDS AND PROWESSES
of the most famous
PANTAGRUEL
KING OF THE DIPSODES,
Son of the great Giant Gargantua.
Newly composed by Maître Alcofrybas Nasier
Contents
Dixain by Maître Hughes Salel to the Author of this Book
The Prologue of the Author
1 On the Origins and Lineage of the great Pantagruel
2 On the Nativity of the Most-Redoubtable Pantagruel
3 Of Gargantua’s grief at the death of his wife Badebec
4 The Infancy of Pantagruel
5 The deeds of noble Pantagruel in his youth
6 How Pantagruel met a man from Limoges who distorted the French tongue
7 How Pantagruel came to Paris [and of the fine books in the Library of Saint Victor]
8 How Pantagruel received in Paris a letter from his father Gargantua, and what it contained
9 How Pantagruel met Panurge, whom he loved all his life
9 bis How Pantagruel fairly judged an amazingly hard and obscure controversy so equitably that his judgement was termed more wonderful than that of Solomon’s
10 Panurge tells how he escaped from the hands of the Turks
11 How Panurge taught quite a new way to build the walls of Paris
12 On the morals and characteristics of Panurge
13 How a Great Scholar from England wished to argue against Pantagruel, and was vanquished by Panurge
14 How Panurge was in love with a great dame in Paris, and of the trick he played on her
15 How Pantagruel departed from Paris on hearing news that the Dipsodes were invading the land of the Amaurots. And why the leagues are so short in France. And the Exposition of a saying inscribed upon a ring
16 How Panurge, Carpalim, Eusthenes and Epistemon, the Companions of Pantagruel, most cleverly discomfited six hundred and sixty knights
17 How Pantagruel erected a trophy in memory of their prowess, and Panurge another in memory of the leverets. And how Pantagruel engendered little men from his loud farts and little women from his quiet ones. And how Panurge shattered a thick stave over a couple of glasses
18 How Pantagruel mos
t strangely won a victory over the Dipsodes and the Giants
19 How Pantagruel vanquished three hundred giants who were armed with blocks of sandstone, and Loup Garou their captain
20 How Epistemon, who had his head sliced off, was cleverly healed by Panurge; also news about devils and the damned
21 How Pantagruel entered into the city of the Amaurots; and how Panurge married off King Anarch and made him a crier of green sauce
22 How Pantagruel covered an entire army with his tongue; and what the author saw within his mouth
23 How Pantagruel was taken ill, and the method by which he was cured
[Dixain by Maître Hughes Salel to the Author of this Book]
[This poem is not in the only extant copy of the first edition. Hughes Salel, a court poet and valet de chambre to François I, is the first to apply to Rabelais the highest literary accolade: he ‘mixes the useful and the sweet’. As this poem appeared in the edition of 1534 published by François Juste in Lyons, the literary public already had time to judge the merits of Pantagruel. Hughes Salel is also the first to call Rabelais the French Democritus.
The last sentence, ‘Long live all good Pantagruelists’ was first added in two editions published by François Juste (1534 and 1537).]
[If mixing moral profit with the sweet
Enables the good author praise to find
You will such praises garner, as is meet.
That I do know. Its laughing face behind,
Within this book the reader sees your mind
Build moral profit: on foundations new.
Reborn Democritus in you I view
Laughing at human beings’ silly ways.
So persevere: should plaudits e’er prove few
Below: in Highest Regions find due praise.
Long live all good Pantagruelists.]
The Prologue of the Author
[Pantagruel was preceded by a modest little book, The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Giant Gargantua. It is a chapbook, not from the pen of Rabelais. Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais, the ‘author’ of Pantagruel) pretends in his patter that his book is of the same kidney. The other books which it is compared to are mainly medieval romances, or parodies of them (much enjoyed in modernized prose versions).
The allusion to Raimbert Raclet, a professor of Law at Dole who is supposed not to understand such a basic text as the Institutes of Justinian, is a reminder that Pantagruel has many in-jokes shared with Law students.
The nonce-word ‘predestigiators’ renders prestinateurs, an invented word combining prédestination and prestidigitation. It was not predestination as such that Rabelais likened to a kind of juggling but Calvin’s interpretation of it.]
Knights most shining and most chivalrous, noblemen and others who delight in all things noble and decorous, you have of late looked in, dipped in and taken in the Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Giant Gargantua, and as men faithful and true you have [gallantly] believed them like the text of the Bible or the Holy Gospel, and have often spent time over them with honourable ladies and gentlewomen, relating long and lovely tales from them whenever you have run out of topics of conversation. For which you are indeed worthy of great praise [and of being for ever remembered].
If only each one of us would abandon his own tasks, [stop worrying about his vocation] and cast his own affairs into oblivion so as to devote himself entirely to them, without letting his mind be otherwise distracted or impeded until he had learnt them off by heart, so that, if ever the printer’s art should chance to fail or all books be lost, every father could teach them clearly to his children [, and pass them on from hand to hand to his descendants and successors as a religious cabbala]; for there is more fruit in them than is perhaps ever realized by a bunch of loud-mouths (scabby syphilitics all of them!) who understand such bits of fun less than Raclet understands the Institutes.
I have known a fair number of great and powerful lords out hunting game or hawking [for ducks] who, if their quarry was not tracked down or if their falcons remained hovering as their prey flew off, were deeply disappointed, as you can well appreciate, yet they resorted (for comfort and to avoid being plunged into boredom) to rehearsing the inestimable deeds of the said Gargantua.
There are folk in this world – this is no silly nonsense – who, being plagued with the tooth-ache and having spent their all on the physicians [to no avail], have found no remedy more expedient than to place the aforesaid Chronicles between two very hot strips of fine linen and apply them to the seat of the pain, sprinkling a little powdered dung over them.
But what shall I say about the wretches who suffer from the gout and the pox? O how often have we seen them after they had been well basted and duly daubed with unguents, their faces burnished like the clasp of a pork-barrel and their teeth clattering like the manual of an organ (or a set of virginals when the keys are struck) while they are foaming at the gullet like a wild boar which hound and whippet have hunted for seven hours [and cornered in the nets]. Then what did they do? Their only consolation lay in listening to a page read from that book. And we have seen some of them who swear that they would give themselves to a hundred barrelfuls of [antique] devils if they hadn’t experienced manifest relief from such readings while sweating it out in their limbos (neither more nor less relief than women in labour experience when one reads to them the Life of Saint Margaret).
Is that nothing! I shall stand you half a noggin of tripe if you can find me another book in any tongue, field or faculty which possesses such powers, properties or privileges. No, my lords, no. [It is has no equal and no paragon; it is beyond compare. That I maintain up to the stake, exclusively.]
As for those who would hold otherwise, take them to be cheats, [predestigitators, mountebanks] and seducers.
You can, it is true, find certain occult properties in a few other memorable books,1 including [Toss-pints, Orlando Furioso,] Robert le Diable, Fierebras, William the Fearless, Huon of Bordeaux, Mandeville and Matabrune; yet they cannot be compared with the one book we are now talking of.
Experience has infallibly convinced everyone of the great profit and utility to be derived from those Gargantuine Chronicles. Why! the printers have already sold more of them in two months than bibles will be bought in nine years.
So I, your obedient slave, wishing to extend your pastimes further, offer you now another book of the same alloy, except that it is a trifle more balanced than the other one and more worthy of credence. For unless you deliberately intend to go astray, don’t think that I’m talking as Jews do about the Law: I was not born under such a planet as ever to lie or to assert anything which was not true: agentes et consentientes, meaning ‘gents with nothing on our conscience’.2
I am speaking like Saint John of the Apocalypse: ‘We bear witness of that we have seen’:3 that is, of the horrifying deeds and exploits of Pantagruel, whose retainer I have been ever since I stopped being a page until this present time when he has given me leave to have a turn at visiting my old cow-byres to discover whether any of my folk are still alive.
And so, to bring this Prologue to a conclusion: I give myself – body and soul, tripe and innards – to a hundred thousand punnets of fair devils if I tell you one single word of a lie in the whole of this history: so too, may Saint Anthony’s fire burn you, the falling sickness skew you, quinsy and wolf-ulcers snip you; may you suffer from bloody-stools; and:
May the clap caught from your Fair,
Dense as any cow-hide’s hair,
With quick-silver for cement
Penetrate your fundament,
and may you fall into the sulphurous fire of the Pit like Sodom and Gomorrah should you not firmly believe everything that I shall relate to you in this present Chronicle.
On the Origins and Lineage of the great Pantagruel
CHAPTER 1
[The tale is set in the context of Scripture which (in the spirit of Twelfth Night, Shrovetide and Mardi Gras, is for a whi
le not taken too seriously, even when, as here in Pantagruel, the Old Testament is traditionally interlinked with the New: the genealogy parodies those of the Old Testament, for example, but has links with both genealogies in the New. So too the murder of Abel by his brother Cain alludes to Genesis 4, but (as antitype and type) is quietly linked to ‘the blood of the righteous’ of Matthew 23:35. Rabelais does not need to draw attention to such echoes of Scripture by citing book and chapter (verses had yet to be invented). They are the very stuff of his humour in this book: his readers are supposed to recognize them.
The mock Old Testament setting is further emphasized by the quiet citing of Eve’s judgement on the forbidden apple (Genesis 3:6): ‘pleasant to the eyes and much to be desired by the taste’.
Noah, the first to plant the vine, was also the first ever to get drunk (with lightning speed).
‘Almighty and everlasting Guts’ renders Ventrem omnipotentem, a carnavalesque distortion of Patrem omnipotentem, the Father Almighty of the Creeds.
Saucy songs were sung in the highest society. Rabelais echoes one set to music by Jean Molinet, in which the ladies sing, ‘Those big cocks which fill your fist… Where are they now? They are no more.’
The tale of the giant who rode astride Noah’s ark is taken straight from the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezar, where the giant is the ‘Hapalit’, the ‘He-who-Survived’ (survived, that is, the Flood). He is associated or identified with Og, the King of Basan of the Psalms.
The last word of the chapter was originally ‘Lucian’: Rabelais’ first allusion to that Greek satirist, some of whose works he had translated when still a Franciscan.]
It will be neither fruitless nor idle [, seeing we are at leisure,] to recall for you the primary source and origin of our good giant Pantagruel, for I note that all fine historiographers have done likewise in their chronicles, not only those of the Greeks, Arabs and Ethnics but also the authors of Holy Writ, as Monsignor Saint Luke particularly, and Saint Matthew.4
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 5