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to a clarity at once simple and formal, excited and cool, to characteris–
tics which 1 find myself trying to describe in terms of light and water."
If
a reader is unfamiliar with the original poem, Merwin's reading
might seem quite credible. But, as Paul Zumthor has said in his
Towards
a Medieval Poetics,
"The story [the
chansons de gestes]
tell is less mean–
ingful and moving than the way in which they give it form and rhythm
.... " Of the
Song of Roland
itself, Erich Auerbach has written,
Anything like flow of discourse does not arise. The rhythm of the
Chanson de Roland
is never flowing, as is that of the antique epic
.... The assonant strophic pattern ... gives every line the appear–
ance of an independent unit while the entire strophe appears to be
a bundle of independent parts, as though sticks or spears of equal
length and with similar points were bundled together.... They are
without any free-flowing, dynamic, and impulsive movement in
expression.
The
Chanson de Roland's
poetic argument relies on paratactic sentence
structure and the power of juxtapositions.
It
has minimal non-periodic
enjambment, its syntax is rigid, and each assonantal line (and often each
distitch within the line) forms a complete clause. In short, the original
poem's movement is essentially incompatible with that of prose: "The
laisse
is a circumspection rather than a narrative," as the scholar Freder–
ick Goldin has written in the preface to his
Song of Roland.
The sense of
inevitability and necessity implied by the forms of the self–
contained
laisses
reflects the medieval Christian mind-frame of the poem's
creation. This sense of tight stricture, like the absoluteness of the hero's
purpose, is part of the poem's meaning: "All the categories of this life and
the next are unambiguous, immutable, fixed in rigid formulations," as
Auerbach describes the feudal world . To the modern sensibility, the
poem's declaration of moral absolutes comes as something of a shock:
We know our duty: to stand here for our King.
A man must bear some hardships for his lord,
stand everything, the great heat, the great cold,
lose the hide and hair on him for his good lord.
Now let each man make sure
to
strike hard here:
let them not sing a bad song about us!
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right!
They'll make no bad example of me this day! AOI (Goldin).
