medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

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Received: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:01:02 PM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 08.11.08 Abelard and Heloise, The Letters (Symes)

Abelard and Heloise. <i>The Letters and Other Writings</i>.
Translated, with an introduction and notes, by William Levitan.
Selected songs and poems translated by Stanley Lombardo and Barbara
Thorburn. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007.
Pp. 356. ISBN: 978-0-87220-875-9.

   Reviewed by Carol Symes
        University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
        [log in to unmask]


William Levitan's new translation of the famous correspondence between
Abelard and Heloise is welcome for a number of reasons. First, it will
satisfy the very wide audience already familiar with the standard
Penguin translation by Betty Radice and will replace it on shelves
everywhere; but it also surpasses this version in its beauty,
faithfulness to the Latin originals, and scholarly apparatus. Second,
it includes not only the letters exchanged between Heloise and
Abelard, beginning with the open letter containing Abelard's account
of his calamitous career, but also the introductory letter appended by
Heloise to the forty-two questions she addressed to Abelard on the
interpretation of Scripture (the <i>Heloisae Problemata</i>), the
confession of faith that Abelard sent to Heloise after his
condemnation at the Council of Sens in 1140 (the <i>Apologeticus</i>,
passed on by his student Berengar of Poitiers), the correspondence
between Heloise and Peter the Venerable, and a selection of songs and
poems by Abelard (some accompanied by music), thoughtfully translated
by Stanley Lombardo and Barbara Thorburn. Generously, Levitan also
gives readers a satisfying introduction, in which he analyzes the very
different Latin prosodies cultivated by Abelard and Heloise, briefly
but accurately sketches the history of the letters' transmission and
reception, offers suggestions for further reading, provides a map of
northern France, traces a chronology of events in the lives and
afterlives of the protagonists, and undergirds the whole with a series
of lucid, helpful footnotes that illuminate these writings' historical
contexts, explain difficult concepts (e.g. universals), and outline
key controversies in recent scholarship. There are, moreover, two
appendices that pursue the letters' legacy. The first provides an
example of one of their fictitious offspring in the modern era,
excerpts from "The Letter to Philintus" by the English poet and critic
John Hughes (1677-1720). The second contains selections from the
correspondence that may represent a medieval imitation, the "Letters
of Two Lovers" copied into a fifteenth-century manuscript and edited
by Ewald Könsgen in 1974, a corpus whose association with Abelard and
Heloise is currently a matter of intense debate.[1]

Obviously, this will be a marvelous teaching text, and it deserves to
enliven the syllabi of many, many courses. But it will also energize
scholars. Levitan's presentation of the letters and their companion
pieces helps them to slough off some very old and unwelcome baggage,
including the anachronistic division of the correspondence into "The
Personal Letters" and "The Letters of Direction," and thus enables
readings that cross artificial boundaries. At the same time, the
volume as a whole constantly calls attention to the complexity of the
interpretive layers that have accrued over eight and a half centuries,
since the letters were first brought together. It thus highlights and
embraces these texts' entanglement in the visceral responses of
generations of readers.

Perhaps most fruitfully, Levitan's fresh translations administer a
series of productive shocks to the system. Nothing looks or sounds the
same. Each interlocutor's distinctive vocabulary and style are as
visually striking as they are tangible on the tongue and audible to
the ear, since Levitan lays bare the letters' metrical structures on
the page. In Abelard's opening narrative, therefore, the reader can
see and hear how moments of violence or emotion are mirrored in
explosive incantations: rhetoric artfully unleashed, and then as
artfully reined in. This, in turn, further heightens the contrast
between his carefully prosaic letters and the sustained lyrical
<i>cursus</i> of Heloise (her first two letters are, essentially, in
verse); his short replies come like a punch in the gut--or like the
missives of a man who has lashed himself to a mast in order to
withstand the Sirens. Eventually, she learns how to play the game,
breaking off her song in the fifth letter to discuss the daily
concerns of the Paraclete, its rule, and its rituals. By the time one
has read through the volume, one understands why Levitan has only to
say that "it is difficult to ascribe the fragments" of the other
"Letters of Two Lovers" to Abelard and Heloise (315); the force of his
argument lies in the stark divergence among the personae evoked by his
translations, differences apparent to an expert philologist but
invisible or inaudible to many working-day Latinists.[2]  Here, they
are made accessible to non-Latinists, too.

As Levitan observes, the letters of Abelard and Heloise are always
"sharply conscious of the audience, large and small, for whom they
were fashioning their appeals" and their effects "depend on the
dynamics of the living voice." (xxvi). His demonstration of their
techniques makes this clear; in fact, these texts constitute highly-
skilled performances. But for whom? In an important article published
in 2000, Morgan Powell argued that these letters, preserved alongside
the <i>Historia calamitatum</i> in the oldest surviving manuscript
(Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 802) were collected and possibly even
composed for the nuns at the Paraclete, to dramatize--literally--the
story of their abbess's worldly life and religious conversion, while
"reaching out to her community and including it" in that story.[3] One
does not have to embrace all the implications of this thesis in order
to recognize--with Levitan's help--that the letters were meant to be
heard, and may have facilitated readings within the community that
kept and copied them. I have attempted to make a similar case from
time to time, through performance of Heloise's first two letters. It
would be fitting if this new translation could take us even closer to
a contemporary audience's experience of listening, by becoming an
audiobook.[4] Why not? The letters have already inspired countless re-
enactments. Maybe that was the intention all along.

--------
NOTES:
1. <i>Epistolae duroum amantium. Briefe Abaelards und Heloises?</i>
Mittellateinisches Studien und Texte, 8. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974.
Levitan contrasts Könsgen's hesitant attribution with the more recent
assertions of authorship made by Constant Mews in <i>The Lost Love
Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-
Century France</i> (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

2. Jan Ziolkowski, "Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the
<i>Epistolae duorum amantium</i>. <i>Journal of Medieval Latin</i> 14
(2004): 171-202.

3. Morgan Powell, "Listening to Heloise at the Paraclete," in
<i>Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman</i>, ed.
Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 255-286 at 257.

4. Stanley Lombardo's narrations of his <i>Iliad</i> and
<i>Odyssey</i>, also published by Hackett (in 1997 and 2000,
respectively) and underscoring his collaboration with Levitan, show
how well this can be done. The recordings were produced by Parmenides
Audio in 2006, and are accompanied by introductions read by Susan
Sarandon.

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