Customer Reviews

Parzival and Titurel (Oxford World's Classics)

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Parzival is a very difficult work to read, let alone translate, and Edwards has done an admirable job here. He states in his introduction that he has chosen to retain the many ambiguities of Wolfram von Eschenbach's language - which necessarily makes the work harder to understand - and that is a difficult, but correct decision. It means that the translation does not give us what we often crave - an easy entry into what we're reading. But it's an honest translation, and a good one insofar as that is at all possible: it's far better to translate ambiguity as ambiguity, than to try and make things clearer.

This not the Parzival to read if you just want to follow the storyline. While this reviewer doesn't have the Middle High German to discuss the faithfulness of Edward's translation, this reviewer does have enough modern English to pronounce the book close to unreadable. For example, whatever reason Edwards had to preserve the German language word order of sentences, as he does from time to time, it's far outweighed by lack of accessibility. In addition, the preservation of "ambiguities" prevents the reader from following the action. This is a Parzival for scholars and specialists. Contains extensive, helpful end notes that illuminate many obscurities in the text, however. If you just want to know what happens, you'd be better of with the popular Hatto or Mustard and Passage translations.