I bought Celtic Legends of Brittany by O.-L. Aubert seventeen years ago at the former Coop Breizh store in Paris following my Breton language course. It was a translation but no translator name was given. That was a merciful decision because the translation was awful. Unfinished sentences and spelling errors, some of which I will cite later, made the read a chore. It took me a week to get through its 183 pages because the writing was so poor.
The 34 legends deal mainly with religion and the introduction of Christianity to Brittany, as well as the Crusades and the time of knights roaming the land. The introduction stated that legends based upon fantasy were avoided, however among the nearly three dozen legends I did read of a few battles between knights and dragons. Breton sovereignty was a prominent theme; warriors went to battle to save Brittany from French usurpation.
Beheading by sword was a common way to murder your enemy. Whacking off heads took on a comical tone with lines such as this, from the legend of Conomor and Triphine:
“Conomor thought for a moment. He had the intuition, soon the certainly [sic], that this child before him was the son of himself and Triphine. Quick as a flash he drew his sword and struck the child’s head off, as he had struck off the head of his mother, and then hastened away.”
On more than one occasion decapitated individuals did not die, and walked around carrying their heads before them. I had a laugh at this passage from the legend Monsieur Saint Yves:
“One story is that St Yves slipped into heaven without St Peter seeing him go through the gates. When he noticed it, he asked St Yves to step out again. But St Yves, conversant with legal practice, said he would do so when formally notified by an attorney. But St Peter could not find an attorney in heaven, so St Yves was safe.”
I stopped taking notes of spelling errors by around page 44, by which time I had recorded only a sample, such as Geat Britain, kown for known, ist for its and five for give. It was easy to continue reading when the word was a genuine misspelling, but clumsy typos such as five for give, or certainly for certainty cited above, made me halt abruptly and obligated me to start the sentence over, trying to figure out what was wrong. Was the incorrect word really the one intended? Aside from these sloppy misspellings, I often had to reread sentences because the translation was just plain wrong. For example, the Conomor and Triphine legend begins:
“In the first half of the sixteenth century, in 520…”
Before I read further, I wanted to know what century we were talking about. Did this legend take place in 520 (the sixth century) or in 1520 (the sixteenth)? I flipped ahead to see what timeline we were in.
Illustrations were inserted to accompany the legends but in about half the cases the pictures were not on the same spread as the text. I looked at these macabre black-and-white drawings, wondering their relevance to the story.