The Three Hairs from the Devil's Beard of Gold: Translating the Multiple Languages of Luzel’s Folktales

Francois-Marie Luzel was born in the Breton commune of Plouaret in 1826 and became a celebrated poet of the Breton language and one of the most eminent French folklorists of the nineteenth century. Arguably his most substantial publication of Breton folktales was the three volumes of Contes populaires de Basse-Bretagne, published in 1887, which contain a total of seventy-nine stories, collected during his travels around Lower Brittany and represent the most substantial single nineteenth century collection of folktales from the Celtic people of Brittany. In many ways Luzel was a man of his time and his collections throw an interesting light onto the methodologies and philosophical underpinnings of mid to late nineteenth century folklore scholarship. In other ways, though, Luzel was extraordinarily modern in his thinking and anticipated much twentieth century folkloristics with his insistence on accurate transcriptions of the storytellers’ own words and the publication of substantial contextual information. Whilst he may not have thought of his texts as such, Luzel was essentially publishing performance texts. As such, Luzel’s work throws up particular challenges for the translator, especially around the issues of authenticity, textual status and the relationship within the texts between the languages of French, Breton and Performance