Month: January 2014

Coming soon: Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales!

by Candace Barrington

The latest update on Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales from The Guardian.  Part performance poetry, part written verse, Agbabi’s retelling of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales provides an exciting update to the medieval text.  Jonathan and I have had the chance to read parts of it, and we’re excited to get our hands on the complete text available in (of course!) April 2015.

We’ve also learned from Lawrence Warner that Agbabi performed parts of Telling Tales at University College-London last week. Once we learn more about the performance, we’ll add a post.

Sejm ptasi: A new translation of The Parlement of Foules in 16th-century Polish

Sejm-ptasi

by Candace Barrington

We learned this week about Marcin Ciura’s Sejm ptasi, a new translation into Polish of Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules. Ciura, a computer programmer in Krakow, chose 16th-century Polish and a 13-syllable meter to give his translation a medieval feel.  He has agreed to an “email interview,” so we will be back with more about the translation.  For an early glimpse, see https://plus.google.com/+MarcinCiura/posts/93J9CQQtooC .

A Global Chaucers post on the New Chaucer Society blog

Hadieh-Shafie-10450-Pages.-Photo-Sothebys

by Candace Barrington

Thanks to Ruth Evans and the New Chaucer Society blog for the opportunity to share some preliminary thoughts on Chaucer’s Voices! And thanks to John Boje (South Africa), José Francisco Botelho (Brazil), Lauri Pillter (Estonia), Alireza Mahdipour (Iran), and Nazmi Agil (Turkey) for so graciously sharing their time and expertise. It’s been an auspicious start to a fascinating project.