Month: April 2024

An Elegant Portuguese edition of Chaucer translated by Daniel Jonas

by Candace Barrington

Ana Sofia Guimarães, a University of Freiburg graduate student who served as a journal manager for New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession in 2023, alerted us to this new translation of The Canterbury Tales. Published in 2021, it features illustrations and layouts based on Edward Burne-Jones’s nineteenth-century woodcuts.

Just turning through Contos de Cantuária is a pleasure, and I look forward to working with Portuguese readers–and maybe even Daniel Jonas, himself–as we think about this new addition to Chaucer’s non-Anglophone translations.

The Translator’s Tale at 2022 K’zoo: Jonathan Fruoco on Saving Chaucer’s Naughty Bits

by Candace Barrington

Jonathan Fruoco has kindly shared the video of his presentation for the 2022 International Congress of Medieval Studies. This case study provides examples from Fruoco’s forthcoming French translation of The Miller’s Tale to illustrate how he conveys Chaucer’s comically bawdy double entendres. Whatever his technique for retaining the joke, he always works to provide a recognizable textual space for his readers.

We look forward to announcing on these pages when Jonathan’s translation is published.

New publication from Lian Zhang: “Teaching Chaucer in China in the Republican Period (1912 – 1949)”

Lian Zhang, our foremost authority on Chaucer’s reception in China, has published an article in the most recent issue of postmedieval. This time, her research deals with the Republican period, a span roughly corresponding to the years just before WW1 and just after WW2 when several young Chinese scholars studied in the U.K. and the United States with some formidable medievalists. In addition to bringing Chaucer back to Chinese university classrooms, the Chinese scholars often brought these mentors to China, thereby working to create fruitful ties between China and the west.

I reproduce here the article’s abstract:

This essay studies the teaching of the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in China during the Republican period (1912-1949), through evidence of students, faculty, institutions, and textbooks. Drawing on university curricula, diaries and recollections of professors and students, and publications of textbooks and modern adaptations of Chaucer’s works, this essay provides a detailed narration of an early part of the reception history of Chaucer in China. Chinese scholars studied Chaucer in Europe and America since the 1910s, gave courses on Chaucer after returning to China, and published Chaucer’s text in Middle English and modern adaptations. The teaching of Chaucer had a great impact on Chinese students and the academic world at the time, and it reflected China’s literary and cultural initiation into what the social reformers saw as modernization in a socially transitional period. This essay argues that Chaucer played a significant role in Chinese discourses of modernization over the twentieth century, and that the Chinese Chaucer was created by two types of reception, as he was claimed both by social reformers for his role in promoting the vernacular language and by traditionalists for the moral themes of his tales. Literary education at the time was influenced not only by China’s pursuit of modernity signified by a rise of vernacular Chinese language and literature, but also by the traditional cultural values grounded in Confucianism.