by Candace Barrington

I’ve been sitting on this announcement for a few weeks so that I could make it on Nowruz, the Persian new year. I simply could not resist the proximity in 2024 of Nowruz, Ramadan, and “Whan-that-Aprill” Day.

After many years of diligent translation following by years of patience, Alireza Mahdipour’s complete translation of The Canterbury Tales has been published by Cheshmeh, an Iranian publishing house known for its editions of both contemporary Iranian authors and translated global authors.

Without a doubt, Mahdipour’s massive undertaking is a milestone in Chaucer’s international reception.

In the opening lines of the General Prologue, Mahdipour evokes the wonders of spring’s arrival: “In the spring, the breath of the rain came down / to the dry soil of England and washed it until the / root was clean…./ Eid has come….” (my back translation using Google translate).

Mahdipour’s essay, “The Translator Writes Back,” was featured in a 2018 special issue of Literature Compass, Chaucer’s Global Compaignye. As Jonathan Hsy and I describe in our editors’ introduction, His essay reflects on translation’s potential to reveal affinities between Chaucerian mentalities and facets of contemporary Iranian culture. Rather than associating Iran with a pejorative sense of the term “medieval,” Mahdipour’s work attends to rich continuities in social and religious frameworks in Iranian culture that mitigate the apparently radical alterity of the past. In bridging the gap between Chaucer’s environment and contemporary Iranian cultural frameworks, Mahdipour eschews the impulse to produce a prose translation and crafts a poetic idiom that is simultaneously Chaucerian and Persian. Without overtly making a claim for shared sources, Mahdipour argues that similarities between medieval English culture and aspects of modern Persian society contribute to the vitality of his translation. The most significant parallels are found in the circumstances shared by Mahdipour’s and Chaucer’s pilgrim-narrator: both found themselves traveling in a group, free “from social, official, occupational, and even familial bonds, [and] eager for the freedom of speech and expression” otherwise denied them. As Mahdipour explains, Chaucerian sensibilities so dovetailed with Iranian ones that his audiences learned he was reciting a translation “only when we came to foreign elements such as ‘Caunterbury,’ ‘Tabard,’ and ‘Southwerk.’ ”

If you’ve been fortunate to visit the Bodleian Library’s “Chaucer: Here and Now” exhibit, you’d would have seen a copy on display with other translations.

My copy of the Mahdipour’s translation took a circuitous route to Connecticut. Because Alireza was unable to ship it directly to me from Iran, he enlisted the help of a former student, Raziyeh J, who now lives in Ottawa but was visiting Iran at the end of the year. She brought it back to Canada and then mailed it to me. Whew! Another fine Chaucerian pilgrimage!

I look forward to working with Raziyeh in the near future as she helps me understand what Mahdipour’s translation can teach us.