The Chaucer Studio and Global Chaucers will be working together in the near future to provide and create recordings of The Canterbury Tales in different translations. We learned from Michael Calabrese of California State University that “the idea of translating Chaucer in different languages for global access is an inherent part of what we would like to do.” The co-directors of the studio are pleased to collaborate with Global Chaucers to provide more readings of Chaucer’s works in translation.
The first planned recording will be in Spanish, read by Christina Gomez, executive director of the studio.
In the future we will work with interested parties to record either already existing translations or new translations. Global Chaucers and the Chaucer Studio will work together to provide global distribution and access. We are currently soliciting participants who’d like to translate and/or record with us.
The new set of co-directors at Chaucer Studio are:
Michael Calabrese (California State University, Los Angeles)
Tom Burton (University of Adelaide)
Regula Meyer Evitt (Colorado College)
Cathy Hume (University of Bristol)
Joseph Parry (Brigham Young University)
Christina Gomez (California State University, Los Angeles)
When Jonathan Hsy and I began the Global Chaucers project in 2012, much of our energy was spent turning over rocks and peering into forgotten crevasses to find examples of Chaucer in non-Anglophone contexts and languages. We relied on internet searches and hunches. Like good detectives, we looked for clues that others had overlooked.
Soon, however, colleagues (some we knew, some we didn’t know) began contacting us with leads. We try to report on them as soon as possible, but too often “scouting reports” end up in a dedicated basket I keep next to my desk. That basket is now overflowing, and I have a small break in my calendar allowing me to report on these wonderful Global Chaucers.
This delightful posting comes from Pamela Wolters, a graduate student at University of Groningen. I met Ms Wolters when I was a guest lecturer (via the marvels of Zoom) at Sebastian Sobecki’s graduate course on Medieval Law and Literature at the university. Over a series of emails, she relayed the following story, slightly edited here.–Candace Barrington
A Guest posting by Pamela Wolters
Peter de Wit cartoon on back cover of Jeffrey Wijnberg’s Horken and Heksen.
Back in 2010, at the literary fair Manuscripta in Amsterdam, I was looking for cartoonist Peter de Wit (one of his cartoons of Sigmund is depicted on the back of the book and here), and was hoping to find him (being a fan of his work) during the interview with Jeffrey Wijnberg, since their collaboration went back a long time.
Quite unfamiliar with psychologist and author Jeffrey Wijnberg at that point, I asked a friendly person standing near the door: ‘Is this the room where the interview with Jeffrey Wijnders will take place?’ He affirmed gracefully. Quite soon it turned out that he in fact was Jeffrey Wijnberg and that he, thankfully, never reproached me for mispronouncing his name. It was a very interesting interview, and his book was about to be published (but had yet to be printed).
Horken en Heksen, derogatory terms for, respectively, men and women (but used here in a funny way), focuses on interactions and relationships between men and women. (Wijnberg works as a psychologist in Groningen and offers relationship therapy as well as individual therapy. He is known for his humour and provocative method.) Every chapter in Horken en Heksen starts with ‘Women are always right, and men find this difficult’ (in Dutch).
His answers during the interview strongly reminded me of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and I got a chance to talk to Jeffrey Wijnberg and tell him so afterwards. He seemed immediately interested, but at that point I thought he was just being polite. Then he asked me to email him some quotes from Chaucer’s Tale, which I did. Some time after that, I received a copy of Horken en Heksen with a translation of one of the quotes that I had sent him on one of the first pages of the book, and my name added to it. I’m still very thankful for this experience, and a bit proud that – by a twist of fate – I managed to get a Chaucer quote in somebody else’s book.
“Dear Pamela, thanks for your literary contribution”
Maar op het laatst, na menig heftig woord,
Kwamen wij samen toch nog tot akkoord.
Hij gaf mij alle teugels in de handen
En dus was ik de baas in huis en landen
Alsook over zijn lippen en zijn handen,
Ik liet hem 't boek onmiddellijk verbranden.
Mijn macht in huis was dra daarop een feit,
'k Had absolute soevereiniteit.
Hij zei: 'Mijn eigen en zo trouwe vrouw,
Doe in je leven wat je altijd wou,
Bewaak alleen jouw eer en ook mijn stand!'
En nadien was er nooit meer trammelant.
--De proloog van de vrouw uit Bath. De Canterbury-verhalen,
Geoffrey Chaucer. Berijmde vertaling: Ernst van Altena. Amsterdam:
Ambo, 2004. (p.207/4.6429-6440). Met dank aan Pamela Wolters
voor het vinden van dit toepasselijke citaat.
We fille acorded by us selven two.
He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond,
To han the goverance of hous and long,
And of his tonge, and of his hond also;
And made hym brenne his book anon right tho.
And whan that I hadde geten unto me,
By maistrie, al the soveraynetee,
And that he seyde, 'Myn owene trewe wify,
Do as thee lust the terme of al thy lyf;
Keep thyn honour, and keep eek myn estaat'--
After that day we hadden never debaat. (III.812-822)
On 5 September, Alireza Mahdipour successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Chaucerian Economies: Reading The Canterbury Tales through New Economic Criticism,” at University of Isfahan, Iran. The topic was a fitting one for Dr. Mahdipour to tackle. Not only has he given us the only Farsi translation of The Canterbury Tales, but Isfahan sits on the Silk Road where it has been a major trading center for centuries. This background certainly shaped why he chose to think about Chaucer’s pilgrims and their tales through an economic lens.
I had hoped to attend his defense via video-conferencing (at 1:30am Eastern Time!), but last-minute technological snafus made my virtual presence impossible. In any case, it’s exciting to have a newly credentialed Chaucerian (with long-standing expertise) in Iran.
Today’s guest blogger is Grace Skidmore, a graduate student at University of Virginia. In her first Global Chaucers post, Grace provides a sensitive reading of the autolithographs illustrating a late-Soviet edition of Russian Chaucer. As you’ll see, her scholarship draws on the work of another Global Chaucerian, Lian Zhang, whose study of Chinese Chaucers has revealed the deep influences of Soviet literary scholars. In her turn, Grace helps us understand how Chaucer could be translated in an authorized edition that also used its illustrations to forcefully critique the regime.
Don’t forget to clink on the links to Sergey Barkhin’s dramatic illustrations. We think you’ll see that they provide a illuminating contrast to illustrations we find elsewhere in the 1980s. Please share your thoughts with us. –CB
by Grace Skidmore
Illustrations of Global Chaucers have emerged as both independent and supplemental adaptations of his work for centuries across cultures. One version of the Soviet Chaucer that combines translation with illustration is the 1980 edition of Ivan Kashkin and Osip Rumer’s Russian translation of Kenterberijskie rasskazy.[1] As the authoritative Soviet translation from Middle English to modern Russian,[2] Rumer and Kashkin translated the majority of the original CanterburyTales which were well-received by Russian readers.[3] The 1980 edition features notes by Shakespeare scholar Alexandr Anikst, as well as a series of autolithographs (etchings on charcoal plates) from the artist Sergey Barkhin. Of Chaucer’s original twenty-four tales, only seventeen appear in Kenterberijskie rasskazy, and each of these seventeen tales is illustrated by at least one of Barkhin’s autolithographs. The remaining seven tales were not translated for a Russian audience until 2007, when Tamara Popova’s edition completed the Tales. (See links below to seven of the images available on Barkhin’s website.)
For almost a century, the arm of the USSR’s censorship bureau known as Glavlit stymied Soviet audiences’ contact with foreign literature and restricted these to a few texts, aside from samizdat (or underground publications). In spite of this generalized wariness of outside influence on the communist experiment, Shakespeare and Chaucer studies still experienced a high level of scholarly interest and exposure in Soviet literary studies. Lian Zhang has noted in her work on Chaucer reception in China that the Soviet literary interest relies on the perception that these authors focalized stories through workers and peasants, rather than royalty, bringing forth qualities of a national literature.[4]
Much of the artistic work depicting The Canterbury Tales conforms to realism or romantic styles, throwing Barkhin’s turn to the abstract into sharp relief.[5] Honored as the People’s Artist of Russia in 1998 for outstanding achievements in multiple art forms, Barkhin’s connection to architecture and theater is evident in the drawings’ awareness of light and space, with the moment he highlights seeming at once everywhere and nowhere. He explains his purpose in illustrating is to allow the reader a fixed second in time, and “not insert into it complicated and confused ideas about the entire world.”[6] In spite of this commitment, complicated ideas of the world nevertheless creep into his artistic reimaginings of The Canterbury Tales. Barkhin remediates each tale by capturing the story in a single frame with a focus on place that strips away much of the lightheartedness in Chaucer’s stories by giving voice to the pilgrims’ anxieties projected into events of bloodshed, incest, betrayal, and murder. Each second of each story portrays a deep anxiety in the darkness in the pilgrims’ stories and emphasizes the elements of uncertainty lurking along Pilgrim’s Way, a vision capsulized in the Flemish friends’ death by debauchery in Barkhin’s illustration of The Pardoner’s Tale.
As products of their own political environment in Soviet culture, the illustrations seem to echo the Soviet ideological reshaping of human life with the illustrations’ shared sense of night and distortions of the land and people. With the USSR of 1980 fraught with economic and political reforms, a new edition of Chaucer was also being published, and Barkhin echoes the uncertainties of the future and a sense of haunted awareness of the past that recalls a disregard for human suffering. Barkhin’s adaptations of Chaucer’s stories translate these experiences into art by tapping into non-traditional modes of depicting medieval England.
In this way, Barkhin’s depictions add an edge to Kashkin and Rumer’s Chaucer translation by taking root in the USSR’s various movements of modernism after decades of censorship. In this way, the 1980 Kenterberijskie rasskazy constructs new artistic contexts for Russian audiences of Chaucer in Russia and beyond, resonating with the conflicted and even violent pasts of medieval England and of the Soviet people.
[i] Geoffrey Chaucer.[Джеффри Чосер] Kenterberijskie rasskazy. [Кентерберийские рассказы] Vstupitelʹnaia stat’ia, sostavlenie, primechaniia А. Abramovicha Aniksta; perevod s angliĭskovo I. Kashkina, O. Borisovich Rumera ; khudozhnik C. Barkhin. [вступительная статья, составление, примечания А. Аникста; перевод с английского И. Кашкина, О. Румера ; художник С. Бархин] 1980.
Congratulations to Lian ZHANG on the publication of her essay, “Chaucer in China: A History of Reception and Translation” in Chaucer Review 55.1 (2020), available online through Project Muse.
Here’s the abstract.
Arranged chronologically, this article presents a general picture of Chaucer reception and translation in China, and examines the development of criticism and the interaction of readers with both the original texts and their Chinese translations. By using indicators like university curricula, editions of translations and reprints, criti- cal analyses, adaptations, and popularizations, this study shows that there have been increasing readership in medieval literature and rising admiration for the poet through- out the reception history, with occasional sharp changes. This reception pattern is deter- mined by a combination of factors such as the intrinsic qualities of the texts, readers’ concern over contemporary social issues and their own literary past, and the political and intellectual context of the nation as a whole, as well as of interaction with the outside world.
Fifty years after it’s 1969 appearance in the Rose Bowl Parade with a giant replica of the Ellesmere Chaucer, the Huntington Library marked its centennial with another flower-studded entry in Pasadena’s 2020 Tournament of Roses Parade. Again, the Ellesmere Chaucer was prominently featured.
Artist’s rendering of The Huntington’s 2020 entry in the Rose Parade®, designed by Phoenix Decorating Company.
When Geoffrey Chaucer traveled to Paris in the 1370s on diplomatic missions for the English crown, he would have seen the city’s cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, situated on the Île de la Cité. Its Gothic renovations complete, the cathedral would have looked much as it does in this 15c miniature. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10509064d/f372
Paris does not loom large in Chaucer’s biography.[1] From a cluster of documents (Life-Records 46-61), we know he took the month-long trip from England to Paris (as well as Flanders and Montreuil) multiple times in the 1370s. Part of the ceaseless back-and-forth of merchants, diplomats, soldiers, and pilgrims crossing the channel, Chaucer’s series of trips to France and Flanders were made on behalf of the English crown to negotiate for peace and to broker a marriage between Richard and a French princess. Modern biographies that speculate on Chaucer’s encounters on these trips tend to consider the poets and diplomats he met (or might have met), not what Parisian architecture or music he could have seen or heard.
The paucity of Parisian references in Chaucer’s verse helps contribute to why no scholar has titled an essay “Chaucer in Paris.” Among the Canterbury tales, Paris figures in only The Shipman’s Tale, which three times mentions Paris as where daun John lives and where the merchant borrows money, suggesting that Chaucer knew the city as both a religious and a financial hub, knowledge he could have acquired by its reputation without ever visiting it. More telling evidence of his visits to Paris appears in his description of the House of Fame palace; its row of poets standing on pillars might draw on the royal palace in Paris (HF 1319-1519).[2] The only other cases are interestingly negative: Paris is the source of the sophisticated French that the Prioress does not speak (CT 1.126), and it is the place where Heloise is not the abbess in Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves (CT 3.678).
While Paris is nearly absent in The Canterbury Tales, the city’s cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, is completely absent. That absence should not suggest Chaucer was unaware of the legendary cathedral. Though nestled among many other churches sharing the city’s vertical skyline comprising towers, belfries, and high-pitched roofs, the cathedral rose above them all. Its two towers reached over 225 feet—about 16 stories—and were the tallest structures in Paris, making the cathedral visible from throughout the city. As we learn from contemporary travel literature, the cathedral would have been immediately visible to anyone approaching the city, whether from the north or the south. [3] Notre-Dame would not have escaped his notice.
Inside, Chaucer would have marked Notre-Dame’s soaring interior height. Unlike Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Canterbury Cathedral—three of England’s great churches that emphasized length rather than height—Notre-Dame’s nave vaults rose 108 feet. Its three rose windows would have been in place, each still glowing with its original glass. The original thirteenth-century spire would have still been in place, not to be removed until 1786. He would not have seen, however, the 16 prophets painted on glass beneath the South Rose window; those are Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century additions. Nor could he have found there such relics as the Crown of Thorns and part of the True Cross, both in the custody of Sainte Chapelle since the mid-thirteenth century. And he could not have listened to an organ concert; none was yet installed. Nevertheless, despite some different elements, Notre-Dame de Paris would have inspired awe in a fourteenth-century visitor.
If Chaucer had traveled as extensively as his fictional Wife of Bath, he might have heard about the stained-glass windows and “gothic” arches at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, an eleventh-century mosque that was also damaged by fire on 15 April 2019. Elsewhere in the Levant, he would have witnessed other Muslim and Middle Eastern innovations, such as the twin towers, the ribbed vaulting, and spires—all of which had been incorporated into Notre-Dame de Paris (as well as Europe’s other grand church buildings).
If he could had peered 650 years into the future, Chaucer would not have been surprised by the Holy Week 2019 fire that destroyed the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris. In England, the Canterbury Cathedral received its Gothic look after a 1174 fire required the choir to be rebuilt. In Chaucer’s lifetime, it had been damaged in 1382 by an earthquake. Even today, Canterbury Cathedral’s lead roof is held up by an intricate latticework of wooden beams similar to those that held up Notre-Dame’s roof. These extravagant buildings that took centuries to build have always been and remain vulnerable to destruction, whether by forces natural or those man-made.
Nor would Chaucer have been surprised by the rush of wealthy individuals and global conglomerates pledging to restore the cathedral by promising $1 billion within a week of the fire. We have Erasmus’s story that when he visited Thomas á Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral in the 1510s, the prior opened, with great theatrical flourish, the box containing Becket’s remains as well as jewels, with each jewel’s monetary value and donating monarch carefully enumerated for the gathered crowd. Attaching one’s name and future to glorious religious foundations has long been the sport of the rich.
Chaucer probably would have been surprised, however, by calls to restore the cathedral to its “original condition.” In the fourteenth century, fires and other calamities were opportunities to upgrade and modernize. In his frequent trips through Canterbury on his continental travels, he would have witnessed how that cathedral was being rebuilt to conform to the more au courant Gothic style, with large portions of the original Romanesque elements removed and replaced. Most likely, his visits to French Gothic cathedrals such as Notre-Dame de Paris would have given him a sense how Canterbury Cathedral would look and feel after its renovations were completed in 1400. Recreating what had already failed might have seemed a curious enterprise to him.
At the same time, Chaucer would have understood our collective grief. He repeatedly returns to images of the walled city of Troy, burned and forever lost, as inciting great sorrow and mourning.[4] As he well knew, powerful kingdoms, even empires, might be built by those who escape the ashes, yet remembrance of the loss always provokes “tendre wepyng for pitee” (CT 2.292).
[1] See, for instance, Marion Turner’s 2019 Chaucer: A European Life.
[2] Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, page 117, citing Laura Kendrick’s 1984 Studies in the Age of Chaucer article.
[3]Stephen G. Nichols, “Paris,” in Europe, A Literary History, edited by David Wallace, 1.22.
The April 2019 issue of Speculum includes my review of David Wallace’s Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford UP, 2017), a lucid, witty presentation of Chaucer’s life, works, and influence.
Part of an ongoing promotion of Chaucer’s “promiscuous topographies,” A New Introduction continues Wallace’s twofold scholarly enterprise: to show not only that Chaucer’s verse embraces all the world known to educated fourteenth-century Europeans, but also that Chaucer’s subsequent influence has extended beyond the poets of Britain to make an impact on every hemisphere.
Wallace advertises this paradigm shift with his first sentence: “Geoffrey Chaucer is a medieval poet enjoying a global renaissance” (1). And it punctuates my review’s final sentence: the New Introduction‘s major contribution “has been to normalize Chaucer’s status as a global poet” (600).
For those already in the Global Chaucers vortex, David Wallace’s introduction confirms why we find this field of research so rich and exciting. For those who are Global Chaucers curious, Wallace provides the roadmap for following Chaucer’s off-island journeys.
This summer, Bangor University (Bangor, Wales) hosts “Speaking Internationally: Women’s Literary Culture and the Canon in the Global Middle Ages” from 26 to 28 June 2019. Part of the Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon project, the conference will examine how a more global perspective might enlarge our understanding of medieval European women writers and the literary canon. The topics and proposals will interest anyone in the Global Chaucers orbit. Thanks to Liz Herbert McAvoy and Sue Niebrzydowski for putting together a fabulous slate of panels and speakers.
The conference’s keynote speakers are
Jonathan Hsy, The George Washington University,
Shazia Jagot, The University of Surrey,
Elaine Treharne, Stanford University.
For more about the conference (including the program and registration information), please see their conference website .
Global Chaucers and Medievalists of Color not only share many members but also uphold the same values. Along with MoC, we acknowledge that “enduring patterns of harassment and racism make academic freedom a mere myth for some” and affirm that “positions of misogyny, ethnonationalism, xenophobia, homo- and transphobia, and other biases are not legitimate positions in any conversation because they make freedom for all within the conversation impossible.” Together, we will work toward making “our old field be the ideal home for those recognitions, one that rejuvenates their force.”
This summer, Bangor University (Bangor, Wales) hosts “Speaking Internationally: Women’s Literary Culture and the Canon in the Global Middle Ages” from 26 to 28 June 2019. Part of the 