Tag: canterbury tales

Pilgrim out of town: Chaucer’s Modern Echoes

by Gail Ashton

St. Pancras, Gray’s Inn Road, to Holborn… Holborn viaduct with its knight flanked by two dragons guarding one of the old city gates…on to Cheapside, Poultry, Bankside…and there ahead London Bridge streaming with traffic and people: to the left, upriver, Tower Bridge, to the right St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the dirty old River Thames chopping and surging below and everywhere crowds walking as if they know where they’re going, contemporary buildings scraping the skyline. And, as if from nowhere, Southwark Cathedral tucked into a hollow, its perfect rising tower the centrepiece to long sweeps of stone fanning out on either side.

This is the oldest church building in London. It stands at the oldest crossing point of the tidal river Thames and was for many centuries the only entrance to the city this side of the river. Some believe there was a place of worship here as far back as Roman times but the ‘modern’ cathedral was re-founded in 1106 by 2 Norman knights. It has had a long and colourful history thereafter.

Yet, as befits this evening’s event with its title Chaucer’s Modern Echoes, this is not simply a medieval shrine but a building at the heart of contemporary life. It’s ringed by the Thames, by bridges and tenement-style wharfsides. In the closing years of the last century the Millennium Buildings were created where the priory of the religious community once stood. Soon there will be a new railway viaduct and the tallest building in Europe, the Shard, standing nearby. Around a corner and along an alleyway and here are the ruins of Winchester Palace, home to a host of medieval bishops. There’s a replica of the Golden Hinde ship, a sign to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and the Clink Museum, site of the former Clink Prison, the oldest gaol in England dating back to 1140.To the left of the cathedral, the small busy Borough market is crammed beneath the railway viaduct, and all the time trains grind along the track, postmodern structures in glass and steel mesh lean into the cathedral yard, straining for a share of its light.

This is a narrow cathedral, the eye drawn to the altar with its small high window. I almost overlook John Gower’s gaudy tomb tucked into the wall and just beyond it Chaucer’s window which depicts the Canterbury pilgrims about to set off on their journey. And before I can even get in to look around I have to wait for the close of a memorial service dedicated to one Michael Cox, master vinter and part of a family owned UK wine company; it’s as if Chaucer has just stepped from the shadows for a last glance at the evening to come.

Tom Eveson and Gabby Meadows intersperse the performances with extracts from Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, Tom in his fabulous rendition of Middle English and Gabby with her mellifluous modern readings. I speak about Chaucer’s literary heritage and his contemporary afterlives with special nods to the fabulous LeVostreGC aka Brantley Bryant and to the medieval meme rendition of the Mamas and the Papas (I never thought I’d be singing in Southwark Cathedral). Lavinia Greenlaw took us on a narrative journey through her haunting A Double Sorrow. And Patience Agbabi blew the roof off with her dramatic performances from Telling Tales: Harry Bailly’s fictional biography; the Prologue’s Grime Mix; her Prioress’s Tale or the amazing Sharps an Flats; the sassy Things alias The Shipman’s Tale; Unfinished Business or the Melibee, her clever and disturbing mirror poem; before ending with Makar, the Franklin’s Tale.

Best of all, as we take turns to speak, in my left ear all night is the rumble and clatter of trains, a helicopter whirring, and Patience stepping into her Sharps an Flats with its call to Damilola stabbed in real life and left to bleed to death in a stairwell, a police siren wailing in time to Chaucer’s still ticking pulse.

My warmest thanks to Poet in the City, especially to Isobel Colchester, Suzy Cooper and Gabby Meadows for hosting and organising this amazing event. And too to the Dean of Southwark Cathedral for bringing over 300 people into such an iconic space.

Watch out for audio interviews when they’re released.

Poet in the City & Chaucer: Modern Echoes

logoAn update on the Poet in the City’s upcoming event, Chaucer: Modern Echoes.  Thanks, Gail!

Guest post by Gail Ashton.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn. Who said that?

I have been in Geoffrey Chaucer’s company for a quarter of a century now, one way or another. I’m still no nearer than the merest echo of him, and, truth to tell, if we met in a dark alley I don’t know which of us would be more afraid. I read books the whole night long. Come morning I’m convinced I know less than I did the day before , and sitting here with my student copy of Riverside literally falling to pieces before my eyes I have a horrible feeling of déjà vu.

The event is Poet in the City’s “Chaucer: Modern Echoes,” held at Southwark Cathedral 10 April 2014. I have done this once before at a similar evening in September 2012 somewhere in the depths of the British Museum, London, where Patience Agbabi thrilled us with trial runs of her then work-in-progress Telling Tales. And I met Professor Helen Cooper into the bargain. All this name-dropping! This time Lavinia Greenlaw (A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde) is on the bill with Patience. You will have heard all this, dear reader. What you might not know is that at 7pm this coming Thursday, someone is going to ask me to talk about our Geoffroi.

When I open my mouth I fear I’ll have nothing to say and – heaven forfend – if I’m called as any kind of expert witness in audio-interview, then the world will see that after all I know nothing, and the only sound from this old house of fame will be but babble whirled into London skies.

If you can, be there. Just don’t expect any authority.

The others are worth listening to over and over. And the cathedral has cake, I’m told, if you’re early enough.

The Miller’s Tale: ‘Wahala Dey O!’

by Candace Barrington

WahalaDeyOh

We have great news for Chaucerians in Reykjavik this summer for the New Chaucer Society Congress! We’ve learned that Ufuoma Overo-Tarimo will be staging her adaptation of The Miller’s Tale to coincide with the conference in July.  Written in both Nigerian Pidgin and English, The Miller’s Tale: ‘Wahala Dey O’ had its premier at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and received a four-star rating and glowing reviews

Ufuoma’s adaptation draws on her background: born in Nigeria and raised in Britain, she is a former student of Sif Rikardsdottir (the Icelandic Chaucerian heading the conference’s local organizing committee); she took Sif’s “Chaucer and the North” course.  She wrote in the play in 2006 while studying for her Masters in English.  Based on the snippets of the play that I’ve viewed on YouTube, I wasn’t surprised to learn she had previously studied Philosophy and History of Religion at King’s College, London University and later studied at the College of Law.  That legal trajectory changed when she moved to Iceland with her husband in 2004 and began graduate study in English.  And even that journey has taken a side trip.

She explained it to me this way:

I discovered play writing and feel very passionate that this is a sound way to get people who would otherwise not care for Chaucer right into the heart of Chaucer’s work. The Edinburgh Fringe proved this right.  As the play attracted all and sundry from curious Chaucerians, English Professors, bored students, wanderers, homesick Nigerian/English expatriates and colonialists, and those in search of a good time…

Chaucerians at the Reykjavik conference will get a chance to meet Ufuoma and to see her play.  We will keep you posted on the performance schedule and how to purchase tickets.

Chaucer in China (2): Reading Lin Shu

by Candace BarringtonLin_Shu

In this second installment of Chaucer in China, I am interested in the first appearances of any Canterbury tale in Chinese and in the paradoxical circumstances of their composition: The Canterbury Tales was not their immediate source text, and the translator, Lin Shu (林紓), did not know English.  His Sinicized  Chaucers provide an instructive contrast to Fang Chong’s mid-century translations that Jonathan Hsy wrote about in Part 1. Unlike Fang, who had studied English and relied upon Chaucer’s text to complete the first translation of The Canterbury Tales into Mandarin, Lin Shu knew no foreign language and relied upon Charles Cowden Clarke’s bowdlerized Chaucer for his source text.  As a preface to our study of these translations, this post describe their circumstances, for which I rely on my correspondence with Michael Gibbs Hill as well as his fascinating monograph, Lin Shu, Inc: Translation and the Making of Chinese Culture (Oxford UP, 2013). In what follows, I summarize appropriate sections of Hill’s cultural history of Lin Shu’s creative translations, and then I suggest what questions they raise and what they have to tell us about Global Chaucers and larger translation issues.

Lin Shu (1852-1924) was a leading translator and dominant presence in China’s literary culture during the late Qing dynasty (ca. 1895-1911) and the early Republic (1912-1927). Though one of China’s most prolific translators and writers at the turn of the twentieth century—he was responsible for over 180 translations of western literary works into classical Chinese—the early translations credited to him were the result of a collaborative process known as tandem translation (duiyi): with the assistance of an oral interpreter who knew the language of the source text well enough to orally translate, line-by-line,  western works of literature into vernacular Chinese, Lin Shu then further translated the text into the ancient prose style (guwen). Through this factory-like process, he became one of China’s most recognizable and highly compensated literary figures. Because he inherited a set of translation practices that considered fidelity to the source text less valuable than conveying an artistry and morality consistent with traditional Chinese values, Lin Shu’s tandem translations and ancient prose style met his earliest audience’s expectations.  These translations juxtaposed traditional orthodoxy (through their linguistic style) and Western Learning (through their source texts), simultaneously introducing Western concepts in the guise of orthodox form and lending his translations credibility. He used the cultural pulpit created by these translations to advocate the ancient prose style—guwen—for widespread literary use, a controversial position for numerous reasons, including guwen’s association with intellectual, academic work rather than narrative fiction. Lin Shu’s translations also faced suspicions that any translation into Chinese faced.  Because the earliest Chinese translations of European and American texts were the consequence of China’s colonial and imperial relations with the West, any translations tagged as Western were colored by the Chinese ambivalence toward Western Learning, seeing in it both a source of new knowledge and an effort to enforce religious conversion and political subjugation.  In the end, his profitable combination of tandem translations and ancient-prose style undermined his advocacy of guwen for wide-spread literary use. When he eventually lost control of the quality of his translations, he and his classical style became associated with retrograde conservatism and shoddy commercialism.

This trajectory of his reputation, from renowned literary translator to discredited hack, provides an important context of Lin Shu’s Chaucerian translations because they appear at the end of his career, when his translation practices aimed for quantity, not quality, and his reputation had become irreparably tarnished.  His later reputation might explain why the series of individual tale translations (appearing between 1916 and 1925) were ignored by accounts of European medieval literature in China, even though they seem to be the first Chinese translations of Chaucer’s works.  As noted by a short article appearing in 2011 in the Shanghai Review of Books (Shanghai shuping), they predate by a decade the once presumed arrival of European medieval literature in China in the 1920s and 1930s.

Relying on Charles Cowden Clarke’s early-nineteenth-century edition designed for children—Tales from Chaucer in Prose—Lin Shu translated nine (of Clark’s ten) Chaucerian tales:

  • “Gaining a Wife from a Duel,” from The Knight’s Tale
  • “The Princess Encounters Hardship,” from The Man of Law’s Tale
  • “The Prodigy of the Forest,” from The Wife of Bath’s Tale
  • “Griselda,” from The Clerk’s Tale
  • “Body and Soul,” from The Squire’s Tale
  • “Three Young Men Encounter the God of Death,” from The Pardoner’s Tale
  • “The Mouth of the Dead that Could Sing,” from The Prioress’s Tale
  • “Talk about Chickens/Cocks,” from The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
  • “Gamelin,” from the apocryphal The 2nd Cook’s Tale

The first eight appeared in 1916 and 1917 in Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshua yuabao); the last appeared in 1925 in Story World (Xiaoshuo shijie). Both magazines were profit-seeking ventures of Commercial Press, and they targeted a non-academic, non-intellectual audience by combining a sense of conservative Chinese propriety with progressive Western learning, thereby appealing to middlebrow readers wanting to acquire both via leisure reading.

These Chaucerian tales appear when Lin Shu and his collaborators were flooding the market with translations.  Between 1913 and 1918, they published forty-one new novels, and in the first eight months of 1916, they submitted 572,496 characters of material. This pace resulted in translations riddled with errors.  Facilitating that pace and perhaps further explaining the shoddy translations was Lin Shu’s amended translation practice. By 1911, he seems to have abandoned his previous method of tandem translation for something more closely resembling subcontracting: rather than transpose the oral text into a classically-styled, written form, Lin Shu would have his collaborators prepare a written translation that he would then edit. This new practice is particularly significant for the Chaucerian texts because the collaborator, Chen Jialin, published his own translations of other texts into classical Chinese, making it unclear how much a hand Lin Shu had in the published versions of the Chaucerian tales.  Nevertheless, it was Lin Shu’s name (and not Chen Jialin’s) associated with the published stories. And it was via Lin Shu’s reputation that Commercial Press developed an aggressive campaign using the short works in Short Story Magazine to market his longer works as both entertaining and enlightening in order to sell the deluge of translations they had purchased from him.

So far, Lin Shu’s Chaucerian tales have not been back-translated into English, yet we can surmise some of the translated tales’ important characteristics. For instance, because they are based on Clarke’s translations for children, we can be assured they were sanitized, keeping at a distance the vulgarity conservative Chinese found repulsive in Western literature while also proffering a Victorian purchase on the tales’ morality. His dual strategy of tandem translation and ancient-style prose means Lin Shu avoided many of the problems noted by Mimi Chan (the only translator of Chaucer into Chinese to write about translating from Middle English verse into Chinese verse: “On Translating Chaucer into Chinese,” Renditions 8 [1977]: 39-51). By focusing on plot and character development, Lin Shu did have to be concerned  with re-creating semantic ambiguity, rhetorical devices, meter, form, or the sly Chaucerian persona; any artistry came through the ancient-prose style. And because he translated into prose, he could readily incorporate into the story any explanations of medieval European culture foreign to Chinese readers, such as Christianity and its attendant professions.

Once we begin to study Lin Shu’s translations more full, we will want to address several questions:

  • How much do these translations demonstrate that Lin Shun and Chen Jialin knew about Chaucer, his works, and his cultural context?
  • Who were their imagined audience? Did the translations present themselves as entertainment or works of learning?
  • Do the tales and any accompanying paratexts use Chaucer’s texts to comment on contemporary cultural debates through revisions to the source text, a practice Hill’s study reveals in Lin Shu’s translations of Dicken’s novels and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
  • Do these translations maintain or adjust or dismiss Clarke’s (embedded) moralities?
  • Do these translations continue Clarke’s efforts to create a sense of chronological distance via archaic vocabulary and syntax?
  • Did the translations introduce neologisms from English or press Chinese terms into new meanings?
  • How well do these translations maintain the guwen style that marked Lin Shu’s earlier translations?

Lin Shu’s Chaucerian translations also have much to reveal about the unnatural division between original works and translation, and  they contribute to our thinking about translation in at least three ways. First, as Michael Hill persuasively argues, these translations deserve to be studied as translations (and not as debased adaptations) because they were presented and received as translations.  At the same time, they also merit study as original works of literature specific to a volatile time and place.  Finally, they need to be studied as possible fictitious translations, which, as Gideon Toury argues, “try and put the cultural gatekeepers to sleep by presenting a text as if it were translated” (“Enhancing Cultural Changes by Means of Fictitious Translations,” in Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms, and Image Projection, ed. Eva Hung [John Benjamin Publishing, 2005]: 3-17). (This third aspect is particularly interesting vis-à-vis Lin Shu because, according to Hill, in the 1910s and 1920s, Lin’s rivals raised more objections to his prose style than to possible inaccuracies in his work.)  It doesn’t require placing much pressure on any of these approaches to reveal their constant overlap and interplay with one another, and Chinese Chaucers look like a good place to start.

Chaucer in Denmark

By EBBE KLITGÅRD, with an introduction by CANDACE BARRINGTON

Blog Post Kiltgård - Bergsøe p. 47 cropped

Today’s post is from Ebbe Klitgård,a Danish Chaucerian whose fascinating study, Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the Translation and Reception History 1782-2012, appeared earlier this year. When I first met Ebbe at the New Chaucer Society Congress at Swansea, Wales, in 2008, I had just recently begun to imagine what a Global Chaucers project would look like, and in those early imaginings, Danish Chaucer did not loom large—or at all. That limited understanding shifted after talking to Ebbe, but it wasn’t until the publication of his study of Chaucer’s reception in Denmark that I appreciated how fully the Danish had embraced Chaucer as part of their literary culture. In this posting, Ebbe graciously shares a significant moment in that story: the efforts of Flemming Bergsøe to introduce Chaucer to the mid-century Danes.

The significance of Danish Chaucer was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago as I worked through the (currently undigitized) Index Translationum volumes from 1932 and 1978. It wasn’t difficult to notice that immediately after WWII the first non-Anglophone translations of the Canterbury Tales came out of Denmark, and Danish translations and appropriations outnumbered those being produced in other languages. Surely, as Ebbe’s post suggests, much of this outpouring is the result of Flemming Bergsøe’s enthusiasm as well as his attractive and engaging translations.

Ebbe’s post also provides a valuable reminder for what we can learn from these Global Chaucers. For instance, he explains that Bergsøe’s version of The Wife of Bath’s Tale translates the Middle English “maistrye” with “Herredømmet,” “a word that literally means ‘man’s judgment’ but is used broadly about both sexes when in power. Still the literal meaning carries funny connotations when used in a connection like this.” By drawing our attention to this one literal translation, Ebbe and the Danish remind us how audacious the Wife is when she demands “maistrye,” with its roots in the masculine “master.”

We think you will find both Flemming Bergsøe’s translation and Ebbe Klitgård’s explication fascinating examples of what Global Chaucers have to offer. Please share your thoughts with us. –CB

A Danish 1940s Translator of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: Flemming Bergsøe.

By Ebbe Klitgård, University of Roskilde, Denmark

This posting contains an edited and abbreviated extract from my recent book Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the Translation and Reception History 1782-2012 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013) which can be viewed here: http://www.universitypress.dk/shop/chaucer-in-denmark-3209p.html  

Among the many Danish translations of Chaucer, Flemming Bergsøe’s Konen fra Bath [The Wife of Bath] from 1943 is arguably the very best. Flemming Bergsøe (1905-68) was an educated sculptor and became a well-known naturalist painter. His interest in literature and his versatility and enterprise ran in the family, as his grandfather was Vilhelm Bergsøe (1835-1911), author, zoologist and numismatist. One of Vilhelm Bergsøe’s main works, the short story collection Fra Piazza del Popolo [From Piazza del Popolo], was in fact inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron. Flemming Bergsøe’s father Paul Bergsøe (1872-1963) was a chemical engineer, who also became well known to the public by writing popular introductions to chemistry. His brother Svend Bergsøe (1902-85), also an engineer, was at least as well-known a public figure, among other things as the first chairman of Rådet for Større Færdselssikkerhed [The council for better traffic security] (Bostrup, Andersen, Kondrup and Kristensen in Lund, gen. ed.,1995: 513). Flemming Bergsøe’s other writings include Det underlige år [The strange year] (Bergsøe 1945), a report from the last occupation year, where he had been a contact person in Copenhagen for leading member of the resistance movement Mogens Fog. Bergsøe also wrote a number of highly entertaining travel accounts.  (In this photo with Niels Bohr, he is the taller one.)

Bohr and Bergsoe

The translation had first been begun in connection with an article from the art magazine Aarstiderne [The Four Seasons] from 1941 titled “Chaucer bør oversættes” [Chaucer ought to be translated] (Bergsøe 1941). Bergsøe was the co-founder and chief editor of this magazine, which focuses on painting, film and literature and is of remarkable quality with its rich illustrations, although it should be noted that Bergsøe and his co-editors would have done well to employ a professional proofreader, as seen also in the extracts below. The very first issue of Aarstiderne from March 1941 contains two contributions by Bergsøe, an obituary about painter Erik Raadal and the Chaucer article of five pages. Both pieces are written with great empathy and involvement, and I will quote Bergsøe’s concluding remarks about Chaucer in extenso:

“Hvad Chaucer siger om Mennesker, om deres Kærlighed og Had, om deres Glæder og Sorger og om deres Krige er evigt aktuelt. Vi gaar i dag anderledes klædt, vi spiser Daasemad og vi benytter Vand-Closetter, men vore Følelser og Tanker, selve det menneskelige, er uforandret fra hans Dage. Og den gamle Englænder beskæftiger sig netop med det menneskelige. – Vi er i Familie med ham, og det halve Aartusinde skiller os ikke mere fra ham, end vi er skilt fra vores Far.

’Canterbury Tales’ bør oversættes til Dansk. Den er en Inspirationskilde, vi ikke har Raad til at undvære. Læsningen af den, efterlader et lignende Indtryk som Læsningen af Bibelen, ’Don Quiqote’ [sic] og Shakespeares Skuespil. I de Bøger staar alt om Mennesker.”

[What Chaucer says about human beings, about their love and hate, about their joys and sorrows and about their wars, is eternally topical. Today we dress differently, we eat tinned food and we use water closets, but our feelings and thoughts, our human existence itself, are no different from his time. And the old Englishman is precisely concerned with being human. – We are members of his family, and the half millennium does not separate us more from him than we are separated from our fathers.

The Canterbury Tales ought to be translated into Danish. It is a source of inspiration we cannot afford to do without. Reading it leaves a similar impression to reading the Bible, Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s plays. These books contain everything about human beings.] (Bergsøe 1941: 16)

These are big words from Bergsøe, but apart from wanting to include Joyce’s Ulysses to this list and considering a few more candidates, no protest from the present writer. It is remarkable how inspired Bergsøe is here, and in the remainder of the article, and it may well be that his sincerely expressed wish was heard in publishers’ and translators’ circles, as a few years later the two full translations of The Canterbury Tales by respectively Mogens Boisen and Børge Johansen were begun.

Bergsøe starts his article by rendering the plot of The Pardoner’s Tale, which he says he remembers from an English reader at school. This will have been the summary “The Three Drunkards” from linguist Otto Jespersen’s schoolbook reader series published in its first edition in 1895, which was used in Danish translation in a Sunday school book edited by Aage Nørfelt in 1965 (Jespersen in Brüel, ed., 1957-60: 70-3, Nørfelt 1965: 134-8). Bergsøe then moves on to a general consideration of the importance of classics in all fields of art, and he regrets the scarce representation of Chaucer in Denmark. He goes on to give a short account of the idea of The Canterbury Tales and an extremely brief account of Chaucer’s life, before embarking on his main errand, a summary with two extracts in translation from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. I shall return to the extracts in connection with my translation analysis below, but let me say here that the short summaries of both prologue and tale show Bergsøe’s fine sense of Chaucer’s tone and acute understanding of the entertainment value. For Bergsøe the Wife is first of all a “Livsstykke” [a live wire] (Bergsøe 1941: 14), and he attaches no sinfulness to her behavior.[1] It is not surprising that the article with its appealing rendition of arguably Chaucer’s funniest tale caused Kai Friis Møller to ask Bergsøe to translate the whole text, as Friis Møller explains in the preface to the full translation (Friis Møller in Bergsøe 1943: 12). Given a few weak points in Bergsøe’s article, it was also probably a good idea to let Friis Møller write the introduction. Besides the inaccuracies about the previous Danish translation and reception, Bergsøe is clearly unfamiliar with the linguistic side of Middle English, which is revealed in another footnote (14, note 3), where he ponders that the Canterbury Tales must be a treasure for linguists. He adds: “Man genfinder mange rent danske Ord og, saavidt jeg kan se, maa det have været talt med en udpræget jydsk eller skotsk Akcent.” [One recognises many purely Danish words, and as far as I can see, it must have been spoken with a distinct Jutlandish or Scottish accent]. This is not altogether wrong, to be sure, but it is also clearly a point made through an amateur’s impressionist gaze. Other non-professional details in Bergsøe’s article include a misspelling of Boccaccio’s name and a wrong count of the number of Canterbury tales. All these weak points should be forgiven in a context where Bergsøe successfully says something very important about Chaucer, as in the quotation above.

There are six full page black and white illustrations by Poul Christensen, showing a marriage scene, two domestic fight scenes and a burial in the prologue, and in the tale respectively the young knight and the old hag. Finally there is an imitation of a pilgrim portrait of the Wife on horseback. Whether they will have pleased the art connoisseur who is the translator is unknown to me, but they certainly function well and make the short book even more reader-friendly. I’ve included two of the illustrations, one at the top of this blog entry and here another (the last page of the short book with the author’s 1st edition signature):

Blog Post Kiltgård - Bergsøe p. 82 cropped

Reader-friendly is an expression that can also be applied to the translation itself, as Bergsøe uses uncomplicated Danish without unnecessary archaisms, and he also makes everything more simple by only giving necessary bits of information in footnotes, such as noting the medieval tradition of weddings taking place at the church door (Bergsøe 1943: 15). Furthermore Bergsøe shows real poetic talent in not only obeying Chaucer’s metre, but also catching the talkative tone of the Wife’s monologue in the prologue, as well as the romance language of the tale. Here is the opening of the prologue with my back translation in prose, and Chaucer quoted from Skeat’s edition. It is not mentioned which source text Bergsøe has used, but I have checked some passages in Skeat’s and Robinson’s editions and can say with some certainty that Skeat is Bergsøe’s text:

Var der paa Jord Autoriteter ej [If there were no authorities on earth]

Saa var Erfaringen dog nok for mig [Then experience would be enough for me]

Til Snak om Ægteskabets drøje Kaar; [For talking about the hard conditions of marriage]

Thi, bedste Venner, fra mit tolvte Aar,- [For, my friends, from my twelfth year]

Og evig priset være Herren god!- [And ever praised be the good Lord]

Med fem Mænd jeg ved Kirkedøren stod; [With five Men I stood at the church door]

Saa ofte holdt jeg nemlig Bryllup der, [So often, you see, I was married there]

Og hver en Mand var god paa sin Manér. [And every man was good in his manner]

(Bergsøe transl.1943: lines 1-8)

‘Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, were right y-nogh to me

To speke of wo that is in mariage;

For, lordinges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,

Thonked be god that is eterne on lyve,

Housbondes at chirche-dore I have had fyve –

For I so ofte have y-wedded be –

And alle were worthy men in hir degree.

(Skeat, ed., The Canterbury Tales, D 1-8)

At first sight “drøje kår” (3) and ”bedste venner” (4) appear to be rather free translations of respectively “wo” and “lordinges”, but actually they are very idiomatic solutions that work well in the context. Bergsøe could have chosen something more solemn and old-fashioned for “lordinges”, such as “ærede tilhørere” [noble listeners], but “bedste venner” is straightforward and accurate. The whole passage convincingly establishes a voice talking intimately to an audience, and Bergsøe is able to stay in this voice throughout the prologue.

Bergsøe’s strategy of avoiding archaic language works especially well since he makes sure that the language is not too modern, either. Occasionally this involves choosing a word or idiom that is only slightly old-fashioned, but still in use. Examples are “inden Kvæld” [before evening] (1012), more poetic and old-fashioned than the standard expression “inden aften”. Also the adjective “ful” [foul] (1082) about the old hag is more colourful and unusual in Danish than its English counterpart. And finally “gør han Haneben” [literally: if he shows cock’s legs] (932) is a well chosen if not exactly modern idiom for flirting. Bergsøe strikes a fine linguistic balance in his poetic translation, and it is only regrettable that we only have this one tale from his hand.

In Bergsøe’s case we have an opportunity to look into the translator’s process of working with his material, as there are two passages of respectively 16 and 62 lines that appear as part of his article “Chaucer bør oversættes” (Bergsøe 1941: 15-16). In the finished version from 1943 these passages have been heavily revised and much improved with regards to poetic quality and linguistic accuracy. I will analyse just a few lines as examples:

Jeg dansede vidunderligt til Harpers Klang, [I danced wonderfully to the sound of harps]

Og som den bedste Nattergal jeg sang [And as the best of nightingales I sang]

Naar jeg var fuld af kraftig Vin [When I was drunk from strong wine]

Matellius, den usle Karl, det Svin, [Matellius, the wretch, the pig]

Sin Kone med en Dolk han stak ihjel [stabbed his wife with a dagger]

Fordi hun drak; hvis jeg var hende, ved min Sjæl! [because she drank; If I were her, by my soul]

Han skulde ej ha’ holdt mig væk fra Vinens Gud; [He should not have kept me away from the god of wine]

Og efter Vin jeg bøjed mig for Venus Bud, [And after wine I gave in to the bidding of Venus].

(Bergsøe 1941: 15)

Jeg kunde danse til en Harpes Klang, [I could dance to the sound of a harp]

Saa godt som nogen Nattergal jeg sang [as well as any nightingale I sang]

Naar jeg mig tog en Slurk af kraftig Vin. [When I took a gulp of strong wine]

Metellius, den usle Karl, det Svin, [Metellius, the wretch, the pig]

Som med en Knippel tog sin Kones Liv, [who took his wife’s life with a cudgel]

Fordi hun Vinen drak; var jeg hans Viv, [because she drank the wine; if I were his wife,]

Mit Drikkeri han skulde aldrig krænke; [he should never be allowed to infringe on my drinking]

Thi efter Vin jeg maa paa Venus tænke: [For after wine I must think of Venus]

(Bergsøe 1943: 457-64)

Wel coude I daunce to an harpe smale

And singe, y-wis, as any nightingale,

Whan I had dronke a draughte of swete wyn.

Metellius, the foule cherl, the swyn,

That with a staf birafte his wyf hir lyf,

For she drank wyn, thogh I hadde been his wyf,

He sholde nat han daunted me fro drinke;

And, after wyn, on Venus moste I thinke:

(Skeat, ed., D 457-64)

First of all Bergsøe has adjusted the metre in the revised version and avoided a clumsy rhythm such as in the first line of the 1941 version. Secondly some of the rhyme words have been changed, so as to allow improvements both in sound and in accuracy. “Vin” and “Svin” rhyme equally well in Danish and English, and this is also the case for “Liv” and “Viv”, although the latter is now archaic in Danish. In the 1941 version, however, the rhyme words are “ihjel” and “Sjæl”, and because of the Danish glottal stop in “Sjæl” and not in “ihjel”, this is a poor rhyme substitute. The 1943 rhymes “krænke” and “tænke” that replace “Gud” and “Bud” come closer to Chaucer’s, allowing also a more accurate translation than in the 1941 version. Accuracy is also obtained by spelling Metellius correctly and by letting him kill his wife with a cudgel rather than a dagger, as in the story from Valerius Maximus referred to in a footnote in the 1943 version. “Naar jeg mig tog en Slurk af kraftig Vin” is idiomatically far better in relation to the source text than the 1941 version, which does not go into detail with the Wife’s rather vulgar manners (“dronke a draughte”), but only states that she was drunk. Both Danish versions have “kraftig” [strong] wine rather than Chaucer’s sweet wine, but logically this is a reasonable solution, as the focus is on getting drunk rather than tasting something sweet.

As opposed to many other translators of Chaucer, Bergsøe does not employ euphemisms or avoidance strategies when dealing with the Wife of Bath’s direct references to sexual organs. The French expression for the female sexual organ belle chose (447 and 510) is left unchanged, a very sensible solution. And in line 116 ”membres … of generacioun” are equally clearly translated as “Redskaber til Avling” [tools for breeding], following the Wife in leaving nothing to the imagination, just as in line 149, where “myn instrument” becomes “mit Instrument”.  Parallel to this, Bergsøe calls a spade a spade in his translation of the rape scene in the Tale, where the line “By verray force he rafte hir maydenheed” (888) is translated by “Med skændig Vold han hendes Mødom tog” [With shameful violence he took her maidenhood]. Here the adjective “skændig” [shameful] is not matched directly in the corresponding line from Chaucer, but the context in Chaucer’s tale makes it a very forgivable explication.

A final example from Bergsøe’s highly successful translation will be the climax of the Tale:

“Da har jeg Herredømmet over Dig, [”Then I have the mastery over you]

Naar jeg maa vælge, som jeg vil, og raade?” [When I may choose as I wish and decide?”]

”Ja,” sagde han, ”bedst er det paa den Maade.”[”Yes”, he said, ”it is best this way.”]

Hun sagde: ”Kys mig, lad vort Had da være, [She said, ”Kiss me, let our hate be,]

Thi Du skal faa mig baade-og, paa Ære, [For you shall have me both-and, truly.]

Forstaar Du, altid smuk og god mod Dig. [You see, always beautiful and good to you.]

Og lad Vorherre blot forbande mig, [And let our Lord throw a curse on me]

Om ej jeg bli’r saa god og tro en Mage; [If I do not become as good and faithful a mate]

Som man har kendt fra Verdens første Dage;” [As has been known from the first days of the world]

(Bergsøe 1943: 1236-44)

‘Thanne have I get of yow maistrye,’ quod she,

‘Sin I may chese, and governe as me lest?’

‘Ye certes, wyf,’ quod he, ‘I holde it best.’

‘Kis me,’ quod she, ‘we be no lenger wrothe;

For by my trouthe, I wol be to yow bothe,

This is to seyn, ye, bothe fair and good.

I prey to god that I mot sterven wood,

But I to yow be al-so good and trewe

As ever was wyf, sin that the world was newe.’

(Skeat, ed., D 1236-44)

This is one of Chaucer’s finest twists to the ending of a well-known medieval romance. Whereas the standard ending in other versions of the same medieval romance has the knight saying that he will choose virtue, before the old hag transforms into a beautiful young girl, the transformation is here provoked by a denouement which corresponds to the message of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, i.e. that women desire to have the upper hand in marriage. Only when the hag knows that she is in power, does she give her love and beauty to the knight. This feminist message is well carried through by Bergsøe, who translates Chaucer’s “maistrye” by “Herredømmet”, a word that literally means “man’s judgment”, but is used broadly about both sexes when in power. Still the literal meaning carries funny connotations when used in a connection like this. The idiom “sterven wood” [die mad] is rendered by Bergsøe as “forbande mig” [throw a curse on me] (1242), which is not quite accurate from a formal point of view, but still it is acceptable in this context, because it covers the same meaning, i.e. it has dynamic equivalence in Nida’s sense (Nida 1964/2000). Bergsøe also manages to convey the dialogue between the knight and the hag in idiomatic Danish showing that we have to do with spoken language. “Baade-og” [both-and] (1240) is one such idiom, and another is the communicative gambit “Forstaar Du” [you see] (1241), which well translates Chaucer’s “This is to seyn”.

With this fine finale, Bergsøe manages to keep up the impressive work he has undertaken in this translation. The extracts from his 1941 article show that he moved a long way in quality over the next couple of years, taking the utmost care to obey rhyme and rhythm, find a natural flow of language fitting to Chaucer’s wife and selecting appropriate idioms that carry the sense of the original accurately. A translation strategy that avoids archaic Danish and lets the Wife appear more as a timeless character works very well, and Bergsøe should also receive full praise for letting the Wife remain vulgar at certain points. It is remarkable that this work was carried out in difficult circumstances during the war, by someone who is not known otherwise for being an expert in medieval studies, in English literature, or in English language, but of all the translations I have investigated in connection with this study, including modern English ones, Bergsøe comes closest to my own absolute ideal of a Chaucer translator. Fortunately Konen fra Bath has been reprinted so many times that it is still available in antiquarian bookshops and libraries. The last available reprint is from 1967 (Bergsøe 1967), and the same year an extract from the prologue, lines 587-827, appeared in an anthology of translated French, German, Italian and English medieval poetry, edited by Anker Teilgård Laugesen. His afterword only mentions Chaucer once (188), and he has reprinted Bergsøe’s translation without revisions except for modernized spelling. (Laugesen ed. 1967).

References:

Andersen, Victor, “Bergsøe, Svend” in Lund, Jørn, gen. ed., Den store danske encycklopædi, vol. 2, 513. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995.

Bergsøe, Flemming, ”Chaucer bør oversættes” in Aarstiderne, No. 1, 1941, 12-16.

-, transl., Møller, Kai Friis, preface, Christensen, Poul, illustrations, Geoffrey Chaucer, Konen fra Bath. Copenhagen: Thaning & Appel, 1943, and later imprints.

-, Det underlige år. Copenhagen, Thaning & Appel, 1945.

Boisen, Mogens, transl., Balfour, Ludmilla, illustrations, Berhardsen, Christian, afterword, Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterburyfortællingerne. Copenhagen: Martins Forlag, 1952.

Bostrup, Ole, ”Bergsøe, Paul” in Lund, Jørn, gen. ed., Den store danske encycklopædi, vol. 2, 513. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995.

Idle, Eric et al., ”Nudge, Nudge” in episode three of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, broadcast by the BBC in 1969. Published in Wilmut, Roger, ed., Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Just the Words. London: Methuen, 1989, vol. 1, 40-1.

Jespersen, Otto, ”The Three Drunkards” in Brüel, Svend, ed., Otto Jespersen, Engelsk 4: Engelsk læsestykker, 1. halvdel. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 20th imprint,1953, 70-3.

Johansen, Børge V., transl. Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterburyfortællingerne I-II. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1958.

Lund, Jørn, gen. ed, Den store danske encyclopædi, vols. 2 and 7, 513 and 138. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995 and 1997. “Bergsøe, Flemming”, and “Friis Møller, Kai”, unsigned articles.

Nida, Eugene, “Principles of Correspondence” in Venuti, Lawrence, ed., The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1964/2000, 126-40.

Nørfelt, Aage, ed., ”De tre svirebrødre” in Litteraturhæfte til den kristne troslære. Copenhagen: Gjellerup, 1965, 134-38.

[1] Monty Python’s Eric Idle would probably have translated it as “a goer”, as in the sketch “Nudge, Nudge” (Idle et al. 1969/1989: 40). Idle’s insinuation in the sketch about a wife who is “a goer” and has “been around” is actually a joke used already by Chaucer, who says about the Wife of Bath in The General Prologue, 467, that “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye”, meaning that she has been going around on amorous adventures.