by Candace Barrington

Much of the history of the Global Chaucers project could be written be detailing a series of chance encounters and missed opportunities. One of the more recent examples of a chance encounter was my meeting Danko Kamčevski (Metropolitan University of Belgrade) this past November at the Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism conference at the University of Lorraine (Nancy, France). He not only knew about Boris Hlebec’s 1983 Serbian translation–Džefri Čoser’s Kanterberijske priče–but offered to send me a copy. Indeed, just a few days after the conference, he wrote that he’d found a copy and gone to the post office to mail it, only to be informed that, in response to the ongoing tariffs, the Serbian Post Office does not allow packages to be sent to the United States.

Meanwhile, Danko has shared a careful explication of Hlebec’s translation of a passage from The Knight’s Tale as well as forwarded Sergej Macura’s 2025 article examining the metrical and lexical equivalences between Chaucer’s Middle English General Prologue and Hlebec’s translation. He has also notified me that Professor Hlebec has recently died. Never getting to correspond with Chaucer’s Serbian translator is my missed opportunity.

Eventually, I’ll find a way to get Kanterberijske priče, and both Danko Kamčevski’s explication and Sergej Macura’s article will contribute significantly to my current writing project. I do wish, though, that I could have thanked Professor Hlebec for his contributions.