Earlier this year, we began a delightful correspondence with Lian Zhang, a graduate student of Dr. Minghan Xiao, professor of English and American literature in Hunan Normal University. Lian’s extensive research on Chaucer’s Chinese reception has opened up many exciting new avenues of interpretation, but for now Lian has agreed to share a tantalizing tidbit: the myriad choices (and dilemmas) facing a translator needing to render Chaucer’s name in Chinese.
We think you will enjoy this small yet fascinating window into the complexities of translating Chaucer’s Middle English text into Chinese.
Confucius says: “If terminology is not corrected, then what is said cannot be followed. If what is said cannot be followed, then work cannot be accomplished” (名不正，则言不顺；言不顺，则事不成). Chinese people attach great importance to their names. A Chinese name suggests both family inheritance and good wishes for the person. The surname is put first to show respect for ancestors, and the given name is after the surname and generally indicates family’s expectations. Take Bai Juyi (白居易) (772-846 AD), a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, for example. “Bai” is his surname, and “Juyi” means living an easy and comfortable life, a simple and sincere hope from his family. What is different from the western tradition is that Chinese rarely name their children after their ancestors or relatives. The given names of the ancestors would always be taboo words for the descendents. Du Fu (杜甫) (712-770 AD), the Poet Sage (诗圣) in the Tang Dynasty, for instance, wrote poetry for over thirty years and never used the word “xian” (闲), meaning free and casual, a very poetic word in Chinese, simply because it is his father’s given name. Du has also been reputed as never mentioning Chinese flowering crabapple (海棠), a plant often praised in classical Chinese poems, as it relates to his mother’s maiden name. In addition to a surname and a given name, Du also had a style name “zi mei” (字“子美”), and an assumed name “Shaoling Farmer” (号“少陵野老”). While a style name is usually given by the family when the person is young and generally indicates family’s good wishes, an assumed name is more often decided by the person himself.
With such a rich history of naming culture behind, Chinese scholars would take translations of Chaucer’s name seriously. The name “Chaucer” has been translated into many versions, either a Chinese full name (with both a Chinese surname and a given name) or just a given name or an assumed name with all good meanings. Chaucer was named as “shao sou” (邵叟), “que sou” (却叟), “chuo sai” (绰塞), “qiao sai” (乔塞), “sao sai” (骚塞), “chao sai” (巢塞), etc, and all of these translations just deal with his surname “Chaucer”. One version including his full name is very auspicious as “qiao sai ji fu lai” (乔塞·极福来), which sounds close to the full name “Geoffrey Chaucer” and means “supreme blessing for Chaucer”. Yet a mistake occurs here, as the given name and the surname are put in the opposite order in the translation. The most commonly used translation for his full name to this day is “jie fu li qiao sou” (杰弗里·乔叟). The above mentioned name “sao sai” (骚塞) is also interesting, as “sao” refers to poets or literary men in classical Chinese, and likely originates from Li Sao (离骚) by Qu Yuan (屈原) (340-278 BC), one of the greatest patriotic poets in ancient China. Thus this name not only has a similar pronunciation but also suggests Chaucer’s literary achievements in history.
In 1913, Sun Yuxiu first introduced Chaucer into China, and translated his name as “xiao su” (孝素), two Chinese words with very good meanings. “Xiao” means filial piety, which is regarded as the most important of all virtues in traditional Chinese culture. “Su” suggests simple, plainness, and quietness. The two Chinese words combined sounds like the surname “Chaucer” in pronunciation, but this combination is more like a Chinese given name, or a style name.
From 1916 to 1925, Lin Shu and Chen Jialin published translations of nine of Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. In the translation for the Wife of Bath’s tale, Chaucer’s name was introduced as “cao xi er” (曹西尔). “Cao” sounds like “Chau-” in Chinese, and is a typical Chinese surname. This surname dates back to the days of the legendary Huangdi Emperor in the third millennium BC, and even today millions of Chinese people still bear this surname. “Xi” means west, an emphasis on Chaucer’s origin, and “er” could be taken as a mood auxiliary word in classical Chinese. Thus Chaucer got a full Chinese name here, with a Chinese surname and a given name indicating the poet’s origin.
Chaucer’s name was more commonly recognized in China as “qiao sou” (乔叟). “Qiao”, a Chinese surname, sounds like “Chau-” in pronunciation, whileas “sou” sounds like “-cer” and means an old and wise man in Chinese, an image close to Chaucer’s portrait we have nowadays. This name is like an assumed name of the poet, as it suggests his profession or social status. It is through Fang Zhong’s influential translation of Chaucer’s works that this name has been made widely known in China. It is also the commonly used name by Taiwanese scholars.
Another Chinese name for Chaucer worth noting is “zhao sou” (赵叟), used by a couple of contemporary Chinese scholars. “Zhao”, or “Chiu” in Hong Kong, “Chao” or “Chau” in Taiwanese phonetics, sounds like “Chau-” in Chinese, and “sou” seconds what the word in “qiao sou” means. Moreover, “zhao” was the surname of the emperors of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) in China, thus the so-called surname of the state, and the most respectable surname for this period. Even today, “zhao” is among one of the most borne surnames in China. The Chinese emperors in ancient time would grant his loyal servants or brave soldiers the surname of the state, and the one who received this huge and rare honor would abandon his original surname. Chaucer, who also lived in the medieval world, would have found it a wonderful experience if he knew he was granted with the Song emperors’ surname.
Chaucer’s life stretched over sixty years, from the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) in Chinese history. While the Yuan Dynasty was ruled by Mongolia Chinese and it is a little bit difficult to match their long Mongolian surname with Chaucer, I find the Ming emperors’ Han Chinese surname, “Zhu” (朱), or “Chu” in both Hong Kong and Taiwanese phonetics, a more suitable match, and we could only imagine how glad Chaucer would be as he is granted with an emperor’s surname of his living days.
How are we to understand a project whose primary objective is “to forge in common a memory, an imaginary, a common view of the world that surrounds us”? What does it mean when that same project attempts to create a common culture by simultaneously broadcasting television programing to German and French audiences, especially when that broadcasting is developed from a German or French perspective and then (mis)translated into the other language with insufficient concern for the lost context? These transcultural questions were two of many issues raised by Damien Stankiewicz’s “Is Europe Lost in Translation?: Lessons from the Micro-Politics of Meaning at the French-German Television Channel ARTE.” Though ostensibly a series of vignettes drawn from Stankiewicz’s fieldwork at the Strasbourg television channel, the paper becomes a study of the politics of translation when well-meaning cosmopolitanism becomes straitjacketed by nationalism, when polylingual discourse becomes “serial monolingualism” (a term I borrow from Bethan Wiggin). Via Stankiewicz’s dispiriting experiences at ARTE, we watch an admirable (it seems) effort flounder when it focuses too much on telling and too little on listening. Consequently, the channel’s unidirectional linguistic and cultural translations frequently miss their mark.
For me, ARTE’s efforts and frustrations provide a potent reminder to the pitfalls of a transnational cultural project. It’s good to be reminded that political agendas (whether or not they are self-recognized) can thwart the highest-minded efforts.
When we launched Global Chaucers in 2012, our purposes were limited and certainly felt apolitical to us. Within months we realized that even our most minimal goals could not be reached without collaborators outside our immediate contacts. At this point, Global Chaucers became politically inflected. Although the direction of Global Chaucers continued to be primarily determined by our goals and interests, our collaborators’ local concerns also shaped the project. Global Chaucers couldn’t be about telling members of the scholarly collective how they should appropriate, understand, or interpret Chaucer. Instead, it had to became a listening campaign, an effort to learn how Chaucer’s non-Anglophone readers understood his work and how they translated that understanding to other non-Anglophone readers. I think it’s this insistence on listening that has helped us expand our network, bringing in new voices and new perspectives, united not by a common understanding of a single text but by a common delight.
In her lucid exploration of language data collection in the field once known as “lexio-statistic glottochronology,” Judy Kaplan’s “From Lexiostatistics to Lexomics: Basic Vocabulary and the Study of Language Prehistory” traces the persistent hold “Basic Word Lists.” Though the data behind those word lists have gone from being recorded and shared on note cards to being stored and processed on the cloud, they have continued to be presented as the scientific basis for big data theories regarding the prehistory of language. As new data is brought into linguistic models, she suggests, it is made to fit the models’ theoretical conclusions rather than the new data requiring any adjustments to the model.
I was particularly interested in her discussion of the Basic Word Lists,* ranging from 15-215 items, comprising a basic vocabulary defined by its stability across time and cultures. Identified as commensurate across all language systems, this stable lexicon includes terms like all, louse, seed, blood, claw, belly, bite, know, sun, yellow, night, new, and round. An essential (and somewhat dubious) premise behind the Basic Word List is the commensurability of these lexemes across languages (and across time). With these word lists, mid-twentieth-century linguists created absolute chronologies of language development. Most recently, archaeogeneticists and evolutionists have used this Basic Word List to push back the limits of language prehistory, albeit in less absolute terms.
One aspect of my study of Canterbury Tales translations also works with word lists. Unlike the linguists of Kaplan’s study, however, I’m interested in intense moments of incommensurability, those points when the receiving language exceeds the confines established by the source text’s language. By and large, my terms have been cultural; for instance, I’ve examined the various ways translators express the idea of pilgrimage and salvation. Additionally, some examples seem so natural that we are surprised when the translations betray their cultural situatedness. In this category are terms associated with emotions, such as anger and joy. What if we extend this investigation to include those supposedly stable terms? Would the literary context of multiple translations support my intuition that these terms are not nearly as stable as supposed?
*Thanks to Roger Bilosoly for sharing this fascinating link. Be prepared to spend many hours tracing linguistic cognates.
Susie Hatmaker’s “The Radical Abundance of Silica: Potential for a Digital Ethics” is concerned with translation as movement: movement of a natural resource from one locale to another, movement of minerals from their raw state to economic value. In many ways, though, the story she tells is one of misrepresentation through faux translation (my term). That is, the histories of Silicon Valley and the computer chip industries housed there are not simple stories of taking an abundant resource–sand–and transforming it into abundant forms of digital information with nothing wasted, nothing extracted. (Nor is it the case with Silicon Valley’s closely related industry, the manufacture and distribution of solar power panels, an industry which claims to transform sunlight into clean, abundant energy.) As Susie’s paper reminds us, the silicon chip and the resulting electronic data industries have never been a pure translation of a natural resource into uncontaminated digital bytes. In order to see those impurities, Susie suggests we listen to the silica, heed its geologic and economic history. Only in this way, we can begin to approach a digital ethics.
Similarly for literary translations. Because all translations are impure, the only false translations are those that deny their impurity or imperfections. However, because there seems to be a universal desire for pure translations, these modes of willful (perhaps, sometimes, naïve) misrepresentation are seductive. Repeatedly, we see Chaucer and his translators resisting the lure of faux translation and importing impurities that mark the ethical integrity of their task.
Among the many images Christine Poggi shared in her 27 September presentation, the most arresting for me was this reproduction of Mona Hatoum’s Projection (2006, cotton and abaca paper). Although Poggi was primarily concerned with translation in its most literal sense, as carrying something over a boundary line, I was struck by how this example of Hatoum’s work queries the process of translation. Through the process of erasure, the artwork exposes the ways maps transmit their prejudices when translating three-dimensional geographical features into two-dimensional representations. Whereas a map’s standard cartographic images project borders, languages, and landmarks as suitable for understanding geography, Hatoum’s translation of a map removes identifying features that would associate a locale with any agenda, people, or language. By stripping away all those features that would link the map to one purpose or another, Projection reminds us that customary maps are filled with the prejudices of those who make them, the powers that support them, and the eyes that read them. Delivering a washed out recreation that seems to bear little resemblance to the original, Hatoum’s art work would initially seem to declare the impossibility, even undesirability, of translation—whether cartographic or any other mode of translation—without prejudice.
If, however, we think about her projections as translations of translations, then she shows how a translation can sometimes return us to the source text’s original purity, a purity visible only from a distance. Projection reminds me of the Apollo 17 photos of the earth taken 45,000 km away, the famous “Blue Marble” images. Artificial political demarcations are naturally absent, but also missing are many topographical features that have traditionally established boundaries. Instead, we have the broad outlines of continents and oceans. Hatoum’s image approximates this borderless, god’s-eye view that the Apollo photograph seems to capture, returning us thereby to a cartographic vision unavailable to most us.
When we study Chaucerian translations, either Chaucer’s own translations or subsequent translations of Chaucer’s texts, it can often feel that we’ve moved so far away from the original that we’ve lost sight of what counts. Perhaps, only perhaps, these translations can bring into relief what we might otherwise miss, those broad outlines obscured by the text’s natural details and the false demarcations we’ve inherited from previous generations of readers.
This academic year, I’m a regional fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum on Translation. Organized by Bethany Wiggin and James English, the interdisciplinary forum seeks to push our conception of translation and the categories it informs. Each week, a participant shares a work-in-progress, and following a brief response by an appointed seminar member, the discussion opens up to the whole group. So, in addition to reading papers outside my disciplines, I’m privy to modes of cross-fertilization generally unavailable to me.
Over the next two semesters, I plan a series of posts that are less reports on the seminar presentations and more reconsiderations of my approaches to global translations of The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes I will be trying out the new perspectives and fresh ideas (for me, at least) presented and discussed at that week’s seminar. In some cases, the other seminar participants will be astonished by my takeaways; I know the conversations vibrate different chords for me than they do for others. In all cases, these are the early impressions recorded in the two hours between the end of the seminar and the beginning of my train trip back to New Haven. Though I will certainly revise these ideas as I continue to work on my monograph, these posting will attempt to capture my raw impressions.
It’s a bit of a delay, but here’s another important review of Ebbe Klitgård’s Chaucer in Denmark, written by University of Iceland’s Chaucerian, Sif Rikhardsdottir, for The Medieval Review.
by MEGAN COOK and DAVID HADBAWNIK, with introduction by CANDACE BARRINGTON
This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Today’s guest posting moves Global Chaucers in new directions, for Megan and David’s work deals with neither The Canterbury Tales nor post-1945 translations, two parameters defining Global Chaucers thus far. Instead, they examine Sir Francis Kynaston’s 17th-century Latin translation of Troilus and Criseyde.
Megan Cook is an assistant professor in English at Colby College, where she teaches medieval literature, with an emphasis on Chaucer and other late medieval poets, and researches and writes about the fate of Middle English texts and books in the early modern period. Her current book project examines the scholarly reception of Chaucer’s works in sixteenth-century England, with special interest in the role of antiquarians in the production of early printed editions.
David Hadbawnik studies poetic diction in English from the medieval through early modern period. He co-edits eth press and is also co-editing a special issue of postmedieval on cross-currents in contemporary and medieval poetry. He has published an article on Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, and his translation of books 1-6 of the Aeneid is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in 2015.
We are delighted they accepted our invitation to bring together their collective knowledge of Kynaston and his understudied translation. Their collaboration sheds new light on what it means (and does not mean) to translate Chaucer into Latin, the global language nonpareil.
THE EARLIEST EFFORTS to translate Chaucer out of Middle English and into a language accessible to non-Anglophone audiences are not in any vernacular language but, rather, in Latin. Latin praise of Chaucer is a minor but persistent strain in his reception: In the 1480s, William Caxton commissioned the Italian poet Stephanus Surigonis to compose a Latin epitaph for Chaucer, which he printed in his 1473 edition of the Boece, and supposedly had posted near the poet’s burial place in Westminster Abbey. In the 1530s, the antiquary John Leland provided readers of his de Viris Illustribus with a list of Chaucer’s titles translated into Latin—the Fabulae Cantianae, Amores Troili et Chrysidis, and the Chorus avium, among others. Leland was aware of the ways in which Chaucer’s preference for the vernacular constrained the reputation of his works in an international community of learning. Elsewhere in his account of Chaucer’s life and works, he writes that “I wish… at least that our language were known to the Latin poets; then they would easily—I say easily—accede to my opinion [of Chaucer’s poetry]/ But since what I want is scarcely possible, I wish at least that having been prevailed upon they would have some faith in me as a lover of Latin literature in this matter.”
While Caxton and Leland are eager to confer on Chaucer the cultural status associated with Latin literature, they are content to let his language stand unaltered (or lightly modernized). By the seventeenth century, however, changes within the English language had made Chaucer’s Middle English less accessible, and some admirers of Chaucer worried that readers would be unable to comprehend his works, much less appreciate their artistry. In 1598, Thomas Speght oversaw the production of the first edition of Chaucer’s Works to contain a glossary, and in the 1630s Jonathan Sidnam produced, in manuscript, a modernized version of the first three books of Troilus and Criseyde.
It is not surprising that as Kynaston set out to Latinize Chaucer he would turn to Troilus and Criseyde, a work set in pagan antiquity and already rife with classical allusion. Although Kynaston produced manuscript copies of the poem throughout his life (distributed as gifts to friends and patrons), his translation is best known via the printed edition of the first two books, which were published in 1635 as Amorum Troili et Creseidae libri duo (STC 5097), with copious prefatory materials in both Latin and English.
However bizarre it might seem to us that the effort to “preserve” and “make accessible” Chaucer’s verse led seventeenth-century writers to translate that verse into Latin, the front-matter of Kynaston’s 1635 Latin Troilus and Criseyde unfolds the logic behind the effort in a way that makes it seem natural, even inevitable. Latinized Chaucer is in some ways the logical conclusion of efforts to establish him as a properly “classical” poet; situating Chaucer in the company of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer was a project that arguably began with the former’s mentioning of those classical authors in Troilus and Criseyde (the famous “Go, litel bok” stanza – V.1786-92), and continued via the encomia of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, and numerous others through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The opening epistle of William Thynne’s 1532 print edition of Chaucer – the distant ancestor of modern collections such as the Riverside Chaucer – provides a compact summary of the cultural work the poet was supposed to have done for the English language. After the “confusion of tongues” that was punishment for, presumably, the Tower of Babel, written language slowly developed, and poets came along to “adorne the rudeness and barbarity of speech.” Latin and Greek were thus “perfected,” with other Romance languages following eventually thanks to their similarity to Latin. English had a tougher go of it, but against all odds Chaucer was able to perfect the tongue not unlike Demosthenes, Homer, or Cicero.
But there was a problem. English continued to change at an alarming rate. Indeed, Chaucer himself had foreseen this issue, also in that famous sequence from Troilus and Criseyde (“And for ther is so gret diversite / In Englissh and in writying of oure tonge… [V.1793-94]). How could Chaucer’s English be perfect if the language also continued to change, to the extent that readers of later ages had increasing difficulty with it? In part, the answer was a characterization of English as a fallen tongue post-Chaucer, expressing an anxiety about linguistic corruption (paradoxically via Latin, French, etc.) and lamenting the loss of an imaginary origin in the ever-receding past. Such anxiety was the backdrop to the so-called “inkhorn” controversy and disputes about poetic diction engaged in by Hawes, Puttenham, Sidney, and others through the late medieval to early modern period. There must, some thought, be a kind of English that gets us back to the Garden found by Chaucer and almost immediately lost due to the carelessness of his descendants – if only we could agree on what kind it is, which linguistic influences to exclude, which to embrace.
The other answer was to leap straight to one of the classical, perfected tongues, in order to avoid the troubling issue of post-lapsarian English altogether. In this light, the logic behind the Latinized Chaucer is still curious, though ultimately sound. Indeed, the Latin Troilus and Criseyde takes its place among a broader discourse of Latin poetry (original and translation) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see, e.g., J.W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, 1990, and the Brill Encyclopedia of Neo-Latin, eds. Philip Ford, Jan Bloemendal, and Charles Fantazzi, 2014). In that context, translating Chaucer into a dead language is not a bizarre feat akin to the attempt at reproducing Don Quixote undertaken by Borges’ Pierre Menard, but a project of “restaurationem & redintegrationem,” of bringing “vetusta a novis, prisca ab hodiernis” – of, in other words, “restoring” a perfect poem to a perfect tongue.
Thus one of the dedicatory poems in English scolds modern poets for their inability to parse old English and hails Kynaston’s effort
to Translate
A booke, not tractable to every hand,
And such as few presum’d to understand:
Those upstart verse-wrights, that first steale his wit,
And then pronounce him Dull: or those that sit
In judgement of the Language they nere view’d,
And because they are lazie, Chaucer’s Rude…
Another perfectly captures the guilt-complex of English speakers at the “fallen” state of their own tongue, and with hyperbole worthy of a modern blurb pronounces Kynaston’s translation an instant classic:
Here is no fault, but ours: through us
True Poetry growes barbarous:
While aged Language must be thought
(Because ’twas good long since) now naught.
Thus time can silence Chaucers tongue,
But not his witte, which now among
The Latines hath a lowder sound;
And what we lost, the World hath found.
Thus the Translation will become
Th’ Originall, while that growes dumbe:
And this will crowne these labours: None
Sees Chaucer but in Kynaston.
Another dedicatory poem reinforces the imaginary displacement of the original by the translation, expressing the (ironic) reality that it is easier to read Chaucer in the new-old language than the old-new one:
’Tis to your Happy cares wee owe, that wee
Read Chaucer now without a Dictionary;
Whose faithfull Quill such constant light affords,
That we now read his thoughts, who read his words,
And though we know’t done in our age by you,
May doubt which is the Coppy of the two.
Perhaps most strangely, one dedication voices the desire to read all of Chaucer in Latin, as if the entire oeuvre of the poet could only be fully appreciated in that tongue:
Thanks Noble Kynaston, to whose Learn’d Arte
We owe a limbe of Chaucer, th’other part
Expects thy happy hand, Me thinks I see
It pant, and heave for a recovery:
First let the Trojan Boy arise, and then
True Trojans all, they are his Countrymen.
The Sumner, Franklin, oh that I might heare
The Manciple, and early Chaunticleare
Crowe latin, next might see the Reve, and Logge,
The Miller and learne Latine for a Cogge,
The Merchant, and Sir Thopas height, the wife
Of Bathe, in vulgar Latine scold for life.
Finally, Kynaston is praised for (paradoxically) making Chaucer more English by taking him out of English:
Chaucer, thou wert not dead; nor can we feare
Thy death, that hast out liv’d three hundred yeare.
Thou wert but out of fashion; then admit
This courtly habit, which may best befit
Thee and the times. Thou hast a friend, that while
He studies to translate, his Latine stile
Hath Englisht thee, and cunningly in one
Fram’d both a comment and Translation.
In the 1635 printed edition, the Latin and Middle English text are presented alongside one another, with Chaucer’s Middle English coming from Speght’s 1602 edition. The mis-en-page advances an implicit claim that Chaucer’s English is equal to Kynaston’s neo-Latin; by demonstrating that Troilus can be successfully translated from Middle English into Latin, Kynaston offers seventeenth-century readers proof of the late medieval writer’s ability to ascend the heights of neo-classical propriety (Troilus and Criseyde’s own status as a translation from Italian hovers somewhere in the background). The two versions of the poem also gloss each other: the Latin seems likely to serve as a crib for the Middle English, but the Middle English, too, could offer some readers a point of entry into some complex Latin phrasing. In the material presented here (first two books), Kynaston’s translation is stanza-by-stanza, suggesting that his Latin provides a full equivalent to the Middle English verse. Bolstered by claims in the prefatory material for the robust representativeness of his translation, and its efficacy in restoring Chaucer from neglect and oblivion, Kynaston’s Latin threatens to eclipse Chaucer’s own verse, superseded both by the Latin translation and by the English poets that built upon his innovations.
Kynaston’s translation varies in its fidelity to Chaucer’s English verses. His translation of the famous opening stanza (Book 1, stanza 1) is particularly rigorous:
Dolorem Troili duplicem narrare, The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
Qui Priami regis Troiae fuit That was the kyng Priamus sone
gnatus, of Troye,
Ut primum illi contigit amare, In lovynge, how his aventures fellen
Ut miser, felix, et infortunatus Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie,
Erat, decessum ante sum conatus. My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.
Tisiphone, fer opem recenscere Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite
Hos versus, qui, dum scribo, visi Thise woful vers, that wepen as I
flere. write.
As Dana Sutton notes in his introduction to the Latin text of the poem, Kynaston uses accentual meter here, rather than the more classical quantitative meter, in a pattern that most closely resembles iambic pentameter with a feminine ending. As a result, Kynaston is able to capture something of the rhythm of Chaucer’s rhyme royals verses. In this stanza, Kynaston is also able to retain some syntactic parallels with Chaucer, beginning with the “dolorem Troili duplicem,” although the stanza as a whole is somewhat less confident than the English original. While the English narrator has a clear “purpos” “to tellen,” the Latin narrator can only attempt to tell (“narare…sum conatus”). Similarly, while in the English, “thise woful vers” do, in fact, “wepen as I write,” in the Latin, they only seem to weep (“visi flere”).
Kynaston takes more liberties with a famous stanza in Book II:
Loquendi forma, scio, quod I know that in forme of speech is
mutata chaunge
Sit intra seculum; & verbamire Within a thousand yere, and words tho
Tunc temporis in precio, & That hadden prise, now wonder nice
laudata, and strange
Nunc vel in desuetudinem Thinketh hem, and yet they spake
abire: hem so,
Amabant etiam tunc (oportet And spedde as well in love, as men
scire) now do.
Diversis item saecis conciliare Eke for to winnen love, in sondry ages,
Amorem; Artes variae sunt & rara. In sondry londs, sondry ben viages.
Immediately clear even from a visual standpoint is Kynaston’s altering of the stanza’s rhythm. While he may have arranged his syntax, as noted above, to maintain an approximation of Chaucer’s iambic line, the effect of the punctuation in line one creates a full stop to either side of “scio” (“I know”), squarely at odds with the smooth utterance of Chaucer’s narrator. Line three begins by strongly following Chaucer’s sense, with “precio” for “prise,” but what are we to make of “laudata” (“praiseworthy”) which merely seems to echo “precio,” rather than veer into Chaucer’s succinct expression that people now think old words “nice and strange”? It seems ironic that in this particular stanza Kynaston seems to have lost, or set aside, the negative connotations of these two words. “Nice” of course was often used by Chaucer to mean “foolish” or “silly,” while “strange” figures as a keyword in the poem as a whole, one that registers the movement of Criseyde through the course of the poem (see, e.g., Criseyde’s final letter to Troilus from the Greek camp, excusing herself for leaving Troy, wherein the same “strange”/“change” rhyme is employed: “this lettre he thoughte al straunge … / Hym thoughte it lik a kalendes of chaunge” [5.1632, 34]). Likewise, Kynaston cannot maintain Chaucer’s repetitive rhythm “sondry…”) in the closing couplet, and resorts to “rara” to end line seven, though Chaucer merely notes that men used “different routes” (“viages”) in different times and places. Caught in a classic translational crux, Kynaston falls victim to hunting for rhyme words that fit rather than following his text’s sense. In both lines three and seven (“laudata” and “rara”), Kynaston essentially chooses to add a related descriptor rather than maintain Chaucer’s more complex dance with meaning.
A manuscript of Kynaston’s full translation, dated 1639 and now held at the Bodleian Library (MS Add. C 287), tells a slightly different story than the printed text. This version includes all five books of Troilus and Criseyde as well as the Testament of Cressid, written by Robert Henryson but published as Chaucer’s in the folio editions (Kynaston recognizes it as Henryson’s work). Unlike the printed edition, which presents the Latin and Middle English unadorned by any interpretive commentary, the manuscript includes frequent intercalations in English as well as “annotationes” in Latin at the end of each book, having to do with the particulars of the translation.
Kynaston’s opening comment, after the first stanza, lays out the problems that prompted his translation: “diverse words in this our most excellent Authors worke do seeme obsolete, and therefore by many are held absurd, as namely tellen & fellen, and such like under favoure of there better judgements such words ought rather to be esteemed as elegances.” In this, Kynaston echoes the comments made by Thynne in his preface to Chaucer’s Works, and EK’s commentary in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar. Like these earlier writers, Kynaston argues that a better understanding of Chaucer’s words will enable a more robust appreciation of his poetry. The implication here does not seem to be that Chaucer’s writings have become wholly unintelligible, but rather that grammatical and orthographic changes have obscured his “elegances”. While Speght and EK focus on Chaucer’s lexicon, Kynaston at least theoretically privileges grammar in his commentary, and recognizes the vestiges of inflection and gender in Middle English. He continues, “it appears by a moast antient Grammer written in the Saxon tounge & character, which I once saw in the handes of my most learned and celebrated frend Mr. Ben: Johnson, & which (out of doubt) Lilly our Grammarian made his Accedence the English tong in Chaucers time, being in substance Saxton, had in nounes distinctions of cases & numbers, & in Verbes of numbers & Tenses.”
Whatever Kynaston’s intentions may have been in setting out to write his commentary, this strain of analysis pops up only intermittently in the first book, and even less so in those that follow. Instead, Kynaston uses the story of Troilus and Criseyde as an occasion to recount a wide variety of gossipy anecdotes, bits of folklore, and somewhat ribald jokes. When he ventures beyond straightforward identification of characters and place names, his notes on the English text digress as often as they illuminate, and many have only a tangential relation to the material they accompany. They bring us away from a serious appraisal of Chaucer as a highbrow writer, and toward Chaucer’s later-seventeenth and eighteenth-century reputation as a “merry” writer, whose works were more likely to inspire popular pastiche and comedic reinterpretations than highbrow re-workings. At the same time, however, amidst the scurrilous jokes and entendre, there is also a serious interest in both Chaucer’s lexicon and grammar that never disappears entirely, and Kynaston remains interested in the connections between Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, as well as Scots.
Kynaston’s commentary is of interest not only because it shows the ongoing evolution of what might be called a historical reading of Chaucer’s text, but because as a translator he himself is involved in a poetic assessment of the text. Thus, for example, Kynaston notes that “Tesiphone being an infernall power, & fained to be the worker of all Sorrowfull perturbations in mens minde[s] (what excellent discription may be found in the first booke of Statius Pampinius)…Chaucer hath not done amiss in going herein out of ye com[m]on path & inuoking the fury as a fitt Muse to his matter.” As with the project as a whole, the implication of comments like these seems to be the more that Chaucer can be shown to conform to the models of poetry that will be familiar to his latter-day readers (whether in terms of scansion, grammar, or decorum), the more his work will receive its due admiration.
In TheRenaissance Chaucer, Alice S. Miskimin writes
Insofar as Chaucer used the language of his own day for poetry, he could only be awkwardly imitated by those born later, and the tone and meanings of his language blurred in a single generation. Insofar as he used elevated, Latinate, and continental poetic diction, his meaning and tone remained ‘polished’ and clear, and he could be copied with relative ease.
Following this “aureate” thread through the subsequent ages of poetic responses to Chaucer, critical estimations of his contributions to English, and textual editing and presentation of his works helps explain the persistent urge to “repackage” Chaucer in the linguistic image of his descendants. Thus certain poems appeared in manuscript and eventually print anthologies, according to not only religious or moralistic tastes, but also linguistic preferences. Needless to say, Chaucer’s poems were also often altered by scribes and editors for similar reasons; and poets like Lydgate rose to prominence by association, enhancing Chaucer’s legacy even as their reputations were burnished. And as noted above, it is perhaps a huge but ultimately logical step from “Latinate” to actual Latin in “preserving” Chaucer for all time. But does Kynaston’s Latin Troilus constitute a truly “global” Chaucer?
While the Latin theoretically could have made Troilus and Criseyde newly accessible to non-Anglophone readers, Kynaston never sought to publish his work abroad: the printed edition was published in Oxford (where, indeed, it might have caught the eye of some foreign academics) and the manuscript copies were all destined for readers to whom he had some personal connection. Amorum Troili et Cresidae might best be understood as a global Chaucer for a local audience. By translating the poem into Latin, Kynaston seeks to make it accessible to readers who are distanced from Chaucer’s original audience not by place or language, but by time. By leveraging the cultural prestige of Latin, Kynaston—like Caxton and Leland a century earlier—makes a pointed claim for the continued significance of Chaucer’s vernacular poem. Paradoxically, or at least surprisingly, as Kynaston moves from changeable English to a purportedly fixed Latin, he engages with many of the same concerns about translation, language change, and poetic expression that underlie Chaucer’s original. Thus, Kynaston’s translation is less concerned than it might first appear with presenting Chaucer to what would have, in the seventeenth century, been an increasingly connected and global community of Latinate readers. Instead, by demonstrating that Troilus and Criseyde can be successfully rendered into Latin, Kynaston uses Latin’s cultural standing among his fellow seventeenth-century academics to assert that Chaucer—despite his archaic language– deserves a place in the “brave new world” of early modern books and readers.
Good news. Contos da Cantuária is among the finalists for the Prêmio Jabuti, the biggest literary prize in Brazil, in the category “Literary Translation – English to Portuguese”. This year has seen a huge number of works enrolled (over 2000 in all categories), so it is really, really good to be among the finalists; that alone is a considerable prize, even if the Contos don’t get to the final three winning places (final results come out in October). I also hope this will help to make Chaucer better known in Brazil; already I have been contacted by Brazilian medievalists who have read the Contos and are thrilled that Chaucer is finally in verse form amongst us. Some months after the first edition of the Contos arrived to the bookshops, a new edition of Paulo Vizioli’s prose translation has been issued (it had been out of print for over a decade). So it seems the merry company is on the road.
Congratulations from Global Chaucers!
We will post the final results when they appear in October.
Paper doll Chaucer goes from counting his beads to riding his horse.
From the beginning of the Global Chaucers project, our various collaborators, Jonathan Hsy, and I have faced the issue of how to theorize our methodological practice. I had the opportunity to think non-stop about that issue last summer when I attended an NEH Institute, “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. At the invitation of one of the institute leaders, Chris Higgins, a group of us wrote essays for a special issue of Educational Theory, “Translation and Cosmopolitan Humanism.”
Equally important, this article effectively demonstrates the highly collaborative nature of the Global Chaucers project. In addition to the usual panoply of readers and auditors providing advice and reactions that writing any article entails, “Traveling Chaucer” depended upon extensive help from Nazmi Ağil (Chaucer’s Turkish translator) and Leyla Zidani-Eroglu (a colleague fluent in Turkish). Without their good will and expertise, the article would have been impossible. Furthermore, without similar good will and expertise from other translators and readers, the entire project would flounder. Thank you for all who have supported this project!
You can read the article here. Please remember that this is an electronic version of an article published in Educational Theory. Complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of Educational Theory, is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal’s website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/edth or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com.
broadcasting television programing to German and French audiences, especially when that broadcasting is developed from a German or French perspective and then (mis)translated into the other language with insufficient concern for the lost context? These transcultural questions were two of many issues raised by 
Artificial political demarcations are naturally absent, but also missing are many topographical features that have traditionally established boundaries. Instead, we have the broad outlines of continents and oceans. Hatoum’s image approximates this borderless, god’s-eye view that the Apollo photograph seems to capture, returning us thereby to a cartographic vision unavailable to most us.
. Organized by Bethany Wiggin and James English, the interdisciplinary forum seeks to push our conception of translation and the categories it informs. Each week, a participant shares a work-in-progress, and following a brief response by an appointed seminar member, the discussion opens up to the whole group. So, in addition to reading papers outside my disciplines, I’m privy to modes of cross-fertilization generally unavailable to me.
