Our seminar’s first paper—Bethany Wiggin’s “Mixing Water and Oil: Environmental Humanities on the Lower Schuylkill River”—considers (among many other issues) two parallel rivers, the lower Schuylkill and the proposed pipelines delivering gas to refineries lining the lower Schuylkill. Although its environmental focus would seem to have little that pertains to my work with Chaucer’s global translations, Bethany’s paper and the subsequent discussion prompted these observations that might have implications for my project.
How can metaphors help us better understand translation? Both words—one made of Greek lexemes, the other of Latin—mean carry over.
When Bethany’s paper asks us to consider the two systems as rivers—one an actual river, the other a metaphorical one—she is asking us to carry over the qualities that we’ve associated with the lower Schuylkill River’s historical degradation (corporate greed, political intrigue, polluted landscape, and uninformed consumers) to the proposed pipeline bringing petroleum by-products to the River’s refineries.
When we think about metaphors, it is convenient to think about them as consisting of a vehicle (the image) and the tenor (the message). In this case, the vehicle (the river) is a potent metaphor because it carries multiple messages. In addition to the negative qualities specifically associated with the Schuylkill River that Bethany’s paper asks the metaphor to carry, the more general river metaphors bring other, more positive, associations with them. From this perspective a river is a natural resource enabling movement and providing food beauty, purity, and recreation. By identifying the proposed pipeline as a metaphorical river, she simultaneously reminds her audience of what it resembles (the environmentally dubious lower Schuylkill River) and what it does not resemble (the ideal river of beauty and benefit).
When we use metaphor to think about translation, it reminds us that the translation is both less and more than the possible meanings carried over from the source text. In addition to losing some meanings and associations inherent in the source language, the translation picks up additional meanings enabled by the receiving language and culture. Metaphor reminds us of this inevitability.
Can we identify something as deliberately untranslatable? What is the difference between accidental and deliberate untranslatability, say the difference between Linear A and the Voynich Manuscript? And what is the difference between two forms of deliberate untranslatability, obfuscation and ambiguity?
This series of questions stems from questions about ways individuals and institutions have purposefully obscured the public’s understanding of the two rivers in question through purposeful misdirection, obscure jargon, bureaucratic obfuscation, and hidden documentation. In this case, the deliberate untranslatability (at least for a certain audience) seems to de-legitimate the documents, records, and accounts associated with control of the two rivers. When we are discussing the public good, transparency and translatability are imperative. To deliberately prevent citizens from translating murky intentions into clear purposes undermines the credibility of the source text.
Chaucer’s translations show him dealing with moments of untranslatability, places where he seems to stutter and stumble when the source text either reveals its own inability to present a concept or resists relinquishing its meaning into another language. Whether deliberate or not, these moments of untranslatability imply the source text is hermeneutically complex and resists easy interpretation. They do not, however, necessarily de-legitimate the source text or its purposes.
Global Chaucers is sponsoring another roundtable at the next New Chaucer Society Congress. Titled “Translating Global Chaucers,” the roundtable will continues the Global Chaucers conversation begun at the 2014 Congress. The focus will be on translations of Chaucerian texts into languages other than standard Present Day English. Participants include translators, scholars, and teachers outside the Anglophone inner circle (UK, US, Canada, Australia, and NZ). Their presentations consider the ways translations
reflect the particular linguistic, cultural, or social context in which they appeared;
reveal understandings of Chaucer’s texts unavailable to an Anglophone reader; and
take advantage of verse or prose forms (or other stylistic conventions) available in the receiving literary culture but not in English.
The five participants are
Stephanie Downes, University of Melbourne, Australia, “Vilains mots! Nineteenth-Century French Translations of The Canterbury Tales”
Marcin Ciura, Independent Translator, “In the Margins of the Polish Parlement of Foules”
Züleyha Çetiner-Ōktem, Ege University, “Reinventing Chaucer’s Sir Thopas from a Turkish Perspective”
Denise Ming-yueh Wang, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, “When Global Chaucers Go Local: Reading Chaucer in Taiwan”
José Francisco Botelho, Independent Translator, “Contos da Cantuária: Chaucer in Brazil”
We’re super excited about the international panel, with its mix of translators and scholars!
Mehmet Güleryüz, “The Evening Sun,” 2013, from his exhibit “With One’s Eyes Open” at The Empire Project (Istanbul), 7 March-27 April 2013.
We’re excited to announce that our article, “Global Chaucers: Reflections on Collaboration and Digital Futures,” appears in the latest issue of Accessus. In it, we consider what Global Chaucers can teach us about Chaucer, digital humanities, medievalism, and collaboration. A lot has happened with GlCh in less that three years, and we value getting to share what we’ve learned from the thrilling experience. Our deepest gratitude to Eve Salisbury and Georgiana Donavin, Accessus‘s editors.
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.
We had so much fun with the Polyglot Reading of The Miller’s Tale at the New Chaucer Society Congress 2014 in Reykjavik that we thought we might try it again at NCS 2016 in London, but with a twist: the languages will be constructed languages such as Barsoomian, Dothraki, Elvish, Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi, Tho Fan, Valyrian,and Vulcan.
Ideally, we will have the translation completed well before July 2016, and it will be shared on the website.
If you’d like to try your hand at translating a Chaucerian passage into one of these (or any other) constructed language, please contact either Candace Barrington (BarringtonC at ccsu dot edu) or Jonathan Hsy (JHsy at gwu dot edu) for more information. Currently, we are considering this passage–the opening lines of The Parliament of Fowls–and we’d ask you to translate two or three lines of it:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye alwey that slit so yerne:
Al this mene I by Love, that my felynge
Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge
So sore, iwis, that whan I on hym thynke
Nat wot I wel wher that I fete or synke.
For al be that I knowe nat Love in dede,
Ne wot how that he quiteth folk here hyre,
Yit happeth me ful ofte in bokes reede
Of his myrakles and his crewel yre.
There rede I wel he wol be lord and syre;
I dar nat seyn, his strokes been so sore,
But ‘God save swich a lord!’–I can na moore.
By usage–what for lust and what for lore–
On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde.
But wherfore that I speke al this? Nat yoore
Agaon it happede me for to beholde
Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde,
And therupon, a certeyn thing to lerne,
The longday ful faste I redde and yerne.
For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,
Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere,
And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.
But now to purpose as of this mater:
To rede forth hit gan me so delite
That al that day me thoughte but a lyte.
(Parlement of Foules 1-28)
Update: Languages and lines claimed for pseudo-glot translations
The Polyglot Reading of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale turned out to be my favorite NCS event. Held at the University of Iceland’s Stúdentakjallarinn, it brought together 14 Chaucerians reading in 14 modern languages (plus a bit of Middle English introducing the tale), providing the audience with a lively multilingual interpretation of Chaucer’s tale. The line numbers, languages, and readers are
3170-3186, Middle English, Candace Barrington
3187-3232, Emily Steiner
3233-3270, Mandarin, Jonathan Hsy
3271-3338, Danish, Ebbe Klitgård
3339-3396, Turkish, Nazmi Ağil
3397-3447, Japanese, Koichi Kano
3448-3500, Russian, Liza Strakhov
3501-3554, Polish & German, Sebastian Sobecki
3555-3610, Spanish, Alberto Lázaro
3611-3670, French, Juliette Dor
3671-3726, Korean, Donghill Lee
3727-3782, Icelandic, Sif Rikhardsdottir
3783-3839, Czech, Alfred Thomas
3840-3854, Italian, David Wallace
To listen to the reading, go to http://youtu.be/RxNy0M0lXBo . The audio recorder was not as expert as the readers, so please be patient with the quality! Also know that you’re missing a real treat by not being able to see the readers in action.
Watch this website for a script of the reading in all 14 languages!
A special thanks to Sif Rikharksdottir for arranging all the logistics. Without her help and guidance, the reading could not have happened.
Finally, MANY THANKS to our readers who stepped out of their comfort zone for the reading. I hope the audience’s enthusiastic response more than compensated for their bravery!
In late April, I participated in “Spaces of Dialogue,” the First International Conference in Transatlantic Literature sponsored by the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard. My focus was on José Francisco Botelho’s translation of The Canterbury Tales. Entitled “Botelho’s Contos da Cantuária and Creating a Medieval Past for Brazilian Portuguese,” the paper examined Botelho’s transatlantic strategies for bring the Middle Ages to 21st-century Brazil.
Below are excerpts from that presentation.
When José Francisco Botelho was commissioned by Companhia das Letras to translate Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales into Brazilian Portuguese, he was faced with several challenges, but the most immediate was the need to create a medieval language for a culture without a medieval past. As part of the Global Chaucers project, I have been conducting extensive email interviews with Botelho, and much of our conversation has centered on this challenge of bringing Chaucer’s verse over the Atlantic and across six centuries. His strategies vary for translating the fourteenth-century Middle English compilation of tales told by a group of English pilgrims; however, for simplicity’s sake, I will focus on three of these strategies: First, he reaches back to medieval Portuguese for technical, obsolete terms. Second, he adapts Lusitanic literature’s traditional decassílabo meter and its popular rima toante for Chaucer’s rhyming iambic pentameter couplets. And third, he draws on regionalismo, and interweaves Brazilian idioms to create a blend of strangeness and familiarity. Together, these three strategies allowed Botelho to create in Contos da Cantuária a Brazilian Middle Ages not found in the past yet emerging organically from Brazil’s present.
In order to give Brazilians a Middle Ages they could connect to, Botelho turned to the most logical source, medieval Portuguese for its embedded “Lusitanic cultural memories” and its “nostalgia of Colonial Empire.” Thus, he mined the sixteenth-century epic Os Lusíadas, deCamões for words with an archaic feel: varão (instead of homen), infant (instead of jovem ), terríbil (instead of terrível ), frecha (instead of flecha ). He turned to Sextilhas do Frei Antão by Gonçalves Dias, whose nineteenth-century collection of “medievalist poems … recreate [the] Portuguese Middle Ages and the wars between lusitanos and mouros. These poems were a particularly important resource for terms for clothing, arms, and armor, such as brial, fustão,saio and venteira. This strategy, however, had to be employed sparingly; otherwise, he would not be creating a translation for contemporary Brazilian readers.
The Lusitanic traditions also provided Botelho’s meter. By adapting Lusitanic literature’s traditionaldecassílabo and its popular rima toante, he found near equivalents to Chaucer’s iambic pentameter lines as well as metrical patterns that evoke a sense of the antique.Chaucer is frequently credited with giving the iambic pentameter line a distinctly English flavor and establishing it as the dominant metrical line in English verse form, a status it held until the early part of the twentieth century. To provide his Brazilian Portuguese translation with a comparable rhythm, Botelho turned to decassílabo, the favorite meter of sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luiz Vaz de Camões, decassílabo, and thus with a lineage comparable to Chaucer’s iambic pentameter. Botelho also turns to rima toante, a less prestigious form of rhyme that is used in popular music as well as popular oral poetry, known as repentismo in Northeastern Brazil and pajada in Southern Brazil. Rima toante matches only the final vowels (rather than the final vowels and consonants as does rima consoante). In choosing rima toante, Botelho follows precedents sets by Cecília Meirelles, the twentieth-century Brazilian poet, whose O Romanceiro da Inconfidência is a “collection of poems written in the manner of Portuguese and Spanish trovadores and uses the rima toante.” Whether Botelho combines the resulting lines into couplets or seven-line stanzas, he provides readers with a verse form that simultaneously reaches back to ancient Portuguese examples and imitates contemporary poetics in order to lend a medieval feel to the verse.
Botelho’s most significant and most sophisticated translation strategy draws on Brazilian idioms associated with regionalismo, a set of loosely connected literary movements that represent the “Brazilian countryside and rural culture” outside the urban literary cultures of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In order for Chaucer not “to sound like an urban yuppie,” he aimed for a “slightly old-fashioned, worldly countryside cavalheiro of the old, sensual Brazil of yore.” This move reaches back prior to the mid-twentieth century when Brazil was a thoroughly rural country, providing him a wellspring of archetypical Brazilian idioms and attitudes not contaminated by postmodern metropolitanism. Most Brazilians identify language from the countryside with a familiar, intimate past that is uniquely Brazilian.
From the beginning of his translation, Botelho takes advantage of this nearby distance. Chaucer’s General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales opens with some of the most famous lines in English literature: “What that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” (1.1-2). Botelho translates them as you see on the slide: Quando o chuvoso Abril em doce aragem / Desfez Março e a secura da estiagem. With “Aragem” and “estagem” he has chosen archaic, literary words which continue to survive in the rural areas of the Southern country. A few lines later, when Chaucer writes “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, / And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes / to ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes” (1.12-14), Botelho translates it as you see on the slide: “Éque o tempo chegou das romarias. / E lá se vão expertos palmeirins / Rumo a terras e altares e cofins.” By choosing “romarias” rather than “peregrinaçãoes,” Botelho has selected a term denoting “catholic peregrinations to shrines of popular saints,” thereby evoking the “almost polytheistic, magic religion, with its eccentric saints and baroque celebrations” that distinguishes Brazilian Catholicism. In addition, “romarias” alludes to a famous 1978 song by Porto Alegre native Elis Regina, “Romaria.” The song tells about a pilgrimage to a local shrine and its characters are the forlorn, impoverished Brazilian peasants who pray for release from their hardships. Botelho further connects these rural pilgrims to the archaic past by translating “palmers” in the next line as “palmeirins,” a medieval Portuguese word evoking Palmeirim de Inglaterra a chivalric romance written in the sixteenth century by Francisco de Moraes. Thus in these initial lines of the General Prologue, Botelho allows the Portuguese Middle Ages and the Brazilian countryside to intersect, thereby combining the familiar with the strange into what he identifies as a “world of seamless fictional verisimilitude” for Brazilian readers.
Once Botelho turns to the tales themselves, he repeatedly creates characters associated with Brazil’s rural past. In The Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer writes: The bittre frostes, with the sleet and reyn, / Destroyed hath the grene in every yerd; / Janis sit by the fyr, with double berd, / And drynketh of his bugle horn the wyn (5.1250-1253); and Botelho translates it as you see on the slide. “Geadas e granizos fustigantes / Já mataram as plantas verdejantes; / Jano, com grande barba bifurcada, / Em uma longa guampa recurvada / Bebe vinho, sentado junto ao fogo.” According to Botelho, “Geada is a weather phenomenon common in the southern pampas. Snow is rare here due to low altitudes, but in winter dawns the Brazilian pampas will appear all white, covered by a thin layer of frozen dew—that’s the geada or ground frost. Guampa means horn or bugle; it is a word very typical of the South. In ‘metropolitan Brazil,’ the more accepted term to translate ‘bugle or horn’ would be ‘chifre’.” By choosing the southern idiom, Botelho bypasses the official Brazilian stereotype of a tropical “country of eternal warmth and scantily dressed people” and posits the “exotic South” where “winter can be brutally cold.” As he explained to me, “I wanted them to picture—unconsciously—an old gaucho sitting by the fireplace and drinking canha from his big old guampa, surrounded by white fields covered by geada. So I put this guampa in the hands of Janus, and I covered European December in South American geada….” By using these indigenous terms, Botelho encourages his Brazilian readers to identify with the extreme cold—even those who reside in the tropical climes—as a phenomenon found “here” in Brazil as well as “there” in medieval England.
Unlike many translators who dampen the sexual bawdiness for which Chaucer’s Tales are so well known, Botelho accents that lustiness. When Chaucer describes Nicholas’s seduction of Alison in The Miller’s Tale, Botelho labels her“bonequinha” or “little doll,” a demeaning endearment typical of a Brazilian malandro or cheap Don Juan. In The Merchant’s Tale, another fabliau about a cuckholded old husband, a weave of rural idioms convey the animal lust at the moment when January looked up into the tree and “saugh that Damyan his wyf had dressed/ In swich manere it may nat been expressed” (IV.2361-2362) with the phrase you see on the slide “Vê que outro está engatando-a de tal jeito” and using the polyvalent “engatando” (with standard definitions meaning to “to clamp or bind,” “to hook,” or “to hitch up horses”). Because, however, “engatando” is used in rural areas to refer to the mating of animals, the translation conveys the crudity of Damian’s animal-like thrusts via a rural idiom. Throughout the Contos da Cantuária, this strategy of using rural idioms allows Botelho to accentuate the lusty sexuality of the Tales in terms familiar—yet always distant—to his readers.
Together, these techniques “interweave salacious idioms and words that would be easily recognized with words and concepts that resonant in Brazilian historical memory of a long-forgotten and very blurred medieval original. By mixing what was specifically Brazilian—the language of Brazilian countryside—with the specifically European—the Portuguese Middle Ages—he creates a fictional yet probable world. It simultaneously evokes Chaucer’s strangeness by medievalizing familiar portions of Brazilian culture, “thus creating a fictional world in which both Chaucer’s world and the Brazilian one contaminate and, therefore, transform each other.
As this small body of examples indicates, we learn a great deal about Brazilian culture and literary history by studying Botelho’s Contos. What the Contos have to teach us does not stop there. For instance, the inherent Latinity of Chaucer’s Middle English text is often lost in modern English translations and interpretations. Brazilian Portuguese’s affinity with Latin means that a Latin phrase has a more fluid fit and does not stick out as much as it does for a modern English reader. Or, for another instance, we could point to the sexual metaphors based on money and commerce circulating in Chaucer’s Tales. Because sexual innuendo is a favorite pastime in Brazilian culture, Botelho’s Contos can revel and celebrate the constant sexual wordplay that many modern English readers miss.
In addition to these readings specific to Chaucer’s Tales, Botelho’stranslation asks us to scrutinize our use of the term and concept, “medieval.” Of late, this term has been placed under a great deal of pressure, especially from postcolonial studies, where it has been argued that “medieval” is a concept developed by Western Europeans to justify their colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. These colonizers wielded the term “medieval” as a way to lump together and marginalize the pre-modern and non-European. Botelho’stranslation takes advantage of this prejudice and exploits the sense that “medieval” equals the backward ways left behind by industrial development and urban sophistication.
At the Medieval Academy this spring, I presented a paper on Nazmi Ağil’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale, or Silahtar’in Hikâyesi. My presentation was part of Session 50, “Empires of Fantasy,” and was titled “’Myn English eek is insufficient’: Translating Medieval English Insularity and Ancient Empires.” After a general introduction tothe Global Chaucers project as well as its foundational premises and working methodologies, the paper then examines Ağil‘s translation.
Today, my focus is the first 205 lines of a Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale, chosen for three reasons. First, it is thus far the only translation for which I have conducted interviews with both the translator and a reader. The translator is Nazmi Ağil, whom I met and interviewed last April in Istanbul. The reader is Leyla Zidani-Eroglu, a linguist, department colleague, and native speaker of Turkish. Her comments were based on a comparison of Chaucer’s English text and Ağil’s Turkish translation. Previous to this encounter, she’d never read any of Chaucer’s Tales. As you will see, her expertise as a linguist leaves a distinctive mark on my approach. Second, Ağil’s 1994 complete translation of The Canterbury Tales is not a word-for-word crib designed to facilitate a Turkish reader studying the Middle English text. Instead, his translation attempts to capture the Chaucerian text without betraying either it or his Turkish audience. His accessible text evokes the antiquity of the middle ages not by reaching back to Turkey’s medieval past but by tapping into the idioms and images associated with the more recent mid-twentieth-century past, a time when a sizable portion of Turkey’s population remembered the years prior to Ataturk’s secularizing policies. As far as Ağil is concerned, the days when sultans and imams dominated Turkey’s cultural landscape are distant enough to evoke a long-ago past for the readers he envisions. Because Ağil’s translation does not attempt what some would call a “faithful” rendition of the original, it might seem more suited as a way to teach us about contemporary Turkish culture than as a way to learn about Chaucer’s originary text. As I hope to demonstrate today, this unlikely candidate stands up to the challenge and has much to tell us about both of my claims. Third, I’ve chosen The Squire’sTale, or Silahtar’in Hikâyesi because it provides a rich field of deictic moments—those moments of incommensurability when the text’s semantics are defined, limited, and reconfigured by its context. These deictic moments are particularly apparent because Chaucer and Ağil each write for an audience with a different relationship to the central characters, events, and locations in the tale. For Chaucer, his Squire, and their audiences, Cambyuskan and his court are in far-off Sartary. For Ağil, his Silahatar and their audiences, the perspective is different: Cambinskan is the grandsire of the Ottoman Empire; he fought battles just over there, and Sartary is nearby. Conversely, when a modern Turk thinks about medieval England, it isn’t the Plantagenet’s backwater kingdom on the far western edge of Europe. It is the predecessor to another great empire. Therefore, the deictic moments of place and time provide for my query two particularly intriguing entry points: first, the Squire’s “here” of the English domestic countryside between Southwark and Canterbury becomes for modern Turks the powerful British empire that the Ottomans failed to stave off and that Ataturk’s reforms sought to emulate; second, the Squire’s “now” in England’s late-fourteenth century’s emerging literary culture becomes for Turks the setting for a story that celebrates the birth of the Turks’ political and cultural dominance for half a millennium. In addition to noting the ways the Turkish perspective allows for a different understanding of Cambyuskan and his court, I’m especially interested on the deixis of place and ways inherent features of English and of Turkish create a sense of distance and proximity.
Even before we examine the translation, thinking from a Turkish perspective reorients our understanding of Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale and provides a sense of the translation’s payoff for us. Set amidst the court of Ghengis Khan, invader and ruler on the eastern frontiers of Europe and associated in the west with cruelty and devastation, the tale perplexes modern readers with its descriptions of Ghengis Khan as extraordinarily wise and fair and noble. This Euro-centric perspective, however, comes undone when we assume the vantage point of modern Turks who trace their cultural and linguistic heritage to the Tartars and Mongols, the people led by Ghengis Khan. For the Turks, Ghengis Khan is neither an abstract figure of ferocious cruelty nor an exotic name associated with the unknown chambers of eastern sultantates. Instead, Ghengis Khan is a founding figure, whose rule marks an originary moment less like the one marked by George Washington’s presidency and more like the invasion of William I, whose subsequent rule is generally remembered as uniting and civilizing a previously fractured (and comparatively barbaric) people. So, like late-medieval Englishmen who traced so much of their political, linguistic, and literary culture to the French invader, so do the Turks, who found their identity not on the displaced indigenous peoples but on the invading Mongols. This similarity might explain, in part, Chaucer’s unexpectedly positive presentation of Ghengis Khan in The Squire’s Tale.
If we then turn to the General Prologue portrait of the Squire—or Silahter—we see that his Turkification most noticeably in explicitly Turkish word choices. Here, the Silahtar wears a local Turkish garment—a “Takiştir”—and when he tells tales, they are “Türküler” or Turkish folk tales. More understated is the shifted emphasis in the portrait. The Turkish Silahtar embodies the courtly values we find in the Middle English original, but he does them in a particularly Turkish way, emphasizing his obedience to his father rather than his courtly performances. In addition to these semantic and cultural shifts, the translation also depends upon deictic moments that exploit the fact that Turkey and England occupied two ends of the medieval map. The Turkish suffixes appended to the sites of the Silahtar’s expeditions into France emphasize a greater distance than the Middle English preposition “in”; the Turkish suffixes lend a sense of motion towards some place, thereby implying the long journey that an expedition from Turkey to France would entail. So Ağil’s Silahtar is a fighter, lover, and courtly performer, but he is primarily a loyal son with noticeable Turkish inflections.
When we turn to the tale itself, we find various ways Ağil gives his translation a certain immediacy. In addition to truly telling a “Türküler,” for his tale is certainly a tale about the Turkish past, Ağil’s Silahtar uses several strategies: he creates a correspondence between his audience and the audience in Cambinskhan’s court; he transforms indirect discourse into direct quotation; he replaces Chaucer’s impersonal “a man” with a second person pronoun; he uses idiomatic expressions; and he ascribes behavior directly to characters when Chaucer makes more general statements. He also, once again, takes advantage of the tale’s geographic deixis. The most obvious case occurs when Chaucer’s “in that lond” (5.69) becomes in the Turkish, Cambinskhan’s land, a change made so that readers are not confused when he translates Chaucer’s “in this land” (5.71) as “bizim ülkede” (62), or “in our land.” And as we saw in the portrait, the complex set of suffixes indicating location in Turkish creates precise relationships between the reader and the place names that open the tale. Ağil’s Turkish translation opens with “Tataristan’da” (1) whose locative case suffix, –da, indicates a state of rest. Its location is further identified with Tatar’s suffix –stan, which derives from the ablative case suffix, –dan, indicating motion from (Kornfilt 242). The tale’s second word “Sarray’da” (1) also includes the locative case suffix, -da, and the comitative suffix in “Rusya’yla” (2) continues that sense of the events happening nearby. That sense is further underlined by “bu savașta” (3), a phrase that does not have a close equivalent in the Middle English text and that implies a certain shared knowledge about the battle between the Tatars and the Russians. And in keeping with its national interests, the Turkish presentation of Cambyuskan doubles-down on the English Squire’s over-the-top assessment of the great khan. Beyond being “in his tyme of so greet renoun” (5.13), the Turkish Cambinskan is of such perfection, that no one comparable could be found across the seven climates and four corners of the world. And whereas the Squire’s ambiguous “fair” could describe Cambyuskan’s appearance or his probity (MED s.v. “fair,” adj), the Silahtar leans entirely towards his moral qualities and not his looks. When the Middle English Squire feels he must remind the reader that he’s been telling his reader about Cambyuskan, the Turkish Silahtar fills the line by identifying him as “hikayemizin kahramanı” (49), or the story’s hero. When the Knight presents the mirror and ring to Canacee (5.143-145), the Turkish translation includes a short phrase that shows the Knight’s efforts to ensure that his master is not seen as superior to Cambinskhan: çoban armağanıdır sultanımdan (136). This phrase literally means that “the shepherd is a gift from his sultan,” and it is used to suggest the lowliness of the gifts in comparison to the height of the Cambinskhan, his offspring, and his court.
Another telling deixis is the two different relationships that the Squire and the Silahtar have to the English language. In keeping with what we have learned about the Middle English Squire in his General Prologue portrait, when he apologizes for his rhetorical failures, his wording points to the limitations of “Englissh.” It is an insufficient language: it does not provide a speaker with the tropes necessary to describe every part of Canacee’s beauty; he must, as he demurs, speak within the limitations imposed by English. His rhetorical abilities are not great enough to overcome the limitations inherent in English. In the Turkish translation, it matters not whether English is sufficient or not to describe Canacee’s beauty. What makes more sense is the speaker’s knowledge of English, and thus the translation emphasizes the narrating Silahtar’s severe lack of English knowledge. It is not an insufficient language that impairs him but his insufficient knowledge of English that impairs him. He emphasizes his distance from English eloquence by departing from a somewhat close translation of the Middle English and closing this passage with two lines of Turkish folk idioms that are nearly untranslatable into English.
More subtle is the way the Turkish shapes the tale through demonstrative adjectives and pronouns that are inherently different from the ones in Middle English. Turkish has three levels of demonstrative adjectives: bu, șu, o. The first two correspond with English’s this/these and that/those, indicating proximity to or distance from the speaker. Turkish adds a third, o, which roughly translates as “yonder” (Kornfilt 106). In the first 205 lines of Silahtar’in Hikâyesi, “bu” appears twenty-seven times. In fifteen of those occurrences, it points to a character or object in the story, thereby reflecting Chaucer’s use of demonstrative adjectives in the corresponding passage. Nearly as frequently, it appears as part of idiomatic phrases that emphasize that these elements belong “here” or that these events took place “here,” further underlining the sense established in the opening lines that the teller and the setting of his tale are co-existent. These same demonstratives can be declined and used as demonstrative pronouns, again indicating proximity to or distance from the speaker (Kornfilt 311-313). In Silahtar’in Hikâyesi,the Turkish uses the more distant demonstrative pronoun to indicate hypotheticals or abstractions. Therefore, Canacee’s beauty (25), the height of Cambinskhan’s stature over all others (52), the knight’s rhetorical style and skill (96 -97), the faraway lands that the brass horse can take its rider (113), the enemies that could be spied via the magic mirror (129), the language of the birds (143), the wound that could result from the magical sword (152), the horse’s excellence (194 and 195), and the strange events that have prompted the court’s speculations—these are all referenced with the demonstrative pronoun indicating distance, o. The mid-distant șu appears the least often. As a demonstrate adjective, it appears only four times, and each time it introduces the next element in a process and does not deal with distance, first when it points out the next element in a process—that crank (118)—necessary for instructing the brass horse to return its rider home, next when it introduces the second gift—that mirror (124)—and later the third gift—that sword (137)—and finally when it references a second, not present, flying horse, Pegasus (208). In all four cases, these demonstratives have the sense of “the following.” Everything else is referenced or modified with bu, or “this/these” creating a sense of pointing to this place, these characters, these events. So in this passage, the main distinction is between bu and o—this close by and that yonder.
The Turkish demonstratives encourage us to revisit and rethink Chaucer’s peculiar use of demonstratives. In many ways, the Turkish translation is picking up on and emphasizing an easily overlooked distinction made in the Middle English text: Chaucer’s use of demonstrative adjectives in the first 203 lines of the tale. This Middle English passage contains only twenty-three demonstrative adjectives, and all but one—the previously mentioned “that lond”—are “this” or “thise,” suggesting an effort to create a sense of proximate closeness. That, paradoxically, is not the case. But for two exceptions [the phrase “in this world” (62), the contrasting “that lond” and “this lond” (69 and 71), the demonstrative adjectives modify either Cambyuskan (or a noun substitute) or they modify the knight and three gifts he delivered. In this passage, the Middle English “this” has the effect of pointing out the strange and the unusual, progressing from Cambyuskan, to the knight, and then to his three gifts. Used this way, the demonstrative adjective “this” is more like the nonstandard “this here” in modern English, used to connote a certain alienation from something that is supposedly nearby. [This here dog tracked mud into the house. This here Senator wants us to fund a bridge to nowhere.] In this locution, the apparent proximity that “this” and “here” would seem to intensify is undermined and lessened by repetition. “This” is “here” but not from here or at least not someone or something I lay claim to. Although Chaucer does not use the “this here” locution, he invariably limits demonstrative adjectives so that his “this” feels very much like “this here”: “Thys Tartre Cambyuskan,” “This strange knyght,” “This steede,” “This mirour,” “This naked sword.” All these demonstrative adjectives support the immediacy of the Squire’s performance, while simultaneously exposing its distant setting.
By translating The Squire’s Tale into Turkish, a language with finely drawn and unavoidable deictics of place, Ağil’s Silahtar’in Hikâyesi prompts us to look at corresponding points in Chaucer’s text and see it anew. These moments should not surprise us. We are working with a tale that already explores the compression of time and space via a magical brass horse whose mechanics instill great wonder in Cambyuskan’s court. By re-examining it through the lens of Ağil’s Turkish translation, we can see more clearly one of Chaucer’s techniques for effecting that compression.
Marcin Ciura’s recently published Sejm ptasi, a Polish translation of Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, provides a happy opportunity for Global Chaucers to celebrate the holiday’s origins among a group of late-fourteenth-century English poets. (For more about the debate surrounding the holiday’s origins, see Bruce Holsinger’s tongue-in-check speculation).
Thanks to Ruth Evans and the New Chaucer Society blog for the opportunity to share some preliminary thoughts on Chaucer’s Voices! And thanks to John Boje (South Africa), José Francisco Botelho (Brazil), Lauri Pillter (Estonia), Alireza Mahdipour (Iran), and Nazmi Agil (Turkey) for so graciously sharing their time and expertise. It’s been an auspicious start to a fascinating project.
Our seminar’s first paper—Bethany Wiggin’s “Mixing Water and Oil: Environmental Humanities on the Lower Schuylkill River”—considers (among many other issues) two parallel rivers, the lower Schuylkill and the proposed pipelines delivering gas to refineries lining the lower Schuylkill. Although its environmental focus would seem to have little that pertains to my work with Chaucer’s global translations, Bethany’s paper and the subsequent discussion prompted these observations that might have implications for my project.
