Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400)

Read in a Penguin Classics translation from the 50s, this is a re-read for me. I last read this approaching 20 years ago when I needed distracting on a long haul flight. And having read it again, I can see why it did it's job! It's not exactly an easy read, it demands attention and concentration - no skimming here. but it rewards the attention with some classic pieces of story telling. The concept was enormous, each of the pilgrims (and there are approaching 30 identified) were to tell two show more tales. He didn't even get as far as one tale each, the work remains unfinished, but some of the stories are just sparkling studies of human nature even now. A lot of the stories are relayed as if the pilgrim is telling a story they have heard elsewhere, so a lot of them can be traced to other sources - there's little in the narrative arc that is original. What is all Chaucer is the linking passages, the representation of all of life in one group. They are a mixture of positions in life and it is noticeable that the ladies represented in the group and in the tales tend to be very strong females - very few shrinking violets here. For his time, that strikes me as noticeable. The introduction, when the pilgrims are introduces, could be (with a little tweaking) any group of random strangers you could gather together today. OK, there are a few more religious job titles then than now (they'd be bankers or management consultants now) but they're such an assorted bunch that they seem to spring to life as you read. I think that's part of the charm, this is the English at the birth of a national consciousness - these are my people, this is part of what makes us who we are. show less

[Review of Ann McMillan's translation:]

Geoffrey Chaucer abandoned writing the Legend of Good Women halfway through. When you read this modernization, you may be tempted to do the same.

I am inherently biased toward liking anything that makes the Legend more accessible to modern readers; there is a lot of argument over whether Chaucer was "really" a feminist, but there is no doubt that he had more sympathy for women than most writers of his situation and era. The best guess as to the history show more of this work -- probably his last major writing before the Canterbury Tales -- is that he was trying to create a catalogue of women's virtues and men's vices, but found it so confining (since the culture of the era allowed only a limited set of women's positive traits) that he gave up. And headed off to Canterbury, and gave us Dorigen, and the Wife of Bath, instead.

Chaucer probably knew what he was doing when he gave up. I wish there were a Chaucer alive today who could try to do a real Legend, featuring all the virtues that women actually possess. There might be less need for the women's rights movement, and the #MeToo movement, if there were. But, in 1386, he was stuck.

And trying to bring him into the twentieth century doesn't help much. Ann McMillan gave it a try, but several weaknesses mar the result.

First, she isn't a poet. Dull as Chaucer's Legend gets to be after you have read three or four or nine tales that all feature pretty much the same cardboard lead character, it is at least beautifully written. It's Chaucer! But McMillan appears to have tried to preserve the meaning rather than the words (she admits to making a literal rendering), while still sticking with Chaucer's pentameter couplets. And it just doesn't work. It took me just three lines to start wondering if McMillan was counting syllables correctly. I checked, and yes, she is; the lines are pentameter. But the stresses are so wrong that it's a tongue-twister to just try to read the lyrics.

A second defect was just bad timing, but it is a defect: This book came out in 1987, the very year the Riverside Chaucer -- now the standard edition -- came out. But McMillan, who had no doubt begun her work much earlier, instead translated the text of the F. N. Robinson's edition. Robinson would have been the best edition to use -- in 1986. In 1987, it was pretty definitely not the best choice.

The third problem is the notes. There are only about six and a half pages. That's just not enough to explain Chaucer's sources, what he did with them, how his social context affected the story, and what others had done with the same tale. Take someone like Medea. Today, knowing the Greek legends, we think of her as jealous and wild and, frankly, wicked. It takes more than a few sentences of notes to explain why Chaucer included this "crazy ex-girlfriend" among his "good women"!

There is, at least, a good introduction -- e.g. it opens by reminding us that, in this context, "Legend" does not mean "fiction" but "old story with a deep truth even though the details are hazy." There is also a discussion of the philosophical sources and viewpoint -- although some of it seemed strangely irrelevant to me. And there are (black-and-white) images of some famous paintings of the various Good Women. All this sets the mood -- and then you get to the poem itself, and it dumps you right out.

Bottom line: If you want to read the Legend... get a real Chaucer (e.g. the Riverside), and read it for the poetry. It isn't that hard! And the Riverside Chaucer has a glossary. If you need a crib, this will do. But it's only a crib. It isn't a true rendering. It just isn't Chaucer. show less

Note that this is a review of Vincent F. Hopper's Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Selected): An Interlinear Translation. Most of the other reviews on this page are of The Canterbury Tales in general, in editions which should have been linked to that work, not to this interlinear Chaucer. As far as I'm concerned, the Canterbury Tales is a five star work, but the Hoppner version is about two stars.

This is an idea that works a lot better in theory than in practice. I have quite a few interlinear show more editions of various works -- the Greek Bible, Beowulf, others. For a language that is not English, the benefits of an interlinear are obvious and the detriments relatively few (unless you're trying to force yourself to become truly fluent in the source language, anyway). I had hoped that that would be true of Chaucer, too.

It isn't. Period. End of story.

Part of that is the way this interlinear is done. A good interlinear presents the main text continuously, usually with the translated text in smaller type below the main one. There is a clear main text and a clear subordinate text. This isn't done that way. Chaucer's text and Hopper's are placed one above the other, with Chaucer's text in roman type and Hopper's in italic, then a blank line. Thus the first three lines are:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
When April with his showers sweet

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
The drought of March has pierced to the root,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
And bathed every vein in such liquor,

This format makes it much too easy to read both lines by accident, when one really wants to read only Chaucer and refer to the interlinear only when necessary. Particularly since the modern English text is pedestrian. What's more, the modern English text sometimes is literal and sometimes is pretty free, which doesn't really help with understanding the Middle English. Hopper's is really a text that belongs as a parallel, not an interlinear. That would save paper, too, and let Hopper include more tales.

And therein lies the other problem: This isn't really the Canterbury Tales. This thing has truly pressed most of the life out of the Tales. As well as misrepresenting them.

Oh, it's no great loss to drop a few tales. The Physician's Tale is no loss, and the Squire's Tale is enough to make your head spin. And the greatest of the Tales -- the Knight's, the Franklin's, the Wife of Bath's, the Pardoner's, the Nun's Priest's -- are here.

But so is the Prioress's Tale, and if any tale should be suppressed, it's that horrid racist one! And the Miller's Tale is gone, and so is "Sir Thopas"! You can't do Chaucer without Sir Thopas! I'd really like to have the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, too.

Now I understand why the Miller's Tale is gone -- it was too dirty for 1948. But if you don't have the Miller's Tale, then you don't have the link between the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale, and you miss much of the point of the Canterbury Tales, which often is not the tales themselves but the links. Yes, the greatest of the tales -- the five I listed above, in particular -- can stand on their own, but the fun of the rest lies in the links. Hopper turned a continuous work, even if one that was never completed and lacks many connections -- into a mere anthology.

Another strange effect of the interlinear translation is that it prevents Hopper from providing an adequate set of notes. There are only about six pages. So the note on "at the Tabard as I lay" says only that the Tabard is "The name of the inn." Which is true, but not particularly useful. It's important to know that the Tabard was a real inn, in a real Southwark, managed by a real Harry Bailly, from which actual pilgrims set out to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. (By the way, there is no gloss at all on "The holy blisful martir for to seek" -- no explanation of the cult of Becket!)

A few other comments: The introduction is pretty weak, though that's not all Hopper's fault; Chaucer Studies have come a long way since his time. But it's still not adequate, and there really isn't enough information about what Middle English edition Hopper used as his base.

All in all, a dreadful disappointment. Admittedly I read Middle English a lot better than most -- I can often go many lines of Chaucer without needing a gloss. But I genuinely think that anyone who wants to read Chaucer (which should be every native speaker of English -- we're talking about the man who made English a great literary language!) would do better with the Riverside Chaucer or its equivalent: You get all the Chaucer, all the notes, and all the meaning. show less

24. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
edition: Broadview Editions, Second Edition, edited by Robert Boenig & Andrew Taylor (2012)
OPD: 1400
format: 503-page large paperback
acquired: April read: Dec 30, 2023 – Apr 27, 2024, time reading: 62:07, 7.4 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Middle English Poetry theme: Chaucer
locations: on the road from London to Canterbury
about the author: Chaucer (~1342 – October 25, 1400) was an English poet and civil servant.

Chaucer is tricky because he’s hard show more to read and his tales vary so much, they are hard to summarize or classify. There is a Boccaccio element to them, but it’s a very different experience. Like Boccaccio, one thing that stands out is Chaucer’s naughty stories – sex and farts and trickery, money and wealth often playing a central role. The plague also has a role. One of Chaucer's tales is about three youths who hunt for Death because he has killed so many, and tragically find what they’re looking for. But what makes Chaucer most stand out from Boccaccio are the tellers of the tales. In Boccaccio, the ten youths are all of a class and many of them blend together, hard to differentiate. Chaucer’s tale is a social mixture – good and bad, wealthy and common. They are each distinct, wonderfully distinct, so much so that they, the tellers, stand out way more in memory than the tales themselves. These characters come out in the story prologues and there is simply more creativity, more social commentary, more insight into this medieval world than anything the stories themselves can accomplish, no matter how good the stories are. The Merchant’s Tale, my favorite, includes many references and wonderful debate between Hades and Persephone, a battle of the sexes. But it doesn’t touch on the Wife of Bath’s 1000-line prologue on being a wife to five men and all the experiences and judgments and justifications within, it’s not even close. She’s the best, but the Miller comes in early, drunkenly inserting this tale of sex and fart jokes, and bringing the whole level of content down. The Miller says, "I wol now quite the Knightes tale!" The knight has just told a more proper Boccaccio-inspired tale. By "quiting", the Miller means he his giving him some payback, getting back at him. (His tale has thematic consistency, but with common characters, farts and sex.) And the Cook’s tale is so awfully improper that it hasn’t been preserved, or maybe Chaucer only wrote 50 lines. Later, the Cook will throw up and fall off his horse. The Canon’s Yeoman exposes his own canon’s alchemy and trickery, getting fired on the spot before he tells his tale. This is all quite terrific stuff in and of itself, a rowdy uncontrolled mixture of societal levels, and mostly humorous confrontations (notably in a post-plague era of social mobility).

The other thing Chaucer does that Boccaccio doesn’t do in the Decameron, is write in verse. This is special all by itself. If you have read excerpts of Chaucer, there's a fair chance that like me you have been bewildered by it. It’s a weird language, oddly drawn out, then oddly compressed, obscuring the meaning, jamming in a weird accent. It doesn't make for great quotes or easy visits. But if you get deep into it, focus hard on it, something happens. It becomes magical, inimical, and lush in sound and freedom, the random inconsistent spelling as beautiful as the random inconsistent and sometimes heavily obscured phrasing. It also becomes recognizable. The more you read it, the more sense it makes. Although I was never able to scan it. Show me a page of Chaucer, and I’m immediately lost in indecipherable letters. I have to begin to read it and find the flow before it comes to life.

I find it interesting, but not inappropriate, that when Chaucer is discussed, it’s almost always his opening lines that are quoted - Whan that Aprill with hise shoures soote/The droghte of March had perced to the roote/And bathed every veyne in swich liquor/Of which vertu engendered is the flour What’s interesting is that Chaucer really doesn’t write that beautifully anywhere else. His language is generally much tamer and less trying, the rhythm more casual.

Last year I read [Troilus and Criseyde] and was enraptured in the language. There is no question the language there is better than here. And is drawn out, as he stays with long monologues that go pages and pages, the reader lost in the rhythms. This here is just not quite like that. Yes, he gets carried away a lot. But it’s always a little jerky and bumpy. There are monologues, but these are story telling monologues, with quick-ish plots. While I liked staying in the Merchant’s Tale, the writing clearly elevated and interesting, it was not the same. But T&C is both made and limited by its singular story. The Canterbury Tales expands on its cacophony of voices. The stories for me actually fade. But the prologues leave such lush impressions, they are somehow so real, and charming and Discworld-ish, and uncontained. It’s a much more powerful thing in my head.

As many know, I read this every morning beginning with April’s shoures soote on January 1. And, with the exception of the prose tales, the Tale of Melibee and The Pardoner’s Tale, it was always the best part of my day. The same could be said for T&C last year. I’ll miss being lost in this. A really special experience, and special gift to English speakers and the language's history.

2024
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