On Chaucer's tale

The Canterbury Tales

A New Unabridged Translation by Burton Raffel

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Modern Library: 624 pp. $35

Geoffrey Chaucer runs the gamut. There are many Chaucers: funny, gloomy, pious, political, gross. There is the learned Chaucer, the feminist Chaucer, the social Chaucer, the religious Chaucer, the rhetorical Chaucer, the Chaucer who attempts little more than trying to titillate the groundling mind with nothing but farce, foolishness and fart jokes. A reader of Chaucer encounters idioms, prayers, jingles, puns, tall tales, harangues, a few inflectional survivals from Old English, words no longer used, slang. It was for such multifariousness that he became "the firste fyndere of our faire language."

Translating Chaucer's masterpiece is a herculean feat, needless to say. "The Canterbury Tales" is a work, 24 tales in all, that constitutes almost all of the literary forms in medieval literature: parodies, exempla, pious sermons, literary confessions, stately romances, saints' legends, lubricious anecdotes, you name it. Generally, it is "Estates satire," as well -- types. "The Franklin's Tale" is a Breton lai. "The Miller's Tale," that smutty story, is a fabliau. "The Nun's Priest's Tale" is a beast fable. The Parson offers an austerely orthodox treatise on penance. Two tales are in prose: "The Parson's Tale" and the "Tale of Melibee," which is full of legal jargon. "The Monk's Tale" expresses scorn for disrespectful and unruly commoners.

"I have tried to give as much of the effect of Chaucer's poetry as I could," Burton Raffel states in the foreword, explaining as if confounded that in his translation the sound of the original poetry is unreproducible. We are told we are being given a "translation from" rather an "edition of" the poem, meaning simply that he is using the accepted order of the classic from the standard F.N. Robinson edition. (Chaucer didn't prepare a full, consecutive grouping of the full, final poem.) When Raffel confesses that he cannot integrate Chaucer's syntax with his own modern version, it is understandable. Although Chaucer's syntax in the original, untranslated, is very much like our own, for a translator to try to save or salvage parts in an otherwise translated sentence would of course cause problems.