Reading Chaucer

"I am just a pilgrim on this road...."

Who am I and what am I doing here? That seems a fair opening question. I am a graduate student at the University of South Alabama, completing weekly posts for “Studies in Chaucer.” That’s the short answer. But it helps to know that I am also a high school English teacher and that I didn’t take a very direct path to getting here. The first time I studied Chaucer, I was an undergraduate at Tulane in the early 90’s, taking a British Lit survey class. The memory is admittedly a little dim. My leanings are to more recent, American literature, so I pretty much left Chaucer alone from there. I graduated, then opted for law school rather than graduate level English. Fast forward to 2020. I returned to the English classroom to pursue that MA I left behind. In 2021, I began teaching, as well. I detoured to getting an M.Ed. this time around, but I’m now back on that MA path. So, in writing my posts for “Studies in Chaucer,” I will be looking to fill that long gap in my own studies and to apply these readings to my own classroom. Be forewarned.

My first gap to bridge is reading Middle English at all. I can already better empathize with my ninth-grade students who are currently limping along with Shakespeare. I threw them in the deep end for Act I of Romeo and Juliet, then backed up and started scaffolding some strategies for how to read it. But it’s really not enough to just say oh that’s an elision or an inversion or an antiquated pronoun. You have to dwell in the language to absorb it. We just completed Act IV, and so many students still ask for a translation--to “read it in English.” Patience. Breathe and have patience. But that brings me to my next point: this is in English.

The point may seem obvious—that both Shakespeare and Chaucer write in English—but don’t they also write in translation? For class this week, we read “The Knight’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales. The Knight (and the poet) draws heavily on Boccaccio in spinning the yarn but never owns up to this fact. Is the Knight translating a story in his retelling? Is Chaucer translating Boccaccio in writing the “The Knight’s Tale”? The introduction to the Norton edition is helpful here: “Modern readers are accustomed to view translation and original composition as two distinct entities” (23). This much is true. If I ask you who wrote Love in the Time of Cholera, you will jump to answer Garcia Márquez but probably give little thought to the translator. Garcia Márquez is the “author,” right? The intro goes on: “In Chaucer’s work, on the contrary, we are required to see them [translation and original composition] as lying on a spectrum” (23). Here we go. Chaucer’s work underlines the idea that all texts may exist on a spectrum of translations. We as readers tend to privilege the fiction of an “original work.” Moving forward with The Canterbury Tales, let’s question our presumptions and explore the concept of “translation.”