Customer Reviews

The Canterbury Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright.
This is the best translation yet of the famous medieval work. I own the Coghill translation (Penguin), as well as the Norton Edition which is glossed and annotated. And the Oxford by Wright, an older version that is exactly the one reviewed here: same number of pages, same introduction, different cover artwork. To the issue at hand: Chaucer's poetry in the Canterbury Tales was direct, earthy, and sensual whenever his characters were thus, so it really betrays the poetry and the poet to translate his work as some sort of tea party where all the participants, including the Miller and the Wife of Bath, were prone to use euphemisms when the conversation got raunchy. But the Middle Ages were far raunchier than many of us think, and Chaucer was a man of his times, only more so. That is why I like this translation by Wright. His modern version flows quite naturally and the characters use words that do fit their personalities. However, the much-praised, but mediocre translation by Coghill does this with the Wife of Bath (Penguin, page 267):

Be sure, old dotard, if you call the bluff,
You'll get your evening rations right enough.

This is euphemism pure and simple, and euphemism of the bad kind, because in the original Chaucer NEVER mentions "evening rations." This "evening rations" nonsense is a term that Coghill put there because he could not bring himself to write the exact, modern term for the original "queynte." (And, no, contrary to some opinions, queynte does not mean "pretty little thing" or belle chose.) I don't blame him, since it would have been probably censored --I'm pretty sure Amazon would censor that word if I were to write it here. But it grates me that so many people have praised Coghill's version of the Tales as "the best" in modern English. No, it isn't. It's barely OK but it's not the best. The best is Wright's rendition. Let's see the original (Norton Critical Edition, page 113, lines 331-2):

For certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right y-nough at eve.

We can clearly appreciate how Coghill has rewritten Chaucer's verse and the Wife's expressions until they correspond with somebody's idea of propriety (Coghill's), but certainly not Chaucer's or his sex-loving Wife of Bath's. Coghill kept the word "dotard," but decided not to keep the modern "queynte." He even goes so far as to invent "if you call the bluff" and "right enough" in order to force a rhyme. What does Wright do? Wright remains far closer to the original, as we expect a good translator to do (Oxford, page 227):

Don't worry, you old dotard--it's all right,
You'll have cvnt enough and plenty, every night.

I have misspelled the key word in order to filter through the censorship, but I hope you get the meaning. Wright also adds certain words and rearranges the lines so that they rhyme, as Coghill did. However, Wright is closer to Chaucer and to the speaker, the Wife of Bath, than Coghill ever was. There are no "evening rations" here. There is a woman who tells her husband that he'll get plenty of sex from her every night. Wright allows us to hear the Wife, and the Miller, and the other characters as Chaucer wanted them to be heard. His pilgrims came from all walks of life, with different experiences and different ways of expressing their hopes, sorrows, happiness and desires. This translation into modern English by Wright doesn't betray the poet by changing his characters' expressions for empty polite talk and euphemisms (although, admittedly, Chaucer made the Wife use some euphemisms, he also made her direct in several occasions; this is one of them). Wright has brought Chaucer and his wonderful Tales closer to us, and he deserves to be praised.

(Please note that I've given this book 5 stars because Amazon forces a star rating for reviews, and David Wright's translation itself deserves no fewer than 5 stars.)

Warning, would-be Kindle readers of the David Wright translation (Oxford World Classics): after the translator's introduction, the majority of the text in this book is stored as images, scanned from the print version! This causes several problems:

* The Kindle's dictionary can't be used.
* Text-to-speech can't be used.
* Text can't be annotated.
* Alternative text sizes can't be selected.
* Text size varies wildly as larger images are resized to fit my Kindle's 6" screen.
* Some of the image resizing renders text too small to be read comfortably on my Kindle's 6" screen.
* The book is a whopping 4.2 Mb for a mere 412 pages! That's more than ten times the size it would be if the text were stored properly in the Kindle's text format.
* The obscene file size, and constantly having to render images, are a drain on Kindle's battery.

It's disappointing and baffling that OUP chose not to produce a proper Kindle version of this excellent translation.

Before I get to the meat of the review, a note: if you're interested in reading The Canterbury Tales, I can't emphasize enough how wonderful the David Wright translation is (it's in the Oxford World's Classics version). Modernized but accurate, understandable but poetic, Wright balances a love of the language with a firm desire to tell the tales, and the result really allows you to savor the tales easily. As for the tales themselves - what could I possibly add? From the opening lines of prologue - which gives about as sprawling and detailed a glimpse into medieval life as you'll ever get - to a closing note written by an older (and somewhat more penitent) Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales are a marvelous set of stories. With tales ranging from dueling lovers to divided farts, from the lives of saints to hot pokers in asses, The Canterbury Tales show that there was a far greater richness, humor, and even baseness to life than we often get from history books. But none of that would matter if the tales and characters weren't as rich and wonderful as they are. The comedies are hilarious, the tragedies moving - but it all comes back to those pilgrims, a group whose richness lingers long after you finish the story. I really love this translation, and I wish it could get more recognition, as I think people would really enjoy reading the tales; whether you're an English major or just a reader, they're really a lot of fun.

Canterbury Tales seems to have a place in English literature akin to, say, Pilgrim's Progress: it's understood as important but it's not something you'd really read on your own. It's got a musty reputation and its survival largely depends on teachers assigning excerpts. This is a pity because the Tales are a lot of fun.

That's probably an odd thing to say about a classic work of fiction. Typically the classics are beautiful, insightful, inspiring, etc. etc. but rarely do we call them `fun', a term that seems to be the only possible excuse for the existence of so many crummy genre novels. And I'm sure that there are literature professors who read deep meaning into the Tales, some blah blah blah about how they display a deep understanding about the human condition and that they have some sort of life lesson for us, but really!

These stories are fun because of the sheer vitality of Chaucer's characters, a healthy antidote to the dominant image of the Middle Ages as somehow ponderous and solemn (cue the Gregorian chants, show an image of a chillingly earnest priest, cut to the Black Death). The characters of the Tales seem incredibly alive, and except for some recurrent themes (particularly virginity and adultery), they're radically different from each other --- from the shockingly vulgar to the smugly righteous ---- and are all exuberantly drawn. The wife of Bath in particular is a pistol. (Speaking of anachronisms, the knight's tale has some accidental hilarity in that it's supposed to be set in ancient Greece but the characters are clearly medieval English in all but name. Imagine Washington crossing the Delaware. . . in a speedboat.) The one truly nasty piece of work is the prioress, whose story is disgustingly anti-Semitic. (I know the argument has been made that the tale is a satire on medieval anti-Semitism, but if it's not clearly satire, then it's part of the problem, not a critique.)

Some of the charm of the work comes from the way the characters react to each other. The knight, for instance, interrupts the monk's portrait gallery of victims of tragedy by saying, "`Mister monk, no more of this, the Lord bless you!/Your tales are boring all of us to death. . ." and then complains that if the bells on the monk's bridle-rein didn't keep him awake, he'd doze off and fall into the mud. A number of stories are retaliations and rebuttals of previous stories, most famously the miller's and reeve's stories, which do the most to earn The Tales a reputation for being `bawdy'. (It's a good thing that the imbeciles in favor of censorship don't read verse.)

A few of the stories are underwhelming, but the overall effect is quite strong: they display such a range that the contrasts intensify the individual tales. This also helps explain why the high school approach of having students read a few stories doesn't leave much of an impression. It's the stories side by side and the friction that that creates that makes everything about them so three-dimensional.

Part of the reason the David Wright translation reads so well, however, is that there are two parts missing, two parts that other editors often cut as well: Melibeus' Tale and the Parson's Tale. When I ran into the first deletion, I was miffed because I avoid abridged editions like the aforementioned plague and there's no mention of heavy editorial work on the cover. (I don't want to clutter my mind with thoughts like, `I've read that work, except for chapters x and y.') I went online to find the story by Melibeus. It is pretty dull. . . and Chaucer didn't even write it. It's treatise he translated. So, is it an abridgment if an editor cuts out the plagiarism? And for the Parson's Tale, is it an abridgement if the editor cuts out a chapter tacked on late in the author's life when they worry that the secular nature of their works will keep them out of heaven and they decide that they want to end with a lengthy sermon?

This may indeed be a great translation, but if you are using a kindle, you will likely never find out. The pages appear to be copied images of the book. This means that every pages formatting and text size can be slightly different. In many cases the text is simply too small to read. So you end up zooming the image in/out everytime you change a page. This should have been dealt with by the publisher.

This might well be a great read. However, the Kindle edition is so badly formatted as to make it almost unreadable. It looks as if the text has been scanned in as pictures and the resulting font size is so small as to necessitate using a magnifying glass. Definitely not suitable for older readers who need reading glasses.

First, a random comment for those who think that the Middle Ages were stupid, backward, and stinky: read Chaucer and enter an entire fascinating world made memorable by one of our finest writers.

Rather than the review the whole sprawling book, I am going to limit myself to what might seem unpromising material: The Prioress's Tale.

We meet this dame in the General Prologue, and if you read superficially, you may just classify her as a "good woman of religion," but if you read a bit more carefully, and have some knowledge of human nature, you are like to shudder a little. In particular, Chaucer's description of her table manners -- never spills a single drop, completely elegant, never stains her immaculate blouse -- is so uncannily precise that I remember seeing a similar woman dining in Bangkok, Thailand: the most "elegant" table manners imaginable, well-slathered in makeup, and wearing a completely artificial smile which was returned by her female companions at lunch that day. At the time, it was one of the strangest spectacles I had ever seen, this sort of affected, upwardly-striving, totally fake elegance: and in fact, it made me shudder and clear out of the place as soon as I could. These women were ALL affected hypocrites, and all ACCEPTING one another's show of affected elegance, and it made my hair stand on end a bit --- "a nest of vipers" came to my mind.

The Prioress is cut from the same cloth, an affected lady who actually aspires to the aristocracy, not to any religious accomplishments. She has little pet dogs whom she spoils, feeding them food more suitable for human infants (there might be a reference to Matthew 15:26 there), and, fatally, wears a bracelet reading "Amor Vincit Omnia" ("Love Conquers All") --- which might be carelessly taken for a Christian motto but is nothing of the kind.

And then she launches into her "tale," which is a short, horrific, and pointless tale of an "innocent Christian boy" who is foully murdered by the foul Jews for practicing his Christian hymns as he went to school through their neighborhood. Oh, those Jews: they slit his throat and threw him in the privy. Later, some Divine Agency brought him back to life, and killed all those nasty, nasty Jews.

Behind the affected elegance of the Prioress lurks a person who really knows how to hate.

So, Chaucer surely knew how to create a devastating portrait of religious decadence and hypocrisy, in a few short pages. How many modern writers can do that?

The book as a whole could not be more highly recommended!

Oxford World Classics - This is a superb edition - probably the best I have read. The writings tell a story about thirty travelers who are on a journey to show their gratitude to the martyr who helped them in their times of great need. The themes in Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century "poem-stories" (Chaucer's "magnum opus") is a poignant critique of his society - its elite, its faithful, the Church, and the petty, self-seving, but crumbling conventions embraced by people surrounding him. The unifying concepts of the series of poems is pilgrimage, decay of social norms (i.e. Chivalry), and religion.

After the Black Death, Europeans started to question the authority of the Church. Chaucer uses two characters, the Pardoner and the Summoner, whose roles are to apply the Church's secular power, are deeply corrupt, greedy, and nasty. A pardoner in Chaucer's day was a person from whom one bought Church "indulgences" for forgiveness of sins, but pardoners were often thought guilty of abusing their office for their own gain. Chaucer's Pardoner openly admits the corruption of his practice. The Summoner is a Church officer who brought sinners to the church court for possible excommunication and other penalties. Corrupt summoners wrote false reports and scared people into bribing them in order to protect their interests. Chaucer's Summoner is portrayed as guilty of the very kinds of sins he is threatening to bring others to court for, and appears to have a corrupt relationship with the Pardoner. In The Friar's Tale, one of the characters is a summoner who is shown to be working on the side of the Satin. This parallels curruption we see today in organized religion, manifesting itself both through more conventional medium, and television, Internet, etc. Decay of values portrayed by Chaucer is applicable to Westen society's transcending values, not only in the Sartian sense, but almost to the point of nihilism, entirely devoid of dignity or accountability.
Pilgrimage was a very prominent feature of medieval society. Travel to exotic destinations is the modern day pilgrimage. The ultimate pilgrimage destination was Jerusalem, but within England Canterbury was a popular destination. Pilgrims would journey to cathedrals that preserved relics of saints, believing that such relics held miraculous powers. Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been murdered in Canterbury cathedral by knights of Henry II during a disagreement between Church and Crown. Miracle stories tied to his remains surfaced soon after his death, and the cathedral became a popular pilgrimage destination. The pilgrimage in the work ties all of the stories together, and may be considered a representation of Christians' striving for heaven, despite weaknesses, disagreement, and diversity of opinion. In our society it is a way to detox, but also to start a new life, as is the case with immigrants.

A collection of tales from the 14th century. The literary device is that a group of travelers are going to Canterbury together and regale each other with stories to pass the time. Some were humorous and others were so banal that I swear my brain was bleeding. The last tale, especially, fell into this category and I wonder if Chaucer had to put it there to avoid persecution from religious fanatics.

The Canterbury Tales is a classic novel that all should read to get a base understanding of early English literature. The translation by Nevill Coghill does an excellent job of preserving the feel and flow of the original book while making it more comprehensible for today's reader. I highly recommend it to all.