If you live in the land where Chaucer’s tomb created the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, his stature is obviously not in doubt. But I continue to be flummoxed by the relative inconspicuousness of Chaucer in the United States. You would think a figure called, erroneously or not, “the father of English poetry” would be fairly prominent in the literary consciousness of one of the major countries in which that language is spoken. But not Chaucer, not here.
Needless to say, thousands of Chaucerians in English departments try their mightiest to teach Chaucer, either in Middle English or in translation. Many students emerge from the experience pleasantly surprised by how modern this medieval poet is, with his complex characters and his consciousness of the way our world makes us who we are. And yet, these days, most American high-school students do not go near Chaucer. Is it because for most of us to read Chaucer, we need a translation from Middle into Modern English? Or is it because, if we come from the United States, we need Chaucer translated into American?
Translating from one kind of English to another can be confusing. Why do we need a translation of English into English? Once the marriage of Germanic Anglo-Saxon and Romanic French produced the offspring Middle English (roughly during the period after 1066 and before the end of the 16th century), there is a direct line of descent to the language we speak, read, and write today. So why translate? Looking at Middle English is like looking at old family photos of relatives long gone. You recognize your brother’s nose, your sister’s chin, your own eyes. But although you may be able to go out on the street wearing your ancestor’s face, you really could not walk around in his bowler or her bonnet. It’s like that with Chaucer. He can feel uncomfortable in an untranslated state.
This is true not only for his spelling and syntax, but also for his vocabulary. Sometimes, we get lucky, and Chaucer’s words are spelled and mean the same as they do in Modern English. Other times, translating Chaucer is like translating any other foreign language: The words are different from one language to the next. And then comes the third category, the most fascinating and the most aggravating because it is the trickiest: the false cognates, words that look like they should mean what they do in Modern English, but don’t. False cognates are especially aggravating, and fascinating when they carry their Middle and Modern English meanings simultaneously. These are exciting moments, when we see, through a kind of linguistic time-lapse photography, Chaucer’s language on its way to becoming our own.
In Middle English, for instance, countrefete means “to counterfeit,” as in “to fake,” but it also has the more flattering meaning of “to imitate.” Corage has not only the Modern English sense of bravery but also, frequently, overtones of sexual energy, desire, or potency. Corage takes its roots from the word coeur, or “heart,” and transplants them slightly southward. The same is true for solas, or “solace.” The “comfort,” “satisfaction,” or “pleasure” it entails is often sexual.
Lust might seem to pose no problem for the modern reader. Yet in the 14th century, the word, spelled as it is today, could mean any kind of desire or pleasure, though around that time it was beginning to carry a sexual connotation, too. And lest it seem as if false cognates always involve sex, take sely, or “silly.” It most often means “blessed” or “innocent,” as well as “pitiful” and “hapless,” but “foolish” was making its way in there, too.
A sentence like “The sely man felte for luste for solas” could mean “The pitiful man felt desire for comfort.” It could just as likely mean: “The foolish man felt lust for sex.” In Chaucer’s hands, it could mean both at once.
Chaucer was fully aware of the slipperiness of language. He delights in it; he makes his artistic capital from it. He is an inveterate punster. The Wife of Bath, for example, repeatedly puns on the word queynte (eventually the Modern English “quaint”). In the 14th century, the word means not only “curious” or “fascinating” but also the curious part of her female anatomy that most fascinates her five husbands. What’s more, the slipperiness of language gives Chaucer the tools to form his famous irony and ambiguity. If the way-too-pretty Prioress is “nat undergrowe” (“not undergrown”), how big is she?
Still, Chaucer also knows the dangers of this slipperiness. The eunuch Pardoner uses his slick tongue to convince the rubes he meets to buy pigs’ bones that he bills as saints’ relics.
But there are other reasons why, aside from his linguistic difference and difficulty, Chaucer is an absent father in the United States. For us, Chaucer not only needs to be translated from Middle into Modern English; his world—its assumptions, details, and paradigms—needs to be translated into American, for historical and political reasons. Still, that should not be difficult because even an absent father has deposited his DNA.
In many ways, despite the distance of 600 years, Chaucer is clearly recognizable to the English. Of course, they do not need to cross a broad ocean to find a church or a chapel, a wall or an abbey’s ruins at least as old as Chaucer. Because he is their own cultural patrimony, he does not need (as much) translation as he does for us. Witness British popular culture. A love of satirical portraits reminiscent of Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales gives brilliance to Monty Python’s sketches or the cast of characters from across social classes in David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s Little Britain.
Whatever remains of a class system in Britain might make the social stratification in The Tales familiar on that side of the pond. But the framing story of democracy at the heart of our own master narrative could seem to run counter to the political hierarchies evident in The Tales (even though Americans embrace Shakespeare, and his world had enough of its own hierarchies). Then, too, we in the United States have our distinctive character types and stereotypes, part of our own artistic heritage and cultural nexus, grown on this soil and nurtured in rebellion against the British. The rugged individual comes to mind.
So what does Chaucer have to do with us? If he’s the father of English poetry, in what way is he our dad, too? In more ways than we might think.
Before American televangelists successfully orchestrated their own undoing, there was the gaggle of corrupt clergy—the Prioress and Monk, the Friar and Pardoner—that Chaucer trots out in his “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales. Before there were “cougars” and Samantha Jones taught “the girls” on Sex and the City that lust knows no age, there was the Wife of Bath. Before the rich old guy Alfie marries the buxom working girl Charmaine in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, there were the aptly named January and May and their marriage made in purgatory in “The Merchant’s Tale.”
Many of these character types, in history and fiction, are as old as the hills (or at least as Roman comedy). But what made Chaucer the father of English poetry is precisely that part of him that we might want to call—not altogether accurately, and with a self-conscious reverse cultural imperialism—American: the way he concentrated on the individual and how the individual defies (stereo)type. That made him the progenitor of an English poetic tradition that eventually produced the other great creator of fully realized and individualized characters: Shakespeare.
We Americans love and revere Shakespeare. We have our kids read him in high school. We stage and make movies of his plays. But we need to scroll back to see where Shakespeare began. In the English-language tradition, Chaucer was the first to show how the individual emerges from the stereotype in the context of, and often in tension with, a social and political reality. Chaucer takes his motley crew of pilgrims and gives them all a voice, a chance to tell their stories in The Canterbury Tales. This may not be precisely democracy, but Chaucer waves at it across the gap of time and space.
Strangely and proleptically, there is something American about Chaucer, then. In his “Notice” at the start of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” In his prologue to “The Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer wrote: “And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game” (“For men should not make earnestness from game”).
Giving voice to individuals in defiance of social stereotypes, ironically challenging your audience to dig for meaning while you tell them to sit back and have fun—you can’t get more American than that.
