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Reviewed by:
  • Chaucer and Petrarch
  • Warren Ginsberg
William T. Rossiter. Chaucer and Petrarch. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xi, 235. £50.00; $95.00.

Assessment of Chaucer's reception of Petrarch has always pivoted about the question of how well the English poet knew the Italian poet's vernacular and Latin works. Chaucer translated one sonnet from the Canzoniere: “S’amor non è” (RFV 132). Did he encounter the poem alone, or did he read it in a florilegium? If the latter, was it in a gathering of various works by mixed, probably unnamed writers, or a version of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta? In either case, why did he single out this particular poem? If Chaucer knew other lyrics from Petrarch's cycle, why does he not recall them? Did Chaucer know, or know of, the Africa, the unfinished epic about Scipio, for which Petrarch was crowned “lauriat poete”? The only work in prose that Chaucer read was Petrarch's “Griselda,” which was part of the third of the four letters to Boccaccio that comprise the seventeenth book of the Epistolae seniles. Did Chaucer have the full letter? Was he able to read the other three? Could he have intuited from them the nature and scope of what we have come to call Petrarch's humanist project?

These questions, and others like them, suggest that any account of these poets will want to factor what Chaucer did not know about Petrarch and Italy into what he did. William Rossiter navigates the gaps in Chaucer's (and in our) knowledge by conceptualizing the poets’ relations as forms of translation. The plural is important. For Rossiter, translation is both linguistic and cultural; he wants to attend to poetic [End Page 368] practice and to the historical concerns that connect and differentiate each man's work. In his introductory chapter, Rossiter therefore rehearses ancient, medieval, and modern theories of inter-and intralingual translation; he argues that, in essence, all ideas about translation are attempts to adjudicate the competing logical, rhetorical, and hermeneutic claims of letter and spirit. Though his survey mostly paraphrases well-known work, and his conclusion is pedestrian, Rossiter is able to assemble the critical principles of the “translative aesthetics” that inform his study. Among these principles are the appropriative force of translation, its multiplicity, and its paraphrastic nature. For Petrarch and Chaucer, translation simultaneously defers to and displaces the authority of its source, blends many sources into “a oneness that is unlike them all,” and rejects word for word rendering.

These ideas underwrite Rossiter's imaginative conceit that Chaucer “met” Petrarch, not in person but intertextually, through his experience of Italy and his reading of Dante and Boccaccio. Rossiter positions himself between David Wallace, whose Chaucer readily understood Italy, and me, whose Chaucer found it at once familiar and strange. Rossiter would smile on both of us; I, for one, was disappointed by his paraphrase of my argument, which washes every nuance from it; he simplifies Wallace's position as well. What, then, were the points of contact that Rossiter claims enabled Chaucer to meet and translate Petrarch? Foremost is the Petrarchan voice of exile; the fragmented self who laments the fragmentation of Italy into warring city-states served to configure the English poet's grasp of Italian politics. Rossiter does not explain how Chaucer came to know this voice—are we to suppose he intuited it from the one sonnet he translated? But even if he was aware of it, Chaucer surely measured it against the great exilic voice we know he knew, Dante's. Instead of investigating the intersection and divergences between sightlines—Rossiter discusses “Italia mia” (RFV 128) but not “Ahi serva Italia” (Purg. 6)—and then comparing Chaucer's own representation of political matters, Rossiter simply juxtaposes common interests. The Canzoniere is an accretive work; it mixes and reformulates elements from many traditions. Chaucer would have found the collection congenial, since he was also a poet who worked by accretion. Petrarch and Chaucer both experienced court culture; both decried clerical abuse.

Rossiter is more responsive to the complexities of cross-cultural translation in his next chapter. Here he proposes that Chaucer was able to [End Page...

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