Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilo y Criseida by Ana Sáez Hidalgo (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER verse is so skilful as not to draw attention to itself. It seems ‘‘natural.’’ It is the art that conceals art. The treasures are there if we look for them, but we have to do the looking. When we do look, we are likely to be astonished by the jewels that have been there all along. This is everywhere apparent in the essays in Part Three of the volume, perhaps nowhere more so than in Chickering’s piece, which shows how very much funnier the Miller’s Tale is in Chaucer’s riming couplets than it might have been if written in prose; or in Wetherbee’s demonstration of how the prosody of the Book of the Duchess portrays ‘‘the delicate psychological process the poem describes’’ (284); or in Owen’s tour de force of close readings both of the portraits and of the linking passages in the General Prologue. (Surely there couldn’t have been any more to be said about the poetry of the GP? Read this essay and think again.) ‘‘Talking about meter is a hazardous business,’’ as Pearsall remarks with his usual crispness (p. 131); but this volume shows that it should be done, and that it can be done with style. The remarkable fact that ten of the fourteen essays brought together here (all but the first three and the last) have appeared in the last twenty-five years—and most of them in response (directly or indirectly) to Gaylord’s ‘‘Scanning the Prosodists’’—shows how much the study of Chaucer’s verse owes to his prodding. He may justly take pleasure in the thought that this volume can ‘‘fill our hearts with joy’’ as (in Brown’s words) ‘‘we tap our feet and hear—far off but distinct—Geoffrey Chaucer swing’’ (p. 278). T. L. Burton University of Adelaide Ana Sáez Hidalgo, trans. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilo y Criseida. Clásicos Medievales. Madrid: Gredos, 2001. Pp. 262. $21.40. Sometime between 1433 and 1454 the Spanish author Juan de Cuenca translated John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Although Cuenca based his work on a Portuguese translation of the poem, as far as we know Cuenca ’s constitutes the first translation into Spanish of a major English literary work. Such an early translation may seem to have heralded a Spanish interest in translating Middle English works, but the subsequent history of Spanish translations has not lived up to its auspicious beginning. It 374 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:02 PS REVIEWS was not until the twentieth century that Spanish translators and publishers started to show a significant interest in Middle English literature. Most of the attention has concentrated on Arthurian works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, as well as Chaucer ’s Canterbury Tales, the only non-Arthurian Middle English work that has been translated numerous times over the course of the twentieth century. All other works by Chaucer have been translated at least once, with the exception of The Legend of Good Women, which has never been rendered in Spanish. Antonio León Sendra produced the first translation of Troilus and Criseyde in 1985, a book that is now difficult to find. Translations of Chaucer’s other works have not been widely published either. Ana Sáez Hidalgo’s is the second translation of Troilus and Criseyde ever to appear in Spain. It is published by a major Spanish publisher , Gredos, which should ensure that this new translation will be more easily available. Troilo y Criseida is handsomely produced. It includes a useful introduction in which Sáez Hidalgo discusses Chaucer’s biography and analyzes the date of Troilus and Criseyde, the origin of the story (including a comparison to Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato), the formal elements, and the genre of Chaucer’s poem. The introduction ends with a discussion of the poem’s manuscript tradition and an explanation of the translator’s methodology. The introduction takes into account some recent work on Troilus and Criseyde, and does a thorough job of explaining structural, genre, and source issues, but it does not identify any of the issues raised by...