Les Contes de Cantorbéry. Second Part by Geoffroy Chaucer (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER maiden but in the process woke three Englishmen who thought he was a thief and pursued him. Other passages recall Chaucer even more strongly; with self-deprecation Dafydd presents himself as the object of ridicule of the girls he would love, and he relates how a magpie once garrulously lectured him for being an old man in love. Unlike Chaucer, however, Dafydd is fond of realistic portrayals of the wonders of nature; for the former Reynard is the sly voice of flattery, but for the latter he is a flash of amber in pursuit of a fat hen. Moreover, Dafydd rests secure in his sense of his own poetic achievement, while Chaucer, whoseEnglishmedium lacked the uninterrupted tradition and poetic status which Welsh had in Wales, could only toy with the posture of an "auctor." Still, the power of each writer's poetry is clear (Dafydd's satiric verses on the contemporary poet Rhys Meigen are "so involved and obscure in their range of abuse that it is not too difficult to credit the later story that the unfortunate victim fell down dead as the result of hearing them"; p. 62), as is their importance in their respective traditions; Chaucer inspired the "Chaucerians," and Dafydd was a model for contemporary and subsequent cywyddwyr, who variously describe him as pensaer yr ieithoedd ("architect of words"), pensaer gwingerdd ("architect of song"), and athro pawb ("everybody's teacher") (p. 160). This collection is part of a renaissance of sorts in Dafydd studies. All of the poems are now accessible to nonspecialists in Richard Loomis's excellent translation (Binghamton, N.Y., 1982), and a selection ofthe originals with accompanying translations are available in an edition by Bromwich herself (Penguin, 1986). "Gwell yw ystafell, os tyf," Dafydd observes; better is a room if it grows, and all these books will better any library which has room for them. TIM WILLIAM MACHAN Marquette University GEOFFROY CHAUCER. Les Contes de Cantorbery. SecondPart. Fascicle 9. Trans.Juliette de Caluwe-Dor. With the English text of the edition of John Hurt Fisher. Louvain-Paris: Editions Peeters, 1986. Pp. xii, 265. $8.00 paper. We may indeed welcome the appearance of the second volume (of a planned four) of]uliette de Caluwe-Dor's French translation of The Canter130 REVIEWS bury Tales. The close ties of Chaucer's Middle English with the French language make furthering the appreciation of his work among French speakers particularly feasible and desirable. Chaucer knew the language well, his English was imbued with the lexicon and usages, and many originals of his works were French. His Gallicism indeed is strong enough that Emile Legouis could with reason call The Canterbury Tales "un des plus remarquablesprolongements al'etranger de notre poesie nationale."1 The French affiliations suggest that Chaucer would be especially translata­ ble, and de Caluwe-Dor has previously testified that this is so: "Chaucer's English being often closer to French than to present day English (a.o., his vocabulary and sentence structure), in some cases I felt my task far lighter than if I had had to translate into English."2 The new volume seems particularly well suited to nurturing Anglicist proclivities of French students of medieval literature. Directed at readers who seek precise understanding of Chaucer's text, and taking up where the first volume leaves off, it presentsjuxta!ineare-line-by-line-translations ofthe prologues and tales of the Reeve, the Cook, the Man ofLaw, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, and the Summoner. It also has the Middle English from the Fisher edition on facing pages, a feature not present in volume 1. Both the parallel text and the fuller glosses placed on the same page with the text rather than in the back, make the second volume more usable than the first. In both volumes the translation is carefully executed and laudably functional. As de Caluwe-Dor declares in the introduction to volume 1 (p. iii), where a choice is necessary, she is willing to sacrifice brevity and grace for fidelitephilologique. At the same time, we know from her earlier declara­ tion thatfidelite is for her no simple matter; in particular, she sees finding...