Chaucer Translator by Paul Beekman Taylor (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER PAUL BEEKMAN TAYLOR. Chaucer Translator. Lanham, N.Y., and Oxford: University Press of America, 1998. Pp. v, 209. $51.00 (cloth); $31.00 (paper). At the end of his introductory chapter, Taylor recognizes the limitations of his approach to Chaucer's translation: he does not "address the man­ ifold complexities of Chaucer's idea of translation," or the theoretical implications of literacy, writing, and vernacularization discussed by oth­ ers, "such as Rita Copeland, Brian Stock and Alistair Minnis" (p. 13). Rather, he restricts his tasks to placing Chaucer's translations "within a broad context of the literary history of ideas," and to tracing the implica­ tions of the "manner in which his 'appropriation' of earlier texts infuses his poetry with fresh meaning" (pp. 13-14). The reader is thus amply warned that despite its title, this book does not engage in the critical investigation of translation familiar to medievalists over the past decade, and that its approach is not new. Taylor's primary references for transla­ tion theory are classic but very dated observations by George Steiner and W. H. Auden, and his attention to recent Chaucer criticism is so scant that the effects are sometimes astonishing. He states in his preface, for example, that a major stumbling block to his discussion of Chau­ cer's method is C. S. Lewis's 1958 suggestion that Chaucer clung to me­ dieval attitudes and renounced the direction of Boccaccio's Renaissance thought (pp. iii-iv)-Taylor gives not even a hint of recognition here that in the forty years since The Allegory ofLove, scholarship has reconsid­ ered Chaucer's relationship with his Italian contemporaries. It must also be noted that eight of the book's twelve chapters rework material from articles published in various journals between 1979 and 1997, and at­ tempts to underscore their coherence are sporadic. Despite the limitations of this book's scope and theoretical approach, some details of its individual studies deserve attention. Taylor accurately describes his method in one sentence in the preface: "In the chapters that follow, I identify a number of recycled linguistic elements which bring fresh meaning to [Chaucer's} story" (p. ii). The book's method of identifying sources and then analyzing the implications of their use in a new context accords with the current trend in both source studies and in some areas of translation studies. So, for instance, Taylor's second chapter, "Genesis and Apocalypsis: Zephirus and The Canon's Yeoman's Breath," carefully documents the biblical and literary underpinnings of Zephirus's breath and the earth's licour as found in the Prologue to The 392 REVIEWS Canterbury Tales, and then traces their implications for other references to breath and odor throughout the tales. The next four chapters, which similarly analyze some of the many passages in The Canterbury Tales fo­ cused on speech, offer informative genealogies and suggest provocative juxtapositions. Taylor is most comfortable, however, with the patristic methods that developed in the sixties, and his attempts to rejuvenate or camouflage them are unsuccessful. His interjection of Jameson's obser­ vations on parody between Kaske's and Kolve's interpretations of The Miller's Tale, for instance, is superficial (pp. 42-43 and notes), and his application of the rubric of translation is so broad and inconsistent that it loses cogency. In chapter 3 we learn that "[t}he Knight had translated the ideological programme of Theseus and his Athens into Ricardian England, and the Miller's jesting anecdote translates the world of Scrip­ ture and Scriptural exegesis into his own social experience"; in the next paragraph we find that "the Miller collaborates with Chaucer the re­ porter to translate terms from the fictive reality of pilgrimage context into the fictive fable of his performance" (pp. 40-41). Later in the chap­ ter, "one thing in light is translatable by darkness into another" (pp. 43-44). Taylor states in his preface that chapters 2 through 6 "reveal Chaucer confronting the implications of Nominalism and Realism to transla­ tion" (p. ii); it would be more accurate to say that their common interest is in proving Chaucer a realist, a conclusion largely based-after some...