Thursday 16th March 14:15—15:45, Session 3
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Interpreting Chaucer |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 3 |
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Moderator: |
Antonio Montefusco |
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Paper 1: |
'O, Great Translator, Noble Geoffrey Chaucer' (E. Deschamps) |
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Paper 2: |
Fictionality and the Literary Tradition of Troy |
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Paper 3: |
'God yow see, with al your book and al the companye': A Scene of Reading in Chaucer’s Troilus |
'O, Great Translator, Noble Geoffrey Chaucer' (E. Deschamps)
Julianna Képes
Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered to be "the Father of English poetry” – that is to be read on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. Is it really so? Or is it the quotation in he title which is more characteristic of him?
As the translator of the Hungarian version of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, I am going to deal with this question. Is Troilus and Criseyde rather a translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato (while the Italian writer’s name is never mentioned by Chaucer, Lollius being pretended to be Chaucer’s original, or main source, whatever you prefer), mingled with the translation of some other Italian pieces of poetry (e. g. Petrarch’s Sonnet 132), or is it much more complicated and complex? Can a more than 8000 verse-long oeuvre be the translation of a nearly 6000-verse-long one?
Is it possible that the two statements – Father of English poetry” and
great translator” – should co-exist, even in the very same work? Can it be partly a translation and a great oeuvre at the same time? That is what I mean to prove by analysing
Geoffrey Chaucers’s Troilus and Criseyde – considered to be the very first psychological novel written in English – and comparing it with its main and minor sources.
Fictionality and the Literary Tradition of Troy
Leah Schwebel
Detecting no mention of “Lollius” in the Filostrato,Thomas Warton speculated centuries ago that perhaps Chaucer “followed a more complete copy of Boccaccio’s poem” than we have at present, one that contains a reference to Chaucer’s pseudo-Latin source. Warton also searched for Lollius directly, a quest that evokes memories of a bygone era, analogous, perhaps, to those older scholar-adventurers on a quest for Keats’ original urn. Despite the apparent inanity of Warton’s pursuit, however, we have not entirely moved beyond a literal reading of Lollius. Although a few critics advise reading him as a literary joke, many others have put forth candidates for his identity. One popular theory suggests that Chaucer discovered a reference to Lollius in Horace’s Epistles and assumed he was an ancient authority on the Trojan War. Concerned with vesting his poem with an “air of authenticity,” Chaucer named Lollius to make his poem historically credible.
To be sure, pretentions to narrative scrupulousness were frequent in the Middle Ages. Poets and historiographers alike hid signs of recent invention beneath claims that they were translating an ancient source. Yet while ubiquitous, claims of invented sources did not go unchallenged. Rather, they were regularly subverted, if not by the author then by his readers. As spurious claims of authenticity accumulated, moreover, the semiotic meaning of the pseudo-ancient source shifts, I suggest, and what began as a motion to establish historical accuracy developed into a veiled admission of authorial invention. By feigning reliance on Lollius, then, Chaucer emphasizes the fictitiousness of the Troilus with a maneuver endowed with centuries of fraud, inscribing his poem in a tradition of textual invention, comprised of fabrications that divulge their own fictionality. Tracing this tradition in the works of Benoit, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, I will argue that these poets accepted fraud as the defining attribute of the Troy story, by which I mean, they questioned the veracity of not only the Homeric but also the anti-Homeric accounts. By appropriating the authenticating language and maneuvers of medieval historiography, which were by this time charged with implications of fraud, they signaled the equally fictitious nature of their writings, aligning themselves with the great authors of antiquity in the process.
'God yow see, with al your book and al the companye': A Scene of Reading in Chaucer’s Troilus
Beatrice Mameli
The second book of Chaucer’s Troilus opens with a lovely scene of meta-literature: when Pandarus goes to pay a visit to Criseyde, he finds her in the company of two ladies while listening to a third maiden reading the “geste of the Sege of Thebes” (book II, lines 78-84). In Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Chaucer’s major source for his adaptation of the story, this scene is absent; therefore the poet probably added it for a specific reason. It could be an elegant game of mirrors between his readers and the readers in the story, or a way of characterising the setting of his poem as Greek and chivalric, but it could also be a means of telling us something about his Criseyde and even of creating a sense of tension and anticipation. The aim of this paper is to explore the possible reasons why the writer decided to insert this scene in the poem, with particular attention to the effect that this scene might have had on the readers of the time. In addition, I will try to analyse why the poet decided to mention this particular romance and whether the whole scene ultimately represents a positive characterisation of Criseyde, as one would expect from the author of the litel book, or a slightly negative one.