Fiction-Stories Poetry

The Canterbury Tales: A New Unabridged Translation

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a classic that most high schoolers read excerpts from in high school. Burton Raffel here offers a new, full-length translation. The translation mostly succeeds (at least in oral format) as it conveys the sense of the work fairly well.

While reading, it struck me how essentially medieval Chaucer’s setting is. While he is often talked about as one standing at the cusp of an enlightened England, his roots are thoroughly planted in the prior era. The Parson’s Tale (the final tale in the series) is based on Thomistic and Aristotelian virtues. It is less a tale and more a sermon as it is filled with admonitions and homiletic crafts. I kept waiting for a bit of irony to slip out; however, I found none. Chaucer seemed to accept the pre-Reformation theology as an inextricable part of his contemporary culture.

Many of Chaucer’s other tales are more entertaining and more story-like. Chaucer’s characters, like the Friar or the Wife of Bath, still stick with us throughout the centuries. Indeed, he succeeds in making us feel as if we are along for the walk to Canterbury. We listen to them pass the time by their communicative skills. Listening to this book on audiobook makes this effect especially pronounced. Each character possesses a unique literary and auditory voice. The new translation helps facilitate this portrayal by removing anachronisms that roughly remind us that Chaucer wrote in middle English. It succeeds in its quest to make this great work relevant to our contemporary era.

The Canterbury Tales: A New Unabridged Translation
by Geoffrey Chaucer
translated by Burton Raffel
Copyright (c) 2013
ISBN13 9781620649145
Audiobook
Genre: Fiction, Poetry