Any project in the works for ten years will have gathered behind it a number of people whose wisdom, support, and kindness were crucial to getting the job done. In my case, these “sondry folk” are bookended by two groups, one stretching back into the past and one stretching out into the future: my teachers and my students. The late Vernon Judson Harward of the English Department at Smith College, my first medieval professor, is the reason I became a Chaucerian. He did nothing to make The Tales easier than they should be, and thus made it clear that their very complexity is the source of their ongoing appeal. My students continue to teach me how richly textured and new Chaucer is and always will be.
Among the medievalists who have been my mentors, I would like particularly to thank Marie Borroff and R. A. Shoaf, the co-advisers of my dissertation on Chaucer at Yale. Their inspiration runs throughout this work. Marie Borroff’s brilliant and beautiful translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl strike a pitch-perfect balance between capturing the meaning and replicating the intricate poetic structures of these poems. The artistry of her translations has been my guide. Over the years, R. A. Shoaf’s innovative scholarship has taught me new ways of gauging Chaucer’s continued presence in our collective literary consciousness. I would like to thank Al and also J. Stephen Russell for their willingness to provide endorsements of this translation for inclusion in my prospectus. And my thanks to Bonnie Krueger, with whom I’ve shared the ins and outs of doing this project for many years. Bonnie’s invitation, years back, to contribute a piece on women and gender for her Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance made me want to do in my writing what I do in my teaching: render medieval literature in general, and Chaucer in particular, accessible and comprehensible to as wide an audience as I can.
My colleagues in the English Department at Trinity College have been wonderful throughout this process. Their advice when I presented portions of this translation in the context of our department’s monthly Salon was astute and encouraging. I am especially grateful to Lucy Ferriss for organizing the Salon, to David Rosen for comments about how to translate the northern dialect of the students in The Reeve’s Tale, and to Paul Lauter, then-chair of the English Department, for his ongoing advice and encouragement. Without the support and wisdom of Margaret Grasso and Roberta Rogers-Bednarek, my work in the English Department, as teacher and former chair, would have been much more onerous and much less pleasant. I’d also like to thank Dean of Faculty Rena Fraden for her persistent encouragement of this work.
David Laurence, Director of the MLA Office of Research and ADE, provided me with important information about enrollments in Chaucer courses; and Patricia Bunker, reference librarian at Trinity College, quickly and expertly assembled data about enrollments nationwide in graduate and undergraduate programs as I was preparing the prospectus for the book.
Central to my work on this translation is the extraordinary scholarship of all the editors whom Larry Benson brought together in The Riverside Chaucer and of John H. Fisher (no relation!) in his Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. These are the two editions of Chaucer’s Middle English text upon which I’ve based my translation. The erudition of their notes and commentary has been invaluable to me in framing my own annotations.
You would not be reading this book without the unflagging efforts of my literary agent, Anne Marie O’Farrell of the Marcil-O’Farrell Literary Agency. My heartfelt thanks are due to Anne Marie and to Denise Marcil, as well as to Christine Morehouse. Chris’s expert advice on the prospectus gave focus and coherence to my plans for the project. I would also like to thank Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Alfred David for their insightful and helpful comments on the text. It has been a privilege to work with my editor at W. W. Norton & Company, Vice President Alane Salierno Mason, whose commitment to my book has made its publication possible, and with her assistant, Denise Scarfi, who has provided patient guidance on the last phases of the project.
I can only say, with Chaucer in his Retraction, that, if, after all this generous advice and support, there are still flaws, as there will be, in this text, that you “arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge and nat to my wyl.”
Finally, more gratitude than I can ever express goes to my family, to whom this work is dedicated:
To my sister Sally Fisher, who, when I couldn’t find data I needed, sent me straight to my reference librarian and saved me much stress and time. And to Sally, too, for long cell-phone conversations on the way home from work, for a constant willingness to hash over our dreams and aspirations, and for the faith that we will both get to where we want to be going.
To my father, Charlie Fisher, who has been helping me realize my goals and ambitions for my entire life; who pushed this project along by wondering out loud whether it would ever get done; and who has shared with me illuminating conversations about the ways in which his polishing of his paintings and my revisings of my translation become significant acts of creation as we remake our work to try to get it right.
To my mother, Shirley Carpowits Fisher, who passed away before this book was done, but who, more than anyone, is its source and inspiration. My mother taught me how much fun it is to write iambic pentameter couplets. She could whip off rhymed stanzas more quickly than she could tie hair ribbons, and she won a significant number of jingle contests when she was young. Throughout our lives, we exchanged rhyming poems on greeting cards. How I wish she were here to see where her knack for rhyming ended up.
And to my daughter and my husband, Sonia Brand-Fisher and Dana Brand, both of whom put up with all this for years with unfailing good humor.
To Sonia, who was willing to listen to expurgated versions of The Tales even before she knew what the Middle Ages were. She has been considerably entertained, since then, to learn what they really say. In the summer of 2007, Sonia served as research assistant for this project, editing, typing, and tracking down references. More recently, she read large portions of the translation aloud to me so that I could tell whether what made sense to the eye meant the same to the ear. Sonia has also offered many well-honed variants on lines that were causing me trouble. In the process, she improved whole passages of the text and showed that she has inherited the family affinity for couplets.
And to Dana, who just never stops letting me know that he believes in what I’m doing more than I do. Dana put me in touch with his agents, Anne Marie O’Farrell and Christine Morehouse, and, as a result, made sure that my project was in the same capable hands as his own recent books on baseball fandom and travel. He has read and commented on versions of this work over the years and has in the process helped significantly. He has listened to me vent. Without his patience, his love, and his confidence in me, I would never have made it out of Southwark.