In offering translations of Chaucer’s four ‘love visions’, I should like at the outset to make the fullest possible acknowledgement to the late F. N. Robinson for his great edition of The Poetical Works of Chaucer (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1933; second edition 1954). I have always returned to it after consulting other editions; when I have quoted him here, the page numbers refer to the first edition. As was almost inevitable, at times I have drawn on his work indirectly, without specific reference, and I trust that this grateful acknowledgement to his extraordinarily full and informative scholarship will compensate for any formal omission of mine. My debt to other scholars is, I hope, made clear whenever I quote them, and the value I attach to their work is signalled by naming them in my select bibliography.
Of recent years, interest in work of Chaucer’s other than The Canterbury Tales has increased. Several translations of Troilus and Criseyde have appeared, and both that great poem and the early love visions are now occasionally set texts, not only in universities and colleges, but in schools. General public interest in our medieval heritage seems to increase year by year. So there is every justification for translating the love visions.
I have kept support material to the minimum, and I hope that the Notes will further understanding and enjoyment of the poems. In discussing classical references I have tried to give generally accepted versions rather than to be exhaustive concerning alternatives, or to define specifically medieval meanings – unless the latter are crucial to the poetic reference.
A word on the problem of verse translation, which Chaucer himself faced whenever he borrowed and adapted a well-known passage from Ovid, or Froissart, or Jean de Meun, or Dante, or Boccaccio. Chaucer’s iambics, whether in four- or five-foot lines, run with an accentual freedom which his French peers eschewed or lacked, and for which he thought fit to apologize. Chaucer was responding to the nature of modern English, which was then in the making, and was breaking out of moulds set by Norman French conquerors and native, slightly archaic, exemplars. So in re-rendering Chaucer in twentieth-century English I too claim my freedoms, though always, I hope, in the interest of representing him as accurately as possible. To be precise: I have generally written iambics, and kept the right number of feet in the line; I have always looked for perfect rhyme, but have allowed imperfection when that seemed the only way of keeping decently close to original meaning; in including Chaucer’s catalogues of proper names, I have abandoned rhyme almost completely when forced to by the fact that the form and pronunciaton of the names have changed since his time. The great difficulty when translating such a shape-shifter as Chaucer, whose tone can change from lofty pathos to farce almost from one line to the next, is to hit the centre of poetic feeling with the appropriate vocabulary of today (with the occasional archaism, to be frank). The attempt leads into advanced interpretation as well as poetic invention, and in both matters I must submit to judgement.
Brian Stone
The Open University
April 1982