ONLY THE greatest poems can be translated without loss, or at any rate without the fatal loss which most poems suffer as soon as they try to breathe in another language. The life of most poems is in their language merely. And this can be a delicious life for those who know that language. But it is nothing like the life of Homer, say, and Dante, a life that was lived in the heart and mind, and that consequently can flourish wherever there are men to listen. The same thing is true, all countries tell us, of Shakespeare. And it is true of Chaucer, whose language—a foreign one even to readers and speakers of English today—is one of the most charming a man ever used but the life in whose poems is so much more charming still that it is impossible to imagine a person dull enough to resist it. All anybody needs is half a chance to hear the voice of Chaucer talking and telling stories.
But it should be half a chance at least. I am not sure that Chaucer has ever had that much of a chance till now. If, in Mr. Lumiansky’s prose, he has that much and more, the reason is first of all the prose. I have long been convinced that verse is the heaviest disadvantage under which translations of great poetry can labor. I prefer Homer and Dante in prose; and I prefer Mr. Lumiansky’s modernization of The Canterbury Tales to any verse one now available.
This is not simply, of course, because Mr. Lumiansky has used prose. It is because his prose has found so natural a way to render the absolute plainness of Chaucer. It is Chaucer’s unique secret, this absolute plainness, this pretense that he is no poet at all, this air of being no more than a man who has been everywhere and learned everything that anybody knows. We love Chaucer instantly, and never cease to love him. And Mr. Lumiansky seems to guess why. He has got to the incorruptible center of a humorous, just, merciful man whose slyness has so little malice in it that we hasten to let it educate us in the ways of the absurd, unchanging world. Mr. Lumiansky’s prose has found this man and given him to us with neither archaism nor adornment. Nor with a modernity that anywhere is modish. For Mr. Lumiansky keeps himself out of sight as well as Chaucer does. It is merely the stories that we get, as clear as sunlight and as live as human speech.
If we do not get Chaucer’s wise, sweet verse—and it is our loss that we do not—there is at least no poor reminder of it in the shape of an impossible substitute. If we want it badly enough, we can go and learn Middle English, which indeed is an excellent thing to do. But short of that the best thing is to have what Chaucer becomes when by modernization he is deprived of his music. That he survives as he does in this book is the surest proof of his simple greatness, and of Mr. Lumiansky’s wisdom in never obstructing our view of what there is to see. The whole of the world is here to see. I for one have never enjoyed it more.