CLASSICS: The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling By Peter AckroydPenguin Classics, 436pp. £25
EVERY AGE needs its own translation of a classic. Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, and, more recently, Coghill all produced versions of The Canterbury Talesand now comes the indefatigable Peter Ackroyd's new Penguin Classics volume. Novelist, historian and biographer Ackroyd produced The Clerkenwell Talesin 2003 and a brief biography of Chaucer in 2004.
The first is a Gothic thriller set in 1399, replete with esoteric knowledge about all aspects of medieval life; events are viewed through the eyes of a different Canterbury pilgrim in each chapter. The biography is a lively overview of Chaucer’s life and times, packed with details of 14th-century London.
Translations reflect the sensibility of an age and versions of the Canterbury Taleschart radical changes in attitudes. Dryden in 1700 felt able to translate only "such tales of Chaucer, as savour nothing of immodesty" and this attitude persisted into the 20th century, with Burrell's Everyman translation in 1908 omitting the Cook's Tale altogether and leaving the other bawdy stories untranslated, declaring that "these poems are so broad, so plain-spoken, that no amount of editing or alteration will make them suitable for the twentieth century".
The 1998 animation of the Tales,however, offered "Chivalry, Love, Lust, The Black Death, Rape, Deception and Chickens" and Ackroyd's cover promises "Love, Sex, Infidelity, Villainy, Drunkenness, Murder". Polite society, clearly, is no longer so polite and Ackroyd himself is at home with the bawdy and the broad.
Chaucer's tales, apart from two, are in verse but Ackroyd has opted for prose, a choice defended in his introduction on the grounds that it "was a daunting concession to the modern world, which does not love the long poem, but a necessary one". The necessity is open to question – Seamus Heaney's Beowulfand Bernard O'Donoghue's Sir Gawain and the Green Knighthave given a new poetic lease of life to two medieval English classics. In this Canterbury Tales, the only foray into verse is the narrator's Tale of Sir Thopas; Ackroyd's version captures Chaucer's parody of popular romance with relish and vigour:
And when he heard the birdies sing
He was filled with love longing,
He spurred on his horse
Over briar and gorse
Until the beast was sweating.
Ackroyd’s prose, however, is often pedestrian and laboured. The famous opening of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, with her pithy and striking assertion
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in marriage
becomes
I don’t care what anyone says. Experience of the world is the best thing. It may not be the main authority but, in relationships, it is a good teacher. I know all about unhappiness in marriage. Goodness me. Oh yes.
Plod, plod. And inaccurate as translation. Ackroyd, to be fair, is not concerned with faithful translation – he terms his work a retelling – but operates instead on what, he argues, is a Chaucerian method of inspired improvisation.
Accordingly, he feels free to display his learning by inserting original, unsignalled passages – explanations of social, medical or historical points, medieval jokes, extra details about the characters (occasionally oddly middle-class, as when he adds to the narrator’s description of the Host the detail that he “did not find out what school he attended”). Such intrusions – emphatically not a Chaucerian technique – are best left to footnotes.
Chaucer is a master of the implied but unsaid, the ambiguous and the understated; Ackroyd prefers the explicit. After describing the Prioress’s pet animals, table manners, home-grown French and imitation of courtly qualities, Chaucer concludes her portrait with a description of the brooch on her beads:
And theron heng a brooch of gold ful sheene,
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after Amor vincit omnia.
What kind of beads? What kind of love? In Ackroyd, the subtlety disappears; the beads are labelled rosary beads and he ends “Love conquers everything. I presume that she was referring to divine love. I did not ask her about that, either”.
Ironically, the only tales Chaucer wrote in prose are omitted: the Tale of Melibee, on the virtue of patience, and the Parson’s Tale, the long concluding tract on penance. Ackroyd’s confidence that they will not be missed is probably justified, given the general readership for which his version is clearly intended, but a dimension of the Tales that Chaucer deemed integral is sacrificed.
Another obvious market is the student one, but Ackroyd’s version, with its many interpolations, is decidedly unsuitable for students.
His own additions are most marked in the first part of the work, where he inserts exchanges among the pilgrims or appends to many of the portraits some kind of interaction with the narrator, usually banal: so, for example, at the end of the Friar’s portrait, he adds: “He seemed to enjoy my company or, rather, he seemed to enjoy himself in my company; he did not enquire about my life or occupation. I liked that”. Fortunately, these invented details fade out as the work goes on.
Ackroyd's Canterbury Talesis undemanding and often trite, but, for a reader who wants only to know what happens, it serves its purpose.
Mary Clayton is professor of old and middle English in the school of English, drama and film at UCD