Word: chaucer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rendering is literally clear and exact, but the reader who wants to feel the real teeth of an ancient winter must still turn to his unrevised Chaucer...
Modernizer Coghill was too much of a poet to follow the patchwork method, i.e., simply to insert modern words where the old ones are unintelligible. He kept Chaucer's rhyme schemes, except where they no longer rang true to the modern ear. And he concentrated particularly on reproducing the lively "tone of voice" of the 14th-century original-by the seemingly paradoxical method of making the verses sound as much like 20th-century conversation as possible...
Male & Female. The completed work (which the BBC has been broadcasting, in parts, as Coghill finished them, for six years) is the best "translation" of Chaucer to be had. It owes much of its bubbling fluency to Coghill's boldness in sacrificing words and word orders to rhythm and clarity. This is evident in the famed opening lines (usually as much as anyone remembers of the Tales)-Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote-which Coghill deftly turns thus: When the sweet showers, of April fall and shoot/ Down through...
...Chaucer, Coghill observes, delighted to silence his own voice and speak with the tongues of characters as varied and opinionated as the Knight, the Wife of Bath and the Clerk of Oxford. It is this multilingual mixture which makes the Tales a "concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant." To revive this effect, Coghill decided to modernize the people's looks as well as their language, to suggest their old status by putting them in modern context. Where Chaucer, for example, says of the carpenter...
Bitter & Bittre. But Coghill's version also emphasizes the fact that Chaucer's multilingual voice was often rough, sharp and cynical. And it is usually when trying to emulate this toughness that Coghill's witty, elegant rendering is inadequate. Try as he may, he cannot quite evoke in the tones of modern poetry that grim old Britain in which full-belliedness and famine, bestiality and piety, riches and utter penury were all such close neighbors that a man might step at any given moment from one condition to another. Transcribing, for example, the winter days so dreaded...