Despite its being the first testimony of Chaucer's genius, the interest of modern criticism in the Romaunt has mainly focused on the issue of authorship, whereas the efforts to assess this text as a translation have been limited both in their number and in their scope. This paper discusses Chaucer's translation of the Roman de la Rose, and provides an evaluation of Fragment A from a modern traductological perspective, while taking account of contemporary theoretical positions. First, this article compares the Romaunt with Chaucer's later translating practice. Second, taking into account that the immediate audience of the Romaunt would have been cognizant of French, this essay considers the pragmatic function of this translation. Finally, I reconstruct some of Chaucer's decisions in the translation process, and then I present the translation strategies he adopted in order to create an English metapoem which replicated the spirit of the Roman, thus proving the adequacy of English for poetic expression
The purpose of this paper is to determine to what exíent the contemporaneous state of chivalry has influenced Chaucer's Knight in his literary endeavor. First
This paper discusses the printed history of the Middle English romance The Lyfe of Ipomydon. First, I present a bibliographical description of the two extant fragmentary copies of the romance, and provide new information concerning the collation and watermarks of the Morgan fragment. Next, in the light of the orthographical relation between the printed texts and their manuscript exemplar,
The Middle English Sir Orfeo presents a medievalized version of the classical myth of Orpheus that shows the influence of Celtic lore. Modern scholars seem to have accepted the views of A. J. Bliss, the editor of the Middle English romance, who argues that the English text is a translation of an Anglo-Norman or Old French version. Since we have no textual evidence that can positively support Bliss’s hypothesis, this article tests the possibility that the Middle English romance actually represents an insular tradition of the Orpheus myth that originated in Anglo-Saxon times with King Alfred’s rendering of the story and continued evolving by means of oral-memorial transmission until the fourteenth century, when the English romance was written down in the Auchinleck manuscript.
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