Publication details
Medieval Performance in the Twenty-First Century? : The Case of Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and Its Translation for Modern Audiences
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | A number of scholars have pointed out the oral character of Chaucer’s poetry, to which Chaucer himself openly and repeatedly testifies in his works. When concluding his Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, the poet prays that “non myswryte” his “litel bok” or “mysmetre for defaute of tongue” (V, 1795-96), suggesting that he had both reading and listening audiences in mind when composing the piece. This presentation will discuss Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls – a short poem which has always been considered occasional and, by extension, to be read out loud or performed in some manner (see, for instance, Mary Giffin’s Studies on Chaucer and His Audience, 1956). The presentation will ask two questions: 1) Do modern scholars and readers have any access to the way in which a medieval poem was originally “published”? Several methods will be suggested, based on both internal (textual) and external evidence. A more important question, however, is: 2) Is it possible, or even desirable, to translate a medieval performance of a poem into a twenty-first century culture, when the conditions for which the work was originally written no longer exist and even the general notion of what poetry is has radically changed? The author of the presentation has recently translated the Parliament into Czech (published in Prague, 2017) and will employ his own experience when discussing the possible model(s) for dealing with the orality and performativity inherent in medieval poetry. |
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