British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dryden in the 1690s: The Virgil and the Fables
Abstract
Dryden’s translations from Chaucer
Professor Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge
Chaucer and Dryden were two of the greatest translators in the English language, not least because language is far from being all that is at issue. The very earliest reference to Chaucer as a writer pays high tribute to him as a 'grant translateur'. Translatio, as medieval commentators regularly noted, meant a 'carrying across': a movement from one place to another (as with bishops, or saints' relics), or from one state to another (like Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream), as well as from one language to a different one, a difference that in turn entailed changes in cultural assumptions and expectations. Chaucer and Dryden were both unusually alert to the range of interpretation the term could carry - how 'translation' could itself be translated into practice - as they engaged with the transfer of texts across space and time and literary kind and culture as well as across language. This paper will follow the metamorphosis of the Chaucerian source texts to their final instantiation in the Fables.
Relevant publications
'After Chaucer', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), 3-24
'Chaucerian Representation' and 'Chaucerian Poetics', in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, Chaucer Studies XXXI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 7-50
'The Classical Background', in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.255-71
The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2004)
'Joyce's Other Father: The Case for Chaucer', in Middayevil Joyce, ed. Lucia Boldrini, European Joyce Studies 13 (Rodopi, 2002), pp. 143-63
Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1996)