Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War.
- Author/Editor
- Strakhov, Elizaveta.
- Title
- Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War.
- Published
- Strakhov, Elizaveta. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022.
- Review
- Strakov's argument is that poets on both sides of the Channel (Jean de la Mote, Philippe de Vitry, Jean Campion, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, Charles d'Orléans, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, even Lydgate) shared what she terms "formes fixes discourse" (17), all seeing in their various approaches to poetic form a means to reify "Francophone culture"--implicit in her title, "Continental England"--in the divisive period of the Hundred Years' War. Shared form allowed for what she terms "reparative translation," permitting "canon-building as the bulwark against war-time cultural fragmentation" (18). Whether working in English or French (or Latin), these poets looked to lyric form "to redraw, or blur, or sometimes even erase lines of regionalist division in an aspiration to restore unity to newly politically fragmented Francophone culture" (48). Clearly there were differences in how this thinking could be applied, over the decades that the war continued: Gower, whom she discusses in the first half of chapter four, focusing on London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), explored and rejected the possibility of finding a "perfit language" to speak wisdom to Lancastrian sovereigns. For Gower, Strakhov argues, "multilingualism fails as a mode of address," requiring "some other mode" (138-39). Gower turns to two elements of "formes fixes discourse," classical allusion, and the exemplum: "Gower . . . presenting a newly troubled world in which multilingualism has run amok, falls back on Vitry's position: well-known exempla offer a bedrock of cultural knowledge, on which the shifting sands of multilingualism can securely rest. Pan-European knowledge of discrete forms are the true 'perfit langage,' fully understood because it is already known" (147). Strakhov also discusses Quixley's English translation of the "Traitié pour les amantz marietz," arguing that the translation "fuses Gower's French and Latin together because, left by themselves, neither is fully sufficient in representing the exemplum's meaning. He thus presents an English text that solves multilingualism's failures by means of judicious interlingual translation practice seeking to repair the fragmentation engendered by Gower's original" (145). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Language and Word Studies
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Traitié pour Essamplar les Amantz Marietz
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations