Klitgård, Ebbe. Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the
Translation and Reception History, 1782-2012. Odense: University Press of
Southern Denmark, 2013.
Reviewed by Candace Barrington (BarringtonC@mail.ccsu.edu)
It
might not be clear to most Chaucerians why they should be interested in Ebbe
Klitgård’s fascinating new book on translation and reception history, Chaucer in Denmark. Denmark, after all,
is a small county, and it’s been nearly a millennium since Sweyn II’s failed
invasion marked the end of Danish incursion on British shores. Beyond an epic
hero (Beowulf), a tragic one (Hamlet), and Old Norse remnants in modern English
(a “happy oaf”), the Danes’ literary and linguistic influence on the English
seems to have been minimal, leaving most Chaucerians to assume they have no
professional interest in Danish language or literature. So, in addition to
providing an overview of Klitgård’s study, this review will also try to
convince readers why his work is important to Anglophone studies in medievalism
as well as to Anglophone studies of Chaucer.
Chaucer in Denmark is the first comprehensive study of
a non-Anglophone culture’s reception and translations of Chaucer, an unexpected
distinction considering that Chaucer’s works traveled to colonies throughout
the British empire and were widely translated in the past century. This is not to say nothing has been written on
Chaucer’s global reception. A handful of studies have provided brief overviews,
with tantalizing hints of Chaucer’s readership in French, Romanian, and
Hungarian. And we get a sense of Chaucer’s place in many more cultures when we
read the introductions appended to translations that now number over fifty contemporary
languages, ranging from Arabic to Finnish and Mongolian. Despite being a goldmine
of information, these resources have generally been overlooked by Anglophone
Chaucerians. The most extensive study of Chaucer’s modern reception, Steve
Ellis’ Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the
Modern Imagination (2000), remains focused on Chaucer’s Anglophone
reception and considers translations into only varieties of Present Day English
and not other languages. Even when scholars have looked beyond the Anglophone
matrix of Australia, Canada, U.K., and the United States, their engagements
remain steadfastly with Chaucer’s reception in the academy. Thus the
only previous book to study extensively Chaucer’s non-Anglophone reception,
Richard Utz’s Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology (2002), focuses on
the ways German scholarship has shaped our understanding of Chaucer; he does not
look at translations of Chaucer’s tales into German. Klitgård’s book covers new
terrain and should inspire scholars to examine what these understudied
non-Anglophone Chaucerian translations can provide, from useful prisms for
examining the receiving culture to new perspectives on Chaucerian hermeneutics.
Chaucer’s
Danish reception also undermines some easy assumptions about the trajectory of
British cultural expansion. Whereas global translations of Chaucer’s tales
might be expected to neatly map onto the outlines of the British empire, a
remnant of the British cultural impositions, Chaucer has had a rich history
Denmark, near a part of Britain’s colonial expansion. Klitgård reveals a
history of Danes discovering Chaucer on their travels and in their studies,
part of the bounty of cultural goods brought back home to displace the German
tradition. At the same time, the story of Chaucer
in Denmark belies the truism that a rising tide lifts all boats, showing
how the increased dominance of English has not always resulted in a correlating
increased profile for Chaucer in Denmark. The story begins at a point when The Canterbury Tales were mishandled
because English was relatively unknown in Denmark, then moves through a period
of increased fortunes as English overtook German as the dominant second
language, and ends with the Tales
sidelined once again when Denmark’s educated class became thoroughly bilingual.
By placing those representations of Chaucer’s Tales in protean contexts (English education and the spread of
English in Denmark; Danish scholars and their criticism; and, non-academic
forms of information, such as encyclopedias, anthologies, and reference works),
this reception history records an intriguing dance in Denmark between the
upward linguistic fortunes of English and the mixed literary fortunes of
Chaucer’s Tales, the contours of
which should encourage scholars to trace those in other linguistic and cultural
domains.
Interspersed
within this story is another, less obvious tale in which translations can
reveal to English readers what they might otherwise overlook in Chaucer’s
Middle English. For this reason, Chaucerians with no interest in medievalism
can learn from Klitgård’s study. By carefully reading the Danish translations
against their Middle English sources, he guides us through those moments where
the Danish text illuminates the Middle English in ways unavailable to the
non-Danish reader, thereby problematizing what Middle (and Present Day) English
takes for granted. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the domesticating
convention of translating place names, wherein the Tabard Inn becomes the
“Herolds-Vamsen,” or herald’s coat,
helping us keep in mind what “Tabard” would have evoked for Chaucer’s early
audiences (120). At other times, it’s a matter of locating a Danish word that
conveys more fully a Middle English word’s connotations now lost in Present Day
English, the case when Uffe Birkedal translates in 1911 the Shipman’s disdain
for a “nyce conscience” (I.398) as “øm Samvittighed” or tender conscience, “which in Danish has connotations to a softness
that would be both foolish and too scrupulous in a character that makes
stealing from others part of his living” (132). In the case of translating from
historical forms of English to modern Danish, two languages that share a common
Germanic ancestor, we can see how some syntactical patterns taken for granted
in English are innovations unknown to its distant cousin. For instance, Otto
Jespersen translates “elvyssh,” Harry Bailey’s description of the Chaucerian
persona, “as ‘elleskudt,’ meaning hit or shot by the elvish people…[because]
there is no idiomatic adjective correspondence in Danish” (105), reminding us
that affixing the –ish suffix was
somewhat uncommon in Old English and had reappeared as a rather recent strategy
for converting nouns into adjectives modeled more on French than German
antecedents. Other examples highlight the inevitable slippages of meaning that
occur when an idea is so embedded in the source language that no translation
can approximate it, a dilemma translators such as Børge Johansen try to circumvent with comparable idioms,
which in turn cause a new set of problems (220-233). Thereby re-awakening
meaning in the source text, the translations allow us to engage more deeply with
the Tales, initiating the hermeneutic
conversation that Hans-Georg Gadamer finds beneficial to both interlocutors in
the exchange. By providing numerous back translations into Present Day English
and then carefully explicating what a Danish reader would see in the
intermediate Danish translation, Klitgård guides his English readers into a
textual world otherwise close to them.
In
telling “the particular story of how the most important medieval English poet
has been translated, presented, analysed and discussed in one European country
in the period from the Enlightenment to the present day” (273), Klitgård
predominately examines three forms of reception: translation, reference works,
and scholarship. The issues he examines in the translations include the use of
archaic language, idioms, and euphemisms or deletions regarding sexually
explicit passages, tale selection, and the translator’s general Chaucer
biography and his complete works. With reference works, he is concerned about
their accuracy vis-à-vis contemporaneous scholarship. And with scholarship, he
establishes their contributions to the larger field of Chaucer Studies. To
identify these bits of Danish Chauceriana, he has tracked down translations in
textbooks, ephemeral magazine publications, and adaptations for the stage.
Because Klitgård writes with a non-Danish audience in mind, he includes ample,
well-placed background information on Danish culture and its history without
overshadowing his main interest in Chaucer’s reception.
Perhaps
it is fitting a Danish scholar should produce the first study of this type.
After World War II, the Danes were among Chaucer’s first and most prolific
translators. As Klitgård’s thorough research establishes, the Danes had at this
point already been translating Chaucerian texts for over 150 years. These
translations predate any translations of Shakespeare into Danish, a fluke of
literary history that arises here (and in the Americas) when Dryden’s and Pope’s
versions of Chaucer are transmitted and translated without any reference to
their Chaucerian source. The first oblique appropriation can be traced through a
series of translations that begin with Dryden’s modernizations of the Wife of Bath and (via French and German
translations and adaptations) end up as Johan Herman Wessel’s musical drama, Feen Ursel eller hvad der behager Damerne
(1782); nearly a half century later, the second series of appropriations begins
with Pope’s adaptation of the Wife’s
Prologue and ends as Thomas Christopher Brunn’s Slagelse-Madamen (1823), a de-medievalized narrative poem set in
nineteenth-century Denmark. Apparently neither Danish author realized his
source was ultimately Chaucer. Shaped by the Danish sense of decorum and the
public’s general unfamiliarity with English medieval culture, the translations
are highly domesticated and refine any elements deemed coarse among bourgeois
readers.
Klitgård
continues his historical survey with the nineteenth-century nationalist turn to
folklore studies. Among those active folklorist was Louise Westergaard, whose
1853 translations of Chaucer were part of her enthusiastic effort to introduce to
Danish readers English writers she had discovered during her travels to England
for the 1852 industrial exhibition in London. Relying on British scholarship
and Thomas Wright’s midcentury collection of Chaucer’s works, her booklet, Chaucer, relates several tales by
interweaving short passages in Middle English (using modernized spelling) with
her glosses and explanatory notes in Danish. Primarily focusing on tales most
amenable to Victorian tastes and sensibilities (such as The Clerk’s Tale and The
Knight’s Tale), she selects for translation passages of high pathos in
order to illustrate and exemplify the moral lessons serving her larger didactic
purposes. By the second half of the nineteenth century, English begins to have
an established presence in Denmark, and Chaucer’s elevated profile was aided by
the work of Britain’s Chaucer Society and the Early English Text Society.
During this time, anthologized Chaucer primarily consisted of “oblique translation
mixed with summary” (92). Denmark also cultivated serious Chaucerians, such as
Otto Jespersen, whose Chaucers liv og
digtning [Chaucer’s Life and Poetry]
(1893) included translated passages that moved beyond the usual tales of high
emotion and didactic purpose.
Soon
after the turn of the century, in 1903, English became “a compulsory main
language in the Danish gymnasium for
the first time” (110), and with that change in status we see more translations
of Chaucer, each attempting a different effect. All these translations were
generally shaped by conservative social mores, and Vilhelm Møller’s perplexing
decision to include The Summoner’s Tale
among the limited number of tales he translated in 1901 meant he had to
severely bowdlerize it. Uffe Birkedal’s translations of The General Prologue and The
Nun’s Priest’s Tale try to convey a medieval sense by using poetic terms so
archaic they have to be explained; at other times he invents archaic sounding words as he tries to capture Chaucer’s
sense in poetry rather than prose. During the interwar years, English language
and literature surpassed German in Danish schools. Significant Chaucerian
scholarship came from Denmark with Aage Brusendorff’s The Chaucer Tradition, which established the canon of Chaucer’s works.
He brought together Anglo-American and German research, each otherwise isolated
from the other. At the same time, Niels Møller’s three-volume survey of world
literature, Verdenslitteraturen, gave
Chaucer a more sympathetic and accurate treatment, and Margrethe Thunbo’s highly
redacted and illustrated volume of tales for children neatly parallels choices made
for Anglo-American editions of children’s Chaucer.
The
war years accelerated the general anglification of Danish culture, a paradigm
shift magnified by Danish resistance to censorship during the German occupation
and manifest in an increase in the proportion of translations from English
relative to other languages. Translation of Chaucer’s tales reflect this
cultural shift in number and kind. Transforming the tales into short stories in
line with contemporary tastes, Lis Thorbjørnsen’s translations do not include
explanatory notes and affect a certain sentimentality by evoking the Danish
past with archaic word choices and native idiomatic expressions. On the other
hand, Flemming Bergsøe’s reader-friendly poetic versions admitted more of
Chaucer’s exuberant humor, captured his tone, and followed his meter, while
avoiding useless archaisms. Jørgen Sonne, a poet of note, continued this
post-war Chaucerian effloresence with a series of lively translations, first in
the 1950s into prose (translating The
Reeve’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, and The
Nun’s Priest’s Tale, plus unusual choices such at The Manciple’s Tale and The
Physician’s Tale), and decades later into poetry (translating “To
Rosemounde,” “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” and excerpts from The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and “Merciles
Beaute”). His unusual choices helped to fill in gaps of Chaucerian works
previously not available in Danish.
The
postwar period also features the only two complete (or nearly complete)
translations of The Canterbury Tales,
and each translator approached his enormous project differently from the other.
Beyond one being in prose and the other in verse, each strove for different
effects. Mogens Boisen, a renowned translator whose reputation often
overshadowed that of the authors he carried over into Danish, relied primarily
on R. M. Lumiansky’s 1948 modernization of the Tales into English prose. Boisen worked to make the medieval
English tales accessible (even palatable), and the end result is a translation that
avoid difficulties by veering toward euphemisms and direct moralizations. Børge
Johansen’s 1958 poetic translation works to capture medieval authenticity by
tending toward the old-fashioned, both retaining the old Danish spelling system
(which had been reformed in 1948) and finding comparable generic forms (such as
using a form of Danish folk poetry used for occasional verse with “dubious
syntax, rhymes and idiom” for The Tale of
Sir Thopas (221). He undergirds this mediated authenticity by relying on
(and acknowledging) valid scholarship and Skeat’s Middle English edition. These
remain the only complete Danish translations of The Canterbury Tales.
After
this profusion of translations, Chaucer’s visibility in Danish culture has
paradoxically diminished as the English language’s has risen. Since 1960,
English has become widely read and spoken among the educated classes, and most
“important English literature in prose is translated with a year of publication”
(237). Left behind are older English works, such as Chaucer’s. Except for
Shakespeare and Dickens, these older texts are seldom retranslated because they
appeal primarily to highly educated readers who no longer need a native, Danish
text to stand in for the foreign, English text. In schools, Chaucer is
predominately taught either in Middle English or in modern English translations
via extracts found in English literature anthologies. (By including Chaucer and
other Middle English in their curriculum, Danish universities differ from those
in other Scandinavian countries that begin their English literature studies
with Shakespeare.) When Chaucer’s tales do appear outside the academy, they are
translations of modern English popularizations, such as Barbara Cooney’s
children’s picture book, Chanticleer and
the Fox. By illustrating the provisional nature of any translation project,
Klitgård’s Chaucer in Demark provides
a salient reminder that Chaucer’s reception in non-Anglophone cultures is no
less complex and no more predictable than the more familiar Anglophone reception
in the Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and United States.
With
the commendable precedent for the study of Chaucer’s non-Anglophone reception now
in place, Chaucerians and medievalists should encourage similar studies by our
colleagues in predominately non-Anglophone universities and cultures. Such work enriches the study of Chaucer in
important ways, yet its survival is not necessarily ensured. Because we know first-hand the difficulties
of maintaining medievalist lines in English departments where we serve an English-speaking
student population, we should be sympathetic to the even more precarious
situations of Chaucerians housed in foreign-language departments. By attending
to what they can tell us, ordering their books for our campus libraries, and by
incorporating their research and translations into our own studies, we can
support their important work and their careers.
We have just begun to listen to them; it would be shameful to lose their
voices now.
Candace
Barrington
Central
Connecticut State University
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