The Retelling of The Canterbury Tales
Peter Ackroyd is an industrious writer, having published in just the last ten years five works of fiction and nineteen of nonfiction (including Venice: Pure City, a must read on my list of books to read in 2011). Luckily for us, he also found the time to translate — or as he calls it “retell” — The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. In his introduction to this marvelous retelling of the six-hundred year-old verse story of diverse pilgrims on their way to Canterbury who meet one night and tell their funny and wicked personal stories, Ackroyd writes that translating the collection of tales into “contemporary English is another way of affirming its centrality and its continuing life. It is reborn in every generation.” The tales are central to understanding our place in the world, both as inheritors of the medieval world so thoroughly depicted in the tales and as holders of the same human characteristics of greed, fear, and desire that the pilgrims exhibit in their stories. What makes the stories of Chaucer so great is that while the medieval world of the pilgrims is very different from our own modern universe, their place in the world — how they understand themselves — will resonate as both familiar and understandable. The pilgrims are not so very different from people we know, including the people we know best, ourselves.
Everyone who has read The Canterbury Tales has their favorite character in the wide-ranging cast of pilgrims (whether that character be their mirror or their opposite, a beloved soul or a repellant one). Readers new to the tales, encountering these characters for the first time through Ackroyd’s retelling, will have a great time picking out their own best-loved figures, from the handsome monk “who was supposed to follow the rule of saint Benedict … but found the precepts antiquated and altogether too strict; he preferred to follow the modern fashions of good living and good drinking” or the Merchant “with his forked beard …What a notable man! Funnily enough, I did not discover his name. I never bothered to ask him.” There is the pardoner, who carries in a sack “papal pardons smoking hot from Rome” and offers seven hundred years indulgence for seven shillings — heaven at a cheap price. Too bad he can’t take some money to fix up his hair, “yellow as old wax, hanging down his back as limply as a bundle of flax and draped across his shoulders … He could have had rats’ tails upon his head.” My favorite character is the good wife of Bath, whose “stockings were of a vivid red and tightly laced; her leather shoes were supple and of the newest cut. Her face was red, too, and she had a very bold look.” And bold tongue: when we hear her tale, she wields the language of sex freely and with pride and desire: “All of us have different talents — some can do this, others can do that. I can do that.” Does it, she does, and we hear all about it.
Ackroyd has taken the lovely, lively, incisive, bawdy, and provoking language of Chaucer and translated it for modern readers to enjoy all over again. For new inductees into the reading of Chaucer, his retelling will ensure their long stay in the hall of admiration and delight, and for those already familiar with the tales, the retelling will reaffirm our affection and our identification with these wonderful tales.
