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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/9/2015, SPi
T E L L E R S , T A L E S , A ND T R A N S L A T I O N I N
C H A U C E R’S C A N T E R B U R Y TA L E S
Tellers, Tales, and

Translation in
Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales
W AR R E N G IN S BER G
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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# Warren Ginsberg 2015
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
In memory of my father, David Lawrence Ginsberg,

and my mother, Shirley Klein Ginsberg
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank the many friends with whom I discussed some of

the ideas that appear in this book. In Italy I have had the pleasure of
conversing with Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi, Piero Boitani, and Alessandra
Petrina. In the United States and Canada I have found equally generous
and stimulating interlocutors in Teresa Kennedy, Karla Taylor, Tom
Hahn, Will Robins, Robert Durling, and Albert Ascoli. At the University
of Oregon, Barbara Altmann, Martha Bayliss, Louise Bishop, Steven
Durrant, Anne Laskaya, Massimo Lollini, Karen Ford, and Steven Shankman
have been inexhaustible sources of counsel and wisdom. To Gina Psaki,
with whom I have taught and talked all things Italian, and to Jim Earl, a
man about whom it can truly be said “nihil humanum alienum est,” I owe
a special debt of gratitude.
Over the years, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Robert Hanning, Winthrop
Wetherbee, and Peter Travis have been the ideal audience I have had in
mind as I wrote. Each read fledgling versions of some of the chapters that
appear here; if they were pleased, I knew, in the words of Chaucer’s
Franklin, “that it was good ynow” to develop further. I also had the
good fortune to be able to present portions of my project to various
audiences; I would again like to thank my hosts at Yale University, the
University of Toronto, the University of California at Berkeley, the
Università per stranieri di Siena, Cambridge University, and the Univer-
sità di Roma III, La Sapienza, who invited me to speak. I would also like to
thank the readers for Oxford University Press; both Albert Ascoli, who
identified himself afterwards, and the other specialist, who has remained
anonymous, made many invaluable suggestions for improving the manu-
script. I would also like to thank the Oregon Humanities Center, which
provided a subvention for the preparation of the index, and Tim Asay,
himself a brilliant reader of Chaucer, who compiled it.
Some matter in some chapters has already appeared in various venues,
almost always in substantially different form. I am grateful to the following
journals and presses for permission to revisit these essays: “Ovid and
the Politics of Interpretation,” which appeared in Classical Journal 84
(1989): 222–31; “‘Medium autem, et extrema sunt eiusdem generis’:
Boccaccio and the Shape of Writing,” which appeared in Exemplaria 5
(1993): 185–206; “‘Gli scogli neri e il niente che c’è’: Dorigen’s Black
Rocks and Chaucer’s Translation of Italy,” which appeared in Reading
viii Acknowledgments
Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005): 387–408; “The Lineaments of
Desire: Wish-Fulfillment in Chaucer’s Marriage Group,” which appeared
in Criticism 25 (1983): 197–210, published by Wayne State University
Press; “Mood, Tense, Pronouns, Questions: Chaucer and the Poetry of
Grammar,” which appeared in Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature
in Honor of Howell Chickering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval
Studies, 2014):165–78; “Chaucer’s Disposition,” which appeared in The
Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English Honor of Marie Borroff
(Cambridge; D. S. Brewer, 1985): 129–40.
Finally, I want to thank Sam and Shira Ginsberg, who have always been
inexhaustible sources of inspiration, pride, and joy. The debt I owe my
wife, Judith Baskin, whose love has sustained me, and lifted me, and elated
me for so many years, I can never repay. But I will never stop trying.
Contents
Introduction: Links and Translation in the Canterbury Tales 1

1. Models of Translation: Ovid, Dante 22
2. Models of Translation: Boccaccio’s Early Romances 61
3. Interruption: The Franklin 80
4. The Dancer and the “Daunce”: Alice, Wife of Bath 115
5. Transit and Revision: The Clerk and the Merchant 145
6. Misdirection and Subversion: The Pardoner 178
7. Translation as Repetition: The Miller and his Tale 204
Conclusion 223
Bibliography 229
Index 247
Introduction
Links and Translation in the Canterbury Tales
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats, “Among School Children”
For many readers, the vibrancy that distinguishes the Canterbury Tales
from other literary collections has two sources: the spirited interplay
among pilgrims and the manner in which their stories seem to fit them.
At times, Chaucer presents his speakers from as many as five different
perspectives. Even though we haven’t been asked to do so, we find ourselves
trying to coordinate the tales the Miller, the Man of Law, and the Franklin
tell with their portraits in the “General Prologue,” the interchanges
reported in the prologues to their tales, the matter sometimes contained
in additional introductions, and the comments or incidents that occur in
endlinks. Finding a sightline comprehensive enough to take in so many
points of view, when they exist, is not easy; the unfinished state of the
work, the missing headlinks, the added and canceled passages, the legacy
of scribal variants, make the task that much harder. Yet for the last
hundred years, critics have debated the import of the methods by which
Chaucer organized his greatest work.
Earlier scholars tended to assume that tales existed for the sake of tellers.
The pilgrim who rehearsed a tale determined what a character in it said; at
the same time, what that character said reflected the personality of the
narrator in a way that he or she did not control. This approach, made
famous a century ago by George Lyman Kittredge, reached a certain limit
in Robert Lumiansky’s theory of roadside drama. It has elicited strong
dissent. David Lawton has emphasized that Chaucer’s narrators speak
with the many voices that have gone into their making. C. David Benson
has written that the drama in the Tales is a drama of style. H. Marshal
Leicester has argued that there are no pilgrims behind Chaucer’s nouns
and verbs; the text creates a voice, not the other way around. Feminist,
new historical, and other cultural critics have directed attention away from
the cast of the characters and toward the social, political, economic, and
2 Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

ecclesiological forces that shaped their representation and reception.
Skeptical codicologists, citing the conflicting evidence of the manuscripts,
have questioned the usefulness of relating tales to tellers at all.1
Nevertheless, as Simon Horobin has said in a recent discussion of Adam
Pinkhurst, “the basic structure of the Tales was evidently intended to be a
series of tales preceded by prologues providing a link from the previous tale
to the following one.”2 The scribe’s late insertion of prefatory material in
Hengwrt shows that Chaucer “was concerned with expanding the number
of explicit relations among tales;”3 the poet’s apparent decision to have
both the Knight and Harry Bailly interrupt the Monk suggests that he was
actively reworking some of them.4
From the start, however, the linking passages were never simply transitions
from one story to the next; even the briefest is a narrative event in itself,
with a weight and integrity of its own. Each is as much a part of the
ensemble I will call a Canterbury performance as the tale and the pilgrim
who tells it. The links, that is to say, do not just provide the thread that
knits together each of the Tales’ ten blocks of text; they sponsor and enact
the impulse to connect the portrait in the “General Prologue” to the story
the pilgrim relates. The links are the ligaments that both stabilize the
poem and give it its elasticity; even more than the pilgrimage and the tale-
telling contest, the conceits that frame the work, the prologues and
afterwords are the sites where Chaucer dramatizes the principles of affili-
ation that guided the construction of his masterpiece and the way his
audiences have continued to read it.
1
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1915); R. L. Lumiansky, ‘Of Sondry Folk’: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury
Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cam-
bridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985); C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety
and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1986); H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canter-
bury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). There are, of course, numerous
other studies one could cite. For a recent overview and assessment of Chaucer criticism, see
Kathy Cawsey, Twentieth-century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences (Burlington: Ash-
gate, 2011).
2
Simon Horobin, “Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript
of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 44 (2010): 351–67; p. 161.
3
Robert J. Meyer-Lee, “Abandon the Fragments,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35
(2013): 47–83. Meyer-Lee also points out that the manuscripts lend as much support to the
belief that Chaucer intended to leave certain blocks without links as they do to the idea that
he would have eventually produced a continuous and integrated sequence of tales.
4
Chaucer appears to have expanded the Monk–Nun’s Priest link to include lines B2
3961–80. See Derek Pearsall, “Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts,”
in Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism, edited by A. J. Minnis and
Charlotte Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992): 39–48, p. 42.

How, then, might we construe the links, and through them the idea of
linkage, in the Canterbury Tales? By what means can we explore Chaucer’s
orchestration of its diverse elements without losing sight of the fact that
they are discrete creations, each with a specific purpose and manner of
achieving it? How do we determine that some correspondences are more
than casual, that certain symmetries are artful, when we know Chaucer’s
book is emphatically a work in progress? If, as Robert Meyers-Lee has
argued, we cannot assume that the poet intended to provide prologues for
all the tales, how can we discuss the warp and woof of the compilation that
contains them.5 How can we talk about the design of the Tales when the
poem abandons its own architectural blueprint? 6 Unlike Dante and
Boccaccio, Chaucer only waves at the notion that he will gather his scattered
leaves into a volume unified by his pilgrims’ concern for the well-being of
their souls; by the second tale, the idea that “le cose tutte quante / hanno
ordine tra loro,” that there is a place for everything and everything is in its
place, has been left to gather dust by the wayside.7 Anyone who wants to
think about the cohesiveness of Chaucer’s poem cannot overlook what
Derek Pearsall has called the “confused clutter of the artist’s workroom, the
evidence of revision, of opportunism, of planlessness.”8
These are some of the issues that I have borne in mind as I wrote this
book. The principal argument I will advance to address them is that the
pilgrim portraits, the introductions and epilogues to their tales, and the
tales themselves, all move in the same direction because each expresses in a
different mode a coordinating idea or set of concerns. For the Clerk, the
idea is transition, for the Merchant it is revision and reticence, for the
5
See Meyers-Lee, “Abandon the Fragments,” p. 76. He also notes that the manuscripts
support the possibility “that Chaucer was content to leave some tales juxtaposed without a
link” (p. 60).
6
Many have commented on the unpredictability and open-endedness of the Tales. See,
for instance, Helen Cooper, “The Order of the Tales in the Ellesmere Manuscript,” in The
Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, edited by Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward
(San Marino: Huntington Library, 1995); 245–61. See also Derek Pearsall, “Pre-empting
Closure in ‘The Canterbury Tales’: Old Endings, New Beginnings,” in Essays on Ricardian
Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, edited by A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and
Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): 23–38. For a powerful theoretical
reading, see Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure
in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
7
As Karla Taylor makes clear, Chaucer did seize on the idea of a volume of collected
leaves to develop his own vision of literary tradition. See “Chaucer’s Volumes: Toward a
New Model of Literary History in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29
(2007): 43–85.
8
Pearsall, “Authorial Revision,” p. 42. Also relevant is Pearsall’s idea that the plan that
each pilgrim would tell four tales is a late revision. See “Pre-empting Closure in The
Canterbury Tales: Old Endings, New Beginnings,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In
Honour of J. A. Burrow: 23–38.

Miller it is repetition, for the Franklin it is interruption and elision, for the
Wife it is self-authorship, for the Pardoner it is misdirection and subver-
sion. My thesis is that in each instance the parts fit together because they
translate one another.
In an earlier study, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, I adopted insights from
Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” to help map the otherness
of Italy.9 According to Benjamin, the translator’s task is to express “the
central reciprocal relationship between languages.” This relationship is
revealed through the disclosure of the intention that underlies each language
as a whole. The differences in sound and letter that distinguish “bread,” for
example, from the French “pain,” underwrite discrete chains of associations;
when the words are substituted for one another, the morphological and
cultural logic that connects the English noun with, say, a rhyme like “bled”
on one hand and “wine” on the other (a loaf of bread, a jug of wine),
disarticulates and is disarticulated by the logic that connects pain et vin
(either in phonic terms or as the fare one once received in bistros for the
cover charge).10 Since all such philological and social incompatibilities
ultimately arise from different combinations of vowels and consonants
prior to their having been assigned a meaning in any language, Benjamin
called the aggregation of these divergences “reine Sprache.” The orientation
of any individual language to this contentless “pure speech” determines its
intentional mode, and it is the mode of meaning that Benjamin says
translations should seek to translate. Once a translator has found a corres-
ponding mode, her rendering will illuminate the different bias of the source
and reveal that its language is as partial and secondary as that of the retelling.
For Benjamin, translation and original are equally derivative; each realizes
its linguistic integrity only in the wake of the other’s exposure that it is a
fragment of “the language of language,” of language “that knows no means,
no object, and no addressee of communication.”11
9
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schoken, 1969): 82–96. For a more detailed discussion of Benjamin’s theory of
translation, which I read partly under the influence of Paul de Man’s response, see my
Chaucer’s Italian Tradition: 8–10, 148–89. It goes without saying that the negotiations
between English, insular French, and the different varieties of continental French in
Chaucer’s day produced equally complex translations. For a superb study of them see
Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years
War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10
For Benjamin, these differences are always social and historical. Today his example of
bread and wine illustrates his point in a different way than it did when he wrote his essay. One
no longer receives pain et vin for a cover charge in French bistros, but a present-day reader
of Benjamin still can hear a transformed echo of it in the English “bread” as slang for money.
11
Benjamin characterizes “pure speech” this way in “On Language as Such and the
Language of Men,” in Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by
Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schoken, 1978), p. 318. On the relation

Even from this thumbnail sketch one could guess that translators have
not found Benjamin’s ideas particularly helpful, in part because they are
difficult to realize, but mostly, I think, because the public they presuppose is
not simply bilingual but bifocal and panoptic as well. The only people who
will discern how manners of meaning in source and translation correspond
to and disarticulate one another are those who see each text as a whole and
both simultaneously. For Chaucerians, however, as for any comparatist who
reads medieval texts reciprocally, Benjamin’s theory, which owes much, as
Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, to Stoic and Augustinian concepts of
naming and discourse,12 along with the vast amount of theoretical work on
translation that has been done in its wake, can be germinal.13 If, for example,
we set the manner in which writing tries to script its own utterance—which,
I submit, is one mode of meaning in Il Filostrato—alongside the manage-
ment of recitation in the Troilus, whose narrator and characters insist on
speaking the texts they write, we do more than sidestep the reduction of
Boccaccio’s poem to inert backdrop. In the space where letter and document,
nobleman and notary, rhetoric and archive, collide and collude with each
other, we can glimpse how municipal ideologies, social customs, local
histories, and literary conventions configured the qualities of fiction one
way in mid-fourteenth-century Florence and another way in late fourteenth-
century London.14
between “reine Sprache” and history, see Giorgio Agamben’s incisive essay, “Language and
History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamin’s Thought,” in Potentialities, edited
by and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 48–61. In
addition to Agamben, perhaps the most important contemporary meditation on the impli-
cations of Benjamin’s ideas is Jacques Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel.” See “Des Tours de
Babel,” trans. Joseph M. Graham, in Pschye: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, edited by Peggy
Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 191–225. See
also Paolo Bartoloni, “Benjamin, Agamben, and the Paradox of Translation,” CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture 6.2 (2004): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/
iss2/5>; Stephanie Waldow, Der Mythos der Reine Sprache: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer,
Hans Blumenberg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), esp. 65–74 and Berghard Balthrusch,
“Translation as Aesthetic Resistance: Paratranslating Walter Benjamin,” Cosmos and History:
The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 6 (2010): 113–29.
12
Agamben discusses Augustine’s elaboration of Varro’s distinction between two planes
of language, the level of names and the level of discourse that derives from it, in Potenti-
alities, 49–50. His reading does far more justice than de Man’s to both the theological and
the historical implications of Benjamin’s “pure speech.”
13
For a good overview of this work, see the “Introduction” by Emma Campbell and
Robert Mills in Rethinking Medieval Translation, edited by Emma Campbell and Robert
Mills (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012): 1–20. For medievalists, the essays gathered in the
now fifteen volumes of The Medieval Translator are indispensable. See as well the specific
works cited in the notes below.
14
I develop these ideas in “Troilus and Criseyde and the Continental Tradition,” in
Approaches to Teaching Troilus and Criseyde and The Shorter Poems, Modern Language
Association, edited by Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl (New York: MLA, 2007): 38–42.

Unlike the Troilus, of course, the Canterbury Tales does not have a
primary source. Nevertheless, I believe a Benjamin-inflected reading of
the work is appropriate, not because very few stories do not rework, to a
greater or lesser extent, a subtending text, but because so many events
and situations restage one another. The drunk Cook’s tumble from his
horse near the end of the journey does not simply repeat the Miller’s
drunken tottering on his near the beginning; it translates it. In the later
incident, the Manciple’s mockery and his Ovidian tale of transformation
open onto allegories of conversion and a sobering call for penance. In
the earlier, Theseus’s stoic embrace of chivalric virtue in the face of an
indifferent destiny runs headlong into the insubordinate parody of a
thrice-tolling Miller and his bawdy fabliau. Together the incidents echo
in opposing modes the way in which “ernest” translates “game,” “solas”
“sentence,” in each.
When the Reeve, to offer another example, demands that the Miller
“stynte thy clappe” (A 3144), his attempt to preempt Robyn’s “legend and
a lyf” (A 3141) reenacts Robyn’s own demand that he, not the Monk,
“quite” the Knight’s “noble storie.”15 The Miller, however, rebels against
Harry Bailly’s authority to ensure that he speaks next; the Reeve intervenes
to quash a tale before it is told. Each pilgrim interrupts to forestall
someone else from talking, but for reasons that translate one another.
In similar fashion, everything the Franklin says or does exhibits his
search for some form of extension that can elide loss or make a disruption
seem to disappear. In the “General Prologue,” his white beard, instead of
marking his age, is likened to a daisy, with all its overtones of sunrise and
springtime freshness. Before his prologue, this genial soul, who is Epicurus’s
“owne sone,” interrupts the Squire, so that he might show, by courteously
amending his discourtesy, that he and the Knight’s son are branches of
the same gentle tree; for him, “cutting in” is a synonym for “grafting on.” In
his tale, Apollo and Diana inhabit the same narrative space as the “Eterne
God” Dorigen prays to, who hardly differs from the Christian “deus
pantocrator;” Janus sits by the winter fire with his bugle horn of wine
while every lusty man cries “Nowel” (F 1252–5). For the Franklin, the new
age succeeds the old as seamlessly as one season or one generation runs into
the next; “gentilesse” is “gentilesse” whenever it is found. He tries to suture
the tear that he, or others, or time, or death, or revelation will have made
one way in the portrait, another way in the introduction, and a different way
in his tale.
15
Here and throughout, all quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer,
3rd rev. ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

I therefore propose to read these and other inner connections in the
poem as intralingual, Benjamin-like translations.16 By approaching them
this way, we can pay equal mind to the idea of the Tales and to its facticity.
We can treat the work as Donald Howard did, as complete but unfin-
ished;17 to Derek Pearsall’s suggestion that an edition should present the
text “partly as a bound book (with first and last fragments fixed) and partly
as a set of [moveable] fragments in folders,” I would respond “nihil
obstat.”18 The thematic or figurative affinities that relate tellers to tales,
or tales to tales, either within particular groupings or across them, do not
depend on their order. The horseback wobbles of the Miller and the Cook
are each the other’s source and translation. So too in the Merchant’s portrait,
prologue, tale, and epilogue, revision and reticence become modes of
meaning no matter the sequence in which we consider them. They all
pivot around a decision to close one’s eyes, or to try to close the eyes of
someone else, to something that has already been seen; in each someone
tries to unsay or dissociate himself from something that he has said.
As a consequence, in the following pages the pilgrims will have pos-
itional but not interpretive precedence over the tales they tell and the
scenes that precede and follow their recitals. The descriptions in the
“General Prologue” undoubtedly situate the wayfarers within the discursive
domain of the estate to which each more or less comfortably belongs.19
Once they accept Harry Bailly’s plan, however, they no longer are solely
the confection of qualities, predilections, quirks, actions, and opinions that
Chaucer depicted. Every pilgrim is a future fictor as well—the figure who
will author the performance of the tale she or he tells.20 From this point of
16
By adapting Benjamin’s theory to read the Tales as if they were an intralingual
translation, I am implicitly arguing that any language, but especially a language as thor-
oughly intermixed with French as Middle English was, can have more than one mode of
meaning, and that these modes can be revealed without appealing to the notion of
transcendental speech.
17
Donald Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1976).
18
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985):
p. 23. Ralph Hanna comments that in such a loose-leaf binder edition of the Tales, some of
the moveable pamphlets “would correspond only partially to the familiar fragments—some
would contain more than one of them, some much less than a whole one.” See Pursuing
History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996): p. 180.
19
The classic study remains, Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973).
20
The fictor, as A. J. Minnis says, was an “inventor, maker, or liar, to follow the
ubiquitous medieval etymology: the fables (fabulae) of the poets are named from fando,
because they are not true things (res factae) but only spoken fictions (loquendo fictae).”
A. J. Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 5.

view, their profiles become vitae, similar to the Occitan vidas or the
prefatory biographies in academic prologues.21 As such, the sketches,
which on first encounter seem definitional, in retrospect appear to be
half-finished and provisional; by the time they reach the Watering of
St. Thomas we have gained a sense of each speaker, but must wait to
hear what he will say, so that we can judge the reliability of our first
impression by gauging its congruence with the kind of story she tells and
the way in which she has told it.
In effect, Chaucer asks us to read his gallery of characters twice: once as
portraiture, a second time the way A. J. Minnis has read the Wife of Bath
and the Pardoner in Fallible Authors; that is, within the context of
contemporary debates about whether the sacraments and other priestly
offices were still efficacious if the man who administered them was
corrupt. If Chaucer wrote all the tales, as he says, “for oure doctrine,”
each recitation, even those he retracts because they “sownen into synne”
(I 1088), in some respect is a manner of preaching. Ultimately, the
standard against which he would have us measure their worth are the
articles of Christian faith. The means by which any one tale achieves its
consonance with them, however, aren’t exclusively doctrinal. They are
aesthetic as well. The Parson’s “meditacioun” on penance is impeccable.
But for Chaucer’s auditors, the authority it commands depends only in
part on the orthodoxy and pedigree of its content. Even before he urges
the pilgrims to cleanse their souls, we believe with Harry Bailly that the
Parson can “knytte up wel a greet mateere” (I 18) because we believe he
really is “a good man . . . of religioun” (A 477). Our confidence in him is
the fruit of our encounters with him; in every instance, when the Parson
appears, we see him put into practice what he preaches. But once he,
finally, has had the opportunity to preach at length, we realize that
Chaucer built his trustworthiness out of the same material from which
his tract constructed its truthfulness. We realize, that is to say, that his
sermon’s exhortation to interdict sin through contrition of heart, confes-
sion of mouth, and satisfaction of deed translates his reluctance to curse
for tithes, which we learn about in the “General Prologue,” his censure of
Harry’s swearing in the “Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale,” his related
yet different interdiction of fables in the “Prologue” to his own. As much
21
I think it makes more sense to liken the portraits to the vitae one finds in academic
prologues than to the prologues themselves. On the latter, see Andrew Galloway, “Middle
English Prologues,” in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English
Literature, edited by David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005): 288–305 and A. C. Spearing, “Textual Performance: Chaucerian Prologues
and the French Dit,” in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages, edited
by Marianne Brch (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004): 21–45.

as by its “sentence,” our faith in the Parson is vindicated by the way his
treatise fits him, by the way it converts the things he thinks should not be
said into the things that he thinks should be. And it is our faith in him,
before, during, and after his tale is done, that enables his summa to speak
to us with far greater power than those of Pennafort and Peraldus ever
could. Many have thought the Parson is the pilgrim through whom
Chaucer bids farewell to his poetry; if so, it is Chaucer’s poetry that
makes us feel he is the proper pilgrim to deliver the valediction.22 His
rejection of fiction in the name of “soothfastnesse” is at the same time one
of his maker’s most powerful affirmations of his fiction’s alliance with it.23
In this, the Parson, as Harry says, has “wordes for us alle” (I 67); his
appositeness reprises all the other instances in which tellers and tales seem
purposefully apposite. In these cases, Chaucer’s translations, I submit,
turn the Canterbury Tales into dramas of “fictorial” authorship, which we
piece together in accordance with two related premises: a certain kind of
person, the kind we meet in the “General Prologue,” will tell a certain kind
of tale; the value of a tale can be reinforced by or stand apart from the kind
of person who tells it.24 Because the links encourage readers to think of a
performance as a metaphor-like clustering of the component texts, by
which I mean, again, that they all share an idea that each expresses
differently, they are the passages in which we watch the pilgrims become
tellers. The prologues and epilogues personalize the portraits: the figures
Chaucer had described in “The General Prologue” reappear on the road to
Canterbury, where they speak and act for themselves. But the congruence
among the parts also circumscribes the pilgrims as inventors of their own
performances; the subjects they choose to talk about, and the way they
announce their choice, have been chosen to suit them. A pilgrim becomes
22
See, for instance, Lee Patterson, “The Parson’s Tale and the Quitting of the
Canterbury Tales,” Traditio 34 (1978): 331–80.
23
On the appropriateness of the tale to the Parson, see Judith Ferster, “Chaucer’s Parson
and the ‘Idiosyncracies of Fiction’,” in Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of The
Parson’s Tale, edited by David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000): 115–50. In the same volume,
Richard Newhauser discusses the “non-literariness” of the tale; he questions its suitability as
a conclusion to the work. See “The Parson’s Tale and Its Generic Affiliations,” 45–76. See
also Lee Patterson, “The “Parson’s Tale.” I agree with Ferster, though for different reasons.
I also agree with Newhauser and Patterson’s characterization of the tale, but disagree with
their assessment of the role it plays in Chaucer’s book. The tale is only one part of the
Parson’s Canterbury performance; Chaucer in fact seems to endorse the experiential value
of his fiction one last time when the Parson’s voice blends into his own in the “Retractions.”
24
Another way to say this would be to stress that my reading of the aesthetics of the
Tales is thoroughly rhetorical. I very much agree with Mary Carruthers’s similar reading of
the medieval idea of beauty. See The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages. Oxford-
Warburg Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

what I am calling a “fictor” when we carry over to his tale this double
correlation of character, speech, and action, which defines his makeup
more emphatically even as it transposes it a second time. The Pardoner is
the Pardoner Chaucer describes; he is that Pardoner, more so but other-
wise, when he speaks ‘in propria persona;’ he is those Pardoners, yet not
identical with either, when he tells his tale. He is the figure, stable and
shifting, that emerges when the narrated effictio in the “General Prologue”
is translated into the speaking subject of the links and the speaking subject
of the links becomes the purposive narrator of his sermon and
exemplum.25
In saying that performances in the Tales are structured like metaphors,
I am, of course, capitalizing on the fact that in the Latin West the term
that translated metaphor was translatio.26 Aristotle had explained, how-
ever, that the kind of “bringing across” a metaphor enacts is transgressive;
it transfers to one thing an attribute that properly belongs to something
else. Medieval translators were aware that in addition to this linguistic
trespass their texts would commit a comparable cultural infringement.27
No matter how much a vernacular rendering might defer to its Latin
source, its readers would inevitably grant it an authority that, if nothing
else, allowed it to take the place of that source.28 At the same time, by
pointing, directly or indirectly, to the ways in which they had domesticated
25
In many of the portraits in the “General Prologue,” the pilgrims seem to express their
own thoughts and opinions in indirect discourse; they already seem to be well on the way
toward becoming narrators. For an insightful analysis, see Thomas J. Farrell, “Hybrid
Discourse in the General Prologue Portraits,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008):
39–93. Carolyn Van Dyke argues that in Chaucer “any agent may appear, and even be,
simultaneously autonomous and determined.” See Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representa-
tion in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2005): p. 20. Chaucer translates the ratios of responsibility that tie the Miller and the Reeve
to what they “choose” to say by making his readers similarly answerable for whether they
will “turne over the leef” (A 3177). Our choice is as free and as constrained as the pilgrims’.
26
For a discussion of translatio as metaphor in medieval commentaries, see Margaret
Nims, “ ‘Translatio’: ‘Difficult Statement’ in Medieval Poetic Theory,” University of Toronto
Quarterly 43 (1974): 215–30. In “Western Metaphorical Discourses Implicit in Translation
Studies,” in Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, edited by James St. André
(Manchester, St. Jerome, 2010): 109–42, Maria Tymoczko reminds us that other cultures
used different terms to think about translation. Arabic tarjama, for instance, with an early
meaning of “biography,” suggests “that the role of the translator was . . . related to that of the
narrator.” The similarity to Chaucer’s practice in the Canterbury Tales is striking; I believe it
opens a new way to talk about the relation between his work and “oriental” frame tales.
27
Zrinka Stahuljak has called this infringement a “tension between power and know-
ledge.” See “An Epistemology of Tension: Translation and Multiculturalism,” The Trans-
lator (10: 2004): 33–57.
28
The fundamental study is Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in
the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). It is important to note, as
Nicholas Watson does, that “less aggressive accounts of relations between translations and
source texts predominate even at the end of the medieval period” in England. See “Theories

the foreignness of their originals, translators implicitly raised questions
about transferability, resistance, fidelity, and hospitability, which any ethical
consideration of cross-cultural appropriation must address.29 Present-day
theorists have in fact used the medieval equation of translatio and metaphor
to launch an ideological critique of current metaphors for translation.30 In
the Tales, the translations that give Chaucer’s aggregations the texture
of metaphors enabled him to foreground relations that are his version of
this critique: the construction and compatibility of personal and public
identity, the relations between men and women before and after marriage,
the negotiation of power and values between professions and classes,
and more.
In all this, then, the prologues and endlinks are pivotal, not only
because they are the passages in which the pilgrims become tellers, but
because they also are the passages in which the tales author the pilgrims: it
is in them that each becomes answerable for the story he tells by revealing
her motives for telling it. The Miller and the Reeve are churls, Chaucer
assures us, and both spoke “harlotrie” (A 3182). Base men do tell dirty
stories, we know, but the Miller’s, in which first one clerk, and then
another, works to push aside a husband in order to sleep with his wife,
becomes an index of his particular brand of baseness when we see him, in
his rush to mock the courtly refinements of the Knight’s lovers, first shove
aside Harry’s objections to him and then the Reeve’s objections to his
subject matter. Not to be outdone, Osewold out-churls the Miller; in his
“countretaille,” not only does John cuckold Symkyn by raping his wife,
Aleyn rapes his daughter. The fact that neither clerk acts out of desire
transforms them into inverted images of the Reeve, who still has a “coltes
tooth” (A 3888), even though his “olde lemes” (A 3886) lack the “myght”
to do what his “wyl desireth ” (A 3879–80). The fact that they violate the
of Translation,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English Vol. 1, edited by

Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 73–91, p. 75.
29
On the ethics of translation, see Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation:
Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998) and the essays in Nation,
Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Postcolonial studies have influenced recent
re-evaluations of the theory and practice of medieval translations: see, for example, Ruth
Evans, “Translating Past Cultures?” in The Medieval Translator 4, edited by Roger Ellis
and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994): 20–45. See also Simon
Gaunt’s more skeptical review essay, “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” Comparative
Literature 61 (2009): 160–76.
30
In “An Epistomology of Tension,” for instance, Stahuljak argues that medieval ideas
expose the power relations that current metaphors of translatability mask by creating the
impression that a global language has come into being that is neutral because it accommo-
dates all political, historical, and cultural contexts. See as well the essays in Thinking
Through Translation with Metaphors.

women in Symkyn’s house to avenge his humiliating theft makes their
villainy blood-brother to the Reeve’s. They justify their actions by appeal-
ing to the law of “esement” (A 4179): Symkyn stole their corn, they seize
hold of his “goods,” wife and daughter both. The Reeve, of course,
anticipates their twisted version of justice; whether or not Robyn intended
to shame him, he will retaliate by co-opting his “cherles termes,” since
“leveful is with force force of-showve” (A 3912). The Miller, he goes on, is
like the hypocrite in Luke who “kan wel in myn eye seen a stalke, / But in
his owene he kan nat seen a balke” (A 3919–20). Hypocrisy nicely describes
the meanness the Reeve exemplifies, but for Chaucer’s reader, the evangel-
ist’s next trope, which Osewold doesn’t quote, is even more pertinent than
the beams and motes that he does:
For there is no good tree that bringeth forth evil fruit; nor an evil tree that
bringeth forth good fruit. For every tree is known by its fruit. For men do not
gather figs from thorns; nor from a bramble bush do they gather the grape.
(6. 43–4).
Beyond inspiring the Reeve’s “open-ers,” leeks, mullock, and straw, the
apostle, who is patron saint of artists, here articulates a principle of
propinquity that Chaucer translated when he made Osewold’s envy and
spite harp and harpist in his prologue and tale.
Indeed, Chaucer’s links so entrench the idea that tellers and tales are in
dialogue with one another, we never leave off turning pilgrims into fictors.
No matter whether the “joly body” who objected that the Parson would
“springen cokkel in oure clene corne” (B1 1183) belongs to the Shipman,
the Squire, or the Summoner, as some manuscripts have it, or to the Wife
of Bath, as Lee Patterson has argued,31 or to no one at all, because Chaucer
cancelled the passage (neither Hengwrt nor Ellesmere contains the “Epi-
logue to The Man of Law’s Tale”), we favor one attribution and reject
another because we think the speaker would be the sort of person who
would challenge clerical authority in so alliteratively clergial a way. When
we call on history and philology to fill in spaces Chaucer left blank, we
continue to work within the boundaries that his linkages mark out.
I
In no other medieval gathering of stories, not even in the Decameron, do
we find connecting passages that create independent events which
31
Lee Patterson, Putting the Wife of Bath in her Place. The William Matthews Lectures
(London: Birkbeck College, 1995).

consistently reconfigure the preoccupations of the tales and the narrators
who tell them. That they do in Chaucer is, I think, in part the poet’s
response to the climate of his times.32 The London he lived in was a tri-
lingual city;33 for many of its citizens, translation not only was a habit of
mind, it had begun to underwrite the recognition of English as a political
and cultural language. The Treatise on the Astrolabe, for instance, begins
with a preface in which Chaucer tells his son, “litel” Lewis, that even
though the rules of English are “light” and its words “naked,” the conclu-
sions that he has set forth are no less true than they are in Greek, Arabic,
and Hebrew (50). If Lewis, despite the rudeness of the “endityng” and the
“superfluite of wordes,” will learn how to use the astrolabe from this tract
as well as he could have from any “commune tretys” in Latin, he will have
all the more reason to thank his father. Before he begins, then, he should
pray that God save the king, “that is lord of this langage” (56).
Chaucer’s special pleading for his native tongue—his defensiveness is
obvious—is hard to square with his confidence that what he says in
English is as authoritative as it would be in the languages of Scripture.
Some scholars have attributed the combination of incompatible attitudes
to the controversy provoked by the Wycliffite Bible; its “General Pro-
logue” similarly alternates between deference and assertion to justify the
translation of Holy Writ into the vernacular. But, as Ardis Butterfield has
argued, Chaucer wrote the Astrolabe during the Hundred Years War. By
naming Richard the lord of England’s language, he was making a state-
ment about what it meant to be English or French at a time when at court
and in Parliament, in law and in commerce, English and insular French
were spoken alongside one another. The words in either tongue were, as
Butterfield says, colored “by histories of meaning, speaking, and writing
that are both French and English, by a use of a French that is English as
well as French, that is both homely and foreign.”34 Chaucer’s debt to
32
One should note, however, the increasingly important role of vernacular translation
in Italy during the fourteenth century. See, for instance, Alison Cornish, Vernacular
Translation in Dante’s Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Kenneth
Clarke has argued that Filippo Ceffi’s “volgarizzamento” of the Heroides influenced Chau-
cer’s Legend of Good Women. See K. P. Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
33
See, for instance, William Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,”
Studies in the Ages of Chaucer 16 (1994): 45–67; Mary Catherine Davidson, Medievalism,
Multilingualism, and Chaucer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jonathan Hsy,
Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2013).
34
The Familiar Enemy: p. xxi. See also Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The
French of England c. 1100–1500, by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with Carolyn Collette,
Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter. York Medieval
Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2009). In the Tales, Chaucer consistently used words that his

Machaut, Gransoun, Froissart, Deschampes, de Meung, and de Lorris was
such that one could say the works he wrote were in French in English.35 In
Benjamin’s terms, two modes of meaning were in dialogue in his language,
each translating the other.
Chaucer also had the good fortune to live during an era when translation
enabled English to cloak itself with the authority of Latin learning. As
Nicholas Watson and others have shown, in the last decades of the
fourteenth century church officials had not yet moved decisively to silence
divinity speaking in the mother tongue. For a poet like Chaucer, who had
read Dante, Langland’s willingness to engage doctrinal debates could well
have made him think that Piers Plowman, despite its many differences, was
an English Comedy. A Wycliffite may have found some parts of the
Parson’s penitential translations more to his liking than others;36 both
its language and the prominence of its position in the Canterbury Tales
bear witness to the influence of the movement. But even the most radical
reformer may have thought Chaucer went too far when Chaunticleer first
transforms an anti-feminist tag into scriptural paraphrase and then renders
“in principio mulier est hominis confusio” as “Womman is mannes joye
and al his blis” (B2 3163–66). Certainly anyone as ready as Harry Bailly to
smell a Loller in the wind would have taken this instance of Bible-
adaptation, issuing no less from such a goose of a rooster, as proof of the
clumsiness and indecency of unlicensed laity meddling in Holy Writ.37
To the literary historian, though, this barnyard instance of co-opted
theology makes us realize both how close and how thankfully far Chaucer
was from the Oxford translation debates and Arundel’s constitutions.38
Still, in an age when, as Watson has said, “flowers, bishops, captured
peoples, and the relics of saints [were] all translat from garden to garden,
see to see, kingdom to kingdom, shrine to shrine; [when] the soul [was]
bilingual readers would have found familiar; see John H. Fisher, “Chaucer and the French
Influence,” in New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, edited by Donald M. Rose (Norman
Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981): 177–91.
35
At the same time, it is tempting to think that Chaucer’s increasingly extensive importing
of Italian works into his own, despite his readers’ unfamiliarity with them, was one way he
navigated the periodic ebb and rise in tension about France and French in England during the
last decades of the fourteenth century.
36
The Lollardry of the “Parson’s Tale” remains an open question. For a recent
assessment, see Frances McCormack, Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent. The Lollard
Context and Subtext of the Parson’s Tale (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).
37
The “Summoner’s Tale” offers another example. See Fiona Somerset, “ ‘As just as is a
Squyre’: The Politics of ‘Lewed Translacion’ in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Studies in the
Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 187–207.
38
I follow here Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval
England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitu-
tions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64.

translat to God in mystical rapture or at death, and learning, culture,
political power, and divine covenant [were] translat from east to west,
pagan to Christian, Old to New Testament,” the ecclesiastical disputes
may well have prompted Chaucer’s readers to think about translation in
and of itself.39 Certainly the adjectives both religious and secular trans-
lators used to characterize their activity—true, false, strange, clear, dark,
light, common, plain—show that they were concerned about their moral
liability for their work.40 But they clearly also felt a certain pride in
creating equivalents in English for the “grammatical, syntactic, rhetorical,
and argumentative structures” they had carried across from their source
texts.41 Two and a half centuries before Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes,
Layamon already had begun to think of the Brut (c.1205) as “an inde-
pendent composition, for which [he] takes primary responsibility and
credit.”42 In his preface, Layamon informs his readers that he drew on
three sources to compose his text, a book by Bede in English, one in Latin
by St. Austin and St. Albin (probably the Latin version of the Ecclesiastical
History), and Wace’s Roman de Brut:
Feþeren he nom mid fingren and fiede on boc-felle;
And the soþere word sette to-gadere.
And þa þre boc þrumde to are. (26–8)43
He took feathers in his fingers and applied them to parchment (book-skins)
and set down together the truer words together and compressed those three
books into one.
39
Watson, “Theories of Translation,” p. 76. In late fourteenth-century England, as
John Trevisa’s “Dialogue Between the Lord and the Clerk” shows, translation was as
much a social as a theological issue. On the role patrons played in sponsoring translations,
see Roger Ellis, “Patronage and Sponsorship of Translation,” in The Oxford History of
Literary Translation: 98–115.
40
Watson, “Theories of Translation,” p. 75.
41
Watson, “Theories of Translation,” p. 76.
42
Watson, “Theories of Translation,” p. 85 quotes Lydgate’s endorsement of Laurent
de Premierfait’s comparison of himself as translator to a craftsman:
In his prologe affermyng off resoun,
Artificers hauyng exercise
May chaunge and turne bi good discrecioun
Shappis, formys, and newli hem deuyse,
Make and vnmake in many sondry wyse,
As potteres, which to that craft entende,
Breke and renew ther vesselis to amende. (I 8–14)
43
I quote from Layamon’s Brut (British Museum Ms. Cotton Caligula A.IX) Corpus of
Middle English Prose and Verse <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/LayCal/1:1?rgn=div1;
view=toc>. The translation is by John A Burrow, Medieval English Writers and their
Work: Middle English Literature 1100–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008):
p. 29.

Closer to Chaucer’s day, Nicholas Love, in The Mirror of the Blessed Life of
Christ (1410), similarly announces that he has cut, reordered, reworked,
and supplemented his source, the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vita
Christi. In his “Proheme,” he alerts his audience that there will be “more
putte to in certeyn partes & [also] withdrawyng of diuerse auctoritis [and]
maters as it semeþ to þe wryter hereof moste spedefull” (10. 19–22).44
Unlike Layamon, though, Love simultaneously let his reader know the
order and content of his exemplars; he included a series of notes in Latin in
which he identifies the chapters he excised or the material he had trans-
posed in his own arrangement. Love comes close to imagining the kind of
bifocal reading Benjaminian translation assumes, though more likely than
not it was anticipation of the censor’s eye that led him to make his
redactions explicit. Love submitted the Mirror to Arundel; he no doubt
expected it would be checked against its originals. Nevertheless, his stance
as translator, bold interventionist one moment, faithful transmitter the
next, makes him, as we shall see, an editorial ally of Chaucer’s Clerk.
As an intralingual translation, John Capgrave’s The Life of St. Katharine
of Alexandria (c.1445) merits special notice. In five books of rhyme royal
stanzas, perhaps in homage to the Troilus, Capgrave renders “more
openly” the “derk langage” of a priest from the parish of St. Pancras
who had translated into English a Latin life of St. Katherine, itself a
translation of Athanasius’s Greek original.45 Capgrave’s terms echo those
in the definition of “best translating” in the General Prologue to the Late
Version of the Wycliffite Bible: “to translate aftir the sentence and not
oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sentence be as opin either openere in
English as in Latyn, and go not fer fro the lettre.”46 In undertaking to
open the “cage” (Prol. 210) in which the “staungenesse” (Prol. 62) of the
priest’s “dark” dialect had confined Katherine’s life, Capgrave shows that
by the mid-fifteenth century an English text could be thought as proper an
object for translation into English as one in Latin or French.
Although Chaucer’s use of links to translate his pilgrims into tale-tellers
was new, I therefore think the way he had coordinated the pilgrimage to
Canterbury would not have seemed outlandish to the circles he wrote for.
The distance is short from Capgrave’s Life to the idea that a work can
internally translate itself, and that if it does, it would generate relationships
that exhibit the tensions and open the productive possibilities of
44
Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed.
and trans Michael Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005).
45
John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo,
Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999): Prologue, 62–4.
46
Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Michigan:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1996): 6. 245–7.

interlingual translations. Indeed, Michelle Warren has urged us to see
Middle English renderings of French or Latin texts as:
the monolingual product of specifically multilingual alliances. These
relations emerge from various occasions and motivations, including class
consciousness, political persuasion, theological dispute, cultural rivalry,
and personal admiration. In each case, translation offers an opportunity
to redefine audiences, social relations, historical inheritance . . .
The critic who would describe these alliances and opportunities, she
continues, will engage a broad range of issues: “domination and resistance,
geographical and regional sites, ethnic and national identity, class and
inter-cultural relations, gender and status constructions, linguistic and
aesthetic values.”47 These are precisely the issues, I submit, that the
alignments of the Canterbury Tales stage and stage again.
II
Chaucer, of course, also found Benjamin-like intralingual translations in
some of his favorite authors. In my opening chapter, I examine two Italian
examples. The first is Daphne’s transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses;
the nymph, whose name is Greek for laurel, becomes Latin laurus, the tree
Apollo makes his own after he fails to seize her. The second is Statius’s
conversion in the Purgatorio, which he dates to his misreading a line from
the Aeneid: Vergil had written “to what, o cursed hunger for gold, do you
not drive the hearts of men,” but in Dante Stazio says, in Italian, “why do
you not rule the hearts of men, o sacred hunger for gold.” In each episode,
translation is a mode that crystalizes the thrust and bias of its author’s
imaginative art. In Ovid it performs the meaning of metamorphosis; in
Dante, it performs the meaning of conversion. Daphne’s transformation,
however, is itself a translation of Lycaon’s metamorphosis into a wolf;
Dante likewise recasts Statius’s encounter with Vergil when, soon after,
he meets Bonagiunta of Lucca and reveals the inner promptings that
translate him into the kind of poet he is. With these self-reconfigurations,
translation becomes not just an event in their poems but a principle
of their composition; they provided an example Chaucer perhaps remem-
bered when he decided he would link events across his narrative. In fact
I argue that Chaucer’s greatest translator, Chaunticleer, splices together
47
Michelle Warren, “Translation,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Lit-
erature: Middle English, Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 51–67;
p. 52.

these forms of reenactment in the climactic moment of the “Nun’s
Priest’s Tale.”
The first chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Prologue to the
Miller’s Tale,” which I present as a translation of the great disquisition
on love that Dante placed in the central cantos of the Comedy.
Chapter Two begins by briefly returning to the Miller’s “Prologue;” here
I examine it in relation to the incident from the Tales it rehearses, the
drawing of straws that obligates the Knight to tell the first tale on the road
to Canterbury. The story the Knight goes on to relate is a thorough
reworking of Boccaccio’s Teseida, which itself, I argue, translates and is
translated by his Filostrato. After analyzing Boccaccio’s poem, I suggest
that Chaucer’s most Benjamin-like rendering of it is not the romance he
wrote but the character of the pilgrim who tells it.
In both these chapters, I treat Ovid, Dante, and Boccaccio as models,
not as sources. In the Metamorphoses, Chaucer discovered a “lateral” and
ambiguous form of translation, which operates as a correlative of an
open-ended, fluid stream of existential change on one hand but as an
instrument of appropriation on the other. In the Comedy, he found a
“vertical” form of translation, illustrated by an act of salvific misrendering,
through which Dante revised Vergil and Statius, both as texts and as
poets, and integrated them into his vision. In the Filostrato and Teseida
Chaucer saw a narrating author translate himself into his tale and
the characters in it, at once echoing classical counterparts and altering
them.
What these works model, then, is an idea of translation that describes
not only a practice but also a logic for organizing a text when one part says
what another says but says it differently. Chaucer peppers the Tales, for
instance, with interruptions; in each case, a pilgrim tries to stop someone
else from talking. In my third chapter, I propose that interdiction, a
“speaking between” that uses speech to cut off speech, becomes a mode
of meaning in the work; the mode it translates and is translated by is
confession. Confession also involves interdiction, but the colloquy it
promotes between sinner and priest culminates in penance, which asks a
person to interrupt himself. After examining the links that connect the
Manciple, the Parson, and Chaucer’s “Retractions,” I concentrate on the
Franklin who, as an Epicurean, would have believed that the soul dies
with the body. Beginning with his interruption of the Squire, everything
the Franklin says or does, as I said earlier, is an expression of his quest for
some form of extension that elides loss or makes a disruption seem to
disappear. I also compare the different forms of interdiction in the
“question of love” that Menedon proposes in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, which
is the closest analogue to the tale the Franklin tells.
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CHAPTER XXV
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION
Betty was whipping mayonnaise in the kitchen when a voice hailed

the Diamond Bar K ranch in general.
“Hello the house!”
Through the window she saw a rider on a horse, and a moment later
her brain localized him as a neighborhood boy who had recently
joined the forest rangers. She went to the door, sleeves still rolled
back to the elbows of the firm satiny arms.
“Hoo-hoo!” she called, flinging a small hand wildly above her head in
greeting. “Hoo-hoo, Billy boy!”
He turned, caught sight of her, and at once began to smile. It was
noticeable that when Betty laughed, as she frequently did for no
good reason at all except a general state of well-being, others were
likely to join in her happiness.
“Oh, there you are,” he said, and at once descended.
“Umpha! Here I am, but I won’t be long. I’m making salad dressing.
Come in to the kitchen if you like. I’ll give you a cookie. Just out o’
the oven.”
“Listens good to Billy,” he said, and stayed not on the order of his
coming.
She found him a plate of cookies and a stool. “Sit there. And tell me
what’s new in the hills. Did you pass the dam as you came down?
And what d’you know about the tunnel?”
The ranger stopped a cookie halfway to his mouth. “Say, that fellow
—the one drivin’ the tunnel—he’s been shot.”
“What!”
“Last night—at Don Black’s cabin.”
A cold hand laid itself on her heart and stopped its beating. “You
mean—on purpose?”
He nodded. “Shot through the window at dark.”
“Mr. Hollister—that who you mean?”
“Yep. That’s what he calls himself now. Jones it was at first.”
“Is he—hurt badly?”
“I’ll say so. In the side—internal injuries. Outa his head when I was
there this mo’ning.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He ain’t seen him yet. On the way up now. I ’phoned down from
Meagher’s ranch. He’d ought to pass here soon.”
“But why didn’t they get the doctor sooner? What were they thinking
about?” she cried.
“Nobody with him but Don Black. He couldn’t leave him alone, he
claims. Lucky I dropped in when I did.”
Impulsively Betty made up her mind. “I’m going to him. You’ll have to
take me, Billy.”
“You!” exclaimed the ranger. “What’s the big idea, Betty?”
“Dad’s gone to Denver to the stock show. I’m going to look after him.
That’s what Dad would want if he were here. Some one’s got to
nurse him. What other woman can go in on snowshoes and do it?”
“Does he have to have a woman nurse? Can’t Mr. Merrick send a
man up there to look after him?”
“Don’t argue, Billy boy,” she told him. “You see how it is. They don’t
even get a doctor to him for fifteen or sixteen hours. By this time he
may be—” She stopped and bit her lip to check a sudden swell of
emotion that choked up her throat.
Bridget came into the kitchen. Betty’s announcement was both a
decision and an appeal. “Mr. Hollister’s been hurt—shot—up in the
hills. I’m going up to Justin to make him take me to him.”
“Is he hur-rt bad?” asked the buxom housekeeper.
“Yes. I don’t know. Billy thinks so. If I hurry I can get there before
night.”
Bridget hesitated. “I was thinkin’ it might be better for me to go,
dearie. You know how folks talk.”
“Oh, talk!” Betty was explosively impatient. She always was when
anybody interfered with one of her enthusiasms. “Of course, if you
could go. But you’d never get in through the snow. And what could
they say—except that I went to save a man’s life if I could?”
“Mr. Merrick might not like it.”
“Of course he’d like it.” The girl was nobly indignant for her fiancé.
“Why wouldn’t he like it? It’s just what he’d want me to do.” Under
the brown bloom of her cheeks was the peach glow of excitement.
Bridget had traveled some distance on the journey of life, and she
had her own opinion about that. Merrick, if she guessed him at all
correctly, was a possessive man. He could appreciate Betty’s valiant
eagerness when it went out to him, but he would be likely to resent
her generous giving of herself to another. He did not belong to the
type of lover that recognizes the right of a sweetheart or a wife to
express herself in her own way. She was pledged to him. Her
vocation and avocation in life were to be his wife.
But Bridget was wise in her generation. She knew that Betty was of
the temperament that had to learn from experience. She asked how
they would travel to the dam.
“On horseback—if we can get through. The road’s not broken yet
probably after yesterday’s storm. We’ll start right away. I can’t get
Justin on the ’phone. The wire must be down.”
The ranger saddled for her and they took the road. Betty carried with
her a small emergency kit of medical supplies.
Travel back and forth had broken the road in the valley. It was not
until the riders struck the hill trail that they had to buck drifts. It was
slow, wearing work, and, by the time they came in sight of the dam,
Betty’s watch told her that it was two o’clock.
Merrick saw them coming down the long white slope and wondered
what travelers had business urgent enough to bring them through
heavy drifts to the isolated camp. As soon as he recognized Betty,
he went to meet her. Billy rode on down to the tents. He knew when
he was not needed.
Rich color glowed in her cheeks, excitement sparkled in her eyes.
“What in the world are you doing here?” Merrick asked.
She was the least bit dashed by his manner. It suggested censure,
implied that her adventure—whatever the cause of it—was a bit of
headstrong folly. Did he think it was a girl’s place to stay at home in
weather like this? Did he think that she was unmaidenly, had bucked
miles of snowdrifts because she could not stay away from him?
“Have you heard about Mr. Hollister? He’s been hurt—shot.”
“Shot?”
“Last night. At Black’s cabin.”
“Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. He’s pretty bad, Billy says.”
“Doctor seen him yet?”
“He’s on the way now. I want you to take me to him, Justin.”
“Take you? What for?”
“To nurse him.”
He smiled, the superior smile of one prepared to argue away the
foolish fancies of a girl.
“Is your father home yet?”
“No. He’ll be back to-morrow. Why?”
“Because, dear girl, you can’t go farther. In the first place, it’s not
necessary. I’ll do all that can be done for Hollister. The trip from here
won’t be a picnic.”
“I’ve brought my skis. I can get in all right,” she protested eagerly.
“I grant that. But there’s no need for you to go. You’d far better not.
It’s not quite—” He stopped in mid-sentence, with an expressive lift
of the shoulders.
“Not quite proper. I didn’t expect you to say that, Justin,” she
reproached. “After what he did for us.”
“He did only what any self-respecting man would do.”
Her smile coaxed him. “Well, I want to do only what any self-
respecting woman would do. Surely it’ll be all right if you go along.”
How could he tell her that he knew no other unmarried woman of her
age, outside of professional nurses, who would consider such a thing
for the sake of a comparative stranger? How could he make her see
that Black’s cabin was no place for a young girl to stay? He was
exasperated at her persistence. It offended his amour propre. Why
all this discussion about one of his employees who had been a tramp
only a few months since?
Merrick shook his head. His lips smiled, but there was no smile in his
eyes. “You’re a very impulsive and very generous young woman. But
if you were a little older you would see—”
She broke impatiently into his argument. “Don’t you see how I feel,
Justin? I’ve got to do what I can for him. We’re not in a city where we
can ring up for a trained nurse. I’m the only available woman that
can get in to him. Why did I take my Red Cross training if I’m not to
help those who are sick?”
“Can’t you trust me to look out for him?”
“Of course I can. That’s not the point. There’s so much in nursing.
Any doctor will tell you so. Maybe he needs expert care. I really can
nurse. I’ve done it all my life.”
“You don’t expect to nurse everybody in the county that falls sick, do
you? Don’t you see, dear girl, that Black’s shack is no place for
you?”
“Why isn’t it? I’m a ranchman’s daughter. It doesn’t shock or offend
me to see things that might distress a city girl.” She cast about in her
mind for another way to put it. “I remember my mother leaving us
once for days to look after a homesteader who had been hurt ’way
up on Rabbit Ear Creek. Why, that’s what all the women on the
frontier did.”
“The frontier days are past,” he said. “And that’s beside the point,
anyhow. I’ll have him well looked after. You needn’t worry about
that.”
“But I would,” she urged. “I’d worry a lot. I want to go myself, Justin—
to make sure it’s all right and that everything’s being done for him
that can be. You think it’s just foolishness in me, but it isn’t.”
She put her hand shyly on his sleeve. The gesture was an appeal for
understanding of the impulse that was urgent in her. If he could only
sympathize with it and acknowledge its obligation.
“I think it’s neither necessary nor wise. It’s my duty, not yours, to
have him nursed properly. I’ll not shirk it.” He spoke with the finality
of a dominant man who has made up his mind.
Betty felt thrown back on herself. She was disappointed in him and
her feelings were hurt. Why must he be so obtuse, so correct and
formal? Why couldn’t he see that she had to go? After all, a decision
as to what course she would follow lay with her and not with him. He
had no right to assume otherwise. She was determined to go,
anyhow, but she would not quarrel with him.
“When are you going up to Black’s?” she asked.
“At once.”
“Do take me, please.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t best, dear girl.”
In her heart flamed smokily rebellious fires. “Then I’ll go with Billy.”
He interpreted the words as a challenge. Their eyes met in a long,
steady look. Each measured the strength of the other. It was the first
time they had come into open conflict.
“I wouldn’t do that, Betty,” he said quietly.
“You don’t know how I feel about it. You won’t understand.” Her voice
shook with emotion. “I’ve got to go.”
Merrick knew that he could prevent the ranger from guiding Betty to
the gulch where the wounded man was, but it was possible to pay
too great a price for victory. He yielded, grudgingly.
“I’ll take you. After you’ve seen Hollister, you can give us directions
for nursing him. I should think the doctor ought to know, but, if you
haven’t confidence in him, you can see to it yourself.”
Betty found no pleasure now in her desire to help. Justin’s opposition
had taken all the joy out of it. Nor did his surrender give her any
gratification. He had not yielded because he appreciated the validity
of her purpose, but because he had chosen to avoid an open
breach. She felt a thousand miles away from him in spirit.
“Thank you,” she said formally, choking down a lump in her throat.
CHAPTER XXVI
BLACK IS SURPRISED
It is not in youth to be long cast down for the troubles of a stranger,

even one who has very greatly engaged the sympathy. In spite of
Betty’s anxiety about the wounded man, her resilient spirits had sent
her eagerly upon this adventure.
She would see Justin. He would approve her plans with enthusiasm.
Together they would ski across the white wastes, they two alone in a
vast world of mysterious stillness. The thin clear air of the high
Rockies would carry their resonant voices like the chimes of bells.
Silences would be significant, laughter the symbol of happy
comradeship. For the first time they would come glowing through
difficulties, perhaps dangers, conquered side by side. And at the end
of the journey waited for them service, that which gave their joyous
enterprise the value of an obligation.
And it was not at all like that—not a bit as she had day-dreamed it on
the ride to Sweetwater Dam. The joy was struck dead in her heart.
Miserably she realized that Justin could not understand. The ardent
fire that burned in her soul seemed only mushy sentiment to him, on
a par with the hysteria that made silly women send flowers to brutal
murderers they did not know.
The bars were up between them. The hard look in his eyes meant
anger. There would be no expression of it in temper. He was too self-
contained for that. None the less it was anger. The reflection of it
gleamed out from under her own dark lashes. She told herself she
hated the narrowness in him that made him hold so rigidly to the
well-ordered, the conventional thing. Why couldn’t he see that there
was an imperative on her to live? Well, she would show him.
Probably he thought that in every clash of will she ought to yield. He
could learn his lesson just as well now as later.
She held her head high, but there was a leaden weight in her bosom
that made her want to sob.
Often she had been proud of his tremendous driving power, the force
that made of him a sixty-horse-power man. She resented it fiercely
to-day. He was traveling just a little too fast for her, so that she could
hardly keep up with him. But she would have fallen in her tracks
rather than ask him to go slower.
Once the slither of his runners stopped. “Am I going too fast?” he
asked coldly.
“Not at all,” she answered stubbornly.
He struck out again. They were climbing a long slope that ended in a
fringe of timber. At the top he waited, watching her as she labored up
heavily. The look he gave her when she reached him said, “I told you
so.”
Before them lay a valley, beyond which was another crest of pines.
“How far now?” Betty asked, panting from the climb.
“Just beyond that ridge.”
“That all?” she said indifferently. “Thought it was a long way.”
“We’ll coast into the valley,” he replied curtly.
She watched him gliding into the dip of the slope. He was not an
expert on runners as her father was, but he had learned the trick of
the thing pretty well. It was in line with his thoroughness not to be a
novice long at anything he set out to master.
Betty shot down after him, gathering impetus as she went. She was
watching the path ahead, and it was not till she was close upon him
that she saw Merrick had fallen. She swerved to the left, flinging out
her arms to prevent herself from going down. Unsteadily she
teetered for a moment, but righted herself with an effort and kept
going till she reached the bottom.
Merrick was on his feet when she turned.
“Anything wrong?” she called.
“One of my skis broken.”
She went back to him. “How did it happen?”
“Dipped into a rock under the snow.” His voice was sullen. Like many
men who do well whatever they undertake, he resented any mishap
due to lack of his own skill. His sense of superiority would have been
satisfied if the accident had befallen her instead of him.
Betty did not smile, but, nevertheless, she was maliciously pleased.
It would bring him down a peg, anyhow.
“What’ll you do?” she asked.
“I suppose I can hobble along somehow. Perhaps I’d better take your
skis and hurry on. I could borrow a pair at the cabin and come back
for you. Yes, I think that would be better.”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll go on and send Mr. Black with a pair.
I’d rather not wait here in the cold. I’ll not be long. You can keep
moving.”
This did not suit Merrick at all. He did not want to be regarded as an
incompetent who had bogged down in the snow. It hurt his pride that
Betty should go on and send back help to him, especially when they
felt criss-cross toward each other.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “You don’t know who is at the cabin.
That tramp Cig may be there—or Prowers. They’re dangerous, both
of them. Yesterday they tried to blow up the men working on the
tunnel.”
“You can lend me your revolver, then, if you like. But I’m not afraid.
Mr. Black wouldn’t let them hurt me even if they wanted to.”
“It’s not very cold. I’d be back in a little while. And, as you say, you
could keep moving.”
“No, I’m going on,” she answered, and her quiet voice told him she
had made up her mind.
He unbuckled his belt and handed it to her. “You’ll be safer with that
.38,” he said. What he thought is not of record.
“Thanks.” Betty’s little smile, with its hint of sarcasm, suggested that
there was not the least need of the revolver; if she wore it, the only
reason was to humor his vanity and let him feel that he was
protecting her.
She crossed the valley and climbed the ridge. From the farther side
of it she looked down upon a log cabin of two rooms, a small stable,
and a corral. They nestled in a draw at her feet, so close that a man
could have thrown a stone almost to the fence. The hillside was
rough with stones. With Justin’s mishap in mind, she felt her way
down carefully.
Smoke poured out of the chimney and polluted the pure light air. No
need of seeing the fire inside to know that the wood was resinous fir.
Betty knocked on the door.
It opened. Black stood on the threshold looking down at her in
ludicrous amazement. She had taken off her coat and was carrying
it. Against a background of white she bloomed vivid as a poinsettia in
her old-rose sweater and jaunty tam. The cold crisp air had whipped
the scarlet into her lips, the pink into her cheeks.
“What in—Mexico!” he exclaimed.
“How’s Mr. Hollister?”
“A mighty sick man. Howcome you here, miss?”
The sound of a querulous voice came from within. “Tell you I don’t
want the stuff. How many times I got to say it?”
“I’ve come to nurse him. Billy brought us word. Father wasn’t home
—nor Lon. So Mr. Merrick brought me.”
“Merrick,” he repeated.
“He’s over the hill, a ways back. Broke a ski. He’d like you to take
him a pair. I’ll look after Mr. Hollister.”
As she followed the lank range rider into the cabin, she pulled off her
gauntlets. Her cold fingers fumbled with the ski ties.
“Lemme do that,” Black said, and dropped on a knee to help.
“I guess you can do it quicker.” She looked at the patient and let her
voice fall as she asked a question. “Is he delirious?”
“Crazy as a hydryphoby skunk.” He repeated what he had said
before. “A mighty sick man, looks like.”
Betty looked into the hot, fevered face of the man tossing on the bed.
From her medicine kit she took a thermometer. His fever was high.
She prepared medicine and coaxed him to swallow it.
“Where is he wounded?” she asked.
“In the side.”
“Did you wash out the wound and bind it up?”
“Yes’m. I’ve took care of fellows shot up before.”
“Bleed much?”
“Right smart. Did you hear when Doc Rayburn was comin’?”
“He’s on the way.” She found cold water and bathed the burning
face.
“Wisht he’d hustle along,” the range rider said uneasily.
“He won’t be long.” With a flare of anger she turned on Black. “Who
shot him?”
“I dunno. He was shot through the window whilst he was ondressin’
for bed. We come together from the old Thorwaldson cabin a while
before.”
“Did that Cig do it?”
“Might have, at that.” Black was putting on his webs. “Reckon I’ll drift
back an’ pick up yore friend Merrick.”
“Yes,” she said absently. “It was that tramp Cig or Jake Prowers,
one.”
“Yore guess is as good as mine,” he said, buttoning to the neck a
leather coat.
“Can’t we have more light in here? It’s dark. If you’d draw back that
window curtain—”
“Then Mr. Bushwhacker would get a chanct for another shot,” he
said dryly. “No, I reckon we’ll leave the curtain where it’s at.”
Her big startled eyes held fascinated to his. “You don’t think they’d
shoot him again now.”
“Mebbeso. My notion is better not give ’em a show to get at him. You
keep the door closed. I’ll not be long. I see you got a gun.”
There was something significant in the way he said it. Her heart
began to beat fast.
“You don’t think—?”
“No, I don’t. If I did, I’d stay right here. Not a chanct in a hundred.
How far back’s yore friend?”
“Less than a mile.”
“Well, he’s likely been movin’ right along. When I reach the ridge, I’ll
give him the high sign an’ leave the skis stickin’ up in the snow
there.”
“Yes.” And, as he was leaving, “Don’t be long,” she begged.
“Don’t you be scared, miss. Them sidewinders don’t come out in the
open an’ do their wolf-killin’. An’ I won’t be gone but a li’l’ while. If
anything worries you, bang away with that .38 an’ I’ll come a-
runnin’.”
He closed the door after him. From behind the curtain she watched
him begin the ascent. Then she went back to her patient and bathed
his hot hands. Betty echoed the wish of the range rider that the
doctor would come. What could be keeping him? From the Diamond
Bar K ranch to Wild Horse was only a few miles. He must have
started before she did. It would not be long now.
In spite of a two days’ growth of beard, the young fellow on the bed
looked very boyish. She gently brushed back the curls matted on the
damp forehead. He was rambling again in desultory speech.
“A cup o’ cold water—cold lemonade. Happy days, she says. No
trouble friendship won’t lighten, she says, with that game smile
lighting up her face. Little thoroughbred.”
A warm wave of exultant emotion beat through her blood. It reached
her face in a glow of delicate beauty that transformed her.
“You dear boy!” she cried softly, and her eyes were shining stars of
tender light.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE MAN WITH THE BLEACHED BLUE EYES
There was not much she could do for him except bathe again his
face and hands. He asked for a drink, and Betty propped him up with
her arm while she held the tin cup to his lips. Exhausted by the effort,
he sank back to the pillow and panted. All the supple strength of his
splendid youth had been drained from him. The muscles were lax,
the movements of the body feeble.
Sunken eyes stared at her without recognition. “Sure I’ll take your
hand, and say ‘Thank you’ too. You’re the best little scout, the best
ever.”
She took the offered hand and pressed it gently. “Yes, but now you
must rest. You’ve been sick.”
“A Boche got me.” His wandering subconscious thoughts flowed into
other memories. “Zero hour, boys. Over the top and give ’em hell.”
Then, without any apparent break from one theme to another, his
thick voice fell to a cunning whisper. “There’s a joint on South Clark
Street where I can get it.”
Into his disjointed mutterings her name came at times, spoken
always with a respect that was almost reverence. And perhaps a
moment later his voice would ring out clear and crisp in directions to
the men working under him. Subjects merged into each other
inconsequently—long-forgotten episodes of school days, college
larks, murmured endearments to the mother who had died many
years since. Listening to him, Betty knew that she was hearing
revelations of a soul masculine but essentially clean.
A sound startled her, the click of the latch. She turned her head
swiftly as the door opened. Fear drenched her heart. The man on the
threshold was Prowers. He had come out of a strong white light and
at first could see nothing in the dark cabin.
Betty watched him as he stood there, his bleached blue eyes
blinking while they adjusted themselves to another focus.
“What do you want?” she asked sharply, the accent of alarm in her
voice.
“A woman, by jiminy by jinks!” The surprise in his squeaky voice was
pronounced. He moved forward to the bed. “Clint Reed’s girl. Where
you come from? How’d you get here?”
She had drawn back to the wall at the head of the bed in order to
keep a space between them. Her heart was racing furiously. His cold
eyes, with the knife-edge stab in them, held hers fast.
“I came in over the snow to nurse him.”
“Alone?”
“No. Mr. Merrick’s with me.”
“Where?”
“At the top of the hill. He broke a ski.”
“Where’s Don?”
“Gone to meet him. They’ll be here in a minute.”
A cunning, impish grin broke the lines of the man’s leathery face. He
remembered that he had come prepared to be surprised to hear of
Hollister’s wound. “Nurse who?” he asked suavely.
“Mr. Hollister, the engineer driving the tunnel.”
“Sick, is he?” He scarcely took the trouble to veil his rancorous
malice. It rode him, voice, manner, and mocking eye. His mouth was
a thin straight line, horribly cruel.
“Some one shot him—last night—through the window.” She knew
now that he had done it or had had it done. The sense of outrage, of
horror at his unhuman callousness, drove the fear out of her bosom.
Her eyes accused him, though her tongue made no charge.
“Shot him, by jiminy by jinks! Why, Daniels had ought to put the
fellow in the calaboose. Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Do you?” she flashed back.
His evil grin derided her. “How would I know, my dear?”
He drew up a chair and sat down. The girl did not move. Rigid and
watchful, she did not let her eye waver from him for an instant.
He nodded toward the delirious man. “Will he make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doc seen him yet?”
“No.”
“Glad I came. I can help nurse him.” He cut short a high cackle of
laughter to ask a question. “What’s yore gun for, dearie? You
wouldn’t throw it on poor Jake Prowers, would you?”
He was as deadly as dynamite, she thought, more treacherous than
a rattlesnake. She wanted to cry out her horror at him. To see him
sitting there, humped up like a spider, not three feet from the man he
had tried to murder, filled her with repulsion. There was more in her
feeling than that; a growing paralysis of terror lest he might reach out
and in a flash complete the homicide he had attempted.
She tried to reason this away. He dared not do it, with her here as a
witness, with two men drawing closer every minute. Don Black had
told her that he wouldn’t strike in the open, and the range rider had
known him more years than she had lived. But the doubt remained.
She did not know what he would do. Since she did not live in the
same world as he, it was not possible for her to follow his thought
processes.
Then, with no previous intimation that his delirium had dropped from
him, the wounded man startled Betty by asking a rational question.
“Did you come to see how good a job you’d done?” he said quietly to
Prowers.
The cowman shook his head, still with the Satanic grin. “No job of
mine, son. I’m thorough.”
“Your orders, but maybe not your hand,” Hollister insisted feebly.
Betty moved into his line of vision, and to his startled brain the
motion of her was like sweet unearthly music. He looked silently at
her for a long moment.
“Am I still out of my head?” he asked. “It’s not really you, is it?”
“Yes,” she said, very gently. “You mustn’t talk.”
“In Black’s cabin, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Shot through the window, Black told me. Remember, if I don’t get
well, it was this man or Cig that did it.”
“I’ll remember,” she promised. “But you’re going to get well. Don’t
talk, please.”
“Just one thing. What are you doing here?”
“I came to look after you. Now that’s all—please.”
He said no more, in words. But the eyes of sick men are like those of
children. They tell the truth. From them is stripped the veil woven by
time and the complexities of life.
Sounds of voices on the hillside drifted to the cabin. Betty’s heart
leaped joyfully. Friends were at hand. It was too late now for Prowers
to do any harm even if it was in his mind.
The voices approached the cabin. The girl recognized that of
Merrick, strong and dominant and just a little heavy. She heard
Black’s drawling answer, without being able to distinguish the words.
The door opened. Four men came into the room. The two who
brought up the rear were Dr. Rayburn and Lon Forbes.
“Oh, Lon!” Betty cried, and went to him with a rush. “I’m awf’ly glad
you came.”
She clung to him, trembling, a sob in her throat.
The rawboned foreman patted her shoulder with a touch of
embarrassment. “There—there, honey, ’s all right. Why didn’t you
wait for old Lon instead o’ hoppin’ away like you done?”
Prowers tilted back his chair on two legs and chirped up with satiric
comment. “We got quite a nice party present. Any late arrivals not
yet heard from?”
Both Lon and Justin Merrick were taken aback. In the darkness they
had not yet recognized the little man.
The foreman spoke dryly. “Might ’a’ known it. Trouble and Jake
Prowers hunt in couples. Always did.”
“I could get a right good testimonial from Mr. Lon Forbes,” the
cowman said, with his high cackle of splenetic laughter. “Good old
Lon, downright an’ four-square, always a booster for me.”
Betty whispered. “He’s an awful man, Lon. I’m scared of him. I didn’t
know any minute what he was going to do. Oh, I am glad you came.”
“Same here,” Lon replied. “Don’t you be scared, Betty. He can’t do a
thing—not a thing.”
Merrick had been taking off his skis. He came up to Betty now. “Did
he annoy you—say anything or—?”
“No, Justin.” A shiver ran down her spine. “He just looked and
grinned. I wanted to scream. He shot Mr. Hollister. I know he did. Or
had it done by that Cig.”
“Yes. I don’t doubt that.”
The doctor, disencumbered of impedimenta of snowshoes and
wraps, fussed forward to the bedside. “Well, let’s see—let’s see
what’s wrong here.”
He examined the wound, effervesced protests and questions, and
prepared for business with the bustling air that characterized him.
“Outa the room now—all but Miss Reed and one o’ you men. Lon,
you’ll do.”
“I’ll stay,” announced Merrick with decision.
“All right. All right. I want some clean rags, Black. You got plenty of
hot water, I see. Clear out, boys.”
“You don’t need a good nurse, Doc?” Prowers asked, not without
satiric malice. He was playing with fire, and he knew it. Everybody in
the room suspected him of this crime. He felt a perverted enjoyment
in their hostility.
Black chose this moment to make his declaration of independence.
“I’d light a shuck outa here if I was you, Jake, an’ I wouldn’t come
back, seems to me.”
The cold, bleached eyes of the cowman narrowed. “You’re givin’ me
that advice as a friend, are you, Don?” he asked.
The range rider’s jaw stopped moving. In his cheek the tobacco quid
stuck out. His face, habitually set to the leathery imperturbability of
his calling, froze now to an expressionless mask.
“I’m sure givin’ you that advice,” he said evenly.
“I don’t hear so awful good, Don. As a friend, did you say?” The little
man cupped an ear with one hand in ironic mockery.
Black’s gaze was hard as gun-metal. “I said I’d hit the trail for home if
I was you, Jake, an’ I’d stay there for a spell with kinda low visibility
like they said in the war.”
“I getcha, Don.” Prowers shot a blast of cold lightning from under his
scant brows. “I can take a hint without waitin’ for a church to fall on
me. Rats an’ a sinkin’ ship, eh? You got a notion these fellows are
liable to win out on me, an’ you want to quit while the quittin’ is good.
I been wonderin’ for quite a while if you wasn’t yellow.”
“Don’t do that wonderin’ out loud, Jake,” the other warned quietly. “If
you do, you’ll sure enough find out.”
The little man laughed scornfully, met in turn defiantly the eyes of
Betty, Merrick, and Forbes, turned on his heel, and sauntered out.

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2 Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Introduction: Links and Translation in the Canterbury Tales 3

4 Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

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of Translation,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English Vol. 1, edited by

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