What comes to mind when someone mentions Geoffrey Chaucer? It’s likely that you know him as the author of the Canterbury Tales. You may well have come across the epithet ‘Father of English Poetry’, which has been firmly attached to him since John Dryden came up with it in 1700. You might also think that he has a reputation for what we might politely term bawdiness. And you are probably asking, shouldn’t an article about Chaucer be in the English Faculty’s alumni magazine, not in the Oxford Polyglot?
But Chaucer does belong firmly in the Polyglot, and not simply because of his contemporary fourteenth-century European connections. In the nineteenth century, there was a huge amount of German interest in his work – enough to fill hundreds of pages of annotated bibliography. And yet the number of Canterbury Tales translations can be counted on one hand, which may well be because of that bawdiness. It meant that translators risked running afoul of the strict anti-obscenity laws in various German states. Audiences, meanwhile, were not primed to associate obscenity with high status literature.
Those who did dare to render Chaucer into German dealt with the danger in various ways. The first German translator of the Canterbury Tales, Karl Ludwig Kannegießer (1827), simply didn’t translate any of the tales he deemed risqué. But he also didn’t really rate Chaucer, damning him with the faint praise that ‘amongst the ranks of second-tier poets, he can take an honourable place’. Those who thought more highly of the ‘Father of English poetry’ were reluctant to leave out the material they considered to be amongst his best work. But the threat of legal action was very real, and they had to tread carefully.
The second translator, Eduard Fiedler (1844) decided to address the issue head on. He acknowledges in a preface that some of the Canterbury Tales were ‘unzüchtig’, a legally significant term for ‘obscene’, but argues that a literary work worth translating should not be presented in a mutilated form. And worth translating it evidently is: while he doesn’t quite go as far as Dryden in his estimation of Chaucer, Fiedler puts him in the same category as celebrated medieval German poets like Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But he doesn’t quite put his money where his mouth is, even if he doesn’t omit the dirty tales or change their plot points. This in itself is no small thing, given that the Miller’s Tale (against which Fiedler warns his sensitive female readers) features a carpenter’s wife named Alisoun interrupting an adulterous liaison to stick her ‘ers’ (arse) out of the window so that she can trick another man into kissing it. Her partner later sticks his own ‘ers’ out of the window in order to fart in the face of the suitor, only to be met with a red hot poker. Fiedler’s strategy is to soften the vocabulary. Alisoun does not stick her ‘hole’ out of the window, nor is her ‘naked ers’ kissed. Only her ‘Hintern’, her behind, is referenced, though it is still kissed ‘mit Inbrunst’, with fervour. As for the vulgar term ‘swived’, arguably best translated as ‘fucked’, Fiedler instead writes of seduction. By removing offensive and explicit words, he ensures that the same actions lose much of their shock value.
Another German Chaucer translator, Wilhelm Hertzberg (1866) was unconvinced by Fiedler’s solution. He believed – or at least claimed to believe – that it was impossible to recreate the effect of reading the Canterbury Tales by translating Chaucer’s choice of words because ‘our High German emerged as a written language, and has therefore been decent since its beginning’, meaning that it ‘only has oblique expressions for certain things’. Chaucer’s vocabulary would thus ‘appear clumsy and obscene’ in nineteenth-century German in a way not true of the Middle English text. There was, for Hertzberg, a lot at stake. He considered the Canterbury Tales to be ‘by far the most significant work of older English poetry’. And so paraphrase was the order of the day – and an often contorted paraphrase at that. He ends up making Fiedler look positively explicit:
Sie sah zum Fenster –– nicht von vorn –– heraus.
Und Absalon –– es war nun anders nicht ––
Küßt mit dem Mund ihr hintres Angesicht
[She looked out of the window –– and not from the front.
And Absolon –– now it was nothing different ––
With his mouth kissed her behind face]
Soon afterwards, Chaucer’s blunt statement that ‘he had kist hire ers’ [he had kissed her arse] becomes an ‘übel angebrachten Kuß’ [ill directed kiss]. It’s true that Hertzberg doesn’t actually change the course of events, but he does make it much harder to work out what’s happening. Indeed, anyone not already familiar with the Miller’s Tale would be forgiven for not knowing what was going on, which might seem to defeat the point of translation.
So why did Fiedler and Hertzberg think it worth attempting to translate this material if it required such intervention? Simply put, it was because they believed Chaucer to be a poet of (inter)national significance, whose best work, in their view, also happened to be his most obscene. It was because Kannegießer did not think Chaucer that important that he felt able to remove what he found offensive, presenting only Chaucer’s decent face – and certainly not his ‘ers’ – to the German public. Fiedler’s and Hertzberg’s interventions in the text are ultimately indicative of their reverence for Chaucer’s work: they do not believe that his obscenity invalidates his status, but they fear that it might prevent German audiences from engaging with him and recognising his significance – to say nothing of the potential legal repercussions. And thus we end up with gentle Chaucer or convoluted Chaucer. The difficulty of the task these men faced in the social and legal context of the time is undoubtedly why so few of the many nineteenth-century German writers interested in Chaucer ever attempted to translate the Canterbury Tales.