THE COGHILL CHAUCER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 656, 1 February 1952, Page 10

THE COGHILL CHAUCER

THE CANTERBURY TALES, by Geoffrey Chaucer, translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill; the Penguin Classics. Enflish price, 3/6. NO volume in this excellent series has had better advance publicity, none is more sure of its welcome, than Mr. Coghill’s modern version of Chaucer’s masterpiece. The BBC broadcasts of the Tales must have won them many new friends: now the whole series (with the exception of Melibee and The Parson’s Sermon, the two long prose "tales" that even Chaucerians seldom finish, which are hefe brilliantly summarised) is made available in unboydlerised form and in ‘bold, legible type for the price, in England at least, of a packet of cigarettes. If the thing was to be done at all, it could hardly have been done better. To anyone who thissed the broadcasts, it need only be said that this is a faithfully rhymed, idiomatic and supremely readable modern rendering: if it does not give us all of Chaucer the poet, it gives us most of the humorist, satirist, and author of the first and greatest of human comedies in English. In a brief introduction Mr. Coghill outlines the life and work of Chaucer, and sturdily justifies his own daring experiment against all comers. Even the entrenched batteries of Chaucerian scholarship may be dis-~ armed by the notes, a model of donnish conciseness: here is a sample:-‘Chiche-vache. In an old French fable there — were two cows called Chichevache and Bicorne. Bicorne was fat because she made her diet on patient husbands who

were in plentiful supply. But the monster Chichevache was thin, for her diet was only patient wives, poor cow."

J.

B.