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His Tales, The Canterbury Tales The following Sunday at a garage sale I find another printing of The Canterbury Tales, by the genius Chaucer. And I look at the printed words and I crack up laughing aloud. The lady who sells her books immediately raises the book price from fifty cents to a dollar. I give her a buck without haggling. "What’s so funny?" She asks. I show her the passage: And that your smock was pulled up over your breast ‘Well think’ she said, ‘as it may please you best, But, Sir, when suddenly a man awakes, He cannot see a thing at once, it takes A little time to do so perfectly, For he is dazed at first and cannot see. Just so a man who has been blind for long Cannot expect his sight to be so strong. "I thought this was an English schoolbook! Here is your dollar!" She was trying to buy the book back. My, "No! Can’t do!" surprised her. Yet her honest "That’s really sexy, I never read it, but I would like to!" changed my mind. I therefore lend her the book for one week. And a few days later I am checking the bookstores up in the city for more of the same The Canterbury Tales, the touchstone of medieval literature. And again I hit pay-dirt. I find what I search for. This Chaucer has written the same book in multiple versions, all similar but none the same. I look at it as an abundance of variety of early masterpieces of English literature. Pure insanity makes me buy the same book, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, over and over? Why else would one want to have many books of the-same-old-prose-and- poetry? Except I tell myself that I attempt to gather up a complete collection of all the various English flavors and shades of one and the same pile-of-word-products, The Canterbury Tales. Oh yes! I did find much to my delight so many variations of sumptuous sensory delighting English poetry. For example the Thyrwitt translation. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer; The Thyrwhitt translation, by George Routledge & Sons, London 1850 not only does it date Chaucer’s birth at 1328 but also uses a great amount of the so called "Old English".
01/09/09 |
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