Lollipop Chaucer

THE CANTERBURY TALES (528 pp.)--A New Translation by Nevlll Coghill--Penguin ($1.25).

Like hosts of other schoolboy scholars, Nevill Coghill tackled Chaucer in his teens, and found the venerable verses too quaint to be much fun. In time--when Coghill himself had become a relatively venerable (47) fellow of Exeter College, Oxford--he set out to de-quaint The Canterbury Tales.

Modernizer Coghill was too much of a poet to follow the patchwork method, i.e., simply to insert modern words where the old ones are unintelligible. He kept Chaucer's rhyme schemes, except where they no longer rang true to the modern ear. And he concentrated particularly on reproducing the lively "tone of voice" of the 14th-century original--by the seemingly paradoxical method of making the verses sound as much like 20th-century conversation as possible.

Male & Female. The completed work (which the BBC has been broadcasting, in parts, as Coghill finished them, for six years) is the best "translation" of Chaucer to be had. It owes much of its bubbling fluency to Coghill's boldness in sacrificing words and word orders to rhythm and clarity. This is evident in the famed opening lines (usually as much as anyone remembers of the Tales)--Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote--which Coghill deftly turns thus: When the sweet showers, of April fall and shoot/ Down through the drought of March to pierce the root . . .

Chaucer, Coghill observes, delighted to silence his own voice and speak with the tongues of characters as varied and opinionated as the Knight, the Wife of Bath and the Clerk of Oxford. It is this multilingual mixture which makes the Tales a "concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant." To revive this effect, Coghill decided to modernize the people's looks as well as their language, to suggest their old status by putting them in modern context. Where Chaucer, for example, says of the carpenter's flighty wife in "The Miller's

Tale," Hir shoes were laced on hir legges hye;/ She was a prymerole, a pigges-nye, Coghill, aware that no modern woman would care to be compared to a pig's eye, freshens her up like this: High shoes she wore, and laced them to the top./ She was a daisy, () a lollipop.

Bitter & Bittre. But Coghill's version also emphasizes the fact that Chaucer's multilingual voice was often rough, sharp and cynical. And it is usually when trying to emulate this toughness that Coghill's witty, elegant rendering is inadequate. Try as he may, he cannot quite evoke in the tones of modern poetry that grim old Britain in which full-belliedness and famine, bestiality and piety, riches and utter penury were all such close neighbors that a man might step at any given moment from one condition to another. Transcribing, for example, the winter days so dreaded in those times, Coghill writes:

The bitter frosts, the driving sleet and

rain Had killed the gardens; greens had

disappeared.

Now Janus by the fire with double

beard, His bugle-horn in hand, sits drinking

wine; Before him stands a brawn of tusky

swine, And 'Sing Noel!' cries every lusty man.

The rendering is literally clear and exact, but the reader who wants to feel the real teeth of an ancient winter must still turn to his unrevised Chaucer:

The bittre frostes, with the sleet and

reyn,

Destroyed hath the grene in every yerd.

Janus sit by the fyr, with double herd, And drinketh of his bugle-horn the wyn.

Biforn him stant braun of the tusked

swyn, And 'Nowel' cryeth every lusty man.

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