An East–West Conversation: Gürpınar's A Marriage under the Comet and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Abstract

AbstractThe Turkish writer Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar's 1922 novel A Marriage under the Comet shows similarities with “The Miller's Tale” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale” from Chaucer's fourteenth‐century The Canterbury Tales in terms of its subject and its characters. In the first part of the novel, Irfan, like Nicholas, makes fun of the uneducated people, frightening them with his astrological explanations and predictions. The second part of the novel, like “The Wife of Bath's Tale,” ends with a speech on an ideal marriage. Here too, it is advised that when choosing his/her spouse, one must value inner beauty more than appearance and that if they want a happy marriage, husbands should submit their will to their wives. The enormous interest shown the Turkish version of The Canterbury Tales, since it was translated in 1994 for the first time, might be attributed to these similarities. In the tales above, Chaucer satirizes the religious, sexual, and class culture of the English society of his age unsparingly. It is possible that Gürpınar's well‐loved novel, which adapts similar stories from a different culture and time to the local context, might have played a role in preparing the relatively more conservative Turkish readers for Chaucer's work, which they would meet eighty years later.