Chaucer Reception and Translation in Denmark

Abstract

This article focuses on the Danish reception and translations of Chaucer, including comparisons with the two English Chaucer transla tions most widely used in Denmark, Neville Coghill's and David Wright's.1 I will begin by briefly discussing the present state of Chaucer reception in Denmark, then outline the history of Chaucer in a Danish context, and finally consider the two extant translations of the Canterbury Tales into Danish. In the English departments in Danish universities, Chaucer is most often taught in translation, with a selection of one or two tales from the Canterbury Tales, perhaps with a few extracts from the General Prologue in Middle English and typically in an anthology such The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Coghill's classic translation is still pre ferred, but recently Wright's translation has been used an alternative. For the well-educated reading public there are the same two preferred options, and in fact most of the few Danes now concerned with Chaucer would pick an English translation. This is probably because the two full translations of the Canterbury Tales into Danish, no other works by Chaucer having been translated, are out of print, though both can still be borrowed from public libraries. But it also has to do with the general high standard of English in the Scandinavian countries. For instance, in Denmark there have been major sales of recent re-translations of Dante and Homer, but English classics other than Shakespeare and Dickens are rarely re-translated. In a small country like Denmark, some classics, needless to say, have never been translated at all. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a case in point, and generally English literature from the Middle Ages is poorly represented on the Danish book market, one remarkable exception being the critically highly appraised Beowulf trans lation by Andreas Haarder, which was reissued to compete with Seamus Heaney's modern English translation.2 Like Hamlet, this classic has the advantage of being located in Denmark, whereas Chaucer by compari son has only one reference, as any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, at the end of the Wife of Bath's Prologue (III 824).