Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Year's War by Elizaveta Strakhov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Year's War by Elizaveta Strakhov Jeffery Moser Elizaveta Strakhov. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Year's War. Ohio State UP, 2022. 268 p. Poetic form as a cultural road map is the basis for Elizaveta Strakhov's extensive research that bridges debates about the socio-political fallout and cultural impact from England's armed conflicts with France in the late Middle Ages. In Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred [End Page 348] Year's War, scholars discover how the author applies the often neglected and discounted observation that good things can come from bad—the silver lining from events and conditions that alter an old world may, and indeed often do, forge new political and cultural connections in a new world. This is the heart of the "reparative translation" model that identifies how literary translation helped rebuild community and restore unity for the European Continent and England during the early fourteenth century and into the fifteenth. Medievalist historians and literary studies scholars will welcome Strakhov's attendance to the late medieval lyric genre known as formes fixes, which covers a variety of emerging poetic forms in pre-Chaucerian times (1300-1400), including two eventually popularized lyric forms of the lament—particularly the complainte--and the ballade, along with other poetic forms. However, these same scholars may take some mild academic umbrage as to whether, theoretically, any firm sense of what counts as "English Literature" existed then, due to a lack of two things: a stable language and continuous works that could be described as "literary" and that were passed down to and replicated or executed through multiple generations. Fortunately, Strakhov anticipated this potential criticism. She identifies specific lyric types in works by ascribed authors, which were readily recognizable to medieval readers according to prosodic features of stanzaic number, stanzaic length, and rhyme scheme. In fact, this is how many manuscripts from the period that have survived to this day came into existence, by medieval narrators and copyists who meticulously translated English, French, and Latin and transcribed verse structure and forms onto the "page." In this way, Continental England examines the phenomenon that poets and scribes "unexpectedly and highly self-consciously" made ties, affinities, and connections through poetry that bind Francophone Europe together (5). The text proves that medieval European historians and scholars of medieval language and literature would do well to look closely at medieval translation and those translators and scribes who engaged with form and interlingual translation work. For Strakhov, "form blows open the stakes and reach of translational literary endeavors" (5). The advantages of attending to form gave her license to consider major authors and texts in entirely new combinations by defining form as "reproducible units of meaning" (15). This, in turn, allowed the [End Page 349] author to methodically approach and dissemble Anglo-French literary relations to parallel, if not counter, the dirth of existing scholarship that abounds and claims that the Hundred Years' War (c. 1137-1453) left England and France more isolated from one another and more bitter and acrimonious. Instead, Strakhov cites English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) as the most evidential and leading practitioner of formes fixes. Chaucer was a prolific translator of verse structure and verse form that contributed to a sense of renewal, less anxiety, and more calm between France and England. Chaucer must not be seen only as a great English poet and author, but also as an avid and astute translator. His works of versification and meter accommodated and helped to civilize communities upon the Continent and in England that were disenfranchised and fragmented from the disputes and armed clashes between the English royal House of Plantagenet and the French royal House of Valois. Of course, not lost upon any literary student, is that Chaucer, himself, was a trusted and worthy civil servant. He was able to pursue and sustain his literary and scientific interests while pursuing a career as a diplomat, courtier, and member of parliament. Too, the relationship and correspondence between the French poet and composer Phillipe de Vitry and the Italian sonneteer Petrarch, along with their literary...