This article considers the relationship between translation and historical alterity in Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer opens Book II of Troilus by admitting that the customs of the poem's ancient lovers might seem strange: culture, like language, changes over the centuries. This passage probably derives from Dante's Convivio, which argues that 1,000 years of linguistic change would render the vernacular of one's own city strange and foreign. In order to understand how such alterity can emerge in a translation like Troilus, this article considers Convivio's statements in the context of fourteenth-century Italian vernacular translations that emulate the syntax and lexicon of Latin source texts. These translations expand the expressive range of the vernacular, allowing linguistic change to be glimpsed as it happens. Similarly, in Troilus Chaucer exploits the transformative potential of translation, using close translation to create effects of linguistic—and hence historical—difference within his own lexicon.
The afterward briefly summarizes the key arguments of this book: that formation does not end at any one privileged moment, but, rather, that readers help bring form into being; and that the history of form and that of readers is thus intertwined. It then brings this argument to bear upon the House of Fame. It suggests that, drawing upon the afterlife as it is depicted in Dante’s Commedia, Fame’s domain depicts a synchronic realm of reception located outside of any one reader’s temporal experience. Yet this world soon dissolves back into diachronic time and the history of lived acts of reading.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.