A translation of one of the great Christian classics, published by Catholic University Press. Acknowledgments that make for an extended and moving act of filial piety, in which “the greatest themes of Piers Plowman [...], the twin concepts of instructive feminine wisdom, offered by the majestic Holy Church and the scrappy Dame Study, and of virtuous male labor, depicted in Piers and those who work in his service,” are identified as having been manifested in the translator’s parents (xv). After such a set up readers might think they know what they are in for. They would almost certainly be wrong. By far the longest and liveliest portion of this book’s Introduction is its explanation of why, as Michael Calabrese puts it, “I translate as if I were talking” not to a priest, professor, parent, or even a student, but “to a stranger at a bar in Jersey” (xxxix). “I have not resisted the urge to use American dialect and changes in anglophone register when the moment calls for it,” he explains; while there are moments of sublimity in the A version, he points out, much of it is, by contrast, “combative, testy, condescending, nasty, and scornful, as one figure or another displays zero tolerance for Will, his idiotic questions, and his foolish quests” (xl).

The result is a hugely entertaining, and inviting, romp through the earliest version of Langland’s great Middle English poem. Calabrese’s engaging approach will surely lure many students into the world of Piers Plowman, as is his primary, and urgent, intention. There is something very alive here that one will not find in many other places. Still, in my opinion Calabrese does not quite recognize the nature of his accomplishment. For one, he says that this rendition makes the characters of the poem, “however allegorical, talk to Will the way people really talk to each other” (xl)--but of course no one really talks in “free verse with the frequent use of the original poetic features of the text,” such as alliteration (xxxiv). More to the point, the informal register is not that of everyday speech in bars; it is instead, thank goodness, stylized and traditionally performative. Much of its effect, to my delight, if perhaps to the bemusement of modern undergraduates, comes from its frequent invocations of great pop music, beginning right away in 1964 with the Beach Boys (Prol.1: “One gentle summer season, in the warmth of the sun”), through 1966 and the Mamas and the Papas (1.77: “Well, I got down on my knees, and I began to pray”); 1969, Neil Young’s “Down by the River” (title of Prologue) and the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” (title of Passus 4); 1970, the Grateful Dead (Prol. 40: “Qui loquitur turpiloquium is a friend of the devil”); and up to 1971-vintage Rod Stewart, “Get on Back to School” (for the title of Passus 11; from “Maggie May”: “I suppose I could collect my books and...”). This hippy-ish vibe applies to Piers the Plowman, who has been “ ‘ditchin’ and diggin’ and doing what he says’ ”; “ ‘Yeah! Brother Piers’ said the pilgrims, and proffered some cash. / ‘Whoa...hold on,’ said Piers” (6.33, 43-44 [ellipsis in original]): shades of “the Dude” from The Big Lebowski.

This very informal register has intriguing effects on phrases that are perhaps intended as straightforward translations, such as Conscience’s “for Christ’s sake” (4.4; orig. “be Crist”), or Robert the Robber’s prayer, addressed “Oh Christ” (5.238; orig. “Crist”). Will today’s twenty-year-olds hear ironic and rather blasphemous oaths (“Oh Christ!”)? Perhaps this is something we have always missed in the original, but the risk is that even those passages that undoubtedly play it straight might end up sounding this way. It was as I waited for a clever quip to break the spell of Wit’s speech in Passus 10 that I realized the extent of the problem, if such it be. It duly arrived, in the form of line 61’s remark that Inwit is lacking in “loser lushes, lounging at the bar” (orig. “sottis thou might se, that sitten at the nale”: “simpletons you might see sitting at their ale”). On its own that rendering works well, but the terms alliterating on <l> suddenly bring slacker culture into what had been, for a moment at least, a world rather far from Jersey bars (e.g., “He dwells in the head, but he serves the soul, / for through his cunning he keeps Caro and Anima / under the rule of Reason” etc. [10.51-53]). More readers might raise their eyebrows at Dame Study’s remark that clerks “have their heads up their asses” (11.83), but in fact this terminology is much closer to the original than is the “lounging” vocabulary: “I wolde his eighen wern in his ars,” she says, a gift indeed to a translator who builds his work on the colloquialism of the tavern.

Except that Dame Study’s claim, of course, is precisely that the clerks’ heads are not up their asses: that is, rather, her wish. This is where the question arises as to how exactly we are to conceptualize this book. In thinking through this issue it will help to turn to a longer selection from Study’s speech, likewise brilliant at what Calabrese sets out to do, and offered here as representative of the book as a whole, but perhaps not quite what one would seek in a classroom translation:

“And whoever has Holy Writ in his mouth

and can talk about Tobit and the twelve apostles,

or preach about the punishments that Pilate pounded

upon the gentle Jesus--whom Jews stretched

upon a cross at Calvary, as clerks teach us--

are little loved or esteemed when they offer such lessons--

no fame or fortune for them--those jokers know the truth!

Their obscene trash really sells, God knows,

more than music or musings on Almighty God,

or else no king, nor knight, nor canon of St. Paul’s

would ever give them one thin dime at Christmas time!” (11.25-35)

The general sense of the original is certainly here, and modern students will easily respond to line 32’s “really sells” as a rendering of the notion that these clerks are akin to the lowly minstrels. To my ear, though, the previous line’s “jokers” cannot but strike the ironic, and thus distancing, chord we encountered in “losers,” while “one thin dime” places us even further afield, in pre-war, black-and-white Hollywood. Issues of tone aside, Calabrese does not render line 25’s “ay”: the passage is initially about “whoever always has Holy Writ in his mouth.” And, however often this imagined pious soul speaks scripture, he disappears with line 30’s shift to the plural, “are...they,” in Calabrese’s rendering; the original “is he” makes much clearer that it is this prophet who gets no credit.

I actually do not think these are serious problems. On the contrary, the looseness on display here is the real flavor and pleasure of this book. It’s just that renderings of medieval poetry that sound more like the 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels (“one thin dime”) or Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (late-sixties California pop; plenty of cursing), to my mind, accomplish something not to be found in translations per se. My sense that “translation,” at least if intended for students, is not really what Calabrese is after comes as well from the lightness of its scholarly apparatus. His notes, which explain the Biblical passages and a few odd medieval customs, such as “love days” (see the note to 3.151, most of which is repeated at 11.17), are quite helpful in part for not weighing down the reader too much. The introduction, though, is quite slight even on its own terms, and includes some questionable claims. He remarks that the association of the name William Langland with Piers “comes from three notes that sixteenth-century bibliophiles...while chronicling English writings from the time before the Reformation,” making for “pretty thin evidence all around but the only grounds for attributing the poem to a named author” (xxvii), but the only one of the inscriptions mentioned is in fact by a very well-informed reader of 1427. A few pages later, the description of the verse form mentions only the AA/AX alliterative pattern, remarking that “[a]ny number of unstressed syllables (alliterating or not)...can flesh out the verse around this core frame” (xxxi), but no metricist would agree with this: the permitted placement of particular numbers of unstressed syllables is in most accounts much more important than the AA/AX pattern. E. Talbot Donaldson, mentioned among earlier translators (xxxvi), should be identified as the translator of the text in the Norton Piers edited by Robertson and Shepherd (xlvi). Finally, in making the important point that Piers is multilingual, Calabrese fell prey to brain freeze: “In the longer B and C text, in fact, around 2,000 of the 7,000 lines,” that is, 28.5 percent, “are (partially or fully) in Latin” (xliv). By my count only around 550 of about 7570 lines in B, 7.3 percent, fit this criterion.

The true audience of this book would not notice these flubs, and those who catch the Langland bug from this terrific performance would quickly find meatier discussions elsewhere (such as Calabrese’s own fine Introduction; see my review, TMR 17.04.05). That is because this book plays the role not so much of “translation” as “re-imagining” of the poem. It is an oddity of Langland scholarship that the history of its translations is relatively well known (e.g., xxxv-xxxvi), while that of its re-imaginings or adaptations remains almost wholly obscure. Maureen Duffy in the 1950s, and John Lawlor in the 1960s, re-imagined portions of the poem for the stage, the former in the language of factory workers, cursing included, including West Indian immigrants to London. [1] The 1967 television mini-series High Dreams included an episode “Piers the Plowman,” with the great scholar and Piers translator Nevill Coghill as the voice speaking medieval verse. [2] In 2017 Duffy revisited it in her prophetic poem “The Vision of Piers Plowless,” and Penned in the Margins, led by Tom Chivers, produced a two-day program of site-responsive performances called “Fair Field,” which likewise employs a modern idiom. [3] While Chaucerians have been celebrating Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales and Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow, both 2014, and both parts of a long and distinguished tradition of reimaginings, [4] Langlandians have barely noticed the equivalents in their own corner of the field.

To my mind Calabrese’s book is a high point in this rich area of Piers Plowman’s history. Taken as a translation it raises precisely those sorts of uncomfortable questions (how far from the original can one get and still call it a translation?; must we read along with notes?; are we really to imagine Piers the Plowman as “the Dude”?) that disappear if instead taken in this context. Here, it can be recognized as a sheer triumph. A second edition of this book could fix up the introduction’s mistakes or even just do away with those sections, and could even, perhaps, not worry about the notes, focusing instead on these great characters, who do indeed leap off the page and into our hearts, like a great Beatles tune, thanks to Calabrese’s fierce devotion to the opening out of this world to our students.

--------

Notes:

1. Duffy wrote Pearson originally as an undergraduate in the 1950s; it was produced as The Lay-Offin 1962: see Michael Johnston and Lawrence Warner, “This Pure and Perfect Book: Marilynne Robinson, Maureen Duffy, and the Heirs of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 34 (2021), forthcoming. Also, John Lawlor, “Two Scenes from The Vision of Piers Plowman,” in To Nevill Coghill from Friends, ed. W. H. Auden and J. Lawlor (London: Faber, 1966), 43-63.

2. Directed by Richard Martin; see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7568878/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm.

3. See Maureen Duffy, Past Present: Piers Plowless & Sir Orfeo (London: Pottery Press, 2017); “Fair Field,” http://thisfairfield.com for information and recordings (I was academic advisor to this production).

4. Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014); Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (London: Faber & Faber, 2014).