Reviews of translations are often ungainly things, since, as John Hollander has remarked, those best qualified to assess translations are likely to be those who do not need them, so the genre risks deteriorating into a conference of pedants. This selection and translation from Chaucer's last, unfinished work bites that bullet quite hard by presenting itself very specifically for a readership that otherwise might find the "Canterbury Tales" unapproachable. Glaser has produced a workable version of most of Chaucer's tales which strives to communicate their narrative verve and variety in a form that will both satisfy the merely curious and suggest by the further pleasures of acquaintance with the original. Sometimes a rather rough cut, Glaser's version would serve teachers who wish to anticipate their students' use of a crib by providing working and often inventive translations for comparison with the original. Gauging his audience, Glaser has also provided a brief, informative introduction that covers Chaucer's biography and career, a general history of the century or so around him, and an overview of unfamiliar institutions like the religious establishment so central to the structure of the poem.
Glaser includes all the tales, but doesn't translate them all. The most widely read and shorter pieces he translates in full, providing short marginal glosses and a few footnotes for Biblical and some classical allusions, where he judges the reference might be either obscure or missed. Prose tales ("Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale") and some short tales of less interest ("The Manciple's Tale"), he summarizes. The longer, mostly less read, tales he excerpts in verse, with bridging passages in prose to sew the patches together. Sometimes these reductions are rather drastic. The Monk has to confine himself to one tragic narrative instead of seventeen, and only seven verse lines of "The Man of Law's Tale" survive. But at the level for which Glaser's work is designed, no-one ever, I think, wished Constance's story longer. "The Squire's Tale", too--probably unfinished in any case--hardly suffers from aggressive compression.
In other cases, the effect of excisions is more disturbing. A drastic cut is visited on the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale", leaving only two lines surrounded by gloss, like an ancient fragment; this I lament more, though others might not. The narrative drive of "The Clerk's Tale", for which Glaser manages admirably to adapt Chaucer's rhyme royal stanza, does suffer from its being snipped up into pieces. Without the cumulative weight of Griselda's patience, lugubrious though we might find it, the main emotional effect of the tale is lost, and some of its key moments--such as Griselda's request to Walter that he refrain from tormenting his new wife as he has done her--are sadly paraphrased. "The Knight's Tale", which does so much to establish what Chaucer's poem as a whole will be, is also badly served by this tactic, particularly in Part Three, which becomes no more than a series of verse vignettes. One gets into a verse rhythm, like a horse at a good trot, only to be jerked violently back, then thrust forward again. A horse would not like it, and neither did I. And it's hard not to miss so deft and translatable a line as "Up rose the sun, and up rose Emily"--though students and other first readers will, of course, not know it's there to miss.
Glaser's practical craft--that abiding concern in the General Prologue's description of the pilgrims--is workmanlike, not too fastidious, with a pleasant willingness to include both older diction (Chaucer's "swyve" for the modern "screw") and serendipitous swerves into modern idiom. The Friar, for instance, prefers a "tavern schleper" to a "homeless wretch or leper" (27), and, in the Franklin's Tale, Dorigen gets her wish when Aurelius "made it appear/ The rocks were gone, the coast was clear". (234) The former tactic commits Glaser to the occasional gloss on his own translation, which might seem partly to defeat its purpose, while the latter sometimes sounds rather odd. But one gets not to mind such things where the run of the verse is lively and free, as it especially is in the shorter, racier tales--fabliaux and folky ones like those of the Shipman or Friar.
A more far-reaching tactic, with serious consequences for how the poems work and feel, is Glaser's decision to contract the original pentameter couplets into four-beat ones, thus effectively turning back Chaucer's own practice from "The Legend of Good Women" to "The Book of the Duchess". Glaser justifies this by noting that there are simply many redundant syllables in Chaucer's Middle English, which, when omitted, either leave a shorter line or oblige a translator to fill up the holes with verbal spackle. The latter effort, says Glaser, produces "stodgy, congested writing, the very antithesis of the elegance and rapidity of Chaucer's own verse". (13) One could argue about this, but it seems only fair to allow a translator these kinds of choices in his search for something "sharper and brighter, more like Chaucer himself". And often the effect can be quite happy. Here is the opening of the Nun's Priest's Tale, for instance (303):
A widow long without a spouseLived humbly in a narrow houseBeside a grove, sirs, in a dale;It's she of whom I tell my tale.She'd led, since she was last a wife,A burdensome, hardscrabble lifeWith few possessions and less rent.By husbanding what goods God sentShe fed herself and her two daughters.
The easy movement here throws the emphasis squarely onto the flow of narrative, yet allows for local effects such the sixth line, with its burdened polysyllables. Such felicities contribute to the success of the verse choice for this sort of tale. Or in the case of the Pardoner's Tale, the shorter line gives a suitably clipped taciturnity and constriction to the grim fable of Death waiting under a tree. Since the pilgrims often aver in one circumstance or another that "There is namoore to say", Glaser's choice not to have them say more can have some good results.
Yet Glaser is not always so lucky, or so careful. His ear has unhappy lapses all through the book that interfere with the clarity and sharpness that he wants. Chaucer was a meticulous metrician; not so his translator. And here the change to tetrameter that serves the end of narrative is partly to blame. Though made for lighter movement, the lower syllable-count is also significantly less accommodating, especially of polysyllables, and Glaser puts a foot wrong rather too often, particularly with unwieldy names: Averagus, Aurelius, Valerian, Almachius, even Virginia. These don't leave much room in an octosyllable line, and too often Glaser distorts his rhythm to accommodate them. Names are not the only culprits, however. Quite a few lines are unhappily ragged, and a line with a complete extra foot (or one missing) turns up all too often. Not only the tetrameters are affected--alexandrines turn up in occasional rhyme-royal stanzas, sounding sometimes an uncanny pre-echo of Spenser. But the tetrameter, being both predominant and trickier, suffers most. Here and there one of these might be excused, or even lauded, as a metrical effect, if a most unChaucerlike one, but their frequency, too often in lines that don't scan well anyway, suggests an unwillingness to polish until the metre comes out right, even when a very little would suffice. Omitting two words from "That is to say, he had a paramour" (118) or the adverb from "And Apius' lechery was well known" (248) would fix the rhythm with no loss to sense.
These metrical glitches are compounded by other technical problems. There is a commitment throughout the translation to various kinds of off-rhyme: "marriage" with "age", "promised" with "request", "stomach" with "sake", even "king" with "dreams". One gets used to this sort of thing, though some of the more egregious examples are mildly irritating, and many could have been eliminated with the least shuffling. Scattered throughout the verse there are also a fair number of unrhymed lines which bring the flow of reading up nastily short--metrical divots of a kind Chaucer never dug.
All these effects together give the verse a roughness that doesn't help the cause of a "sharper, brighter" Chaucer, and doesn't well represent his verse practice to a modern reader. The latter point is my real concern. There is much to enjoy in this translation, which does seem to meet Glaser's announced goal of being "the most readable translation of Chaucer available". (12) But in seeking readability, while sometimes not taking sufficient care at its challenge, Glaser's version may end up giving the impression that Chaucer was less than a careful technician in his material. That, I think, would have pained Chaucer, who wrote a poem cursing his copyist, Adam, for making mistakes in his work. Since he himself cared about the matter, one owes it to him to convey, along with the delicious variety of his characters and the variegated colours of their lives and tales, the nicer pleasures of his craft.