The Canterbury Tales

Mardy Bum

The Canterbury Tales: Chaucer

Is it a big pile of academic gobbledygook or is it a riveting and thoroughly interesting and enjoyable read.

I'm between the two to be honest. It is very interesting but once the whole academic side is brought in it is not an easy book to actually understand and very put downable.
I do think Chaucer and Shakespeare are the best two writers in history but obviously I'm not taking this on how much enjoyment I got from reading their works as both are not for the light read section.
Opinions?

WinstonSmith

Obviously Mardy it is a matter of personal tastes. I have always found Chaucer to be quite humourous. If ya know the historical contexts then ya can read it and just giggle to yourself at certain parts of it, but ya can have things like the technical metre of some stories, the biblical allusions etc... etc... in the back of the head. You can get enjoyment from seeing how these enhance or subvert the meaning of the words on the page, but ultimately the book was written and the words on the page are what matters most.

Eliot Rosewater

Did you read a modern translation?

I have an immaculate collection The Best Poems in English Language by critic Harold Bloom. Bloom maintains that Chaucer should be read in Middle-English to preserve his "cognitive music". The Chaucer excerpts in the collection are thus printed in Middle-English, with difficult words translated in the right hand margin.

Mardy Bum

I have it read every which way, translated and originally:) Yes it does sound better to the ear in middle english, the flow is preserved but whatever it is I wouldn't want to read it unless necessary, to much politics I reckon.

Blush_01

The only problem I have with The Canterbury Tales is that I have to be on my own because it needs to be read out loud in Middle English. I don't get as much pleasure out of it if I read it quietly to myself.

WinstonSmith

I had to learn quite a lot of it for exams a few years ago. I can still remember large parts of it: The opening of the Wive of Bath's tale for example:
Experience though noon auctoritie
were in this world is right enuf for me...
But yeah there is a lyricality to the original that would lead me to recommend it above any translation. And the saturation of politics in it is one of the things which endear it to me...

funlovintapir

to anyone who hasn't read it - saying that it's academic sort of implies that it's difficult and laborious, but it's really not. i found it very easy to get into once i had a moderate grasp of the language by making a short list. that's the difficult part, even though a lot of the words can be guessed anyway by their sound when read aloud. and a small bit of background reading in the popular genres and history of the time can make the parodies more enjoyable and interesting. i thought it was a way more pleasurable read than it's 'difficult' reputation had led me to expect. i really like the shipman's tale.

Red Hand

It's a book I often dip in and out of...have read it once cover to cover, but now I just read a few pages every so often. It does need to be read out as someone said above.

It is funny in parts...Chaucer gave some of his characters a real bawdy sense of humour.