'Awak: Chaucer Translates Bird Songs

Author / Editor
Koff, Leonard Michael.

Title
'Awak: Chaucer Translates Bird Songs

Published
Roger Ellis and Rene Tixier, eds. The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age, 5. ([Turnhout, Belgium]: Brepols, 1996), pp. 390-418.

Description
Briefly sketches a medieval philosophy of animal language in relation to medieval notions of translation as a communal ideal. In ClT, Chaucer presents translation as a form of revelation; in SumT, it is transgressive; in KnT, a kind of disguise. In ManT, translation is replaced by silence to indicate that incomprehensibility is a moral rather than a linguistic phenomenon.

Alternative Title
Medieval Translator, no. 05

Chaucer Subjects
Background and General Criticism.