Interpreting Chaucer via biblical and liturgical traditions: case of translating "Prioress’s Prologue" from "The Canterbury Tales" in to modern English and Ukrainian

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Interpreting Chaucer via biblical and liturgical traditions: case of translating «Prioress's Prologue» from «The Canterbury Tales» in to modern English and Ukrainian

T.V. Shmiher

Ivan Franko National University of Lviv;

Lviv

Comparing the ways of receiving Chaucer's text by today's English and Ukrainian readers by assessing the possibilities of rendering the poetic techniques applied in Prioress's Prologue, the author of the paper presents translation gains, losses and challenges which translators face when they have to decode and present an author's historical and cultural experience encoded in the text. The paper deploys the original texts of Prioress's Prologue as well as its translations into New English (1795-2007) and Ukrainian (2019). The intertextual richness of the Chaucerean text and literary culture is viewed from the points of biblical intertextuality, liturgical hymnography and religious poetry. Chaucer's collage technique hides great power of ideological and aesthetical contrast, and the change of historical and cultural experience destruct the expected emotional impact in today's audiences. The statuses of the biblical and liturgical prototexts contain different value for contemporary readers in intracultural and intercultural dimensions. In the theoretical perspective, all the `modernizations ' of Chaucer 's text are fully-fledged translations and require appropriate in-depth translation solutions.

Keywords: interlingual and intralingual translation, biblical prototext, liturgical text, collage technique.

ІНТЕРПРЕТУЮЧИ ЧОСЕРА КРІЗЬ ПРИЗМУ БІБЛІЙНОЇ ТА ЛІТУРГІЙНОЇ ТРАДИЦІЇ: НА ПРИКЛАДІ ПРОЛОГУ ІГУМЕНІ З «КЕНТЕРБЕРІЙСЬКИХ ОПОВІДЕЙ» У ПЕРЕКЛАДАХ СУЧАСНИМИ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЮ ТА УКРАЇНСЬКОЮ МОВАМИ

Т.В. Шмігер

Львівський національний університет імені Івана Франка м. Львів

Порівнюючи способи сприйняття тексту Чосера сучасними англійськими та українськими читачами через оцінку можливостей передачі поетичних прийомів, ужитих у Пролозі Ігумені, автор статті представляє перекладацькі набутки, втрати та проблеми, з якими стикаються перекладачі, коли їм доводиться декодувати та зберегти авторський історико-культурний досвід,закодований у тексті. У статті розглянено оригінал тексту Прологу Ігумені, а також його переклади новоанглійською (1795-2007) та українською (2019) мовами. Інтертекстове багатство Чосерового тексту та літературної культури розгля-дається з погляду біблійної інтертекстуальности, літургійної гимног- рафії та релігійної поезії. Техніка колажу Чосера приховує велику силу ідейного й естетичного контрасту, а зміна історичного та культурного досвіду руйнує очікуваний емоційний вплив на сьогоднішню авдито- рію. Беручи до уваги сучасних британських чи американських англіканців та українських православних чи греко-католиків, багато хто не сумує за недооціненою мистецькістю колажу в Пролозі, яка ґрунтується на католицькій культурі слова. Більше того, у такому англійсько- українському культурному зіставленні є більше подібного, ніж несхожого, коли доводиться обговорювати вплив Прологу на сучасні емоційні та естетичні смаки. Статуси біблійних і літургійних прототекстів мають різну цінність для сучасного читача у внутрішньокультурному та міжкультурному вимірах. Український перекладач постав перед проблемою зміни статусу богослужбових текстів, яка полегшується стабільним статусом біблійного прототипу. Використання різних мов ув оригіналі також важливе через їхній статус, але зараз їх статус змінився в англійськомовному просторі, а також змінилися текстові смаки. Читач віддаляється від оригінального тексту в культурному сенсі, і оригінальні цінності вже не є цінностями для сучасних читачів. Це також означає, що оригінальний текст змінив свій статус, втрачаючи старі сакральні компоненти та набуваючи нових - але все ще сумнівних - смислів. З теоретичного погляду, всі «модернізації» твору Чосера є повноцінними перекладами і потребують відповідних глибоких перекладацьких рішень.

Ключові слова: міжмовний та внутрішньомовний переклад, біблійний прототекст, літургійний текст, техніка колажу.

Etics in time-distant writings as well as to debate over the status of `modeniza- tions' in the spectrum of translation genres.

Translation is not only the way of heteroglossic people(s) to communicate between themselves, but translation can also contribute to a more insightful interpretation of a text in its original language. Meanwhile, translations within the same language are often regarded to be not `fully-fledged' translations and ignored without comprehending that intralingual and interlingual translations shares the same perils of losses and gains. The objective of this paper is to compare the ways of receiving Chaucer's text by today's English and Ukrainian readers by assessing the possibilities of rendering the poetic techniques applied in Prioress's Prologue of Chaucer's `Canterbury Tales'.

Intralingual translation is underestimated in comparison with interlingual translation. The case of Chaucer's writings is a decent example given the amount of translations, modernizations and adaptations since the 18th century and lacking profound interest in assessing their quality1. The application of the term `modernization' also misguides the reader as, on the one hand, it may diminish the authority of its translation status, but, on the other hand, every translation is a text `modernised' or transformed according to the values of a very specific reading community, and translator-modernizer face all the same problems as the interlingual translator does. Translations from Chaucer might have produced a fruitful background for delineating between genres of translation, modernization and adaptation, but such a generic scale is rarely discussed in translation studies. This paper focuses on texts of Prioress's Prologue translated by William Lipscomb (1795), William Wordsworth (1882 edition), John Urban Nicolson (1934), John S. P. Tatlock (1940 edition), Vincent F. Hopper (1970 revision), Nevill Coghill (1977 revision), A. S. Kline (2007), and Gerard Ne Castro (2007). In Ukrainian culture, the first excerpts of `The Canterbury Tales' were translated by Yevhen Kryzhevych in 1978, while the full translation by Maksym Strikha came out in 2019 only. This explains the fact why Ukrainian researchers wrote about Chaucer's oeuvres, but avoided writing about their translations.

The objective of this paper is to consider the challenges which translators face when they have to deal with an author's historical and cultural experience encoded in the text. Laurel Broughton (2005: 584) describes the textual knot of the truly Marian-like hymn shaped in the form of the Prologue: “The Prologue richly reflects medieval Marian devotion and bears a strong relationship to liturgical sources as well as to the Prologue to The Second Nun's Tale and Canto XXXIII of Dante's Paradiso”. The translator will take no pain at collating the two prologues (if the whole text of the Tales is trans-

lated by the same translator). Given the amount of existing commentaries, the identification of Dante's fragment is not problematic, either. The situation is very special with the Ukrainian translation as Maksym Strikha is the translator of both Dante's `Paradiso' and Chaucer's `Canterbury Tales', so he easily traced the relevant fragment (as he commented himself (Чосер 2019:153)). The act of reading for both today's English and Ukrainian reader involves great intelligibility, so if a reader is not very careful, they will miss out this Dantean line among other liturgical sources.

The intertextual genesis of the Prologue to Prioress's Tale advances a primary translation principle: a translation should reflect the intertextual network of an original. However, intertextual milieu in cross-cultural communication may initiate a request for the use of authoritative texts, which trigger no cultural response in the target literature or may impact a different cultural effect on the recipient. Meanwhile, some texts which are to be requested for may stay never requested.

The intertextual richness can also be explained by the fact that Chauce- rean literary culture was strongly aural; thus, medieval readers or listeners picked up the right association rather easily. The literary canon appearing in Chaucer's era looks very obscure for today's reader. Similarly, the gap is even larger when a reader from a different national literary tradition is meant. At the same time, Chaucer's poetic technique can be described as `collage', i.e. layering disparate literary pieces to a poetic framework (Boyd, 1987, p. 148). This technique triggered a number of associations in listeners' and readers' mind, and this is why it is so important to summarize what power authoritative texts lost or acquired in intertemporal and interspatial dimensions and to identify to what extent a receiver of the text can interpret or overinterpret or underinterpret a poetic piece.

Cal treatises and religious chants, the epigraph brought a symbolical blessing to Prioress's deed. This peculiar symbolism can be supported by the fact that later the longer context of the phrase is translated as the words of Prioress.

Most English translators kept the original Latin phrasing, some modifying it with an added reference (Coghill, Kline) or a paralleled translation (Kline). Lipscomb and Wordsworth omitted it: while the former behave very freely with the text, the latter might not have considered it important for the textual integrity as he just translated only Prioress's tale. The Ukrainian translator preserved the Latin phrasing which is an obvious marker of a Catholic text (as contrasted to the traditions of Ukrainian Orthodoxy). Understandably, Chaucer did not intend to stress the Catholicity of his writings, but this is the denominational opposition which arises in the English-Ukrainian cross- cultural communication as the Ukrainians used at first the Bible in the Church Slavonic translation (esp. the 1581 authoritative edition in Ostroh) and later in New Ukrainian translations.

Nevertheless, political overtones should also be reconsidered while re-membering what washappening in the early 1380s: John Wycliffe was struggling with the Church and simultaneously translating the Bible, while Chaucer was writing Prioress's Tale. At that time, English literature had possessed the complete translation of the Psalter done by Richard Rolle, but the choice of the key word `merueilous' in Psalm 8:1 hints some connection with the earlier version of the Wycliffite Bible: Rolle used the word `selkouth', a native and poetic but inappropriate correspondent; early Wycliffite version reads `merueilous' which can be considered a perfect biblical equivalent describing `illustrious nature of God' (the correspondent `wonderful' from the later Wycliffite version is theologically misguiding, and some contemporary translations successfully render it as `majestical'). Thus, Chaucer (in) directly sup-ports Wycliffe's endeavour to translate the Bible in his native tongue. The context of struggle for the English-language Bible is absolutely irrelevant for the Ukrainians, even those who lived during the Reformation under the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: ardent fights for the Bible in Polish vernacular did not echo with high political overtones in the Ukrainian milieu where the Church Slavonic Bible was more or less comprehensible for commoners, and Ukrainian men of letters were elaborating the local variant of the sacred Church Slavonic language.

Developing the idea of Chaucer's incorporating a translated piece of a psalm, we face another facet of such incorporation: do translators treat the Chaucerean text as an original or search for a ready biblical translation to incorporate? This is relevant for understanding the level of theological insightfulness and religious perception. Theologically, the variant `merueilous' from the early Wycliffite Bible is exact equivalent of the original Hebrew `NTH' that comes from the adjective `wide, great, high, noble' (by The BrownDriver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon) and leads to the idea of `glory, magnificence' (ibid.). The lexeme `merueilous' is applicable both for human and for the God (by The Middle English Dictionary of the University of Michigan), but the explanation `worthy of admiration, illustrious' indicates the self-sufficiency of the bearer of this feature that does not require any approval (wordy admiration) from others, namely humans. chaucer liturgical biblical translating

The Anglophone biblical tradition renders the idea of God's illustrious nature exactly, but differently at various periods of the history of the English language. The once fully equivalent `wonderful' (Miles Coverdale, 1535), `admirable' (Douay-Rheims Bible, 1582) and `excellent' (King James Bible, 1611) have lost the semantic component `superiority', and this is why the 20th- and 21st-century translations deploy mostly the word `majestic' (New International Version; New Living Translation; New American Standard Bible; World English Bible) or rarely `greatness' (Good News Translation). This semantic change happened around the 17th and 18th centuriesand was to influence the Anglophone translators. Successfully, Limpscomb applied the form `glorious', Wordsworth experimented with `wondrous'. The more recent translators returned to the Chaucerean variant `marvellous' (Nicolson, Tatlock, Hopper, Coghill, Kline, Ne Castro). This return does not only show the translators' option for staying closer to the original but their relation to and understanding of the biblical tradition. The earlier translators must have been in the stalemate: they were to incorporate a well-known text which was ready, but had become obsolete. They chose a way-out of more poetical license. The later translators did not feel so much obliged to insert the Bible into `their' text, so while choosing between the authority of the Bible and the authority of Chaucer, they chose the author.

The Ukrainian biblical tradition offers a range of variants for a Ukrainian translator, though mainly highlighted is the human admiration of God by perceiving His essence as a wonder: `чюдъно' (Frantsisk Skoryna, 1517), `чюдно' (Ostroh Bible, 1581), `предивне' (Rev. Ivan Khomenko, 1963), `подиву гідне' (Rev. Rafayil Turkoniak, 2006). The theologically correct variant is found in newer translations: `величне' (Metropolitan Ilarion (Ohi- yenko), 1962; New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, 2014). The third option deploy the idea of glory: `дивна твоя слава' (Panteleimon Kulish, 1871) and `славне' (Kulish-Puliui-Nechui-Levytskyi, 1903). The latter variant is not the best option from the interpretational perspective. As of today, the English lexeme `glory' is more honourable that the Ukrainian `слава', as the sense `disposition to claim honour for oneself / desire for fame' had been dropped by the mid-18th century. `Слава' stands for `wide popularity as a sign of general appraisal' or `reputation' (by the academic Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, 1978) that designate the dominant importance of recipients, thus, indicating that God is illustrious because people think so, but not because He is such due to magnitude.

This background demonstrates why the Ukrainian poetical variant `слава' introduced by the Ukrainian translator is not the best option if the whole historical and theological context is judged. The translator, however, comments this line by referring to the theologically exact translation and, supposedly, triggers a reader's association between `слава' (glory) and `велич' (majesty).

Additional multifariousness is observed in the biblical metaphorical phrase`thy name' which stays here not as much as a title for glorification, but indicates the existential essence of the God. The theologians explain that `thy name' means `thy revealed character', and `a names comes to be the equivalent of all that we know about the person who bears it' (Dummelow, 1978, p. 331). This perfectly fits the idea that it is not `name' which is majestic but the very essence of God. Although this symbol is bright and open for general interpretation, as well as the common readership may easily slip the deep theological reason and concentrate on the poetical description of the name, the overexplicitation of this symbol will not be accepted by poetry readers. This state of art refers to both Anglophone and Ukrainian readers, and neither Anglophone nor Ukrainian translators changed this symbol.

3. Liturgical hymnography

Why Beverly Boyd suggested the term `collage' was because Chaucer integrated a number of quotations from medieval English liturgical texts which circulated mainly in Latin but sometimes in Middle English as well. This discloses the author's attitude to his text by addressing to texts of very high authority. Chaucer's montage technique must have evoked direct and bright associations for his then listeners and readers. The key text is the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other connected text in a missal and canonical hours, as it was revealed by Sister Mary Madeleva (1965, p. 31-33).

Nevertheless, one should bear in mind that the service was exercised in Latin and the complete English version was introduced back in the 18th century. So, Chaucer could also act as a peculiar translator of liturgical text and even experiment with vocabulary without fearing life-threatening sanctions from the Church. Besides, more changes happened as the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s which revised the Missal. A lot of congregations stopped using the Little Office in favour of the revised Liturgy of Hours. A different challenge for identifying excerpts from Catholic liturgical texts is posed by religious practices of Protestant and Orthodox population who experience different histories of shaping their rites. All these contemplations help draw some borderlines limiting the completeness of appreciating the artistic mastership of Chaucer in the Prologue. Still, interlingual and interdenominational differences may be considered to be not so critical as their liturgies and imagery share the common root - the biblical prototext - which distribute the successful decoding for all Christians.

The image of `bussh unbrent' is an easy for deciphering: originating from Moses' Pentateuch, it is known among all Christians and interpreted in the same way when it symbolizes the virginity of Mary. The contemporary spelling is `bush unburnt' and it was used consequently by all Anglophone translators. Suddenly, here arises an intercultural difference caused by Orthodox liturgical practices. The difference is sometimes stressed in the way of naming as in the Orthodox Christianity, the stable term is `burning bush' (`неопалима купина'). The venerating service dedicated to the `Unburnt Bush' Icon of the Mother of God contains readings from the Bible on Jacob with the ladder (Gen. 28), Moses and the burning bush (Ex. 3) and the gate through which the Lord may only enter (Ez. 44). These quotes enriched the symbolism of the burning bush with some extra symbols, so it was even sealed in the later form of the typical design of the `Unburnt Bush' Icon.

Ukrainian religious translations offer to keep the variant borrowed from the Church Slavonic service, i.e. `неопалима купина' which is only associated with the religious context under discussion. Strikha used the shortened form `купина' (the noun without the adjective) which has one unmistakable sense in the religious context and is a perfect functional match for the original full phrase. Meanwhile, we observe the emergence of another verbally different tradition which renders `bush' as a literal and non-poetic `кущ' (`кущ, що горить і незгоряє'), e.g. in the Divine Office of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (Молитвослов, 2015, p. 1011). It is not applicable to claim that this violates the existing tradition of Ukrainian religious translation as it is the very Church that insert and blesses this tradition, but the usage of a non- highly formal lexeme will disperse the condensed power of this word which it has acquired by the millennium-long accepted usage. The readership will have more loosely associations for interpreting this passage from Chaucer, if the variant `кущ' acquire a wider currency among believers and speakers.

The Anglophone liturgical tradition gives no space for translators to experiment with the word `mayde'. All the translators used the accepted term `maid' (sometimes paralleled with the variant `maiden'), which is a good equivalent for the Old Hebrew `ЛйП', similarly being ambivalent by combining an unmarried woman's young age and her possible, but non-obligatory virgin status. This is the word from the Bible (Is. 7:14) that caused so much disputes and disasters later on. Like the translators of the Septuagint, Matthew (1:23) mistranslated the biblical verse and employed the Greek `napOйvoз', accidentally stressing the sexual semantics (Seidman, 2006, p. 39). Taking in account the age and typical behaviour of a young Christian, it is highly probable that a young unmarried woman is a virgin, though this is not a most important precondition as it is in pagan and courtly stories about dragons and virgins.

Chaucer was in a difficult situation: from the semantical perspective, the lexemes `mathen' and `virge' might act better as an opposition to `moder', but their usage was rather limited, so the author opted for the wide-spread word

`mayde' to build his poetic opposition on. Although this word is very good for Mary's biblical contexts, the opposition `maid-mother' could also stand for an unmarried mother or seduced girl.

The Ukrainian translation is very expressive: Strikha introduced the phrase `діва-мати' (virgin-mother) which sharply divided the marital status. Strikha's translation provoked a question whether a similar ambivalent word exist in today's Ukrainian. The question can be resolved by referring to the Church Slavonic hymns and their translations into New Ukrainian. The Church Slavonic `отроковица' (teen-girl) (e.g., Великій сборник, 1990, p. 242), which can be taken as a full equivalent for the Old Hebrew lexeme, is rarely rendered almost as transliteration: `отроковиця' (e.g., Малий октоїх, 1938, p. 6). In the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (Version 9) (Shvedova, 2017-2020), the lexeme `отроковиця' is recorded 31 times (0,05 per million). It is very rare, because the male counterpart `отрок' is recorded 1969 times (3.11 per million) but it can prepare ground for popularizing the female-gendered form. Besides, the analysis show that `отроковиця' is used in today's texts, so it has a chance to get a wider currency, too, and contribute to the application of synonyms which denotes `діва' (recorded 10058 times, i.e. 15.90 per million).

In the religious domain, intercultural analysis draws interesting conclusions every now and then. Preliminarily, Chaucer's simple phrase `blissful Queene' does not cause a lot of pain for translators as it is so easy to address to everyday religious praxis and deploy a clichй. Both English and Ukrainian translators reproduced the original image well: in New English, it is `queen', in New Ukrainian, it is `цариця'. Both lexemes are supported by quotes from liturgical books. Yet, the etymological perspective can always play a trick. While `queen' derives from the Old English `cwen' (woman, wife), `цариця' is a transformation of the name of the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar (Cf. Shmiher, 2019, p. 227). Thus, it sounds that the usage of this lexeme reverse the order and puts the human nature before the Divine essence. A better option without any etymological reverberation of the human essence is `владичиця' (sovereign lady) which is another wide-spread title of the Virgin Mary.

Difficulty of interpreting Palestinian botany. What is translated traditionally as `lily' in European languages is not a botanical lily (Lilium candidum, Madonna lily), but rather a flower in general (Youngblood, 1995, p. 1005). In West European civilization, St Ambrose, St Jerome, Venerable Bede and many others symbolically connected Jesus Christ and chastity via the white lily that later started denoting the Virgin Mary. This merged image `whyte lily flour'also symbolically combined both the theological truth and the Catholic tradition.

In translations, thus, translators have three options: a) to preserve `lily'; b) to keep to `flower'; or c) remain the merged tautological image. Lipscomb applies the general term `Flower' and - by rhyming with `Power' - gives it an additional associative overtone. Wordsworth kept the merged image `white Lily-flower' (also rhymed with `power' and `dower') and his example was followed by later translators, among which only Coghill modified the phrase with the superlative `whitest'.

St Anselm's prayers and meditations have not been translated into Ukrainian and they do not circulate as texts in Ukrainian religious discourse. So, in the Ukrainian translation, Strikha used the term `лілея' (lily), thus staying the only one who tried to avoid unnecessary excessive and tautologicalpo- eticity. Taking into account the power of rhyming, rhymes for `лілея' are not very successful (inflected forms: `Лілеї' (lily) - `моєї' (my) - `усієї' (whole)), as the rhymed words cannot serve as key words for interpretation. In Ukrainian religious culture, lily is similarly associated with purity and love as well as the Annunciation (Жайворонок, 2006, p. 338), which is a very fortunate coincidence that in English, white lilies are called Annunciation lilies. The Ukrainian image of the lily is rather a good equivalent as some scholars believe that the biblical lily is the lotus, which can be translated by the Ukrainian term `водна лілія' (water lily).

Time-distance texts hide a lot of riddles for contemporary readers, sometimes it refers to openly understandable textual fragments which turn to be misconceptions. Line 467 contains an interesting albeit mysterious image: `mayde Mooder free'. The final `free' is rhymed with `Deitee' and `lighte' that are also important for divine description. The MED UofM suggests a bundle of interpretations connected with the noble status contrary to enslavement. As the Virgin Mary was never an object of slave-themed discussions, we should tend to see the underlining of Her noble status where She is noble in manner and appearance. This usage is accepted in Middle English as an epithet of compliment, but later this sense died out.

Not all translators felt the necessity to substitute this word for a more impressive and obvious phrase. Wordsworth, Nicolson and Kline preserved the original, but already misguiding `free'. Most translators did translate this lexeme: Tatlock and NeCastro opted for `noble'; Hopper, for `gracious'; Coghill invented the phrase `chaste and free'.

However, what if the word `free'stays here for another pagan survival or Chaucer's pun joke? What if `free' is not an adjective, but a noun? It could have been a name, i.e. the name of the goddess of love, sex and marriage - Frie (alternative spellings: Fre, Frea) whom we are grateful for the name of

Friday. Could it be a secret message that Frie is the Deity of Light? Or vice versa: in appraising the Virgin Mary, did Chaucer apply long-left but not forgotten pagan poetics? This way of reasoning looks like overinterpreta- tion,especially in the context of a sheer coincidence that Frie is the goddess of Friday, and the hero of the hypothesized allusion in the phrase `on the brest- soukynge' - St Nicholas - as an infant would suckle but once on Fridays.

The Ukrainian translation was impacted on by the rules of prosody: Strikha translated the puzzling `free' as `щасна' (happy, lucky). It is rhymed with `незгасна' (undimmed) and `безмежна' (infinite) that render the aura of Christian divinity. However, the initial key `щасна' is not satisfactory as the image of the `happy Theotokos' is not typical in Ukrainian liturgical tradition. The emotional scale of the Virgin Mary is disbalanced towards the solemn and tranquil feelings. The phrase `Rejoice, Mary' reiterated in Marian akathysts and troparia presupposes the change of Her mood from sadness to joy. Thus, Strikha's choice is unmotivated from the perspective of liturgical discourse, but his usage of the supportive rhymes shadows the analysed emotion-term and makes the general impression which exactly correlates with Ukrainian religious perception.

The Middle English `quethen' was conjugated variably, among them it was `quod' which was chosen by Chaucer, though it was not a dominant form, but, coincidentally, it looks the same as the Latin word `quod'. Did it happened because Chaucer wanted still to give a touch of Latin into his text? Perhaps, as Latin was not only the official language of the Church, but also the Sacred Language? This lingual choice finally caused the translators' triple attitude to the original word. Omission was a way-out for Tatlock and Ne Castro. Lipscomb reduced the whole poem by half, so it is not surprising that this `inconsistency' is not in his text. The rest translators can be divide into archaizers and modernizers: Wordsworth and Kline rediscovered the archaic form `quoth', while Hopper, Coghill and Nicolson used the modern form `said'. The modernizers lost a flavour of separating the speech of the narrator. In Ukrainian, the very passage reads poetically smoothly and evokes no excessive thoughts.

From Chaucer show that all the `modernizations' are fully-fledged translations, and the range of translation solutions does not provide the background for dividing the long history of translations of Chaucer's into the periods of modernizations and of translations. The change of historical and cultural experience which generate the necessary emotional impact is identical from the 18th century up till now.

All the translators faced the problem of the changed status of liturgical texts which is eased by the stable status of the biblical prototext. The use of different languages is also important due to their status, but now their status has changes, and so has the textual flavour. The reader is getting more distant from the original text in the cultural sense, and the original values are not values any more for contemporary readers. This also means that the original text has changed its status by losing old sacred blocks and acquiring new - but still doubtful - senses.

Thus, Chaucer's collage technique is, too, in danger when only plain text is seen, imagine and interpreted. The significance of comments rests unchanged, but comments usually reach the prepared reader and stay unattended by lay readers. Considering today's British or American Anglicans and Ukrainian Orthodox or Catholics of Byzantine Rite, the underappreciated Catholicism-based collage artistry in the Prologue is not mourned by many. What is more, there is more similar than dissimilar in its English-Ukrainian cultural juxtaposition when one has to discuss the Prologue's impact on contemporary emotional and aesthetical tastes.

References

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