Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures

In the late fourteenth century, the French poet Eustache Deschamps praised the work of Geoffrey Chaucer in a ballade whose refrain repeats "Grant translateur, noble Gieffroy Chaucier." This praise of Chaucer as a "great translator" rather than a "great poet" has been a particular puzzle to literary scholars and has sometimes been read as a backhanded way of slighting Chaucer and the English vernacular poetry he represented. Deschamps's own identity, as a Frenchman living in a country still scarred by the memories of King Edward III's invasions (and by the ongoing English colonization of Calais), would seem to amplify such a reading; Deschamps indeed expresses hostility to the English and their violence in his other writings.

Yet in her provocative and powerful new book, Elizaveta Strakhov argues for quite a different reading of Chaucer the "grant translateur." She writes that "Deschamps's address to Chaucer is far more than just the chronological starting point for Chaucerian reception; it establishes a whole modality for thinking with the figure of Chaucer about England's difference from the Francophone Continent" (97). From this perspective, Strakhov argues that we should read Deschamps's ballade as inclusive rather than slighting, that it represents Deschamps's acknowledgment of Chaucer as a poetic conduit for Francophone poetry and its literary traditions to be "planted" in England. In this way, she brilliantly turns the literary critical tradition upon its head, replacing a moment of French-English hostility with one of integration and exchange.

This is, in a sense, the pattern of Strakhov's book, as she calls upon the reader to reimagine French and English literary exchange during the Hundred Years' War not as a process of nationalist opposition but as one in which the boundaries of Francophone culture were being actively renegotiated. English authors were eager to situate themselves within these preexisting circles of poetic authority, while French authors struggled to think through literary commonality with their political antagonists. While nationalist tendencies (particularly the desire to see post-Chaucerian England as decisively English) and disciplinary boundaries (Strakhov notes, for example, that most scholarship on [End Page 363] cross-channel literary exchange has typically been done by manuscript scholars rather than by literary critics) have privileged difference in the historical record, she encourages the reader to think of late medieval English literature as a product of Francophone literary traditions and continental exchange.

Strakhov asserts that scholars have treated translation exclusively as displacement, as a space of rivalry and replacement. On the contrary, she argues, the late medieval literary world often also provides us with examples of reparative translation, practices that use a shared feature to emphasize commonality, to graft new languages into a shared literary tradition. This is the kind of translation that Strakhov identifies within the writing of English and French poets of the Hundred Years' War period, with form (particularly in the poetic formes fixes and their investment in classical allusion) as the feature that allowed these poets to speak to one another across the treacherous divide of politics and warfare. By elevating form over linguistic difference, Strakhov offers the reader the opportunity to reexamine familiar medieval texts from new vantage points and to note the commonalities and similarities that underlie the traditional linguistic binaries.

Chapter 1 investigates the unique possibilities offered by forme fixe lyric to continental exchange, particularly in the work of Deschamps and Guillaume Machaut. Strakhov argues that both Deschamps and Machaut contribute to making forme fixe lyric a poetic space particularly suited to historicizing and collective literary projects, one that could allow for the compilations across time and space, held together by the similarity of form. Chapter 2 builds upon the first by examining the often anti-English pastourelle poetry of Deschamps and then continuing into a discussion of the public French debate in the mid-fourteenth century over whether poetry might be produced in England, the enemy of France. In her consideration of Philippe de Vitry's withering attack on...