The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) | Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) | Geoffrey Chaucer | Yess

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The Canterbury Tal...

	The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) Geoffrey Chaucer Penguin Classics, 2003 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature.

Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth century that is as robust as it is representative.

Translated by Nevill Coghill

The Hobo Philosopher

I suppose that any freshman college student has read some of these Tales. I had a professor who read a few of them to us in the Olde English. It was really fun and you really got a grasp of where the English language was coming from - and poetry.
I went on from my English class and read the whole works. They are good, classic short stories. You are really going back to the basics here. The stories are all easy to read and are about the everyday type people and their everyday lives. You get classic English literature, history, short story writing techniques, and the roots of the English language all in one medium sized book. Can't beat it. It's a bargain.

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Yess

great buy got here in about one week definitely worth the wait. Great book for a great price

very nice

Coghill - a friend of Lewis - provides a very fresh and loyal translation (a verse translation) to Chaucer. Nothing of course is better than the real thing, but I suggest this always as a happy second.

Classic

In order to understand English litterature and the English language, many have read, or at least tried to read, Chaucers "Canterbury Tales". I too did begin (and sort of finished) the work in Middle English, which is not as hard as one might be lead to think, but is quite labourious and painstakingly slow at times. With this version, a great compromise has been found, translating it as true to the original as possible yet in modern English. I know that every time you make a rewrite or translation, things are lost, but sometimes it is necessary, or just quite convenient. This is one of those times.

It is great fun reading the Canterbury Tales. The structure of the work makes it very accesible and easy to pick up after some time away. You could treat it as a whole entity or as a collection of short stories centered around a group of persons on a pilgrimage. One of the books that any decent home library shouldn't be without.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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