完訳 カンタベリー物語（上）

by Geoffrey Chaucer, ジェフリー・チョーサー, 桝井 迪夫 (Translator)

花ほころび，そよ風吹きそめる四月のある日，身分も職業もさまざまな二九人の巡礼がサザークの旅籠に顔を合せた．当時のイギリス社会の縮図というべき顔ぶれが，カンタベリーへの道中，順番に話をすることになって……．中世イギリス最大の詩人チョーサー（一三四〇頃―一四〇〇）の代表作．バーン＝ジョーンズの端整な挿画を収載．

350 pages, Paperback

Published January 17, 1995

About the author

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.