Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Clerk's Prologue (Forrest Hainline's Minimalist Translation) Poem by Forrest Hainline

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Clerk's Prologue (Forrest Hainline's Minimalist Translation)

'Sir Clerk of Oxford, ' our Host said,
'You ride as coy and still as does a maid
Were new spoused, sitting at the board;
This day not heard I of your tongue a word.
I trust you study about some sophime;
But Solomon says `everything has time.'

'For God's sake, as be of better cheer!
It is no time for to study here.
Tell us some merry tale, by your faith!
For what man that is entered in a play,
He needs must unto the play assent.
But preach not, as friars do in Lent,
To make us for our old sins weep,
Nay that thy tale make us not to sleep.
'Tell us some merry thing of adventures.
Your terms, your colors, and your figures,
Keep them in store til so be you indite
High style, as when that men to kings write.
Speak so plain at this time, we you pray,
That we may understand what you say.'
This worthy clerk benignly answered:
'Host, ' said he, 'I am under your yard;
You have of us now the governance,
And therefore will I do you obeisance,
As far as reason asks, hardily.
I will you tell a tale which that I
Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his words and his work.
He is now dead and nailed in his chest;
I pray to God so give his soul rest.

'Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet,
Hight this clerk, whose rhetoric sweet
Illumined all Italy of poetry,
As Linian did of philosophy,
Or law, or other art particular;
But Death, that will not suffer us dwelling here,
But as it were a twinkling of an eye,
Them both have slain, and all shall we die.

'But forth to tell of this worthy man
That taught me this tale, as I began,
I say that first with high style he indites,
Ere he the body of his writes,
A proem, in the which describes he
Piedmont and of Saluces the country,
And speaks of Apennine, the hills high,
That be the bounds of West Lombardy,
And of Mount Vesulus in special,
Where as the Po out of a well small
Takes his first springing and his source,
That eastward aye increases in his course
To Emelia, to Ferrara, and Venice,
The Which a long thing were to devise.
And truly, as to my judgment,
Me thinks it a thing impertinent,
Save that he will convene his matter;
But this his tale, which that you may hear.'

Here ends the Prologue of the Clerk of Oxford.