Los cuentos de Canterbury, de XXX a clasificación A

The Canterbury Tales has been widely translated and modernised for the benefit of large audiences who are unacquainted with what John Dryden once called Chaucer’s “rough style”. The translations of Chaucer’s masterpiece into Spanish —the main topic of this essay— are scarce but noteworthy, nonetheless. Their interest lies in the fact that the translation of supposedly lewd or sexually explicit passages tends to be irregular in terms of their degree of explicitness. This essay explores the degree to which Chaucer’s‘ lewdness’ has been preserved (or nullified) in translations by Pedro Guardia Massó, Jesús L. Serrano Reyes and Antorio R. León Sandra. The possible reasons that underlie the translators’ modifications in terms of idiom and/or register in their Spanish versions are also discussed.