Old Janus drinking from his guampa : A Brazilian re‐creation of The Canterbury Tales

This article explains the circumstances that shaped, and the strategies that guided, my translation of The Canterbury Tales into Brazilian Portuguese. This first complete and versified translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales aims to re‐create the aesthetic, poetic, and narrative power of the original, in order to give it new life in the context of Brazilian culture and, more broadly, of contemporary South American culture. The article describes the methods used during the translation to create a fictional Middle Ages, in which Brazilian readers of the twenty‐first century could find a measure of familiarity and strangeness. To do so, the translation incorporates dictions inspired by rural Brazilian culture and popular oral poetry. At the same time, these dictions connect with the cultures of neighboring countries, such as Argentina and Uruguay. The article demonstrates how words, images, and poetic forms extracted from the universe of rural popular culture were used in crucial passages of the Tales , in order to create a veritable fictional universe, based on the idea that the translation of a classic is not only the recreating of a past text but also a way to echo other voices.