The General Prologue to “The Canterbury Tales” in Serbian: Aspects of Versificational and Lexical Equivalence

The paper discusses two aspects of Boris Hlebec’s 1983 translation of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: the versificational and the lexical. It sheds light on the regularities and peculiarities of Chaucer’s metre, like the iambic pentameter, but also its extrametrical eleventh syllable, and sets the original against the hendecasyllabic metre, one of the most natural metres in Serbian poetry, to demonstrate a higher incidence of the 5+6 syllable matrix in translation than is the frequency of the pure iamb in the English text. The caesura is also shown to occur more often after syllable 5 in Serbian than after syllable 4 in English. By far the most frequent rhyme in translation is feminine, with sporadic occurrences of masculine or dactylic variants, and some instances of words shifted within a line, or occasionally lines with switched places within couplets. In order to give the text a more archaic overtone, the translator resorted to a number of Turkish/Oriental loanwords used from the epic stock; he also employed specific trade-based lexical items for the pilgrims, and he relied on some comic-epic vocabulary present in folk tales and the best of Serbian translations of humorous mediaeval narratives.