Meet a Medievalist Maker: Jonathan Fruoco
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
My name is Jonathan Fruoco and I really shouldn’t be here. I accidentally became a medievalist fifteen years ago when my lifelong passion for the Middle Ages led me to study English literature — hoping that “English” would eventually mean Middle English. It didn’t. Not at my university, where I remained the only one working on anything remotely medieval. Like many of my generation, I first entered that world through Tolkien. The cadence of his language, the distant echo of Chaucer and the anonymous poets of the fourteenth century, fascinated me long before I understood where it came from. Studying medieval literature felt like unlocking the linguistic DNA of the stories I loved most — and before I knew it, I had become someone whose daily life revolves around the Middle Ages in one form or another.
Process
Translating Chaucer is a strange and humbling act. It’s like listening through centuries of static to a voice that is both foreign and familiar, comic and solemn, earnest and ironic. My process always begins with sound — with trying to hear the rhythm and pulse of Chaucer’s English before attempting to reproduce it in French. I read aloud, often several times, until the Middle English begins to breathe again. Then I start to translate, slowly, line by line, resisting the temptation to modernize or rationalize too quickly.
A translation of Chaucer cannot simply be about meaning. It must convey tone, irony, and playfulness — all the qualities that make Chaucer such a living, unpredictable writer. I’ve come to see translation as a form of performance: every translator, like every actor, must find their own balance between fidelity and reinvention. The challenge is not to domesticate Chaucer, but to make him speak in a new tongue while keeping his mischievous smile intact.
Because Chaucer’s language sits halfway between the English we know and the French we think we know, translating him into French is both natural and treacherous. There’s an uncanny familiarity: words like gentil, courtoisie, aventure already populate his verse. Yet the meanings have shifted, the idioms have warped, and the rhythm has been transformed by time. My work, then, often feels archaeological — uncovering linguistic fossils, dusting them off, and setting them into new contexts that speak to today’s readers.
Project
It started in Toronto during the 2018 congress of the New Chaucer Society. During the conference, it was mentioned that the NCS ought to find ways to reach non-Anglophone Chaucerians, and France came up in the discussion. That had me reacting for obvious reasons: I had noticed how few French medievalists attended these international gatherings.
I knew the state of Chaucerian studies in France, but I hadn’t realized how isolated we had become. It’s a strange state of affairs, especially for a poet like Chaucer, whose writing is profoundly international. As Émile Legouis wrote over a century ago, Chaucer is “vraiment nôtre par filiation.” In other words, he belongs to us as much as to the English tradition. Despite this, Chaucer remains virtually unknown among French-speaking readers and students — a situation that deprives them of one of the great architects of English poetry. We all know Shakespeare, of course, but who would Shakespeare have been if Chaucer hadn’t decided, centuries earlier, to write fiction in English at a time when the language of culture in England was still French? What would English literature have become without the genius of a poet who managed to transpose the elegance of Italian and French verse into a vibrant, vernacular idiom that made room for both beauty and irony?
Chaucer has often been called the father of English poetry, but I prefer to think of him as one of the originators of English prose: his flexible, living language became the foundation for centuries of storytelling. And yet, despite that legacy — and despite his deep connection to France — more than 60% of French people have never even heard of him. That is the injustice I wanted to address through my translation. After several earlier attempts — from partial twentieth-century translations to the complete but uneven editions by Juliette Dor and André Crépin — Chaucer still had not truly found his place in the French literary landscape. In response to that gap, we decided to produce a new bilingual edition of Chaucer’s works for Classiques Garnier: one that would stand apart from previous efforts and restore the poet’s voice for a modern francophone audience.
Our edition reproduces the texts according to their accepted order of composition, allowing readers to follow the evolution of Chaucer’s style and ideas. It also offers, for the first time in French, a full bilingual presentation accompanied by an entirely new prose translation — my own — designed to remain as close as possible to the rhythm and texture of the original. Because Chaucer’s English draws so richly on French vocabulary, I chose not to erase those shared roots. The translator must become something of an etymologist: to uncover the traces of ancien français still beating within Middle English and to let them resonate again in modern French.
My guiding principle is simple: not to “modernize” Chaucer, but to let his language breathe in a contemporary idiom that still honours its medieval depth. In doing so, I hope to bring back to life a writer who is both European and timeless — a poet whose laughter, intelligence, and humanity still speak directly to us, across the centuries.
Peek
Va, petit livre, mon humble tragédie ! Dieu donne à ton auteur, avant sa mort, la force d’écrire une comédie ! Mais, petit livre, oublie la jalousie et sois le sujet de toute poésie et baise les pas qui ont laissé leur trace, Virgile, Ovide, Homère, Lucain, et Stace. (l. 1786-1792)
Comme il existe une grande diversité en anglais dans l’écriture de la langue, je prie Dieu que tu sois copié sans fautes, et scandé sans nul défaut de langue, que tu sois lu, chanté, où que tu sois sans contresens, j’en implore Dieu ! Mais revenons-en plutôt à mon histoire. (l. 1793-1799)
Le courroux, j’étais en train de vous dire, de Troïlus coûta fort cher aux Grecs, qui par milliers périrent là de sa main, étant au combat sans aucun égal sinon Hector en son temps, j’ai ouï dire. Mais, malheur, par la volonté de Dieu, vilement le tua le féroce Achille. (l. 1800-1806)
Et lorsque Troïlus fut ainsi occis, son esprit si léger rejoignit en paix jusqu’à l’intérieur de la huitième sphère, laissant derrière lui tous les éléments. Et de là il vit très distinctement les astres erratiques, oyant l’harmonie des sons de ces célestes mélodies. (l. 1807-1813)
Et de là-haut il contempla alors ce petit point de terre que la mer entoure et il se mit à mépriser ce misérable monde, pure vanité comparée à la pure félicité qui règne dans les cieux. Et finalement, il abaissa les yeux vers sa mort. (l. 1814-1820)
Et en lui-même il rit alors des maux de ceux pleurant là en bas son trépas et maudit notre ardeur à suivre ainsi les désirs aveugles qui jamais ne durent au lieu de donner notre cœur au Ciel. Il se rendit ensuite, en résumé, là où Mercure l’avait décidé. (l. 1821-1827)
Ainsi finit Troïlus, par amour ! Ainsi finit sa si grande valeur ! Ainsi finit sa dignité royale ! Ainsi finit sa passion, sa noblesse ! Ainsi finit l’inconstance du monde ! J’ai dit comment il s’éprit de Criseyde ainsi que la façon dont il périt. (l. 1828-1834)
Ô jeunes et fraîches gens, garçons ou filles, dont l’amour en vous grandit avec l’âge, éloignez-vous des vanités du monde et tournez au contraire les yeux du cœur vers ce Dieu qui vous fit à Son image et songez que ce monde n’est qu’une foire qui fanera tôt comme de belles fleurs. (l. 1835-1841)
Aimez Celui qui vous aima vraiment depuis Sa croix, pour racheter nos âmes, mort et ressuscité, siégeant au Ciel. Car Il ne trompera celui, j’ose dire, qui met en Lui son cœur sans partage. Puisqu’Il est le meilleur amour, si doux, à quoi bon chercher de feintes amourettes ? (l. 1842-1848)
Prompt
Exercise: Hearing the Middle Ages
Translation begins with listening. To experience that, try this short exercise:
Pick a short passage of English you love — it could be from Shakespeare, Austen, or even a modern novel.
Read it aloud several times, paying attention to rhythm and sound rather than meaning.
Now, translate the passage into your own words in another language you know — or, if you don’t speak another language, into a different register (for instance, into slang, or into a formal tone).
Finally, read both versions aloud again. What has changed? What remains?
This simple experiment reveals what I find most thrilling about translation: words are never fixed, meaning is constantly reborn in the act of expression. When you translate, you don’t simply carry a text from one language to another — you discover that every act of reading is already a form of translation.
