Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe: text, manuscripts and traps for the translator / Anna Wojtyś (UW)

Research Group for the Study of Manuscripts SIGLUM extends an invitation to an online lecture by Prof. Anna Wojtyś (University of Warsaw), entitled Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe: text, manuscripts, and traps for the translator. The meeting will take place on 28 May 2024 at 17:00-18:30 CET via Zoom. To register for the meeting please contact us at siglum@wn.uw.edu.pl.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe is a text that earned him the title of “the first technical writer in English” (Basquin 1981: 19). The treatise is assumed to have been written with great clarity, which is consistent with the assumed reader being a boy of the “tendre age of .x. yer.” Hence, the presence of repetitions, similes, explication, and direct marking of important passages. In the process of preparing the first Polish translation of the text, one comes across problematic linguistic elements. Among the traps set for the translator, there is archaic vocabulary, no longer comprehensible culture-specific items, and syntactically ambiguous passages. The deciphering of the intended sense often needs to involve the consultation of the diagrams and illustrations present in some of the manuscripts.

Anna Wojtyś is associate professor at the Institute of English Studies, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw. Her research focus is on Old and Middle English, historical morphology, phonology and semantics. She is the author of the first Polish translation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play The Two Noble Kinsmen (2017). She is currently working on the first Polish translation of Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe.