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6 - Language and its Limits: The Cloud of Unknowing and Pearl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2023

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Summary

WHEN I was a student reading English at Cambridge, I had the good fortune to be taught by a great medieval scholar and inspiring teacher, Elizabeth Salter, one of whose special enthusiams was the Middle English mystics. She had been a student of Phyllis Hodgson, the editor of the standard scholarly edition of the Cloud-author's work, and that was doubtless how I came to read The Cloud of Unknowing for the first time, when most of my contemporaries were more likely to be reading Sons and Lovers or A Passage to India. But Elizabeth Salter saw the writings of the medieval mystics as works of literature, to be read alongside the poetry of their age, the poetry of Chaucer and Langland and the Pearl-poet. In 1966, for example, she wrote in an essay on Chaucer's greatest single poem, the story of the passionate and tragic love of Troilus and Criseyde,

It is both a sad and a triumphant fact that the only medieval writings on love which rival the grace and intensity of Chaucer's language in Book III of Troilus are religious treatises, and Chaucer had to win the full release of his imaginative powers for this difficult subject by religious means.

With Elizabeth Salter's encouragement, I read the Cloud as a literary text alongside other literary texts; that is, as a text whose meaning is not on the other side of its language, but is created in its language. More than ever, I continue to find that a profitable way of reading it. As a student I found the Cloud enormously difficult and enormously impressive, but I did not go back to it in a serious way until quite recently, when I was commissioned to produce a new translation of the Cloud and some of the associated texts for the Penguin Classics series. I had never before translated anything of comparable length, and I knew no better than to agree. If I had realized what a gruelling task the translation would be, I am not sure that I would ever have started it. For better or worse, it was completed and published, and labouring at it forced me to think further about the distinctive way in which the Cloud-author uses language – uses an intensely bodily language to point beyond the bodily sphere.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2005

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