explanation (razo):
First, I hope this is taken for the tongue-in-cheek piece that it is. I love virtuous women as much as any gentleman – please see below for more details on the genre and my decision to go with such a potentially awkward piece of humor. That said, I admit the translation is somewhat rough. It can be fairly difficult when dealing with a number of abstract concepts to translate them from one language to another (even when the language is “the same,” made different only by 600 years of development). So, please forgive me for any awkward phrases when translated into modern English. I’m happy to discuss any of the lines with anyone who is interested.
On to the piece itself: this is a complaint (as the title suggests), a genre of poetry popular in England in the mid-to-late fourteenth century. I have mimicked in many thematic aspects several of Geoffrey Chaucer’s own complaint poems, especially “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” “A Complaint to His Lady,” “The Complaint of Venus,” and “The Complaint Unto Pity.” For example, there is a single speaker directly addressing the source of his problem; Chaucer complains to his purse that it’s not full enough of money! Chaucer’s complaint poems are almost all filled with at least a bit of sarcasm and self-deprecation, and a few of his related works (though not necessarily complaints) are a bit closer in ideology to my own work. The closest might be “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” in which Chaucer yells at his young friend Scogan for having an argument with his lady – Chaucer frets that Venus will not be pleased with men, and he has enough bad luck with ladies as it is, being a fat, old, bald man. Since one of the requirements for this competition was a poem in praise of the queen, I thought perhaps the best way I knew how was to simultaneously praise her and poke fun at young men like me, who aren’t necessarily always after the best catch (so to speak). I hoped it would sound like the sort of thing a young Chaucer might write (or at least consider writing).
Chaucer’s complaints all utilize a rime royal rhyme scheme: seven-line stanzas with an ABABBCC rhyme pattern. With the exception of the longest complaints, this rhyme pattern is held throughout the entire poem (usually three stanzas, which is the makeup of the ballade form of poetry). After the third stanza, I have included an envoy – a message – to the subject of my poem, even more direct than the preceding stanzas. Chaucer writes several such envoys, including one in “To his Purse,” “Complaint of Venus,” and in many of his ballades (“Womanly Noblesse,” “Fortune,” “Truth,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” to name a few) and in his “Lenvoy” poems (“Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan” and “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton” come to mind).
I have used as many fourteenth-century Chaucerian vocabulary and word forms as possible. Where my primary source(1) lacked information, I turned to the electronic Middle English Dictionary(2). I cannot recall any words that I had to extrapolate fully from a modern version, though the “-ie” ending of several lines was used instead of “-e” for a more visually consistent rhyme scheme.
(1) Benson, Larry. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
(2) The Electronic Middle English Dictionary. Frances McSparran, ed. U of Michigan, 2001. <http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med/> 20 November 2004.