Directions: Read the following passage carefully and then translate
each underlined part into Chinese.
71. It was not until modern scholarship uncovered the
secret of reading Middle English that we could understand that Chaucer, far from
being a rude versifier, was a perfectly accomplished technician, and that his
verse is rich in music and elegant to the highest degree. 72. Chaucer’s
own urbane personality is a delight to encounter in his books. He is avowedly a
bookworm, yet few poets observe nature with more freshness and delight. He is a
master of genial satire but can sympathize with true piety and goodness with as
much pleasure as he attacks the hypocritical. 73. It is
not an uncommon estimate of Chaucer that he must be counted among the few
greatest of English poets. In range of interest he is surpassed only by
Shakespeare. He was recognized already in the Renaissance, when it came to
England, as the Father of English Poetry. He was a man of wide learning and
wrote with ease on religion, philosophy, ethics, science,
rhetoric. No man has more completely summed up an age than
Chaucer has his, yet the people of his great poems are revealed as men and women
are in all times. Master of verse, as Chaucer was, he introduced
into English poetry many verse forms: the heroic couplet (in which form most of
The Canterbury Tales is written), verse written in iambic pentameter, rhyming
aa, bb, cc, etc. --a form that was to be very important in the eighteenth
century. The rime royal, a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameters, rhyming
ababbcc (Troilus and Criseyde). The terza rima, three-line stanzas, rhyming aba,
bcb, cdc, etc. (which he imitated from Dante, in some of his minor poems). And
the eight-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhyming ababbcbc(The Monk’s
Tale).