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).