The ways in which Dante speaks in and through The Canterbury Tales are numerous, various, and subtle, and I have necessarily proposed and dealt with only a few that seemed important and suggestive as a means of establishing that Chaucer's poem is indeed in the line of "epic succession" to the Comedy. Dante speaks thus in The Canterbury Tales, also "in translation," though not in a role especially created for him, as Virgil does in the Comedy, one reason being perhaps that although he died a little more than half a century earlier, his is still a palpable presence in the Europe of Chaucer's day. poet, but in the only way a poetry, whatever its original language, can speak to us: by a sustained act of translation. Dante's Comedy "reads" Virgil by making him speak, not, it is true, precisely in the language and manner of the first-century B.C. Herzman has written ( Acta 9, 1), and his formulation expresses most succinctly the central argument of this book. "My suggestion is that Chaucer read Dante the way Dante read Virgil," Ronald B.
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