I found my eighteenth great grandfather’s (on my mother’s side) translation of Boethius into Middle English- on my own shelves
Let’s walk this further back to my teen years in the surge and resurgence of ancestry tracking. Someone once told me that the Mormons had their hand in tracking all the people back for reasons, and whatever reason that was is inconsequential to this story because the people who track things tracked them back. I have benefited from these hobbyist records more than once, but where later they would return a lost brother, here they gave me a huge great grandfather. I don't know if he would own me. I am adopted and the internet might be wrong.
Geoffrey Chaucer.
When I found that out at fourteen or fifteen, I lighted on it with the delight of one who found out their father was a prince. Then I found out how scandalous he was and I delighted in having a scandalous grandfather, but I still didn’t know him very well. Then I didn’t talk about it because I was Growing Up and one didn’t speak of mysterious scandalous Grandpapas.
Finally I knew some of what he wrote and was not courageous enough to own it except in excerpt.
But in the last couple years I was encouraged to read him through and see what he was doing before judging the content, so I did. And I came to love my grandfather. He has a whole lot more common sense than most people did teaching purity seminars in the early twenty-oughts. He is a saint.
I have read a lot of men, and count many of them as fathers, but with Chaucer I came to know him, and love him, and own him as family and a storyteller at the same time which does things to a person.
I picked up the Riverside Chaucer and gave it to my husband for his birthday in a stack of cosmology shaping books last October and forgot about it in the course of picking up stakes and moving to Troy.
Around the same time I decided to read off my own shelves and lean into Lewis’s asides on developing a proper self. It is the academic’s version of clean living.
Lewis’s list involved ten or so books and sent me on a hunt to run down Latin. Boethius was at the top of the list right under Dante. I began combing my shelves because I have the Britanica classics set, some Harvard Classics, random Penguin, Puffin, and Norton editions. No Consolation.
I did have a copy on my phone. So I resigned myself to reading on my phone. In all of the digging I found Chaucer translated Boethius and I really wanted to read it. But as it was not on my shelves, it was out of reach.
Yesterday night I was cleaning up books and the Riverside Chaucer was unearthed. I moved it towards its shelf and the page just happened to turn open to read Boece. And that was that. Unforseen grace - my grandfather will walk me through Boethius and to his own teachers who encouraged his own translations.
Further Up and Further In
Comments