A Foreign English Tongue
By Joseph Wakelee-Lynch
“We are not just of today, we are also of yesterday. Reciting from ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is a very integral part of yesterday, and it helps give people a sense of tradition and continuity that we do not have today.”
Sullivan’s custom, indeed, continues. Mel Bertolozzi, professor emeritus of English who taught British literature, said he inherited the tradition from Sullivan and Frank Carothers Jr., another English department Hall-of-Famer. Bertolozzi estimates he heard student recitations for 20 years before retiring in 2007. It was fun, he said, but also important. Chaucer “chose to write ‘The Canterbury Tales’ in the London dialect of English of his time, and that pretty much established it as the national dialect for the island. He got poetry in English going.”
Kristen Trudo ’14, an English and psychology double major, faced her recitation this spring while studying with Barbara Rico, professor of English. Rico recited the text herself as a Yale undergraduate; in fact, her first visit to a professor’s office was to test her Middle English locution. Rico’s students recite not in class but in her office, one on one. That prospect seemed stressful to Trudo, but she practiced with a friend during a visit to Disneyland. “We spent the entire day reciting it out loud, freaking people out,” she recalled. “By the end of the day, I had the first 15 lines down.”
Trudo is interested in a writing career and has taken courses in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, which included summer study last year at Oxford University.
“I may never use the recitation in a job interview,” Trudo said. “But the recitation is about connecting to our history, our past, and writers who have come before us and moved the world with their words.”