Over the years, octogenarian translator Burton Raffel has tackled and conquered many of the most forbidding challenges in world literature: Beowulf, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, the Nibelungenleid. This book finds him grappling quite gracefully with another behemoth, Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century classic The Canterbury Tales. For modern readers, the robustness and subtlety of this collection is often diluted by the vagaries of language evolution. With a respectful poetic hand, Raffel retouches Chaucer's minutely realized word portraits, recovering their sheen. A Modern Library translation destined to be both popular and critical acclaimed.