'For to seken straunge strondes': Translating Chaucer Hospitably in Refugee Tales

Abstract

In Refugee Tales, David Herd suggests that the asylum process symbolically dehumanises asylum seekers by restricting their ability to narrate their story on, and in, their own terms. Refugee Tales is an attempt to remedy this situation: mimicking the structure of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the text presents us with a series of anonymous stories about someone either seeking asylum in the UK – “The Detainee’s Tale”, “The Appellant’s Tale” – or connected to that experience – “The Lawyer’s Tale”, “The Interpreter’s Tale”. Like The Canterbury Tales, Refugee Tales begins with a “Prologue”. But while Chaucer’s prologue describes the physical and mental attributes of his tale tellers, Refugee Tales turns the focus onto us, its readers, with a powerful poetic call for us to develop an ethical and hospitable response to the refugee crisis. In this article, I explore the ways in which Refugee Tales seeks to provide a shape for this hospitable response through its use of translation. Drawing upon Ricœur’s idea of linguistic hospitality, an approach which seeks to bring the foreign and the domestic into open interaction rather than aggressive opposition, I argue that the ways in which the text translates the canonical Chaucer text into these 21st Century refugee stories challenges the traditional binaries between the foreign and the domestic. In so doing, Refugee Tales offers us an opportunity to think hospitably about our own response to those who seek refuge on our shores.