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Chaucer’s Enigmatic Thing in The Parliament of Fowls

This article argues that the enigmatic “thing” for which Chaucer’s dream-vision narrator searches is both a structuring device for the Parliament of Fowls and a reflection on the process of translation, specifically the translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. “Thing” appears with the same enigmatic sense three times in the poem: near the opening, as the narrator falls asleep, and in the conclusion. The second of these instances occurs in a line from the Consolation of Philosophy expressing the frustration that desire continuously brings to individuals. As a poet and a translator of Boethius, Chaucer repeats this frustration at a crucial point in his poem to suggest that he sees translation as an activity inherently unstable and yet also productive.