Peregrinajes with Piers Plowman: Translating the Embodied City of Angels with Cal State LA’s Piers Plowman Students—A Collaborative Project by Michael Calabrese, Katie Rocio Luna, and the Piers Plowman Students of Cal State LA

Abstract

With great pleasure Michael Calabrese and Katie Rocio Luna introduce a series of translations, composed by Cal State LA students, of the great 14-century Middle English poem, Piers the Plowman, written by William Langland. Piers Plowman recounts the wanderings of a man named “Will,” representing all of human desire. He’s an everyman on a complicated pilgrimage, experiencing a series of dreams that take him into internal confrontations with personifications of his own mind. In the selections that follow, you will see Cal State LA students, both undergraduate and graduate, interpreting various passages in Piers Plowman in creative/critical modern English translations of the original Middle English text. This collection of student work manifests the practice of “translation pedagogy,” where the classroom itself and student assignments draw upon individual students’ multilingualism, cultural backgrounds, and interests, in the service of adapting the Medieval poem and its language.