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“Kek kek”: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls Michael J. Warren [Birds] often engage in social relations with other members of their species; and they communicate with them by acoustic means recalling articulated language. Claude Lévi-Strauss1 The biosemiotic view that there exist signs, per se, in animal communication, or in any other communication among living systems, poses the question about the translatability of these signs, both by humans and by other organisms. Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop2 Lévi-Strauss’s familiar remarks on the parallels between birds’ and humans’ interactions and communications would not have appeared strange to medieval thinkers. Indeed, the Middle Ages contributed a great deal to this transhistorical fascination—the inclination to identify bird society as “homologous to that in which we live,”3 to see that birds “Among all bestis” appear, like us, to “[folwen] most honest[ee] of kind.”4 Lévi-Strauss’s observation that birdsong is akin to “articulated language” (langue articulé) echoes a particularly medieval [End Page 109] debate on the nature of the articulate, rational voice, in which birds were prominent precisely because their human-sounding vocalizations foregrounded and reified a central worry for medieval theologians: the distinction between rational man (animal rationale) and irrational beast (animal irrationale). Paradoxically, birds’ voices were ubiquitously compared to or depicted as human speech in various discourses because they display vocal abilities, even whilst being rigorously denied this likeness. Avian vocality, that is, could plausibly be considered discrete and articulate, sophisticated and adaptable, but such possibilities were hard to reconcile with mainstream doctrines. Within this context, I wish to argue that Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls not only moves beyond typically superficial comparisons with human articulated language, but imagines the potential for translatability between species. In some ways the most obvious candidate for a study on the specifics of nonhuman voice, this poem has received surprisingly little attention in this regard, perhaps because it does not involve explicit human–nonhuman discourse or bird mimicry.5 In my view, however, the poem’s concerns with interspecies communications and translative acts make birds’ utterances “richly problematic” in the way that Peter W. Travis argues for Thomas’s reverberating fart in The Summoner’s Tale. The “cultural proscription” that claims “certain sounds are insignificant noises” is problematized to produce voices that might be read not as unreasonable nonsense, but as legitimate “counter-harmonics” that, moreover, have significant impact upon our understanding of the dizzyingly complex allegory.6 The birds and their voices are responsible for a great deal of complication in our attempts to read the poem figuratively, but they also might be key to understanding how we can approach these complications. If The Parliament’s allegory, as so many readers have discovered, refuses to settle, there is some reflection of this in Chaucer’s vociferous assembly of squabbling birds who do not conform to wholesale figuration, whose vocal and symbolic meanings slip in and out of coherency. [End Page 110] This essay, then, engages recent thinking in animal studies in order to give fuller attention to birds’ voices per se. After examining the difficulties presented to this aim by traditional approaches to allegory, and outlining mainstream medieval thinking on avian vocalizations, I will focus on the well-known, intrusive bird-calls line (499) to argue how Chaucer engages with issues of translation, an act that invests the birds’ voices with meaning that is traditionally denied to them in the contexts of both allegory and scholastics. The moment occurs when the lower birds—the seed- and water-fowl—erupt into outcry at the lengthy and tedious protestations of love from the eagles that last from “morwe . . . / Tyl dounward went the sonne’ (489–90):7 The goos, the cokkow, and the doke also So cryede, “Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!” hye, That thourgh myne eres the noyse wente tho. (498–500) Impatient to get on with the business of pairing, certain birds take matters into their own hands, and the debate rapidly disintegrates. In this poem about which voices do and do not count, I propose that Chaucer asks us to consider real birds’ voices at line 499 (or, at least...
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