Michael Calabrese's new, modern translation of Piers Plowman: The A Version is “born from years of classroom experience.” The translation is designed for student readers. Calabrese explains that, in order “to actualize [this] vision,” he took pains to work “in isolation from academia” and “did not share the text with colleagues” (ix). Calabrese's translation, then, is—like William Langland's Piers Plowman—a reformist vision, fairly anti-clerical, and enthusiastic about searching for virtue in the toil of common folks. The translation is fantastically readable.

Both students and teachers will benefit from the introduction, which begins with a section titled “What Is Piers Plowman?” (xvii). Calabrese's matter-of-fact phrasing of this question is, I think, emblematic of the spirit of the translation. This is a theoretical inquiry into issues of reception and textual criticism, posed in the direct language of impatient lay readers. This intro strikes a friendly tone that thoroughly unpacks the issues involved in Piers studies, and it will be very useful in the undergraduate classroom.

Notably, Calabrese sees Piers as “an embodiment of virtue, honest labor, and stringent wisdom” (xviii). In crafting this “reader-centered” text, Calabrese lays out how the poem is especially illuminating for those interested in “social justice” and “the historical treatment of the poor.” This is the kind of proselytizing that Piers needs in order to appeal to twentieth-century readers.

It is clear that Calabrese's translation is a spiritual pursuit, celebrating the blue-collar piety and working-class poetry that, for Calabrese, are the ethical core of Langland's poem. Calabrese argues—I think, compellingly—for teaching the A Version of the poem, because it is “the first, shortest, and perhaps most accessible of the three versions” (xix). The intro's survey of other translations may interest professional readers; more important for students will be the quick and dirty section “Langland's Poetics (in a minute)” (xxx).

I personally liked the translation, because I found Calabrese's choices so different from the Piers that I know and love. If you have studied Piers—memorized it partly, or re-read the poem often—then, this translation may feel to you odd yet joyful, like reuniting with an old friend and finding them wondrously changed. I was quite surprised that Calabrese decided to translate the text into free verse, without striving at all to maintain the alliteration; and, frankly, my Conscience wants to say that it is a cardinal sin to so drastically alter Langland's poetics.

But the effect of the radical alterations is to produce a text that is likely to win over contemporary readers. Well-designed footnotes offer guidance to the student, though I expect that the Latin portions may still feel like a turn-off for some readers. Most successfully, Calabrese does justice to the range of humor of Langland's original, at once slapstick and sophisticated. I found the effect of the translation often to be wryly hilarious in its contemporaneity, as when Covetousness speaks of his wife's “microbrewery” and Will ponders if Mede “makes the world go ‘round’,” (65).

I recommend reading and teaching Calbrese's translation of Piers. And I would argue, more generally, that Medieval Studies ought to be re-oriented toward more greatly supporting, encouraging, and undertaking such public-oriented, critical-creative projects. Calabrese's translation ensures that Langland's old, familiar ways are still crazy after all these years. Yet if contemporary medievalist translation projects can make Catholic-Left claims about the Middle Ages as a resource for social justice, then those claims should be carefully examined. In Calabrese’s Acknowledgements, he speaks lovingly about his working-class, Italian-American, Catholic family, whose passionate devotion has been the main inspiration for his translation of Piers. The historical fact is that the white family—with its Christian theocratic impulses—is a modern, and not a medieval institution; and the modern white family has been one of the world’s leading engines of abuse, torture, exploitation, and genocide. In the spirit of Doing Well, I hope that Calabrese’s translation of Piers will be one passus in an ongoing series of dialogues, debates, discourses, and dreams that will lead toward a Kinder Knowing.