"Signs in Translation: Plowing and Pilgrimage in

Piers Plowman"

Dr. Ming-Tsang Yang 楊明蒼教授 (臺灣大學)


The difficulties and limitations of the vernacular sign are closely related to Langland's writing of poetry.  The project Langland carries out is an audacious Englishing of the essence of the Bible along with its concomitant privileged Latin discourses.  Piers Plowman is a poem of searching and exploration in unknown territory through the inadequate verbal signs of a vernacular language.  It is in the figure of the plowman that the relationships between the valorization of the local and the vocation of vernacular writing are foregrounded. 
 Since the exilic, sinful plowman is translated into the Christian, godly pilgrim, the land and the local, while valorized, are not fixated.  Writing is therefore both earthly plowing and sacred pilgrimage, a process in which the reader is also made to share in the ongoing search as well.  It is this dialectic plowing, and pilgrimage, of the vernacular sign and the sacred sign that constitutes the ultimate economy of Piers Plowman.