Chaucer's "makyng" of the Romaunt of the Rose

Despite its being the first testimony of Chaucer’s genius, the interest of modern criticism in the Romaunt has mainly focused on the issue of authorship, whereas the efforts to assess this text as a translation have been limited both in their number and in their scope. This paper discusses Chaucer’s translation of the Roman de la Rose, and provides an evaluation of Fragment A from a modern traductological perspective, while taking account of contemporary theoretical positions. First, this article compares the Romaunt with Chaucer’s later translating practice. Second, taking into account that the immediate audience of the Romaunt would have been cognizant of French, this essay considers the pragmatic function of this translation. Finally, I reconstruct some of Chaucer’s decisions in the translation process, and then I present the translation strategies he adopted in order to create an English metapoem which replicated the spirit of the Roman, thus proving the adequacy of English for poetic expression.

Electrospinning of silica sub-microtubes mats with platinum nanoparticles for NO catalytic reduction

Silica sub-microtubes loaded with platinum nanoparticles have been prepared in flexible non-woven mats using co-axial electrospinning technique. A partially gelated sol made from tetraethyl orthosilicate was used as the silica precursor, and oil was used as the sacrificial template for the hollow channel generation. Platinum has been supported on the wall of the tubes just adding the metallic precursor to the sol–gel, thus obtaining the supported catalyst by one-pot method. The silica tubes have a high aspect ratio with external/internal diameters of 400/200 nm and well-dispersed platinum nanoparticles of around 2 nm. This catalyst showed a high NO conversion with very high selectivity to N2 at mild conditions in the presence of excess oxygen when using C3H6 as reducing agent. This relevant result reveals the potential of this technique to produce nanostructured catalysts onto easy to handle conformations.