Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (New York Review

Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (New York Review Books Classics)

It was out of medieval Provenceâ€”Proensaâ€”that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the ProvenÃ§al troubadours that it found its perfect expression. Their poetry was also a central inspiration for Dante and his Italian contemporaries, propagators of the modern vernacular lyric, and seven centuries later it was no less important to the modernist Ezra Pound. These poems, a source to which poetry has returned again and again in search of renewal, are subtle, startling, earthy, erotic, and supremely musical.

The poet Paul Blackburn studied and translated the troubadours for twenty years, and the result of that long commitment is Proensa, an anthology of thirty poets of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, which has since established itself not only as a powerful and faithful work of translation but as a work of poetry in its own right. Blackburnâ€™s Proensa, George Economou writes, â€œwill take its place among Gavin Douglasâ€™ Aeneid, Goldingâ€™s Metamorphoses, the Homer of Chapman, Pope, and Lattimore, Waleyâ€™s Japanese, and Poundâ€™s Chinese, Italian, and Old English.â€
Country USA
Brand New York Review Books
Manufacturer NYRB Classics
Binding Paperback
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2017-01-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781681370309

Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (New York Review Books Classics)