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  • Published: 15 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681370309
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $48.00
Categories:

Proensa

An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry



The poetry of the Provençal troubadors has had a profound influence on the development of the lyric, from Dante and Petrarch to Ezra Pound and the Black Mountain poets, despite the difficulty of Old Provençal, or Occitan, the original language of the troubadors. The renewed interest of the English-speaking world in troubador poetry was initiated in the early twentieth century by Pound's criticism and translations of the troubadors. Yet no poet writing in English has done more for this body of work than the American poet and translator Paul Blackburn, who devoted over twenty years to the study and translation of occitan ancien. Proensa is the result of that long commitment, an anthology of thirty troubador poets of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. It is a dexterous and spirited work of translation, which, as George Economou writes in his introduction, "will take its place among Gavin Douglas' Aeneid, Golding's Metamorphoses, the Homer of Chapman, Pope, and Lattimore, Waley's Japanese, and Pound's Chinese, Italian, and Old English."

It was out of medieval Provence—Proensa—that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the Provençal 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. Blackburn’s Proensa, George Economou writes, “will take its place among Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid, Golding’s Metamorphoses, the Homer of Chapman, Pope, and Lattimore, Waley’s Japanese, and Pound’s Chinese, Italian, and Old English.”

  • Published: 15 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681370309
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $48.00
Categories:

Praise for Proensa

"Blackburn has skillfully incorporated musical elements and also "high" diction and syntax...a great translation."--Stephen Fredman, Chicago Review

"Spare, modern, and abstract without violating the artistic intricacy of the original...Proensa is a boon to those who will never experience the pleasure of studying the troubadours in their original accents but who now can appreciate their complex beauty in Paul Blackburn's dense dynamic re-creations."--Patricia Harris, Romance Philology

"Blackburn's forgotten translation of Troubadour poets, Proensa, is a testament to translation as a test of truth...never did strings plucked at such a distance reverberate so closely."--Paul Pines, Big Bridge