The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.44 (672 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0374273480 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-09-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars, Robert Henryson was influenced by their vision of the frailty and pathos of human life, and by the inherited poetic example of Geoffrey Chaucer. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, the Testament completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover, Diomede, and of her subsequent decline into prostitution and leprosy. Written in Middle Scots, a distinctive northern version of English, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident but faithful idiom that matches the original verse form and honors the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.A master of high narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable, and his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are delicately pointed with irony. Seven of the <
From Publishers Weekly Nobel laureate Heaney's new versions of very old narrative poems are unlikely to make the same worldwide splash as his Beowulf, but they remain moving and memorable. 1505), the best poet of the much-maligned generation that followed Geoffrey Chaucer. Misfortune and fortune, repentance and retribution, pity and prudence, and a late-medieval Christian outlook, in which this life prepares us for the next, all pervade the stories told and retold by Henryson (d. Heaney's facing-page translations, composed (like Henryson's) in seven- to nine-line rhymed stanzas, give a fluent, often delightful modern cast to all of these pathos-filled tales. Henryson's “The Testament of Cresseid,†set in the Trojan War, describes the last days of the title character's life. (Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Having abandoned
Rhetoric meets roguery A middle-aged man contemplates the aftermath of Chaucer's tragic Cresseid. Abandoned by Troilus after she dallied with Diomede, did she deserve the contempt with which she was treated in this tale from the Trojan war? Henryson defends her, and his serious consideration attracts Heaney to revive from his "mid-Ulster" upbringing the speech rhythms shared with a "hidden Scotland" that he hears within this late fifteenth-century poem's elegant defense of a fallen woman, turned a leper.Heaney, as with his translations of the medieval Irish tale of mad Sween
His surviving corpus amounts to fewer than five thousand lines. Counted among the Scots makars, he composed his highly inventive verse in Middle Scots. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats." Robert Henryson lived in Dunfermline, Scotland, sometime between 1400 and 1500. Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His p