Proensa

Proensa PDF

Author: George Economou

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1681370301

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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.”

A Walking Tour in Southern France

A Walking Tour in Southern France PDF

Author: Ezra Pound

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9780811212236

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Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of "Walking Tour 1912", editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound's footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. "What this peripatetic editing process...revealed", he writes, "was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound's gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet...".

Lark in the Morning

Lark in the Morning PDF

Author: Robert Kehew

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-09-15

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 0226429334

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Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of Pound & Snodgrass, to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse & the astonishing variety of troubadour voices.

Courts of Love, Castles of Hate

Courts of Love, Castles of Hate PDF

Author: Aubrey Burl

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0752475320

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The figure of the Troubadour combines the ideals of knighthood with the inspiration of the poet and musician and created a cultural explosion which influenced the whole course of Western art and civilisation. Burl traces the story from the birth of the first Troubadour in 1071 to the execution of the last Cathar Good Man in 1231 and the close of the distinctive southern French culture that had given rise to it. The tale incorporates the Crusades to the Holy Lands and the Albigensian Crusades through the Languedoc and the regular incursions from the English. In telling his story of the Troubadours and their song he brings to life the world of medieval Languedoc. The author is acknowledged as an authority on the Troubadours, one of the most evocative subjects in history.

A Handbook of the Troubadours

A Handbook of the Troubadours PDF

Author: F. R. P. Akehurst

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 0520913000

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This book is a reference volume and a digest of more than a century of scholarly work on troubadour poetry. Written by leading scholars, it summarizes the current consensus on the various facets of troubadour studies. Standing at the beginning of the history of modern European verse, the troubadours were the prime poets and composers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the South of France. No study of medieval literature is complete without an examination of the courtly love which is celebrated in the elaborately rhymed stanzas of troubadour verse, creations whose words and melodies were imitated by poets and musicians all over medieval Europe. The words of about 2,500 troubadour songs have survived, along with 250 melodies, and all have come under intense scholarly scrutiny. This Handbook brings together the fruits of this scrutiny, giving teachers and students an overview of the fundamental issues in troubadour scholarship. All quotations are given in the original Old Occitan and in English. The editors provide a list of troubadour editions and an index, and each chapter includes a list of additional readings.

Songs of the Women Troubadours

Songs of the Women Troubadours PDF

Author: Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1135577803

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This work offers an edition and translation of some 30 poems by the trobairitz, a remarkable group of women poets from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who composed in the style and language of the troubadours. Introductory essays and notes by specialists in the field place the poems in literary, linguistic, historical, social and cultural contexts. English versions facing Occitan texts elucidate the original language and themes, while supplying poems that can be enjoyed by contemporary readers . The varied corpus includes love songs (cansos), debate poems (tensos), political satires (sirventes) and other lyrical sub-genres (including dawn-song, lament, ballad, chanson de mal mariee). To represent the range of female voices available in the lyric corpus of the troubadours, the editors have selected songs consistently attributed to historically documented women poets, as well as songs whose authorship is open to question. The latter may be presented by the manuscripts with or without a named woman poet, but all offer female speakers personae characteristic of troubadour poets in general.

The Troubadours

The Troubadours PDF

Author: Simon Gaunt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-06-28

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780521574730

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The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.

The World of the Troubadours

The World of the Troubadours PDF

Author: Linda M. Paterson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-10-05

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780521558327

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Occitania, known today as the "south of France," had its own language and culture in the Middle Ages. Its troubadours created "courtly love" and a new poetic language in the vernacular, which were to influence European literature for centuries. There are many books on the troubadours, but this is the first comprehensive study of the society in which they lived. For readers of literature it offers a wide-ranging insight into the realities that lay behind the poetic mystique. For historians it opens up an important and neglected area of medieval Europe.