Proensa

(Paperback, Main)

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The poetry of the Provencal troubadours 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 Provencal, or Occitan, the original language of the troubadours. The renewed interest of the English-speaking world in troubadour poetry was initiated in the early twentieth century by Pound's criticism and translations of the troubadours. Yet no poet writing in English has done more for this body of work than the American poet and translator Paul Blackburn, who devoted more than twenty years to the study and translation of occitan ancien. Proensa is the result of that long commitment, an anthology of thirty troubadour poets of the eleventh through 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."

Reviews

Shortly after Proensa was first published by Robert Creeley in Mallorca in 1953, Paul Blackburn wrote his own best definition of these songs: To give / and man enough to receive, LOVE, / when he finds it offered. / To take the sun and the goods of earth, while it lasts. Over sixty years later his voicings of the troubadours still ring freshleaping with joy, sorrowing with duende. Richard Sieburth

Blackburns 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

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 Blackburns dense dynamic re-creations.Patricia Harris, Romance Philology

Author Bio

Paul Blackburn (1926-1971) was a lyric poet and one of America's foremost translators of troubadour verse. A contributing editor and distributor of the Black Mountain Review, he published thirteen poetry collections. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he taught at the New School and the State University of New York at Cortland. George Economou has published Geoffrey Chaucer (1975) and two other books on medieval literature. He is also a poet and translator.