The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables: Translated by Seamus Heaney

(, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.

A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable: his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated: their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.

Reviews

Praise for Seamus Heaneys translation of "The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables":
"The Testament of Cresseid "is a beautiful, rare work, unique in the history of literature for [the recognition] scene alone. Heaney has done us all a generous and graceful service. Ruth Padel, "Financial Times
"The wintry force and appeal of ["The Testament"] are certainly apparent in [Heaneys] rendering . . . Read him and youll want to experience the original, too. Sean OBrien, "The Sunday Times "(London)
"The Testament of Cresseid "is [Henrysons] masterpiece, possibly the greatest short narrative poem of the Middle Ages. It mingles human sympathy, moral judgment, ironic awareness and grim humour in equal measure . . . [Heaneys] translation of "The Testament "into modern English . . . is a reminder that translation is one of the glories of the English literary tradition.

Author Bio

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize.