Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, a Bilingual Edition [Paperback] Review

This is a wonderful introduction to the great troubadour lyric and provides a useful series of commentaries of each troubadour included in the book. The editor who did translations to complement those of Pound and Snodgrass provides a passionate and valuable survey of the 200-plus years of this lyric tradition. Most importantly, the Occitan texts - side by side with the English - are a revelation, providing the lyric power and beauty of this world-changing literary movement. It is very difficult to not come back and read over the lyrics time and again.

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Product Description:
Although the troubadours flourished at the height of the Middle Ages in southern France, their songs of romantic love, with pleasing melodies and intricate stanzaic patterns, have inspired poets and song writers ever since, from Dante to Chaucer, from Renaissance sonneteers to the Romantics, and from Verlaine and Rimbaud to modern rock lyricists. Yet despite the incontrovertible influence of the troubadours on the development of both poetry and music in the West, there existed no comprehensive anthology of troubadour lyrics that respected the verse form of the originals until now.

Lark in the Morning honors the meter, word play, punning, and sound effects in the troubadours' works while celebrating the often playful, bawdy, and biting nature of the material. Here, Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of two seminal twentieth-century poets-Ezra Pound and W. D. Snodgrass-to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse and the astonishing variety of troubadour voices. This bilingual edition contains an introduction to the three major periods of the troubadours-their beginning, rise, and decline-as well as headnotes that briefly put each poet in context. Lark in the Morning will become an essential collection for those interested in learning about and teaching the origins of Western vernacular poetry.


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