The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables

A brilliant new translation from the Nobel Prizewinning poet and translatorof Beowulf The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars Robert Henrysonwas influenc... » 

A brilliant new translation from the Nobel Prizewinning poet and translatorof Beowulf The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars Robert Henrysonwas influenced by their vision of the frailty and pathos of human life and bythe inherited poetic example of Geoffrey Chaucer. His finest poem and one ofthe rhetorical masterpieces of Scots literature is the narrative Testament ofCresseid. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan war the Testament completesthe story of Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde offering a tragic account of itsfaithless heroines rejection by her lover Diomede and of her subsequentdecline into prostitution and leprosy. Written in Lowland Scots a distinctivenorthern version of English the Testament has been translated by SeamusHeaney into a confident but faithful idiom that matches the original verse formand honors the poems unique blend of detachment and compassion. A master ofhigh narrative Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable and hisburlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are delicatelypointed with irony. Seven of the fables are here sparklingly translated bySeamus Heaney their freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. TheTestament of Cresseid and Seven Fables provides a rich and widerangingencounter between two poets across six centuries. «