Marie Borroff

Provides translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience.

Patience ; and Pearl : Verse Translations

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Laura L. Howes

Presents a scholarly translation, an essay on the metrical form, translator's notes, and explanatory annotations of the canonical Arthurian romance.

An Authoritative Translation, Contexts, Criticism

Here, at last, a finely sensitive translation gives us the poem itself, not just a translator's impression, for Marie Borroff's translation successfully preserves the formulaic character of the language, reflects the diction of the original poem, and reproduces the metrical variety of the original and its cumulative momentum or 'swing.'

A New Verse Translation

The classical medieval poem relating Sir Gawain's romances, his conflict with the Green Knight, and return to the Round Table

"One of our small handful of essential poets"-this is Northrop Frye's estimate of Wallace Stevens. Unsurpassed in virtuosity of Language and in richness and range of dramatic effects, Stevens' poems are his creative response to a world that threatens to impoverish man's imagination. Viewing Stevens' work as a whole ,and recognizing the greatness of his achievement, the critics in this volume employ approaches as diverse as their subject and illuminate as they disagree. They pay tribute to the luxuriance of his early verse; the sparse, cleanliness of his later poems; his loftiness of spirit; his human compassion; his appreciation of the sensuous details of reality."-Publisher

Wallace Stevens; a Collection of Critical Essays

Marie Borroff is a literary critic, poet and philologist as well as mediaevalist, with a particular interest in the powers and effects of poetic language. In this collection of essays she explores problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain - or Pearl - poet. The work should be useful in the study of late-Middle English literature.

Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Beyond

Traditions and Renewals

A Stylistic and Metrical Study

Pearl

These poems, written over fifty years, address such subjects as the celerity of time, old age, art, literary acquaintances, and the author’s beloved New England landscape. They delight in sound and form, even as they unsettle and disturb.

Stars and Other Signs

Of the five poems contained in this book, two are acknowledged masterpieces. The plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance, brilliantly interweaves elements of suspense and high comedy. Pearl, a dream vision, presents its poignant story of the education of a misguided Christian soul in metrically intricate and verbally ornate stanzas that add up to an overarching numerical design. Together with these two, Patience, Cleanness, and Saint Erkenwald make up the complete works of their anonymous author. All exhibit the dramatizing powers and metrical virtuosity of a master-poet. But none became part of the established literary canon until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the single manuscript copies in which they survive were edited and printed. Taken together, these works offer us a wide-ranging portrait of life in the late Middle Ages from the point of view of an independent-minded, learned, and cosmopolitan Englishman, a man as conversant with the conduct of life in great households as with Christian tradition and doctrine. He knew, among other things, how to sail a medieval passenger ship from its mooring to open sea, how to dress the carcass of a deer or a boar at the end of a royal hunt, and how a knight might flatter a noble and beautiful lady in the most intimate of situations while politely evading her seductive overtures.

Marie Borroff

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