Book 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. Seven Fables and The Testament
of Cresseid is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter
between two poets across six centuries.
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). District and Circle, his eleventh
collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S.
Eliot Prize. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
