Book description
In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost
daughter on the far bank of a river: 'my pearl, my girl'. One of the
great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem
Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance. Its account of loss and
consolation retains its force across six centuries.
Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative
intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O'Donoghue says in his
introduction, 'an event of great significance and excitement', an
encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.
'Draycott's version is compellingly human.' - Lachlan Mackinnon,
Times Literary Supplement 'When Jane Draycott read, for the first time,
sections of her exquisitely modulated translation of the 'Pearl' poem,
its echoing character seemed to transport me from one cultural space to
another... I came as close to hearing the 'Pearl' poet's voice as I am
ever likely to be.' - Stella Halkyard, PN Review 'The language is
marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over
into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original,
gorgeous and natural this old poem can be.' - David Morley, Poetry
Review
Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at
King's College London and Bristol University. Her first full
collection, Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was
shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002
she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004,
the year of her second collection, The Night Tree, she was nominated
as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' list of poets.
Her third collection Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) was shortlisted for
the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize, and her translation of the 14th-century
Pearl (Carcanet/OxfordPoets 2011) is a PBS Recommendation and winner
of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation. Jane Draycott's other
books include No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop 1998, shortlisted for the
Forward Prize for Best First Collection), Christina the Astonishing
(with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and Tideway (illustrated by
Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She lives in Oxfordshire
and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University
and the University of Lancaster.
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College,
Oxford, and has published seven books of poems, including Gunpowder,
which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1995, and his Selected
Poems (Faber, 2008). His verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.
