The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

British novelist, brother of A. C. and R. H. Benson, born at Wellington College, Berkshire, educated at King's College, Cambridge and the British School of Archaeology in Athens. His successful first novel, Dodo (1893), was followed by a stream of novels, biographies, and reminiscences. He is most famous for the series of comic novels he published during the 1920s and 1930s, the 'Mapp and Lucia' books, which satirize provincial life in the small coastal town of Tilling (Rye) and which contain, in the characters of Lucia, grande dame of Tilling, and her rival, Miss Mapp, two of the most endearing comic types in British fiction.

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