It was out of medieval Provence—Proensa—that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the Provençal troubadours that it found its perfect expression. Their poetry was also a central inspiration for Dante and his Italian contemporaries, propagators of the modern vernacular lyric, and seven centuries later it was no less important to the modernist Ezra Pound. These poems, a source to which poetry has returned again and again in search of renewal, are subtle, startling, earthy, erotic, and supremely musical. The poet Paul Blackburn studied and translated the troubadours for twenty years, and the result of that long commitment is Proensa, an anthology of thirty poets of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, which has since established itself not only as a powerful and faithful work of translation but as a work of poetry in its own right. Blackburn’s Proensa, George Economou writes, “will take its place among Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid, Golding’s Metamorphoses, the Homer of Chapman, Pope, and Lattimore, Waley’s Japanese, and Pound’s Chinese, Italian, and Old English.”

The songs of the troubadour poets of the south of France were a pervasive influence in the development of the European lyric (and indeed other genres) from the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond. Much troubadour poetry is on the topic of love, and is composed from a first-person position. This book is a full-length study of this first-person subject position in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches where appropriate, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining. Dr Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, and provides close readings of many of them, as well as translating all medieval quotations into English in order to make the discussion accessible to the non-specialist. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anybody investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.

Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of Pound & Snodgrass, to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse & the astonishing variety of troubadour voices.

From Dawn to Dawn - Troubadour Poetry. Translated into English from the Occitan by A. S. Kline. Published with commentary notes and illustrations courtesy of the public domain collections of the British Library. The troubadour tradition of lyric poetry originated in eleventh century Occitania - a region comprising what is now southern France together with portions of Catalonia and northern Italy. Occitania, whilst a cultural union linguistically founded on the Occitan language, was neither a legal nor political entity in its own right. The troubadour school of Occitan poetical and musical fiction, rich in genre and satire, concerned itself principally with the twin themes of chivalry and courtly love. Spreading across Europe over two and a half centuries, the tradition eventually waned in popularity and died out around the time of the Black Death. This selection of Occitan poetry comprises verse of poetic merit rather than that of purely historic interest. The translations herein aim to preserve, in some measure, the rhyming schemes of the originals. The form of Occtian poems was at least half their art - with crucially many being set to music, of which much survives. This and other texts available from Poetry in Translation