Böcker av Chretien de Troyes

This verse translation of Yvain; or, The Knight with the Lion brings to life a fast-paced yet remarkably subtle work often considered to be the masterpiece of the twelfth-century French writer Chretien de Troyes.

The first of five surviving Arthurian romantic poems by 12th-century French poet Chretien de Troyes, this work narrates a vivid chapter from the legend of King Arthur.

This translation of "Cliges", the second of five surviving 12th century Arthurian poems, is in a metric form invented specifically to reflect the poet's narrative speed and tone.

In the poem presented in this volume, the romance begins with the marriage of Cliges's parents and continues with the clandestine mutual love of their son and his uncle's bride, Fenice. Cliges and Fenice are finally united after executing a false-death plot aided by black-magic.

The text presents is a circa 1170 version of the Griselda legend which tells the story of the marriage of Erec, a courageous Welsh prince and knight of the Round Table, and Enide, an impoverished noblewoman. The translator's introduction includes discussion of the Arthurian legends in history.

One of the most influential storytellers in Western literature, French poet Chrtien de Troyes helped to shape the ever-fascinating legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Of Chrtien's five surviving romantic Arthurian poems, the last and longest is Perceval, an unfinished work that introduces the story of the Graila legend quickly adopted by other medieval writers and taken up by a continuing succession of authors. In Chrtien's romance, Perceval progresses from a naive boyhood in rural seclusion to a position of high respect as a knight at Arthur's court. With the help of two teachershis mother and Gornemant of GoortPerceval is ultimately able to reject the worldly adventures chosen by other knights and seek important moral and spiritual answers.Acclaimed for his sensitive and faithful translations of the poems of Chrtien, Burton Raffel completes the Arthurian series with this rendition of Perceval. Raffel conveys to the modern English language reader all the delights of Chrtiens inventive storytelling, perceptive characterizations and vividly evoked emotions.

In this outstanding new translation of Lancelot, Burton Raffel brings to English language readers the fourth of Chrtiens five surviving romantic Arthurian poems. This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur legend.

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. 

In this new verse translation of one of the great works of French literature, Dorothy Gilbert captures the vivacity, wit, and grace of the first known Arthurian romance. Erec and Enide is the story of the quest and coming of age of a young knight, an illustrious member of Arthur's court, who must learn to balance the demands of a masculine public life-tests of courage, skill, adaptability, and mature judgment-with the equally urgent demands of the private world of love and marriage. We see his wife, Enide, develop as an exemplar of chivalry in the female, not as an Amazon, but as a brave, resolute, and wise woman. Composed ca. 1170, Erec and Enide masterfully combines elements of Celtic legend, classical and ecclesiastical learning, and French medieval culture and ideals.In choosing to write in rhymed octosyllabic couplets-Chretien's prosodic pattern-Dorothy Gilbert has tried to reproduce what so often gets lost in prose or free verse translations: the precise and delicate meter; the rhyme, with its rich possibilities for emphasis, nuance, puns and jokes; and the "e;mantic power"e; implicit in proper names. The result will enable the scholar who cannot read Old French, the student of literature, and the general reader to gain a more sensitive and immediate understanding of the form and spirit of Chretien's poetry, and to appreciate the more Chretien's great contribution to European literature.

Taking the legends surrounding King Arthur and weaving in new psychological elements of personal desire and courtly manner, Chr tien de Troyes fashioned a new form of medieval Romance. The Knight of the Cart is the first telling of the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Arthur's Queen Guinevere, and in The Knight with the Lion Yvain neglects his bride in his quest for greater glory. Erec and Enide explores a knight's conflict between love and honour, Clig s exalts the possibility of pure love outside marriage, while the haunting The Story of the Grail chronicles the legendary quest. Rich in symbolism, these evocative tales combine closely observed detail with fantastic adventure to create a compelling world that profoundly influenced Malory, and are the basis of the Arthurian legends we know today.