Proensa ─ An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

The poetry of the Provençal troubadours has had a profound influence on the development of the lyric, from Dante and Petrarch to Ezra Pound and the Black Mountain poets, despite the difficulty of Old Provençal, or Occitan, the original language of the troubadours. The renewed interest of the English-speaking world in troubadour poetry was initiated in the early twentieth century by Pound’s criticism and translations of the troubadours. Yet no poet writing in English has done more for this body of work than the American poet and translator Paul Blackburn, who devoted more than twenty years to the study and translation of occitan ancien. Proensa is the result of that long commitment, an anthology of thirty troubadour poets of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. It is a dexterous and spirited work of translation, which, as George Economou writes in his introduction, “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.”

Paul Blackburn (1926–1971) was a lyric poet and one of America’s foremost translators of troubadour verse. He is often grouped with the Black Mountain poets because he was a contributing editor and distributor of the Black Mountain Review, though he never attended Black Mountain College. Before his editorial days, Blackburn worked in New York printing houses and as a shipping clerk. He published thirteen poetry collections, including The Dissolving Fabric and Three Dreams and an Old Poem, and several major works of translation, including The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz and Poem of the Cid. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he taught at the New School and the State University of New York at Cortland.

George Economou was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Long Island University for many years. He is the author of Geoffrey Chaucer (1975) and two other books on medieval literature. He is also a poet and translator.