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.”
