Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cliges

Cliges

De Troyes, Chretien
De Troyes, Chretien
Chretien

Paperback

Series: Chretien de Troyes Romances S

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0300070217
ISBN13: 9780300070217
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jul 21 1997
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.65 Width: 5.49 Depth: 8.41
Language: English
In this extraordinarily fine translation of Cligès, the second of five surviving Arthurian poems by twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes, Burton Raffel captures the liveliness, innovative spirit, and subtle intentions of the original work. In this poem, Chrétien creates his most artful plot and paints the most starkly medieval portraits of any of his romances. The world he describes has few of the safeguards and protections of civilization: battles are brutal and merciless, love is anguished and desperate. Cligès tells the story of the unhappy Fenice, trapped in a marriage of constraint to the emperor of Constantinople. Fenice feigns death, then awakens to a new, happy life with her lover. Enormously popular in their own time, each of Chrétien's great verse romances is a fast-paced psychologically oriented narrative. In a rational and realistic manner, Chrétien probes the inner workings of his characters and the world they live in, evoking the people, their customs, and their values in clear, emotionally charged verse. Cligès is filled with Chrétien's barbs and bawdiness, his humor and his pleasure, his affection and his contempt. It is the unmistakable work of a brilliantly individualistic poet, brought to modern English readers by Raffel's poetic translation in a metric form invented specifically to reflect Chrétien's narrative speed and tone.

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