Seamus Heaney's masterful translation

The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars, Robert Henryson was influenced by their vision of the frailty and pathos of human life, and by the inherited poetic example of Geoffrey Chaucer. Henryson's finest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of Scots literature, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, the Testament completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover, Diomede, and of her subsequent decline into prostitution and leprosy. Written in Middle Scots, a distinctive Scottish version of English, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident but faithful idiom that matches the original verse form and honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion. A master of high narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable, and his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are delicately pointed with irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated by Heaney, their freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. Together, The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables gives readers a wonderful introduction to the world of Robert Henryson.

Robert Henryson, the old schoolmaster of Dunfermline, is dying. Yet as Death presses upon him in these final days, more insistent still are his memories of four students—the bright, passionate Isabel Inglis; the charismatic George Crichton; the somber, studious John de Leith; and the awkward, but brilliant musician Ingraham Bannatyne—whose lives were irrevocably changed in that summer of 1482, when a group of frustrated noblemen hanged James III’s low-born advisers on Lauder Bridge. As the figures of these young people pass before his imagination, Robert turns to the one means he has left to discover meaning in this tragedy from so many years before and to celebrate the lives of those caught up in it—his poetry.