The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables (Signed First)

Heaney, Seamus

ISBN 10: 0571249280 / ISBN 13: 9780571249282

Published by Faber & Faber, 2009

About this Item

First edition, first impression, signed to the title page by Seamus Heaney. A lovely, Fine copy: tight and square binding in sharp midnight blue boards; very bright, crisp and clean, presenting as unopened. The unclipped dustwrapper is likewise Fine: crisp and vibrant; small/minor sticker shadow to the rear panel. The wrapper is presented in a removable, archival-quality Brodart cover. All orders are sent very carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and sturdy cardboard. SEAMUS HEANEY SPECIALISTS.

Seller Inventory # M257

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables (Signed First)
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571249280
• ISBN 13: 9780571249282
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Selected Signed

About this title

Synopsis

The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.

A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated; their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. Seven Fables and The Testament of Cresseid is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.

About the Author

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim.