Output details

Pearl : a translation

This is a new poetic version of the 14th century dream-vision Pearl, one of the great treasures of the British Library. Sister-poem to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl is an elegy for an infant daughter, an account of loss and consolation that retains all its imaginative and emotional force across the six centuries since it was composed. Aided by the support of a major Arts Council England grant, the author worked in consultation with Bernard O'Donogohue (distinguished poet and Middle English tutor at Wadham College, Oxford). The aim was to create a contemporary re-working of the poem that would bring it to light for a wider readership beyond its hitherto narrow scholarly audience. With the purpose of re-casting the tight metrical rhythms and rhymes of the original poem for a modern ear, the work deliberately aims towards a more fluid and echoing character while retaining a clear connection with other aspects of the poem's harmonic patterning – the tetrametric line, the concatenatio of chain-linking phrases, and in particular the drive and energy of the poet's alliterative phrasing.

Published in April 2011, the book was reprinted within a few weeks after reaching the number-one slot on Amazon UK's list for poetry, drama and non-fiction. The translation featured in interviews and readings on both BBC R3 and R4 and was reviewed in The Independent, The LRB and PN Review. An extract from the book won the Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation in 2008, and the full book-length work was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation in Spring, 2011.