Lavinia Greenlaw’s new book A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014) is, in her own words, ‘not a version, and certainly not a translation, but an extrapolation’ of Chaucer’s long poem, Troilus and Criseyde (Greenlaw, p. xi). As she writes in a radical paraphrase of Chaucer’s anxieties about linguistic change, ‘This is nothing new / But it’s close to home’ (Greenlaw, p. 46). Greenlaw’s work comes in the midst of a wave of versions, translations and updatings of long medieval poems by distinguished modern poets — to mention only the most celebrated: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (1999), and his version of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables (2009); Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007) and The Death of King Arthur (2012).
In this article, I want to ask why contemporary poets turn to the medieval. What is at stake in these updatings, and what sort of results do they produce?
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