The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.
A leading expert in the emerging field of fire ecology, James Agee analyzes the ecological role of fire in the creation and maintenance of the natural forests common to most of the western U.S. In addition to examining fire from an ecological perspective, he provides insight into its historical and cultural aspects, and also touches on some of the political issues that influence the use of fire. Although the focus of chapters on the ecology of specific forest zones is on the Pacific Northwest, much of the book addresses issues that are applicable to other regions. Illustrations, tables, index.
Writing at the time of political and social crisis in Athens, Aristophanes was an eloquent yet bawdy challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. The Achanians is a plea for peace set against the background of the long war with Sparta.
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Nothing has so completely stirred the imagination of the entire civilized world as the recent discovery of a civilization, lost for more than 5,000 years, of the Weans of the Great West, or Salt, Continent. Now for the first time this fascinating story of the expeditions of Kenya’s greatest scientists is told—in terms comprehensible to the general reader. Who were these Weans, whose eastern coast was guarded by a ferocious giantess, who worshipped (among others) a root deity and danced when the spirit came down, and whose final destruction and disappearance is shrouded in mystery? You will thrill—as who has not?—to the descriptions of the rich finds in the diggings at n. Yok, Bosstin, and Oleens, and the spectacular discoveries in the Valley of the Sun by the team of Sri. B’Han Bollek, Bes Nef and his wife, Sra. Bess Nebby, and Nat Obelgerst-Levy, here related by Robert Nathan, who was himself a member of one of the three triumphant expeditions generously underwritten by the Konegi Foundation and the archaeological departments of the universities of Kenya, Uganda, and Ruwenzori. “This will be the big archaeological book of the century”—Nat Obelgerst-Levy, Archaeol. D., Ruwenzori University