Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems

Andrew Lang collected more than fairy tales. In this intimate volume, published the year after his death, the Scottish poet turns his erudition and delicate ear toward the French tradition that shaped him. Here are the spare, stark verses of François Villon, the fifteenth-century rogue-poet who hanged yet wrote of beauty with blood on his hands. Here too is Pierre Ronsard, the Renaissance master who mourned youth's passing with classical grace. Lang renders these voices in English that preserves the original's music while finding its own melancholy beauty. The collection includes original poems in the same vein, pale imitations or genuine companions to what came before. What emerges is a meditation on impermanence: the transience of love, the cruelty of time, the way poetry alone persists against death. For readers who loved the fairy tale collections but never knew Lang was also a translator of extraordinary sensitivity, this book reveals another dimension of an endlessly curious mind.