Jane Draycott 
Pearl 

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: ‘my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, ‘an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.

About the author

Bernard O’Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford, and has published seven books of poems, including Gunpowder, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1995, and his Selected Poems (Faber, 2008). His verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.