Erec Et Enide

"Ms. Gilbert's couplets read beautifully, encompassing Chretien's range of tone--from wit to elevation of sentiment--very sensitively."--Charles Muscatine, author of "Chaucer and the French Tradition"A wonderfully accurate and witty translation of Chretien's "Erec and Enide which brilliantly renders the rhymed octosyllabics of the original text in compelling, colloquial English. . . . A treat not just for students and scholars of Old French literature but, more important, for what we now call general readers--that is, all those who relish a rollicking, well-told tale."--Sandra M. Gilbert, editor of "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women"Older translations, generally in stupefying Maloryan prose, convey little of the sense of the poetry so obvious in the original, and admirably reproduced in this translation."--Robert Harrison, translator of "Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux"One of the best English verse renderings of any poem by Chretien."--William J. Kibler, author of "An Introduction to Old French"A union of scholarship and consummate art that affected me like the great stories I read in my formative years; a permanent vicarious experience."--Ruth Stone, poet, author of "Second-Hand Coat"This will be a standard English translation of "Erec and Enide and a definitive one."--Roger J. Steiner, editor of "The New College French and English Dictionary