The Song of Roland »

W. S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union
City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he
worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in
many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands.
His many books of poems, prose, and translations are listed at the
beginning of this volume. He has been the recipient of many awards and
prizes, including the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of
which he is now a Chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the
Bollingen Prize in Poetry; most recently he has received the Governor's
Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in
the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the
Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

A contemporary prose rendering of the great medieval French epic, The Song of Roland is as canonical and significant as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. It extols the chivalric ideals in the France of Charlemagne through the exploits of Charlemagne's nephew, the warrior Roland, who fights bravely to his death in a legendary battle. Against the bloody backdrop of the struggle between Christianity and Islam, The Song of Roland remains a vivid portrayal of medieval life, knightly adventure, and feudal politics. The first great literary works of a culture are its epic chronicles, those that create simple hero-figures about whom the imagination of a nation can crystallize, observed V. S. Pritchett.

The Song of Roland is animated by the crusading spirit and fortified by national and religious propaganda. This edition features W. S. Merwin's glowing, lyrical translation.