It was out of medieval Provence Proensa that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the Provencal troubadours that it found its perfect expression. Their poetry was also a central inspiration for Dante and his Italian contemporaries, propagators of the modern vernacular lyric, and seven centuries later it was no less important to the modernist Ezra Pound. These poems, a source to which poetry has returned again and again in search of renewal, are subtle, startling, earthy, erotic, and supremely musical.
The poet Paul Blackburn studied and translated the troubadours...