Pearl A Translation

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.

Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King’s College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert’s Drop (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, The Night Tree, she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society’s "Next Generation" list of poets. Her third collection, Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize. Jane Draycott’s other books include Christina the Astonishing (with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and Tideway (illustrated by Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.