Few works have shaped a national literature as thoroughly as the Poem of the Cid has shaped the Spanish literary tradition. Tracing the life of the eleventh-century military commander Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Cid (from the Arabic Sayyidi, "My Lord"), this medieval epic describes a series of events surrounding his exile. The text of the poem survives in only one early-thirteenth-century manuscript copied by a single scribe, yet centuries later the figure of the Cid still was celebrated in the Spanish popular ballad tradition. Today almost every theme that characterizes Spanish literature-honor, justice, loyalty, treachery, and jealousy--derives from the "Poem of the Cid."

Restored by poet and medievalist George Economou, this elegant and spirited translation by Paul Blackburn is judged by many the finest English translation of a great medieval poem.

This book contains 162 poems: the 154 canonical Collected Poems, presented by year and within each year's order of composition and/or first printing, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems interspersed chronologically among them. Only one of his rejected, early poems has been included, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street,' used here as a kind of overture to the collection.

William Langland's Piers Plowman is one of the major poetic monuments of medieval England and of world literature. Probably composed between 1372 and 1389, the poem survives in three distinct versions. It is known to modern readers largely through the middle of the three, the so-called B-text. Now, George Economou's verse translation of the poet's third version makes available for the first time in modern English the final revision of a work that many have regarded as the greatest Christian poem in our language. Langland's remarkable powers of invention and his passionate involvement with the spiritual, social, and political crises of his time lay claim to our attention, and demand serious comparison with Dante's Divine Comedy. Economou's translation preserves the intensity of the poet's verse and the narrative energy of his alliterative long line, the immediacy of the original's story of the quest for salvation, and the individuality of its language and wordplay.

Partly an addendum to George Economou's versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, published by Shearsman in 2013, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself, in the form of versions of the master's uncompleted poems.