A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde

"As you say, it’s not a translation; it’s a response. It’s a lyric sequence, but it finds across the whole of Troilus and Criseyde small moments of thought or memory or emotion. Greenlaw finds cracks of possibility which she expands in these seven-line poems. She also puts the story in the here and now, in our English. Her book is sympathetic to the notion that we might take this poem very seriously, and it might be very moving, and full of pathos and pity. She takes Troilus’s sorrow, which can be quite indigestible, longwinded, and not necessarily gripping in the original, and make you stop and dwell on it. It’s as if she ignites those moments in the poem like a firework, and you get to watch it burn out brightly. It’s the most moving set of lyrics. If you know Troilus and Criseyde , there are poems which utterly capture Chaucer’s spirit for a split second or two. There’s a brilliant interplay between the original and this book. Many of those instances are very much, as I said, to do with taking Troilus seriously—considering what it is to be in love for the very first time. We all know the self-deceptions of love, but that doesn’t cancel out what it feels like to fall in love, be betrayed, and have all one’s hopes raised and then dashed. Those moments are there in Chaucer, but they’re crowded round with other things. Lavinia Greenlaw isolates them. Like lots of lyrics, it makes it an ‘I’/‘you’ event. It captures the first-person perspective that’s sometimes only implicit in Troilus . That might be another way that the poem is timeless: it registers the psychological, physical processes of being in love. Greenlaw responds to its universals: the vanity of being in love, and the absurdity, and the self-regard, and the fear, and the delight of it. There’s a really interesting moment in one of Chaucer’s sources, Benoît’s Roman de Troie , where Briseida imagines what future generations will make of her, and Chaucer borrows that and has Criseyde reflect in the same way. It makes you think: what would it be to be Criseyde—to somehow magically know that you’re going to be held up as an example for all time? Just as women are trapped in Troy, women are trapped in stories. And so, anticipating its future, it’s a work that produces lots of literary responses. They’re not necessarily straight translations; Robert Henryson writes what might be considered a sixth book to the poem, answering the question of what happened to Criseyde. Later on, Shakespeare comes back to the story; Dryden retells it; Wordsworth translates bits of the poem into modern English. Many writers, all the way through to Greenlaw, re-engage with it. I love it too. Her lyrics take you into those feelings. As a poem about the experience of being in love, it’s brilliant to teach Troilus and Criseyde to 19-year-olds. At that age, you’re sort of teetering on the edge of all those questions. To be prepared both to take love absolutely seriously and to suggest that the center of the poem, when the lovers are in bed together, might be as-near-as-damn-it, heaven, but at the same time to give you all the tools to take love to pieces, this particular set of gender roles and relationships—all of those things—I find it startling that it has both strands. And Chaucer writes like this before the realist novel ever existed. And before Renaissance drama with its characters and psychologies on show. We’re invested in Troilus, Criseyde and Pandarus as much as we would be with any of the characters in novels we read or plays we see. That’s why it has to be there, on courses, in literary histories, in the hands of readers."