Welsh Poems: Sixth Century to 1600

Welsh Poems: Sixth Century to 1600 by Gwyn Williams gathers a millennium of verse from the oldest heroic laments to the late Renaissance, rendered into agile, musical English by one of the language’s most gifted translators. In a lucid introduction, Williams frames Welsh poetry’s signature “burning tree” mood—its dazzling yoke of contraries: battle and desire, spring and winter, sanctity and transgression—and traces how this sensibility shapes form as well as feeling. Rather than the single...