REWRITING PEARL: Translations by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage

Pearl is an anonymous fourteenth century poem of 1212 lines, very alien in some ways, piercingly moving in others. Its speaker tells how, mourning the loss of his “pearl”, apparently his daughter, he fell asleep in the garden where he lost her before she turned two. While his body slept, his spirit journeyed to the Earthly Paradise, a landscape of miraculous beauty and light where he saw a Maiden on the far side of a river, his lost daughter, crowned, robed in white and shimmering with pearls. No longer an infant but … Continue Reading