Really the only difficult thing about Piers Plowman is finding a good translation that is readable and hasn’t lost the original context.

I recommend that anyone trying to read it, go out and find following version:

ISBN: 9780393960112

Title: Piers Plowman: An Alliterative Verse Translation

Author: William Langland

Translator: E. Talbot Donaldson

Edited & Annotated: Elizabeth D. Kirk & Judith H. Anderson

I spent a lot of time looking through options for reading Piers Plowman, and this version is highly readable, annotated extremely well, and doesn’t seem to mess up any of the context.

Sidenote: The translator also has a pretty good Beowulf Translation, which I have also picked up and started reading.

  • M_de_Monty@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    There’s also a terrific episode of the BBC podcast In Our Time where scholars of the poem discuss it and the context in which it was written. The whole premise of the show is to make academic study accessible to ordinary people and this episode stands out as particularly good to me. I highly recommend listening to it!