Paul Blackburn Translations

Guillem de Poitou

Lorca/Blackburn: Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca chosen and translated by Paul Blackburn

Peire Vidal

Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

Poem of the Cid: A modern translation with notes

On Labor Day, September 6th, 1971, a week before his death, I visited my friend Paul Blackburn, his wife Joan and their son Carlos in Cortland, New York. I had come to say goodbye, but we also talked about the business of seeing his remaining work into print, and at Paul's request I took on the task of finding a publisher for Proensa, his book of translations of the troubadours. It was published by the University of California Press in 1978, but my commitment to Paul's translations would continue for two more decades, during which several more books would appear, the last a new edition in 1998 by the University of Oklahoma Press of his translation of the Spanish medieval epic the Poem of the Cid. That sad, memorable day was one of the finest we ever spent together.