Weiskott, Eric: Cycle of Dreams

Punctum books, paperback Publication Date: December 15, 2024 Publisher Marketing: An experimental hybrid work, Cycle of Dreams pairs translation and original poetry. The translations, or adaptations, are of William Langland's strange and wild fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, a politically radical English and Latin poem written in the wake of plague and divided into a prologue and twenty passūs or steps. Eric Weiskott transposes the action from London and Worcestershire to New England and Long Island. The translations refashion and modernize Piers Plowman by disarticulating its continuous shape and rearticulating it as a collection of lyrics. The translation appears on the left and original poetry on the right in each page opening, so that the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries speak to one another as in a dream. Like Piers Plowman itself in manuscript culture, Cycle of Dreams attracts paratexts. Images illustrate the absent presence of Langland's authorship. A series