Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a … Continue reading Pearl, trans. by Jane Draycott (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich