The one-eyed singer, songwriter, and knight errant Oswald von Wolkenstein (surnameliterally “Cloud-Stone”) was among the last of the great troubadours. A contemporaryof Villon, versed in Petrarch, and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, Wolkenstein was lostto history until scholarship in the 1970s recognized him as the German language’s firstgenuinely autobiographical lyric voice. In the hands of the magician-translator RichardSieburth, working in the spirited tradition of Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn, Wolkenstein’s verse rises from the page like a medieval Bob Dylan. Facsimiles of Wolkenstein’smusical compositions are included.
