Henryson

Robert Henryson is a great fabulist. His master may have been Aesop, but the voice that speaks the Moral Fables is distinctively that of his place - Scotland - and his chosen tradition. His debt to Chaucer, from whom his best-known work, the Testament of Cresseid, clearly derives, is a large one, and he acknowledges it generously. But it is a positive debt, not the kind that might have stifled his native originality. He is as distinctly himself as his contemporaries Dunbar and Douglas are.

Little is known of Henryson's life but much can be surmised about his humane vision from the poems, particularly the Moral Fables. He is the most approachable and benign of the Scottish poets of his time.

Alan Riach was born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1957. He studied at Cambridge and Glasgow and worked in New Zealand at the University of Waikato from 1986-2000. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid's Epic Poetry and Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography. He is currently the Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, and President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

Eliot Weinberger (b. NYC, 1949), is an essayist and translator. He won PEN s first Gregory Kolovakos Award for promoting Hispanic literature in the US, and he is America s first literary writer to receive Mexico s Order of the Aztec Eagle. He lives in New York City.