Just as Malory rewrote the legends of Arthur that he inherited, just as Chaucer translated and touched up his borrowings from Boccaccio, and just as Dante “translated” the cosmology of his age into verse—when Lewis sat down to write, he participated in a similar authorial process, a paradoxical “slavish” imitation combined with the most “cavalier” creativity. He composed in the same way as those medieval authors he studied as a scholar. Lewis borrows them, intensifies them, adds color. Perelandra turns out to be Dante and Jean de Meun in space.
