Approximately 600 years ago, a poet whose name has been lost to history wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One of the eeriest stories in the Arthurian canon, the poem tells the story of a Christmas bargain struck between Sir Gawain and "a knight of such a kind -/ entirely emerald green."
The poem has been translated before, notably by J.R.R. Tolkien and W.S. Merwin. Simon Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Middle English is a masterpiece. Armitage maintains the driving pulse of the poem's alliterative and bob and wheel structure, while infusing it with the brightness of his own voice. His joy in the language of the poem is evident, and no other translation I've read has so closely captured the feeling of being told a story. Yet even with that joy and brightness, Armitage never allows the reader to forget the impending doom that hangs over the poem, like the long-anticipated blow from the Green Knight's axe.
His Sir Gawain belongs in the same company as Seamus Heaney's Beowulf or Sweeney Astray. And it is a poem that I will be pleased to offer, like Heaney's work, or the Avary-Gaiman Beowulf, as a response to "why read medieval literature?" The answer is because these are works that are not hundreds of years dead, but hundreds of years living. Because here there be dragons. And Grendels and Green Knights. And Stories.
The picture at the top of this post is one of the free poetry e-postcards you can send from this site. The art is by Brian Froud, and the poetry is "Green Men" by Bill Lewis. If you are interested in other versions of the Green Man, I highly recommend one of my favorite collections, The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and illustrated by Charles Vess. Terri gives a terrific introduction to the Green Man as a mythic figure, and while I particularly love the stories and poem by Midori, Charles de Lint, and Neil Gaiman, every contribution is excellent.
So he winds through the wilds of the world once more,
Gawain on Gringolet, by the grace of God,
under a roof sometimes and sometimes roughing it,
and in valleys and vales had adventures and victories
but time is too tight to tell how they went.
I just finished reading this--a wonderful midwinter's read. I've never before felt the landscape of the Green Chapel and Gawain's own personality made to feel so immediate.
Posted by: Elizabeth Wein | January 31, 2008 at 07:53 AM
"Because here there be dragons."
Yes that should be reason enough ha, ha!
Posted by: Dragonlady | January 31, 2008 at 10:07 AM