Review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Translated by Simon Armitage
By: Michael A. Arnold
2007's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is Simon Armitage's best work. I should probably expand on that.
'Translation' feels like a slightly odd word to use with this book, because the original was written in Middle English by the mysterious 'Pearl Poet', about whom literally nothing is known except through inference. They were clearly someone from northern England, given their vocabulary use and their spelling habits, but that is probably everything we can really say for sure. We cannot even say what he called, or would have called, what we now know as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, since it is untitled in its only surviving manuscript. The only other major Middle English poet is Chaucer, whose more standardized London English is much closer to the standard Modern English being used to write this sentence.
But the language used by the 'Pearl Poet' (named after their poem we call Pearl) is much more accented than Chaucer's, and much more difficult, seemingly putting them in an area around Lancashire or Yorkshire, but it would be hard to pin down where exactly. This is important, too, because of the subject of the poem, but we will return to this.
Poets have always looked to past literature for inspiration. More recent, contemporary poets have taken to translations in a way that has not really happened before — at least not so commercially, and there is a good market in translating works of the past for modern readers. Many people do what to read, for example, The Iliad, or the poetry of Ovid, but they might not have the time or the resources to learn a foreign, or even an ancient, language, which is frankly really hard to do. Simon Armitage has done a lot of work in translating literature from Middle English — which is not quite another language, but it can appear to be one. He has so far translated Peal and the Alliterative Morde Arthur alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and all are well worth reading if you are very interested in medieval literature. .
Middle English was spoken and written generally (the dates are far from exact) between the Norman conquest of the British isles in 1066 and somewhere around 1500 when it developed into Modern English. Armitage himself has said that reading Middle English as a layperson, a non–specialist, can be a lot like seeing words through a frozen sheet of ice, which is a beautiful and very accurate way to describe it. A lot of the time the words are recognizable enough, but then there is a moment where the ice is perhaps a bit too thick and you cannot see it clearly anymore. For example, here's a section (picked at random) from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
Passages like this can be so familiar, but also so tantalizingly strange that someone who is not already familiar with Middle English might find reading it for pleasure difficult.
Just like the term 'Middle English' implies a middle point between the Old English of the Anglo Saxon period (an example from Beowulf 'Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum') and early Modern English, seen in someone like Shakespeare — this is a poem that also seems to be between those two worlds: between the alliterative style of Old English poetry and the rhyming long stanza verses that Chaucer would inspire. Alliterative verse is where a line will have three or four stressed syllables per line, all the same sound, such as the S sounds in the line line of Old English quoted earlier 'Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum'. This poem has both styles in one stanza, which is called the 'bob and wheel', with the main body of the stanza being dominated by alliterative lines, the 'bob', and the end of each stanza is a smaller four line rhyming section, the 'wheel' – with the rhymes acting as if they sign each stanza off like a little bow. Armitage's translation has imitated this. Here is the first stanza of the poem to show this:
Once the siege and the assault of Troy had ceased
This is interesting, and really well handled throughout. There have been a number of different translations of this poem, some have been very scholarly, prose translations, trying to extract all the possible nuances of meaning from the Middle English worlds. Others have been more poetic translations, showing some version of the poem's power. Armitage admits in the introduction he is more 'guided by his the Pearl Poet's example', and his aim was to write a good modern poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As he later wrote in an article in The Guardian, this is 'not an exercise in linguistic forensics … but poetry'. That is not to suggest that Armitage's translation is not accurate. To be honest, after cross referencing a few sections between Armitage's translation and the original text it is difficult to think of a better version — especially since it employs so many rhythms of speech from northern England, mirroring the language of the original. Also, Armitage says that the Pearl poet often has 'unequal line lengths, … variable verse lengths, and … wildly fluctuation pace of the story'. The Pearl Poet was someone who took rules and bent them to his purposes — which is something Armitage has also done, and which also affected his general attitude in translating, or perhaps reworking this poem.
The north of England is also important to the narrative of the poem. Gawain must travel through a northern landscape that is barely even rural, but is wild – hostile and unmapped. There are some very beautiful descriptions of this landscape in the poem, particularly in the second part, and the landscape — nature, is in effect something Gawain must challenge and be challenged by as the poem goes on. Medieval society was reliant on nature, and it was painfully aware of how much nature could both give and take away. This poem is primarily a narrative, and as a story (as Armitage himself as rightly said) it has everything you could want as a reader — it is a love story, or at least a poem about love, a religious story, an adventure story, a horror story, a thriller, and also (perhaps) an ecological story too, since nature is so important to the world of the poem, and the world around the poem. It is not an accident that the titular Green Knight wears the colour of grass and leaves, but his role in the poem is more complex than just this.
The Green Knight is both supernatural and natural at once, and the tension between the two is what makes him so interesting. The Green Knight himself seems to be drawn from the ancient pagan concept of the Green Man, a figure associated with fertility, yet this is a Christian story, or at least a story by a Christian – and all of these themes together mean that this is a poem that could be read in several different ways. The important thing is that when Gawain makes his deal with the Green Knight, he is entering into an agreement with powers he does not at all understand, but which govern his everyday life. What all this means could fill entire shelves of critical scholarship, but the important thing to for anyone reading the poem for the first time is that the story of this poem is primarily a quest into an unknown land, and where strange things are found. This adventure story into lands not really known, the weird north, is an amazing source of drama and suspense in this story.
There is a saying that you never read the same book twice, because every time you reread something you either imagine it differently in your head (even just slightly) or you see things in it you never noticed before, such as connecting more of the underlying structural threads. This is certainly a book that you can reread a number of times and experienced in a slightly different, slightly richer way each time – even if it is something really small, like paying closer attention to all the different references in the first stanza.
To people who have not read many medieval poems before (even if only in translation) the first stanza of Sir Gawain will probably seem quite strange. It seems on the surface to have absolutely nothing to do with the plot except by setting up that the story is set in England. Yet, it starts off by making reference to the Trojan War, the founding of Rome by Aeneas, the founding of Tuscany by Ticius before giving a kind of mythological basis for the English royal line with reference to the supposed ancient, pre–Roman king Brutus. There is no evidence any of these people actually existed, especially 'Ticius' — which may just be a spelling error, possibly referring to Turnus, a character in Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid about the Trojan hero Aeneas. It is also very hard to know if medieval scribes thought such figures were real, but the point is that this first stanza is calling up the memory of these ancient heroes and figures, and placing them alongside King Arthur, the Round Table, and Sir Gawain, as if to suggest that they are all worthy of the same amount of respect and importance. By extension, this is also suggesting that the trials of Sir Gawain, and even more abstractly the stories and literature of England, are the equal of those more ancient classics — and at the same time this is hinting at the mixing of Christianity with the Pagan past that the poem plays with in ingenious ways.
There is also, importantly, the sound of this poem. In his introduction to the poem, Armitage points us to a line in part 3, part of a scene describing the hunt and slaying of deer: 'and retrieves the intestines in time–honored style'. The repeated T sound is making the reader put their tongue (almost worm–like) to the roof of their mouth and not–quite splitting the words out, as if in disgust at the sight, but it is also clear from the poem that the poet is very familiar with both the language and the act of hunting, and the characters in this section are enjoying the hunt. There is an attraction and repulsion here – and this alongside a number of contrasts of opposites, and a sensitivity to sounds and language and how all these mixes together, is the sign of the exceptional gifts of the Pearl Poet. This is something that Armitage was keenly aware of when he worked on this own version of this poem, and tried to replicate rather than simply translate.
In a sense, this is Simon Armitage's poem and not the Pearl Poet's poem given a new coat of paint. And yet in another sense, it is that original poem as if it were written today. The only real way to access the original poem is to read it in the Middle English – but Simon Armitage's translation can only be called an achievement of considerable poetic skill – the result of a modern poet at the peak of his craft. With the cadences and rhythms of a northerner, Armitage has been able to breathe a warm breath onto the frozen ice that covers the medieval manuscript of this very northern poem. To hear Simon read this poem is to feel something of what the original must have been like to a contemporary of the Peal Poet, hearing it for the first time in a castle or hovel in medieval England — there are recordings of him reading the poem online. This book can be read in a number of different ways, which always makes rereading it rewarding, but most of all this is a great story about someone going into the wild and being tested by it — written by a person from that wild world itself. Everything the Pearl Poet did to make you the reader live the journey and trials with Gawain, Armitage has done too — and for that this book really deserves to be read.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
With mony luflych lorde, ledez of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With the city a smoke–heap of cinders and ash,
The turncoat whose tongue had tricked his own men
Was tried for his treason — the truest crime on earth.
Then noble Aeneas and his noble lords
Went conquering abroad, laying claim to the crowns
Of the wealthiest kingdoms in the western world.
Mighty Romulus quickly careered towards Rome
And conceived a city in magnificent style
Which from then until now has been known by his name.
Ticius constructed townships in Tuscany
And Langobard did likewise, building homes in Lombardy.
And further afield, over the sea of France,
On Britain's broad hill–tops, Felix Brutus made
______his stand.
And wonder and dread and war
Have lingered in that land
Where loss and love in turn
Have held the upper hand.