About the Book
The famous Middle English poem by an anonymous English poet is beautifully translated by fellow poet Simon Armitage in this edition. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates in crystalline verse the strange tale of a green knight who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own ax. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered, and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.
About the Author :
anonymous -- 1. not named or identified 2. of unknown authorship or origin
Simon Armitage is a British poet, playwright, and novelist. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, a Lannan Award, and the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Additionally, Armitage writes for radio, television, and film, and was recently elected Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Bill Wallis has performed in over two hundred radio series and plays, while among his numerous productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company are The Alchemist, The Master Builder, and Twelfth Night. He is also a prolific film and television actor, having made numerous appearances in such productions as Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Midsomer Murders, Bad Girls, Doctors, Poirot, and as Dr. Nick MacKenzie in Dangerfield.
Review :
[Armitage's] Gawain is fresh and startling, as though it had been written yesterday; it is rough-knuckled and yet it sings
-- "New York Sun"
[Armitage's] version inventively recreates the original's gnarled, hypnotic music...but also has a free-flowing, colloquial twang that allows the poem to partake of the energies of contemporary speech.
-- "Financial Times"
Armitage, one of England's most popular poets, brings an attractive contemporary fluency to the Gawain poet's accentual, alliterative verse: We hear the knights of Round Table chatting away charmingly, exchanging views. This is a compelling new version of a classic.
-- "Publishers Weekly"
Armitage's animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf.
-- "Sunday Telegraph (London)"
Compulsively readable...Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version.
-- "New York Times Book Review, front-page review"
It's not surprising that, as a northerner, Armitage feels a strong affinity with the poem. He has written pleasingly in this paper about the poem's vivid contrasts- standard and colloquial English, order and disorder, 'exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo...polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors.' And what he has done is to adopt and greatly extend this contrast in the language of his translation...I enjoyed it greatly for its kick and music, its high spirits, its many memorable passages. I enjoyed it because, like the Gawain poet, Armitage is some storyteller.
-- "Guardian (London)"
Joining translators such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage has taken on one of the earliest stories in English literature...He meets this poetic challenge courageously, staying faithful to the story's structure and style but filling the Middle English rhythms with his trademark sound...In the story of Gawain, Armitage has found a language capable of change. By insisting on that change, he had found a new poetry, a method of survival. Six hundred years away, Gawain is closer than he has ever been.
-- "Observer (London)"
Many may feel, listening to Armitage's excellent introduction, that they are understanding the dynamics and aesthetics of alliteration for the first time. Bill Wallis' masterful reading of Armitage's contemporary alliterative lines is preparation and tutorial for listening to his even more masterful reading of the Middle English original, on the final three discs. This dual experience is, compared to following the same lines on the page, akin to experiencing a film subtitled and one dubbed. For the audiophile, as much as for the student or scholar, these back-to-back renditions are a matchless pleasure, a revelation, and an expansion of the mind and ear. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.
-- "AudioFile"
The story is rich, eerie, and intoxicating as it follows Gawain from Camelot to his likely doom among the forests and crags and icy streams of the mysterious north...Armitage never lacks for boldness. His enjoyment of the original's thickly consonantal four-stress alliterative line drives the narrative on at great pace. Nor does he neglect the poem's concern with pattern, color, and bejeweled decoration of castles, ladies' costumes, and knightly equipment, seen flashing and glowing amid the inhospitable winter landscapes that dominate the poem...[Armitage] honors the original and will win it readers.
-- "Sunday Times (London)"
This is a translation to be savored for its own linguistic merits: Armitage has pored over and polished every word. In the introduction, he writes that his ambition was to produce an independent, living piece of 'poetry.' He has certainly done that.
-- "New Statesman"
