Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (review)

JEGPdid not review Marie Borroff's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knightwhen it first came out in 1967. In fact, almost nobody did. A rare notice came in The Year's Work in English Studies(1967), which called it "both accurate and sensitive" (p. 72). But within a year, her translation entered the academic canon when it was incorporated in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. In the anthology's first edition of 1962, Sir Gawainwas represented by the 1929 translation of Theodore Howard Banks. From 1968 on, most college undergraduates would become familiar with the only medieval English poem that rivals Chaucer and Langland through the lens of Borroff's rendition. The only question is why it took more than forty years to enshrine this already canonical translation in a Norton Critical Edition.

Norton's decision to make it a critical edition is, in fact, somewhat out of character with the series. The only other medieval English work in translation among the critical editions is Beowulf. All the Middle English works—Chaucer, Langland, romances, lyrics, even Julian of Norwich—are in the original. With Margery Kempe (2001), they split the difference—Lynn Staley is listed as both translator and editor, but the text is more modernized than translated, attempting to remain "as faithful to the original Middle English as possible, without sounding archaic" (back cover). Presumably, Norton decided to make an exception because Sir Gawain's Middle English is arguably the hardest there is among all the major fourteenth-century works and, for undergraduates, would be nearly as impenetrable as the Old English of Beowulf.

Borroff's translation has maintained its popularity over the years, and, indeed, in publishing the critical edition, Norton was responding to repeated requests from professors over the years. A comparison with the translation it replaced in the anthology shows why. When his translation was first published in 1929, Theodore Banks was praised in Speculum(1930) for his ability "to adapt his vocabulary to modern usage" (p. 222). It certainly captured the original better than Jessie Weston's two earlier translations, one in prose and one in rhyming alexandrine couplets, and was more accessible to modern readers than the contemporary translation by S. O. Andrews, which retained much of the Gawainpoet's archaic vocabulary, such as wones, snell, graithly, and louts. But it also regularized the meter, with no more than two unstressed syllables between stressed ones, and for some reason eliminated the alliteration in the wheels, downplaying the poet's blend of native alliterative and French rhyming verse traditions. The Speculumreviewer thought this was all to the good, since Banks was thus able "to mitigate the jolting of the alliterative verse" (p. 222). By contrast, Borroff, who already had written a metrical study of the poem before undertaking its translation, strove not only to be as accurate as possible in a nonliteral verse translation but also to convey as fully as possible the flexibility and musical effects of that verse, jolts and all.

The translation as newly published is substantially the same as the one in 1967. Borroff "substituted current words for some archaisms that in retrospect seemed pointless and corrected a few mistakes" (p. xxix). Examples of the former would be the replacement of handselswith "hand-gifts" in l. 491 and of brandwith "broad sword" in l. 828. An example of the latter would be replacing "may heaven requite it" in l. 1038 with the more faithful "may the high king repay you." Where archaisms remain (presumably for poetic reasons), for example, "welkin" (l. 525) and "latchet" (l. 591), Borroff supplies marginal glosses that were not in the 1967 version.

Despite the retention of a few obscure Middle English words, there is some risk in these adaptations of losing the flavor of the northern dialect or some of the strangeness that can make the experience...