Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (review)

Since the critical—and financial—success of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in 1999, a number of translations of early and Middle English poetry have followed the model Heaney has provided. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the late fourteenth-century Arthurian romance written by an anonymous poet and surviving in a single manuscript, has received particular attention as of late. Simon Armitage, Bernard O’Donoghue, W.A. Neilson, and Jessie Weston are but a few of those who have taken on the task of translating its “difficult” alliterative and metrical verses, making its Yuletide tale of loss (of an identity as well as of a head) accessible to a contemporary audience (lii). With his new verse translation, Joseph Glaser, Professor of English at Western Kentucky University, adds to the number of available versions of the poem. He adds as well to his own repertoire of translations of Middle English poetry, two of which have also been published by Hackett; Professor Glaser has translated Le Morte D’Arthur (Pegasus Press, 2005), The Canterbury Tales in Modern Verse (Hackett, 2005), and Middle English Poetry in Modern Verse (Hackett, 2007). The present volume includes a substantial (forty-three page) introduction by Christine Chism, a translator’s preface, and a short list of suggested reading. The text of the poem itself is accompanied by explanatory notes.

One of the greatest strengths of the volume is the introduction by Christine Chism. Its language is both accessible and eloquent; the concepts she explains are sophisticated. In it, she contextualizes the poem in terms of both its literary and critical reception and introduces readers to the cultural and political climate of fourteenth-century England. Further sections suggest possible directions for undergraduate research and gesture toward contemporary scholarship on the poem. “Sir Gawain as Fallible Hero,” for example, introduces readers to the paradoxical injunctions of chivalric masculinity that construct Gawain’s conflict. In Chism’s words, Gawain “encounters unexpected contingencies with a heady combination of chivalric grace and performance anxiety that ultimately creates perceptible strain” (xxv, emphasis mine).

Also to be lauded are the translator’s preface (in which Glaser reflects candidly about the challenges of translation and the difficult choices such a task requires) and, wonderfully, the translation itself. It is both accurate and evocative. The poem’s complex structure, accentual alliterative verse alternated with the metrical “bob and wheel,” presents the greatest—though not the only—challenge to translators. Glaser’s translation succeeds in rendering both formal elements of the poem in modern English, while faithfully conveying the sense of the original lines. His choice is to represent alliteration and meter as exactly as possible, deviating from the Gawain-poet’s model only when the resulting syntax proves awkward. The resulting verses are unlike those of O’Donoghue, who argues that an adherence to the alliterative and metrical forms of the Gawain-poet’s verses produces clumsy lines, and those of Armitage, who preserves the poem’s alliterative force but takes a number of (provocative) liberties.

The most innovative element of Glaser’s approach to his translation is his emphasis on the poem’s linguistic inheritance, which he strives to preserve. Glaser underscores the poem’s east Cheshire dialect, arguing that its translation “must contain a relatively high portion of chewy Old English or Norse terms” (xliv). Glaser demonstrates the point by citing his translation of the Gawain-poet’s description of a boar. Tolkien’s edition has “[h]ef hyʒly the here, so hetterly he fnast” (l.1587). While Marie Borroff translates the line as “[h]is hackles rose high; so hotly he snorts,” Glaser replaces “fnast” with “grunted,” recalling the hard syllables of the original verse. His line reads “[i]ts hackles rose high, and it grunted so hotly.” Lines like these represent Glaser at his best.

Glaser’s audience is not the popular one dazzled by Heaney or by Simon Armitage’s recent translation of the same poem. The language of his Preface, as well as of...