In the spring of 1998, as part of my studies for my master’s degree in English, I signed up for a course called “Middle English Alliterative Verse.” When I saw the syllabus, it shocked me: We were to translate thousands of lines of medieval English into the modern.
Geoffrey Chaucer was one thing; he lived in London, and his language is closer to our own. Unlike modern English, Middle English was highly dialectal, and thus the poems from medieval writers just a hundred miles away could read like this: “Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye” … Excuse me?
That’s the first line, untranslated (more or less; we don’t even have some of the alphabet they had back then), of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an epic poem, authorship unknown, probably written in the late 1300s. I began working on my translation … and thus began one of the great adventures of my life.
Gawain is a superb and dazzling story. In it, one of King Arthur’s knights sets off on a journey. Before it ends, he will be forced to confront physical hardship, terrible loneliness and fear, magic (some light, some dark), and, most challenging of all, his own human shortcomings.
Put this book on your list of light summer reading. ;) All right, I’m jesting, but I do recommend Simon Armitage’s 2007 translation of the work. It’s livelier and more enjoyable than W.S. Merwin’s 2002 rendering – and lively and enjoyable is as it should be; this is, after all, an epic fantasy, without which modern works such as The Lord of the Rings would not exist.