ISSN 1750-4953


Marginalia

Home
About Marginalia
Current Issue
Archived Issues
Notes to Contributors
Links to Other Online Journals

Marginalia -- The Website of the MRG

As a poet with an international reputation, Simon Armitage's decision to translate one of the most famous poems in Middle English brings a new audience to a fourteenth-century treasure. Armitage includes a concise introduction in his edition which provides information about the poem and the Pearl manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x, making manuscript studies, for once, the province of the many non-medievalists who will buy the book. For the medievalist, Armitage explains that while trained scholars may find Gawain 'perfectly readable in its original form', the peculiar status of Middle English, falling as it does somewhere between our own language and the less accessible Old English, means that the lines 'seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalizingly near yet frustratingly blurred.' Armitage goes on to comment that it is his experience as poet which makes the temptation to 'blow a little warm breath across that layer of frosting' irresistible. He pins his particular interest in Gawain to his fascination with narrative and form, and to his own northern background. He sees recognisable northern speech rhythms in the Gawain-poet's text and the reader will detect a regional pride in the translation, which recalls Seamus Heaney's appropriation of Beowulfinto a poetic idiom infused with the memories of his childhood.

The northern lexical set that Armitage employs is a resonant vehicle for the Gawain narrative. It is especially effective in the hunt passages. Occasionally, a colloquialism jars slightly for this reader; Gawain's alliterative exclamation in response to Bertilak's praise in the exchange of offerings is oddly comic: '"Oh fiddlesticks to the fee" said the other fellow' (1940).

Gawain's alliterative form is frequently rejected by modern translators. To Armitage, however, it is the 'warp and weft of the poem' and alliteration indeed characterises his version. He employs the form, with its characteristic stress patterns as well as linked letters, to good effect so that the poem is infused with a kind of 'otherness' that perfectly suits the Arthurian and supernatural setting.

I know that, proverbially, one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but this truly is an edition to treasure. It is published by Faber and Faber in a slim hardback, with a pale grey dustcover. The front illustration is an illustration in the grey colour scheme of Gawain on Gringolet. Only his cloak and shield are picked out in red, with the pentangle subtly clear in the centre. Despite my occasional reservation about the use of idiom, I'd recommend this both to medievalists and to those people with no knowledge of Middle English that Armitage seeks to reach.