Translating Gawain

Using this blog as a scrapbook, here are some of Simon Armitage's comments from his introduction.

The lack of authorship seems to serve as an invitation, opening up a space within the poem for a new writer to occupy. Its comparatively recent rediscovery acts as a further draw; if Milton or Pope had put their stamp on it, of if Dr Johnson had offered an opinion, or if Keats or Coleridge or Wordsworth had drawn it into their orbit, such an invitation might now appear less forthcoming.

Some translators, for perfectly valid reasons and with great success, have chosen not to imitate its highly alliterative form. But to me, alliteration is the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threads In some very elemental way, the story and the sense of the poem is directly located within its sound. The percussive patterning of the words serves to reinforce their meaning and to countersink them within the memory.

It's surely no accident that the second passage is itself so alliterative, but also noticeable that it sounds perfectly natural. English, modern or middle, likes alliteration. And that's not the only advantage Armitage has. As a northern poet, you feel his diction is directly derived from the Gawain poet.

I read the book in three or four train journeys in three days. It's a really good read, thanks both to the brilliance of the original story, and to what seems to me to be wonderful translation. Very occasionally you sense that the alliteration is forced, leading to a jarring choice of word, but why not? Chances are, that happened in the original, and it's a poem, not a news report. It should tease and tickle the heart's inner ear.

The Last Man and the Green Man

I've been reading Mary Shelley's The Last Man for what seems like months, but have now finished it. It's mentioned in the reading list for the Comparative Literature syllabus, for its imagining of a world without people: specifically, what is the meaning of a city without people? It sounded interesting, and I'd never heard of it so gave it a go. The initial reaction to the book (when it was published) was terrible, but the critical quotations in the Oxford Classics introduction express disgust with the subject matter, rather than the technique. The subject matter, eventually, is a plague that gradually kills off all but the narrator. So there's lots of disease and death. The Introduction suggests that the book has now become more popular because we are less alarmed about looking at the possible end of the world. Maybe. But there's also a clear wish-fulfillment at work: of course we wish Mary Shelley had written something else as good as Frankenstein; we wish she had written something that could be construed as a critique of patriarchy.

The big problem with the book, though, is that it's at least three books in one, and it takes forever for the big story to start. There's apparently a roman-a-clef going on, with characters who represent Percy Shelley, Byron and others. This at times suggests a strong emotional drive - Mary Shelley saw so many people die too young. But this also maybe gives rise to the second problem: the variability of peoples' characters. That might not matter in a less conventional novel, but this is essentially a standard Victorian form. You just get the feeling that whenever she needs to move things on she just recasts.

And the interesting stuff about adjusting to a world without people comes right at the end; a tiny proportion of the book. By then I was forcing myself to read on, not taking the time to think about the issues. But it didn't strike me as being particularly focused.

One thing that's not mentioned in the introduction is the attitude to religion: there's a token theism, but strikingly no reference to Christianity at all, which must have been strange and contributed to the book's poor reception. Although, obliquely, the last hundred pages or so can be read as a rewind of the Genesis creation myth.

Anyway, I have now moved on to something lighter: Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight. It really is lighter, and I suppose I ought to be thinking about it in terms of translation theory, but for now I'm just enjoying the story.