SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
translated by Bernard O’Donoghue
Penguin, £8.99; 128pp
THE MIDDLE AGES are much in vogue, Bernard O’Donoghue writes in the introduction to his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Harassed English undergraduates might disagree, but there is no doubt that, from the BBC adaptations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Seamus Heaney’s masterly Beowulf, this period is increasingly attractive to the literary consumer.
O’Donoghue’s translation is executed with real skill. As King Arthur’s court feasts on New Year’s Day, a mysterious Green Knight appears offering a strange challenge. Gawain accepts, and journeys through the forbidding landscape of the poem to meet his vow to the Green Knight, encountering the magical castle of Bertilak, full of delight and danger, on the way. The poem is steeped, as O’Donoghue says, in a courtly romance culture and the magical realism of the Celtic literary tradition.
Advertisement
Yet, there is something very modern about its characters: the impulsive Arthur; Bertilak’s manipulative, enchanting wife; and Gawain, the apogee of chivalric honour who cannot sleep because he is so terrified of meeting his destiny. Indeed, Gawain is a modern hero riddled with the same psychological complexities as, say, Bellow’s Herzog: a chaste man who does not want to refuse a woman’s advances for fear of seeming unchivalrous, a warrior driven to meet the Green Knight’s challenge by the fear of seeming fearful.
O’Donoghue handles these complexities with aplomb. A poet of rare skill, his choices as a translator reflect his desire to preserve the rhythm of the original without constraining it by forcing it to obey the alliterative form. There are moments of genuine beauty, particularly in descriptions of the bleak landscape, and of dynamism, such as the hunting scenes or the riotous feasts.
But it is Gawain himself, forced to confront his understanding of chivalry through a quest of almost existential self-examination, who makes this poem so powerful and so appropriate for our alienating modern world.
O’Donoghue’s translation is not really for the serious student — its introduction gives a rather outdated critical reading — but that is its strength. O’Donoghue has produced a wonderful translation, accessible as it is artful, engaging to a modern reader but still engaged with its medieval roots.