Tributes continue to pour in for Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
‘It’s not surprising that, as a northerner, Armitage feels a strong affinity with the poem. He has written pleasingly in this paper about the poem’s vivid contrasts - standard and colloquial English, order and disorder, “exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo . . . polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors”. And what he has done is to adopt and greatly extend this contrast in the language of his translation … I enjoyed it greatly for its kick and music; its high spirits, its many memorable passages. I enjoyed it because, like the Gawain poet, Armitage is some storyteller.’ The Guardian
‘The story is rich, eerie and intoxicating as it follows Gawain from Camelot to his likely doom among the forests and crags and icy streams of the mysterious north … Armitage never lacks for boldness. His enjoyment of the original’s thickly consonantal four-stress alliterative line drives the narrative on at great pace. Nor does he neglect the poem’s concern with pattern, colour and bejewelled decoration of castles, ladies’ costumes and knightly equipment, seen flashing and glowing amid the inhospitable winter landscapes that dominate the poem … [Armitage] honours the original and will win it readers.’
Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times
‘Joining translators such as JRR Tolkien and Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage has taken on one of the earliest stories in English literature … he meets this poetic challenge courageously, staying faithful to the story’s structure and style but filling the Middle English rhythms with his trademark sound … In the story of Gawain, Armitage has found a language capable of change. By insisting on that change, he had found a new poetry, a method of survival. Six hundred years away, Gawain is closer than he has ever been.’ Observer
‘This translation [is] so enjoyable … in another reality, it is read aloud at Christmas instead of everyone watching the family film on TV.’ Leeds Guide
‘Armitage’s animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Simon Armitage, West Yorkshire’s poetic knight errant, is to be commended for his courage in taking on this formidable text … It is to Armitage’s considerable credit that he has produced a version whose rhythms are irrefutably located in the windswept uplands the poem so evocatively conjures. Alan Garner dismissed a previous translation with the remark that the writer should have felt ‘the light of those hills and have the speech of millstone grit on the tongue’. Armitage does all this and more.’ Time Out, Book of the Week
‘Every bit as exciting as any previous version … Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has always been a magnificent yarn. Armitage’s genius is to add fresh polish to an ancient story.’ Sunday Mercury
‘[A] shining contemporary translation, pulsing, coursing with life.’ Yorkshire Post
‘It is a tricksy, sly, deceptive text that Simon Armitage, exceptional West Yorkshire poet and man of many parts has translated wonderfully in this slim, beautifully presented volume … In all it is a sophisticated, multi-layered morality tale which Armitage has rendered in clear, uncluttered lines, making it – most pleasurably – an easy read, just long enough to devour in a day … Armitage just loves the text, and has felt for years that he was in some way destined to translate it. He was right, and his labours were worthwhile. Just as the tale of Beowulf seemed an ideal match for Seamus Heaney’s gruffly broad and bloody lyricism, and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid resonated with his love of spiritual transformation and heavy sense of fate, so this sprightly, arch, witty and often beautiful tale is a perfect fit for Armitage’s spiky, penetrative northern muse.’ Herald
‘What’s most heartening about this translation is that it doesn't appear to have been done for any reason. It’s not some spritzed-up version of a Greek tragedy that's really about the Gulf War; it doesn't make any claims, as so many reworkings do these days, to be relevant to our own age. It’s done out of a love of language and story-telling. That ought to be enough reason. But there’s another one. By the end of the poem, Gawain has accepted not only the challenge, but also the need to see it through. On the way he speaks the language of love to a woman who turns out to be the Green Knight's wife, and makes a crucial slip in his dealings with her; and from the process Gawain emerges forgiven, and a fuller man than he was before. If Armitage has stretched his own technique and learnt still more about his craft while giving us the spirit of the Gawain poet, so much the better.’ Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph
‘Armitage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400.’ Brian Morton, Sunday Herald
‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the most haunting contributions of the 14th-century to the legends of King Arthur and Round Table … Simon Armitage, like Ted Hughes a Yorkshireman, also found himself attracted by the way the poem lures its bewildered southern protagonist into a northern setting and vernacular, and his version inventively recreates the original’s gnarled, hypnotic music, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama. The idiom Armitage develops is delicately responsive to the aural intricacies of Middle English, but also has a free-flowing, colloquial twang that allows the poem to partake of the energies of free speech … As he points out in his introduction, Gawain is at once “a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale”. Armitage’s translation is alert to the competing demands of each of these strands, and captures much of this great poem’s beguiling mixture of dreamy magic and bracing vigour.’ Mark Ford, Financial Times
‘This is a translation to be savoured for its own linguistic merits: Armitage has pored over and polished every word. In the introduction, he writes that his ambition was to produce an independent, living piece of “poetry”. He has certainly done that.’ Alistair Sooke, New Statesman
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