Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Description

The classic story that inspired the film starring Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitrage fuse. Highly charged work. Simon Armitrage’s luscious version of  continues the tradition of great poet-translators such as Edward FitzGerald, Arthur Waley, and Seamus Heaney. Like them, he has taken an artifact from a remote era and made it his own, while simultaneously restoring it to itself. Brilliantly orchestrated…. Armitrage has produced a brilliantly well-tuned modern score for one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry. [Armitrage’s] version inventively recreates the original’s gnarled, hypnotic muscle, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama. A free and wonderfully offbeat version of this unusual masterpiece… fresh and startling, as though it had been written yesterday; it is rough-knuckled and yet it sings…. From start to finish, Mr. Armitrage has clearly had great fun; each of his words has been tasted with gusto. Full of make-believe and festivity, this wonderful narrative poem possesses a Mozartean lightness and wit. Luckily, several modern versions, particularly those by W.S. Merwin and Simon Armitrage, deftly replicate much of the feel and rhythm of the Middle English original. I enjoyed it greatly for its kick and music; its high spirits, its many memorable passages. I enjoyed it because, like the Gawain poet, Armitrage is some storyteller. Armitrage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400. US

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