Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

by Simon Armitage (Translator)

Overview

About Simon Armitage’s translation

Simon Armitage’s “compulsively readable, energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version” (Edward Hirsch, The New York Times) of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offers “a brilliantly well-tuned modern score for one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry” (Poetry Review) that “recreates the original’s gnarled, hypnotic muscle, its tableaux and landscapes, and its weird, unsettling drama” (Mark Ford, the Financial Times). This edition, revised by Armitage with advice from scholars Alfred David and James Simpson, also offers a new introduction by the translator.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393532494
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/11/2020
Series:	The Norton Library
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	299,249
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Simon Armitage is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and from 2015 to 2019 served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. He has published ten collections of poetry and is the author of four stage plays, over a dozen television films, a libretto, two novels, and three memoirs. His poetry has won numerous awards, including a Gregory Award, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliantly orchestrated.... Armitrage has produced a brilliantly well-tuned modern score for one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry."

Poetry Review

"Armitrage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400."

Sunday Herald - Brian Morton

"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."

Wall Street Journal - Michael Dirda

"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."

The Guardian - Kevin Crossley-Holland

"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."

New York Sun - Eric Ormsby

"Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitrage fuse. Highly charged work."

Seamus Heany

"[Armitrage's] version inventively recreates the original's gnarled, hypnotic muscle, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama."

Financial Times - Mark Ford

"Simon Armitrage's luscious version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 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."

John Ashbery