Sir Gawain And the Green KnightPearl Poet
Sir Gawain And the Green Knight
by Pearl Poet · first published 2017
13mentions
3recommended by
12HN commenters
2019–2026first – last mentioned
25% recommend75% neutral
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…famously has no direct translation, so everyone puts their own spin on it. Reading the amount of thought that goes into a translation is always interesting to me - for instance the introduction to a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have really helped me understand how the alliterative style worked and why the translation was done in a certain way (and why it was so hard).
on “The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler” ↗…investment, it gets easier with each new author. The payoff is freedom from historical provincialism. Only reading contemporary authors is like only knowing people from your home town. By the way, have you read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? It's really hard - you are basically looking up every word in the back - but it is a wonderful poem in the alliterative style.
on “Paradise Lost (1667)” ↗Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is exceptional, much better IMO than the Tolkien translation. So I'm very excited for this. The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite: https://www.audible.com/pd/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-A...
on “Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated” ↗…differed from one another. Chaucer’s English is similar enough to modern English that bookish people today can quickly get used to it with the help of an annotated edition of the Canterbury Tales. But Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the less popularly known writers of the Middle English period like the Pearl-poet or William Langland are more challenging and generally only ventured by specialists, and everyone else relies on translations.
on “Learn to read Middle English” ↗…original transcription was subsequently discovered in the 1930s, so we still have access to the words, just not the original artifact. [2] This very same library is home to the only known manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [3]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_library#Ashburnham_Hous... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon#History_o...…
on “Library fires have always been tragedies – just ask Galen” ↗…rather than English. The class did not read him, except for one student who chose that as the focus of a class project. I did have a high school English class covering (among other, non-medieval works) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the story of Tristan and Iseult. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was read in translation, but Tristan and Iseult was a fairly modern reimagining (set in the original period), with an author's introduction…
on “Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author” ↗That sounds really good, I don't think I ever read Tristan and Iseult. I'd have slotted Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in with Beowulf in the "medieval" part of the literary canon but I could be off-base there. I remember reading Beowulf in high school but not the other. That might be a function of which one I found more…
on “Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author” ↗I agree that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is "medieval". I meant to say that the English class covering it was not focused on a historical period, covering literature that was much more modern in the same year. Beowulf is from around the 8th…
on “Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author” ↗Is six hundred years ago more than a few? Chaucer is still more or less comprehensible. (Though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from roughly the same time, not so much.)
on “Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king” ↗Hopefully I'll knock at least a couple off my "most shameful not to have read" list: - Paradise Lost - The Divine Comedy - The Aeneid - Moby Dick - Middlemarch - Othello & at least the lesser Henriad - Any of several Russian novels, of which I've read none (War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment probably being the biggest) - Kafka's The Trial - The Canterbury Tales (I've
on “Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?” ↗Go ask your average Burger to read the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and figure out if they know how to pronounce it. Ask the same of a Dutchman and Van Den Vos Reynaerde, or any other people and their ancient texts, barring perhaps Icelandic people.
on “Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)” ↗…mythology of King Arthur, appearing almost six hundred years after the popular stories first appeared in public circulation as a cultural response to the rise of the idea of courtly love. And the story of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight itself was a later addition as well to epitomize the growing ideal of chivalry. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson was adding to the story over twelve hundred years after it first appeared in response to gothic…
on “January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all” ↗> Despite his stature and success, Tolkien has largely been ignored by literary critics. Is that really true? I mean, even outside of the Middle-Earth books, I thought Tolkien's translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" [1] and view on Beowulf [2] had a very impact on the literary world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knigh... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf:_The_Monsters_and_the_...…
on “Tolkien’s Middle-Earth wasn’t a place. It was a time in (English) history” ↗