Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tapa blanda

"Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitrage fuse. Highly charged work." -- Seamus Heany, Nobel Prize-winning translator of Beowulf "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 "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." -- Mark Ford "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." -- Eric Ormsby "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." -- 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." -- Kevin Crossley-Holland "Armitrage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400." -- Brian Morton

One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that "[helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).