Description
Book Synopsis"Compulsively readable. ... Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version."-Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review
Trade Review"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." -- Poetry Review
"[Armitrage's] version inventively recreates the original's gnarled, hypnotic muscle, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama." -- Mark Ford - Financial Times
"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 - New York Sun
"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 - Wall Street Journal
"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 - The Guardian
"Armitrage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400." -- Brian Morton - Sunday Herald
