Honor wagered.

Miller, John J.

W.S. Merwin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Knopf, 171 pages, $22

The image on the cover of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--the new translation of it by the poet W. S. Merwin, and just published by Knopf--chillingly captures one of the most striking scenes in all of English literature. A glowing green head looks like a luminescent version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, and it's nearly as haunting. The eyes are wrong; in the poem, they're explicitly described as red, not white. Yet this single flaw is easy to forgive. The picture is unnerving, which is exactly as it should be.

The event it depicts occurs in the first part of the poem. As the knights of the Round Table gather for a Yuletide feast, King Arthur demands a "tale all new of some wonderful event." As if on command, a hulking figure bursts into the royal hall unannounced. Carrying a huge battle-axe and wearing no armor, he seems a barbaric throwback to a time before there was courtly chivalry. His most impressive quality of all, however, is his color: He is entirely green.

This otherworldly intruder mocks his hosts and challenges them to an absurd game. He will let one of the knights strike him with his axe, if in return he is allowed to deliver a blow of his own a year later. Arthur's nephew, Sir Gawain, accepts the bizarre offer. Just as he grips the axe, the Green Knight flashes some skin on his neck, daring the young man to behead him. In a fierce stroke, Gawain cuts straight through. The Green Knight's head drops to the floor, gushing blood. Arthur's men actually kick it around like a soccer ball. All the while, however, the Green Knight's body remains standing. It steps into the scrum, grabs the decapitated head by the hair, and lifts it up high. The severed thing actually speaks: See you in a year, Gawain. Then the Green Knight turns and goes, leaving behind a stunned audience.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight isn't really about the Green Knight; it's about Sir Gawain, and how he strives to keep his end of a deadly bargain. Yet the Green Knight is the poem's most fascinating character. C. S. Lewis has called him "as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature ... as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host." Is he an incarnation of the devil? Some sinister trick of that Arthurian arch-villainess Morgan la Fay? Even when the poem finally identifies the Green Knight, at its conclusion, his real meaning remains obscure. In a foreword, Merwin rightly says the poem derives its "power and authority" from "the insistent presence of the unknown."

There is, indeed, plenty that isn't known about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We don't know the name of the Gawain poet. We don't even know the name of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--if, in fact, it has one. The single manuscript that has survived provides no title. It comes to us through the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, a seventeenth-century gentleman whose library also has given us Beowulf and the Lindisfarne Gospel. A 1731 fire destroyed about a quarter of his priceless manuscripts, and our literature would be immeasurably poorer if the flames had spread further. It wasn't until 1839 that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print for public consumption.

What we do know is that the poem is one of the first great works of literature in a language that is recognizably English. It was probably written in the late fourteenth century, around the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales are a bit difficult to read in the original, though it may be done with some assistance; Chaucer wrote in a London-based version of English that is a direct ancestor of the language we speak today. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, however, is written in a dialect, and it is a bit harder to crack. Its form of English--or Middle English, as the linguists call the language of the day--was based in the North West Midlands, and it is clearly more archaic than Chaucer's English. Even its poetic form, with a heavy emphasis on alliteration, looks backward to the Old English (which is essentially a foreign tongue) of Beowulf. Translation is probably the best means for experiencing it, except for genuine aficionados of Medieval lit.

The first great translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was that grand Oxford philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, who is better known as the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's version is still widely used by students. Merwin is merely the latest competition to come along, though he is also different in that he approaches the poem not as a professor or an expert in Middle English, but as a poet in his own right. A native New Yorker who attended Princeton, Merwin was the tutor to the son of Robert Graves. In 1952, W. H. Auden identified him as a promising young talent. In 1970, he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders. He is also an admired translator of Dante, as well as other romance-language poetry. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight marks his first foray into the older forms of English. His publisher no doubt hopes to repeat the surprising commercial success Seamus Heaney had with Beowulf two years ago, when the Irish-man turned that old standby of ninth-grade English into an international bestseller.

Every translator faces important choices, a give and take between authenticity and readability. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is no different. It was part of something scholars call the Alliterative Revival--a lastgasp movement that briefly breathed life into a dying form that had dominated English before the Norman invasion. Many translators of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, including Tolkien, have struggled to preserve its alliteration. In a foreword, however, Merwin writes that he did not want "to cramp and twist the lines in an effort to make an exact replica of a verse form in what has become, in six hundred years, another language." Alliteration is not absent from his rendition, but it also holds no special place.

Take the very first line of the ninth stanza, in the original:

 Wel gay watz his gome gered in grene

Here is how Tolkien translates it: "Very gay was this great man guised all in green." Tolkien hews to the original, even sticking with the G-sound, which not all translators do even when they're trying to keep the alliteration. The syntax isn't colloquial, but the line preserves an essence of the original.

Here is Merwin: "How splendid he looked, this knight in the green apparel." Merwin's is a bit easier to read, though it casts aside one of the poem's key poetic elements.

This isn't necessarily a poor decision. Merwin, in fact, has written what is probably the most readable version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His edition reproduces the original language on the facing pages, which invites readers to keep tabs on their translator. Some will say Merwin sacrifices a unique and critical aspect of his text, and they will have a point. But consider: Would you prefer watching Shakespeare while standing in a crowded pit of people, as most Elizabethans experienced it, or while sitting in the cushioned seats of an air-conditioned theater? My own preference is for the latter, though someday I may try the former just to see what it's like.

There is obviously room for alliteration in English poetry, but it simply doesn't occupy the central place it once did, and this has been true for centuries. Today, meter and rhyme are more important. They are tools for the Gawain poet, but not fundamental features. (It must be said, however, that Merwin's failure to reproduce the rhyme in the couplets that conclude each stanza is difficult to understand; Tolkien managed it quite well without sacrificing readability.)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may represent an older form of poetry, but what makes it fascinating is how it displays a more modern vision. Despite formal similarities with the literature of the Anglo-Saxons, it essentially rejects the chestbeating virtues of Beowulf in favor of newer, Christian ones. Like Beowulf, Sir Gawain is bold and brave. Yet he is also chaste, faithful, and patient--qualities that the Beowulf poet doesn't idealize. There is tension and violence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but not much in the way of monster-vanquishing combat. If Beowulf is a hero in the mold of Conan, Gawain is a champion in the service of something else.

There are two main parts to the story, both of them challenges thrust upon Gawain. The first is the initial encounter with the Green Knight, in which Gawain faces a public challenge and then confronts the grim task, a year later, of setting out to meet his apparent doom. The second part occurs shortly before he is scheduled to rendezvous with his nemesis. The wife of his host tries to seduce Gawain while her husband is away on a series of hunts. During this erotic temptation, Gawain is invited to violate every standard of courtly decency he has committed himself to uphold. It is a private challenge, in which Gawain must draw strength from the virtues that are more celebrated in the Christian world than the heroic one.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been called a wintertime festival poem, a pagan Celtic tradition continued by Christian Britain, and its blend of ancient custom and modern belief is masterly. The themes of death and renewal are never far from the surface, and one of the most celebrated passages is a vivid description of the seasons changing as Gawain prepares to hold up his end of the strange deal he made with the Green Knight. In many primitive cultures, chastity must come before fertility, just as winter must come before spring--and Gawain has to keep his honor in the most trying of circumstances right before he places his life before the Green Knight's sharp axe.

There are other ways in which the poem updates the past. The opening lines are about Troy--they place King Arthur's court and ancient Britain within the context of Homer's world. In doing so, the Gawain poet pays homage to a literary inheritance. Merwin does the same thing when he chooses this subject for translation. He offers a fine version, and even purists who might quibble with what he's done must admit that it's a welcome trend for our leading poets to grapple with the English classics, at a time when so much other literature is unmoored from tradition.

John J. Miller writes for National Review.