Over the years there have been dozens, possibly hundreds of translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ranging from important scholarly restorations, to free-handed poetic or prose versions, to exercises in form and technique by students of Middle English, many of them posted on the internet. Some translators, for perfectly valid reasons and with great success, have chosen not to imitate its highly alliterative form. But to me, alliteration is the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threads. In some very elemental way, the story and the sense of the poem is directly located within its sound. The percussive patterning of the words serves to reinforce their meaning and to countersink them within the memory. So in trying to harmonize with the original rather than transcribe every last word of it, certain liberties have been taken. This is not an exercise in linguistic forensics or medieval history; the intention has always been to produce a living, inclusive and readable piece of work in its own right. In other words, the amibtion has been poetry.

On the subject of alliteration, it should be mentioned that within each line it is the stressed syllables which count. A line like ‘and retrieves the intestines in time-honoured style’ (1612) might appear not to alliterate at first glance. But read it out loud, and the repetition of that ‘t’ sound – the tut-tutting, the spit of revulsion, the squirming of the warm, wet tongue as it makes contacts the roof of the mouth – seems to suggest a physical relationship with the action being described. If the technique is effective, as well as understanding what we are being told we take a step closer to actually experiencing it. It is an attempt to combine meaning with feeling. This is a translation not only for the eye, but for the ear and the voice as well.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem which succeeds through a series of vivid contrasts: standard English contrasting with colloquial speech; the devotion and virtue of the young knight contrasting with the growling blood-lust of his green foe; exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo; exquisite robes and priceless crowns contrasting with spurting blood and the steaming organs of butchered deer; polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors … and so on. Those contrasts stretch the imaginative universe of the poem and make it three-dimensional. Without the space they open up, there would be no poem to speak of. The same contrasts can be observed in the form of the poem as well as its tone, with elements of order and disorder at work throughout, often operating simultaneously. On the side of order we have the four-beat pulse of each line, the very particular number of verses, and the rhyme and rhythm of the ‘bob and wheel’ sections. On the side of disorder we have the unequal line lengths, the variable verse lengths, and the wildly fluctuating pace of the story. Even the alliteration, constant and insistent for the most part, occasionally fades from view altogether. So within the strictures and confines of this very formal piece we detect a human presence, the Gawain poet, a disciplined craftsman who also liked to run risks and take liberties. He would appear to have set himself a series of rules, then consciously and conspicuously gone about bending them. As his translator, I hope to have been guided by his example.