Simon Armitage

I have been on a Simon Armitage craze recently. I was aware that he had published an acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a family favorite since 1999, when we did a short, comical version as our annual New Year's Eve dramatic presentation). And then I was browsing in the excellent campus bookstore at Miami University and saw a radio play version of the Odyssey done for the BBC by Armitage - well, I'm a sucker for the Odyssey, so I picked it up, read a couple pages and bought it. Fabulous! As appropriate for the radio play format, it's shorter than the original and more focused on dialog than narrative. And it's fresh and vivid - it captures the feeling of ancient Greece, yet is expressed in a contemporary conversational style.

So then I got Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the library. Armitage's introduction was very interesting - he chose to compromise strict accuracy in translation in favor of capturing the sense while retaining the strong alliteration and rhythm that are so characteristic of the original. His commented that the history of the manuscript (lost until relatively modern times) was a stimulus for fresh translations, allowing one to put a personal mark on it that would be less possible for texts that have been in the public domain for a few hundred years and consequently worked over repeatedly by eminent translators. It had been many years since I had read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and I was delighted to find it to be, in Armitage's hands, no arcane chivalric epic, but a vivid account of courage, temptation, and character.

I have also read a few of Armitage's poems in Shout, and find them to be fresh, exciting, sometimes savage, and sometimes hard to understand. These will take more work for me.

A prodigiously talented man!

A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

I have been reading le Carré for years - originally knocked out by The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and then even more enthusiastic about the Smiley novels. The Perfect Spy was a particular favorite.

The books are all about deceit in interpersonal relationships - a topic of great personal interest to me, as my father and mother divorced when I was very young and I grew up with my father and grandmother, who re-created my exceptionally savvy mother as an irrelevent no-account. Further, my grandmother was a true Victorian - born in Leicester, England in 1890 - who did not talk plainly or realistically about important things in life (sex, religion, prejudice). And finally, as I was growing up, there was an increasing chasm between the attitude presented to me by my father and grandmother that mothers were inconsequential and the fact that my dad lived almost his entire adult life, unmarried, with his own mother.

Well, but to le Carré! So the last few of his books (e.g., Russia House, Tailor of Panama) did not seem to me to be all that great. I liked The Constant Gardener, but hadn't read the books afterward. Then I heard le Carré interviewed on NPR about his new book, A Most Wanted Man , and next time I walked into my local library, it was sitting on the new arrivals shelf! So I grabbed it. Found it to be true coin of the realm - immediately engaging, with the familiar le Carré voice and world established immediately and firmly. The book doesn't contain many surprises, but was still a wonderful read. le Carré is now 77 - hope he keeps writing for another 30 years!