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!