★★★★★ 4
Laudable Work, with One Reservation
Format: Paperback
I appreciate Mr. Winny's time and efforts to produce a "bilingual" edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. No stranger to the pitfalls of poetic translation, I prefer to have the original side-by-side with the modern English language rendering, as you get with this book. That way, I can quiet the academic growl in my head that remains skeptical of the inevitable poetic license the translator--by necessity--must take to adapt ancient words into modern parlance. My only complaint is that since the poem in its original is half the appeal of what this book promises, why modernize the letters? The Gawain poet's Middle English is already much more obscure to the modern reader than Chaucer's. Why not retain the yogh, the thorn, etc.? The target audience is already willing to climb the mountain, so why lop off the peak?
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Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2015

