Alumni Book Club: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Alumni Book Club: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The April Alumni Book Club session will discuss Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage in person at 2115 Tawes Hall at 6:30 p.m. A light supper will be served.
Description:
One of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse who rudely interrupts Camelot’s Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, this Arthurian epic was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. . . . Simon Armitage―one of England’s leading poets―has produced an inventive translation that resounds with both clarity and spirit. His work, presented here with facing original text and a note by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original but succeeds equally in its ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes―acoustic, physical, and metaphorical―to share in and double the pleasure of this enchanting classic.
The Alumni Book Club meets on the third Thursdays of the month at 6:30 p.m.
To be added to the listserv list for monthly meeting reminders, contact Karen Nelson.