Gritty "Gawain": our next Yuletide classic?

When it comes to winter-holiday literary classics, you've got Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" — and then what?

Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory"? Paul Theroux's "London Snow"?

Clearly there are still some vacancies here.

I propose filling one of them with a 14th-century masterpiece by an unknown author, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

"Gawain" is grittier and sexier than the tales of Dickens and Thomas. And if the number of recent translations is anything to go by, it's an obsession for alliteration-loving poets. Notables W.S. Merwin, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ted Hughes have all taken a crack at translating it. Now Yorkshire-born poet Simon Armitage has recast it anew (Norton, 198 pp., $25.95) into language that attempts, with marked success, to re-create the charge and chewy richness of the 14th-century original.

My own acquaintance with "Gawain" goes back to my freshman year in college, when I was introduced to it along with excerpts from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (reading both in the original). I appreciated that Chaucer's story-cycle had greater scope and variety, but weren't those rhyming couplets just a little bit singsongy?

Sure, they charmed — but they didn't thrill.

"Gawain" thrilled. Its feisty tale of fleshly temptation and challenged honor is written in a dialect of northwest England, and its anonymous author shunned the rhyming Italian-French metrical-verse influences at work in Chaucer, relying instead on alliteration and assonance to work his poetic magic. In this way, "Gawain" looks back to "Beowulf" and other pre-Norman invasion, Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The story is set in King Arthur's court where, during Christmas festivities, an uninvited visitor, very tall and very green (both in skin color and clothing), invites any of Arthur's men to behead him ... provided he can return the favor in a year's time.

Gawain takes him up on it, thinking he'll be in the clear once the visiting lunatic is dead. So he gets a shock when the beheaded visitor picks up his still-chattering noggin to sort out rendezvous details for the following year.

How Gawain keeps his integrity (sort of) while resisting a sexy temptress and his urge to save his own skin is at the heart of this sly, delectable tale.

The story is terrific, but it's the syncopated gusto of its language that makes "Gawain" a classic. When we read Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, even Annie Proulx — any writer with an appetite for the gruff, knockabout vitality of the English vernacular, especially its craggier dialects — we're tasting the dividends of "Gawain."

The description, too, is magical. The snowy wilds of England and Wales, the rich castle furnishings and boisterous merrymaking, the wintertime hunting expeditions (literally visceral in their detail; this is not a poem for vegetarians) — all make you feel you've lived in a medieval world, immersed in its damp chill, warmed by its firesides.

The whole package was enough to make converts of many of my freshmen classmates. No doubt it helped that we had a professor whose lectures often reduced us to helpless laughter. One talk he gave concluded: "So that's why 'Gawain' is, in a way, like a gigantic, overgrown puppy dog." (I'm still trying to figure that one out.)

Why read a translation, then, if the original is so good?

Armitage, in his introduction to his version of the poem, gives the best answer: "To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalizingly near yet frustratingly blurred."

Armitage is good, too, on why a literal translation that abandons the alliterative scheme of the original just won't do. "In some very elemental way," he says, "the story and sense of the poem is directly located within its sound." To re-create that "story and sense," Armitage has taken some liberties with the content of certain lines and passages, serving up "a kind of controlled and necessary flirtation" with the original text rather than a word-for-word conversion of it into modern English.

The result is an interpretation as much as a translation — and "Gawain," like Beethoven's Ninth or "The Nutcracker," can stand up to any number of interpretations. Armitage's inventive approach is just one place to start.

As for that "puppy dog," maybe it was just my professor's way of saying that this playful, teasing, growly poem doesn't like to let go, once it has its teeth in you.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com