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Article: Honor wagered.(W.S. Merwin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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W.S. Merwin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Knopf, 171 pages, $22
The image on the cover of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--the new translation of it by the poet W. S. Merwin, and just published by Knopf--chillingly captures one of the most striking scenes in all of English literature. A glowing green head looks like a luminescent version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, and it's nearly as haunting. The eyes are wrong; in the poem, they're explicitly described as red, not white. Yet this single flaw is easy to forgive. The picture is unnerving, which is exactly as it should be.
The event it depicts occurs in the first part of the ...