Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In The Times, Alan Garner contemplates the Middle English Christmas-time poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, newly translated by Simon Armitage. “The language of Gawain is alive, rooted in its Pennine Land,” he writes, arguing that the English spoken now in Gawain country means that the Middle English language of the poem is only a “small barrier” to those readers. He then offers extracts by himself, Simon Armitage, Bernard O’Donoghue, Ted Hughes and J RR Tolkein for readers to compare.

Wars and a man

Brad Leithauser in The New York Times on Robert Fagles' Aeneid

Comparison of a passage from the Aeneid in three translations

Eric Ormsby's Variations of Virgil , review of Fagles in The New York Sun

Charles McGrath, feature on Fagles in The New York Times, Translating Virgil's Epic Poem of Empire

Review by David Barber in the Boston Globe


A new Aeneid for the 21st century Richard Jenkyns in the TLS

Carpe diem, and all that

The Odes of Horace, translated by Len Krisak, is an excellent reworking of the Latin author's poetry, says Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian

Down with the damned

Sean O'Brien's new translation of Dante's Inferno is dull, anachronistic and, above all, not needed, says Eric Griffiths in The Guardian