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Introduction The survival of Middle English literature was a hazardous business, and a great deal has been lost. Of the most fortunate survivors – works which depend on a single manuscript – there is nothing to be more grateful for than the British Library manuscript labelled Cotton Nero A x, containing four narrative poems from the northwest midlands of England in an ornate language of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s time. The most celebrated of the manuscript’s four poems is the final one, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the pre-eminent masterpieces of European Romance. The first of the four poems is Pearl, a work which would not be secondary in appeal to anything except such a masterpiece as Gawain. The other two poems, equally brilliant in language and colour, are lively Biblical paraphrases, Patience (the story of Jonah and the whale) and Cleanness, which mostly consists of three Old Testament stories on the subject of sinful worldliness – the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar’s Feast. It is almost certain that the poems are all by the same writer, usually referred to out of deference for the two most distinguished items as ‘The Gawainpoet’ or ‘The Pearl-poet’. There is probably no writer in English who is so unfortunate to be unidentified; this poet is one of the great writers of the Middle Ages, of the era of Dante and Petrarch and Chaucer. As far as modern versions go, Gawain has fared well, ever since the manuscript first came to notice in the early nineteenth century. There is a huge body of criticism on the poem, and since the early twentieth century a steady stream of distinguished translators: J.R.R.Tolkien, Marie Borroff, W.S. Merwin and Simon Armitage, for instance. Pearl has fared much less well, despite the general warmth of its advocates and the volume of enthusiastic criticism on the poem which often mentions it in the same breath as Dante, Boccaccio and Langland. The reasons for this are clear. Gawain (like all the poems in the manuscript) is written in a ringing alliterative language. The modern translator has to decide whether to try to reproduce the formal effect of this; several have done so with great success – Borroff and Armitage, for example. But that is the only decision to be made; the poem’s narrative compulsion and descriptive brilliance carry any version forward, alliterating or not. 7
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The case of Pearl is very different. In the introduction to one of its most valuable modern editions A.C. Cawley and J.J. Anderson say, rightly, ‘from the point of view of its metrical form Pearl is probably the most complex poem written in English’. Like Gawain, though less absolutely, it uses alliteration; but that is only the start of its formal devices. It is made up of 101 twelve-line stanzas, with an intricate rhyme-scheme and a recurring link-word at the start and end of each group of five stanzas. The recurring link-words carry the poem’s themes consistently, and the last line links back to the first (as in Finnegans Wake). As with the manuscript’s other poems, there is a great range of lexical diversity: English, French and Norse vocabulary, and variation in register from the French elegance of courtly love to the colloquial of northern English. So the decision to be made by the translator of Pearl is altogether more difficult. How many of these interlocked formalities will the modern version attempt to reproduce? Some of the traditional translations have coped pretty well: notably Tolkien and Borroff. But with them you never feel you are reading something which is at once close to the original and readable in its own right as a new poem. This is what Jane Draycott’s new translation does so remarkably. Her great achievement is to produce a stanza-for-stanza and largely line-for-line translation which manages to retain total freedom in modern English. This version could not be further from the vices of translatorese. As with Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, when the alliteration offers itself in an unforced modern idiom, Draycott uses it. Perhaps most rewarding of all, she is always ready to work free of the line-ending by introducing an enjambment which (as critics such as Donald Davie and Christopher Ricks have shown) has had such an enlivening effect in English poetry since Milton. This is evident in her very first line: the original’s Perle, plesaunte to prynce’s paye To clanly close in golde so clere (which might be literally translated as something like ‘Pearl, so delightful for a prince to set in pure gold for his pleasure’) is represented, immediately arrestingly, as One thing I know for certain: that she was peerless, pearl who would have added light to any prince’s life however bright with gold. 8

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Introduction

The survival of Middle English literature was a hazardous business, and a great deal has been lost. Of the most fortunate survivors – works which depend on a single manuscript – there is nothing to be more grateful for than the British Library manuscript labelled Cotton Nero A x, containing four narrative poems from the northwest midlands of England in an ornate language of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s time. The most celebrated of the manuscript’s four poems is the final one, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the pre-eminent masterpieces of European Romance. The first of the four poems is Pearl, a work which would not be secondary in appeal to anything except such a masterpiece as Gawain. The other two poems, equally brilliant in language and colour, are lively Biblical paraphrases, Patience (the story of Jonah and the whale) and Cleanness, which mostly consists of three Old Testament stories on the subject of sinful worldliness – the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar’s Feast. It is almost certain that the poems are all by the same writer, usually referred to out of deference for the two most distinguished items as ‘The Gawainpoet’ or ‘The Pearl-poet’. There is probably no writer in English who is so unfortunate to be unidentified; this poet is one of the great writers of the Middle Ages, of the era of Dante and Petrarch and Chaucer.

As far as modern versions go, Gawain has fared well, ever since the manuscript first came to notice in the early nineteenth century. There is a huge body of criticism on the poem, and since the early twentieth century a steady stream of distinguished translators: J.R.R.Tolkien, Marie Borroff, W.S. Merwin and Simon Armitage, for instance. Pearl has fared much less well, despite the general warmth of its advocates and the volume of enthusiastic criticism on the poem which often mentions it in the same breath as Dante, Boccaccio and Langland. The reasons for this are clear. Gawain (like all the poems in the manuscript) is written in a ringing alliterative language. The modern translator has to decide whether to try to reproduce the formal effect of this; several have done so with great success – Borroff and Armitage, for example. But that is the only decision to be made; the poem’s narrative compulsion and descriptive brilliance carry any version forward, alliterating or not.

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