The Green Knight’s castle and the translators

One of the particularly fine passages in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the description of the Castle when Gawain first sees it. Yet when one studies the way in which translators have handled it, one finds that many modern versions seem unnecessarily colourless, and others though more colourful, are freer than needful. I have consequently gathered a fairly full sampling of modern versions of the passage, with the purpose of searching for possible principles of translation which might be useful elsewhere as well as in the passage itself. It seems fitting that the results should be presented here, since the chief tool I have used is the semantic law formulated by Martin Joos in 1953. The law, as it applies to a given context, states that the possible meanings are to be judged as to which contributes least to the totality of the context. I have discussed and used the law frequently with students, and also in print in 1959 (Hill 1959). The present essay constitutes a further presentation of the results of using the law

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