English 443 Home Page

Final Translations

To everyone in my English 443 Class,

Thank you all for a wonderful semester, and I apologise for my bout of ill health at the end and, with the help of a cocktail of antibiotics, am on the mend. I am sorry we did not get a chance to finish Pearl, but I hope I encouraged you to explore the poem, the Gawain-poet, and the period in general further. I look forward to reading all of your essays. In a few cases, I have been unable to return work to some of you. Later in the week I will place all unreturned work in the file in the English department office under your last name. You may retrieve it there.

Now onto the translation assignment. This will be an in-class translation. You will be given a random passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which you will be asked to translate into Modern English prose. Your translation must have the following characteristics:

It must be in prose, not verse (hence no line breaks, rhyming, etc.).
It must contain only vocabulary and grammatical forms acceptable in Standard Edited Modern English.
It must contain only spellings acceptable in Standard Edited Modern English.
It must be as close as possible to the Middle English vocabulary and grammar of the original text, subject to the stipulations above.
It must be accompanied by footnotes explaining the reason for any instance in which you have violated the above stipulations.

You will need to bring paper or a blue book for this translation. You will have 90 minutes to complete the translation.

In order to study for the exam, I would recommend selecting some individual stanzas and practicing. You can then check your translations against a published one, such as the excellent poetic translation by Marie Boroff in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. You should also study carefully the material on the language of the Gawain-poet on this web site. Make sure you have the grammatical forms memorise. I suggest going through the grammar step by step and looking for examples of each grammatical form in the text. Make sure that you are familiar with any technical terms from medieval culture discussed in class, but I will provide you with a gloss for any Middle English vocabulary which has not survived in Modern English.

As a reminder, the exam will take place on Monday, 20 May from 5:30-7:00 in our normal classroom. I'll see you all then.

Good luck to everybody for all your final exams.

Scott Kleinman

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