translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

apparitions, and many others); it is one of those metaphysical accidents that
constitute the ferment of any form of conversion (or re-conversion).
He makes his entrance at a temporal threshold (New Year’s Day), a
time fit to issue a process of moral regeneration, but also on a day when
Christians celebrate the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision (the holy infant who
enters the male community and honours, through a sacrifice of blood, the
sealing of God’s covenant with man). His superb detachment while
awaiting decapitation, his invulnerability despite physical dismemberment
(the spirit’s reign over the flesh), uplift the mysterious visitor to the
standard of a potential moral reformer, who might as well be in search of a
disciple.
Mediaeval scholars, as well as the reading public (a rather small caste
though), were exceptionally well-endowed to apply Neo-Platonism to any
sort of literature, which may have allowed for an ambivalent reading of the
first fitt, where the human plane mirrors the divine plane. The apparition
clearly calls for vigilance, as the noble party of guests and Gawain, their
champion, are at a loss: the giant’s appeal to magic (in surviving
decapitation) may have been inspired by the devil, as it were. It is, after all,
the devil’s ominous custom to purport temptation through the voice of
false prophets. The hilarious kicking around of the severed head by the
knights, like in a gruesome game of football merely aids their disbelief and
renders them incapable of understanding the plight of their sinful
mortality, while Gawain, the symbolic executioner, is let into a mystery of
initiation, taking the very first steps on his route to conversion.
In a study entitled Transformations of the Wild Man, Edward Savage
draws an interesting parallel between the Green Knight’s beheading and
that of John the Baptist, as both instances carry a significant semiotic load.
The Baptist prepared the way for Christ and converted the masses through
baptism, asking solely for sincere repentance and willingly sacrificing
himself to fulfil the scriptures; would it be then too far-fetched to assert that
the Green Knight, in his turn, may be regarded as a prophetic character
who also invites conversion through self-sacrifice? Savage equates John the
Baptist and the Green Knight with the pre-Christian myth of the wild man, a
sacrificial deity who ensured fertility and moral regeneration:
It is in John’s beheading, however, that we see his greatest kinship to
the wild man. I have already noted the wild man’s kinship to the
Green Knight. I have also mentioned the wild man’s resemblance to
Jack-o’the-Green, the foliate beheaded deity of Celtic lore. Finally, we
have noted the wild man’s role as the decapitated and resurrected
nature god of early English folk drama. (Savage, 1985: 38)
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