translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Other scholars, notably Carolyn Walker Bynum, expand the
Neoplatonic reading of the romance and are of opinion that the story of Sir
Gawain displays several isomorphisms with Biblical narrative instances,
other than the Green Knight’s affiliation to a line of notorious beheaded.
Camelot is thus transfigured into a reflection of God’s court, with Arthur as
“a lesser image of God” (Walker Bynum, 1987). As for the Green Knight, he
mirrors “Lucifer in God’s court” (Walker Bynum, 1987), while his giant
features remind a mediaeval, Bible-conscious audience of the Antichrist. In
his turn, tackling the fiendish visitor’s offence, Gawain is much alike Christ
himself or Michael fighting the dragon, whose head he severs in defence of
the Christian values he abides by.
With all these, the nature of the Green Knight’s person and apparition
remains pretty much ambiguous. The return of the knightly community to
long-forgotten values seems unlikely (as the knights of the Round Table fail
to see beyond the surface of the Beheading Game), and consequently, the
Green Knight contemplates the single viable solution: to single out the most
apt individual and guide him along the path towards conversion. The
disciple’s moral maturation is nonetheless preconditioned by the
prescriptions of the same knightly code he is chosen to reform: by word of
honour, Gawain must come full circle and keep his head of the bargain.
The beginning of the second fitt describes the glamorous arming of
the hero prior to his departure; as he is only too human, Gawain thinks
death to be the terminus in his voyage of initiation. Doubt has already crept
its way into the soul of the chosen knight and his practical wisdom labels
the journey as ‘folly’, while the court mourn for him in tragic tones, still
unable to grasp the true essence of the experience they had all witnessed:
(...) By Christ, it is evil/ That yon lord should be lost, who lives so
nobly!/ To find his fellow on earth, in faith, is not easy./ It would have
been wiser to have worked more warily,/ And to have dubbed the dear
man a duke of the realm./ A magnificent master of men he might have
been,/ And so had a happier fate than to be utterly destroyed,/
Beheaded by an unearthly being out of arrogance.(XXIX: 674-681)
A victim of his fellow-knights’ compassion, Gawain prepares himself
for the quest in a manner that shows him as yet unaware of any purpose in
his peregrinatio. To regard it solely as a deathly adventure is to be, as
Gawain exemplifies, quite remote from the Stoic heritage of the Christian
teaching. As Sidney E. Berger shows, “every man’s life is a journey from
birth to death, from the temptations of the world to one’s symbolic reward,
from a bodily to a spiritual existence, from sin to salvation (or
damnation).”(1985: 87) By now, the crisis of chivalry has been deepened:
the five basic virtues of chivalry that inspire the knight on errand
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