translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

death. Thus, the lady manages to undo the Endless Knot, and talks Gawain
into trading a divine symbol for a secular one.
Richard Green parallels this situation with a famous apocryphal
Biblical story, in which Virgin Mary bestowed her girdle (the Sacra Cintola)
upon Doubting Thomas, on the eve of the Assumption, as a token of faith
in Christ and truthfulness. The girdle Gawain receives is, in its turn, a
“secular travesty of the Sacra Cintola” (1985: 9), and renders him as a
serious candidate for failure in his moral trial. Though deceitful, the lady,
through persuasion, teaches Gawain a lesson of humility; paradoxically,
her ultimate power resides in the humility with which she proposes the
girdle, and the temptress triumphs by means of Christian ethics.
Finally, on New Year’s Day, Gawain, restored in his confidence by
the girdle’s grant of invulnerability, reaches the Green Chapel, a forest
clearing actually. Though guilty of cowardice and covetousness (CI: 2508), as
he grievously rebukes himself, Gawain is spared by the Green Knight –
Bertilak, his metaphysical instigator, who masterfully directs the ceremony
of Gawain’s confession and absolution. The fearsome axe, which barely
nicks Gawain’s neck, is the final move in this complicated scheme of
humility and power.
This, in fact, stands for the so-called colée (accolade), the alapa militaris
with which the suzerain confirms his vassal, and the aspirant is let into
initiation. (Cardini, 1999: 86) The Green Knight now displays a sort of
protective irony, as he translates Gawain’s failure as an individual
hypostasis of humanity’s global plight: conversion and martyrdom are
fatally separated by man’s love of his own God-given gift, life. His lenient
laughter “is the laughter of the insider, of one privy to a set of second
meanings for common signs, one who comprehends and encompasses all
of the possibilities.” (Estes, 2000: 75)
Gawain returns to Camelot contemplating his fellow-knights’ future
contempt and laughter, but instead, they welcome him as if he were
returned from the Inferno. The decoding metaphor of the romance is both
humorous and sceptical: private shame becomes public pride in the
anticlimactic denouement when the knights of the Round Table adopt the
green girdle as a badge of honour. The symbolic conclusion of Gawain’s
romance is that feudal aristocracy is no longer able to survive a potential
Beheading Game, at any given moment of truth, and the sole salvation of
chivalry is the honest attempt to keep the right balance between power and
humility. The final message is suffused with a strange sense of resigned
dignity since, at all times, man is perilously tempted to choose the easy
path and not the Via Dolorosa of spiritual uplift through self-sacrifice.
Ultimately, according to the mediaeval poet’s courageous but at the
same time bitter, though humorous, retranslation of the chivalric code, why
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