Translating Gawain Bibliography: Ecocriticism

Place has always been a key aspect of Simon Armitage's work, from the travel writing of Moon Country (Faber, 1996) to poetry intimately born from, and connected to, Armitage's home town of Marsden in West Yorkshire. Armitage draws on the physical aspects of places but he also focuses intently on their sound, drawing particularly on the speech patterns, dialect and the aural flavours of his own home region.

Ecocriticism explores the interaction between the physical world and the environments constructed in literary texts and others forms of art. In recent years ecocritical studies have begun to engage with earlier literature, building an understanding of human artistic engagement with the nonhuman over time. The draft material relating to Armitage's Gawain translation provides further insight into how language and the physical world can interact in a literary text, and the way in which their interaction can merge the past with the present.

The draft material relating to Armitage's Gawain translation provides fertile ground for producing new avenues for ecocritical study. For example, Armitage's various translations of the Middle English word 'wodwos' indicates that this is a key word in his process of translation. Armitage's decision to retain the Middle English 'wodwos' provides a nod to Ted Hughes's collection 'Wodwo', connecting his own poetry with that of another prominent West-Yorkshire literary figure. Through this word 'wodwos' Armitage also connects his translation to the medieval past, by both the direct retention of the Middle English language, and by invoking the physical aspects of the environment(s) associated with wodwos in medieval cultural and literary traditions.

The following bibliography details a selection of useful texts introducing ecocriticism, ecocritical studies relating to the late medieval, and work examining Armitage's construction of place within his poetry: