Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology by Paula Deitz Read Free Book Online Page B

dale.
    Th
    en he looked around on every side, and it seemed a wilderness.
    Nowhere could he see a sign of a place where he might shelter,
    Only high banks rising steeply, on both halves of the dale,
    And rough and knobby rocky knolls, with sharp and craggy outcrops;
    It seemed to him that the lowering clouds were grazed by the jutting rocks.
    Th
    en he drew his horse to a halt, checked for a little while
    As he sat him, turning this way and that, to seek the chapel out.
    He saw no such thing on any side—and that seemed strange to him—
    Except that a little off to the left in the glade was a sort of mound,
    Or a smooth and rounded barrow on a bank-side above the brim
    Of the channel of a watercourse that was fl owing freely through;
    Th
    e brook was bubbling within, as if it had come to a boil.
    Th
    e knight then urged his horse along, bringing him up to the knoll,
    Alighted from him gracefully, and at a linden tree
    Attached the reins of his noble steed to one of the rough branches.
    And then he walked across to the mound and he strode all around it,
    Turning over in his mind what this strange thing might be.
    It had a hole on one end, and the same on either side,
    And it was overgrown with grass in patches everywhere,
    And all was hollow on the inside—nothing but an old cave
    Or a crevice in an old crag, but which it was he could not

    Be
    sure.

    “Ah, Lord!” sighed the noble knight,

    “Can the Green Chapel be here,

    Where the Devil, around midnight,

    Might say his morning prayer?
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    “Now indeed,” said Gawain, “without doubt this is a wasteland;
    Th
    is chapel is horrifying, overgrown with greenery—
    A very fi tting place for that man who dresses himself in green
    To do his devotions dutifully—in the Devil’s fashion.
    Now I feel in my fi ve senses that in fact it is the Fiend
    Who has imposed this tryst on me, and will destroy me here.
    Th
    is is a chapel of mischance—may it be checkmated!—
    It is the cursedest kind of church that ever I came into!”
    With his helmet high up on his head and his lance held in his hand
    He climbed up to the top of the roof above the rough abode
    Th
    en, farther up on the high hill, he heard, by a hard rock,
    Beyond the brook, above the bank, a wondrously loud noise.
    What! It clattered against the cliff as if it would cleave it in two,
    Like someone at a grindstone who was sharpening a scythe.
    What! It whirred and whetted, like water at a mill!
    What! It made a rushing, and a ringing, harsh to hear.
    Th
    en, “By God!” Sir Gawain said, “that weapon is being prepared
    To welcome me as a knight of my rank ought to be greeted, it would

    Appear.

    God’s will be done. To moan

    Will never help me here.

    Th
    ough my life may soon be gone,

    A noise won’t make me fear.”
    With that the knight cried boldly out, as loudly as he could,
    “Who is the master in this place, who holds this tryst with me?
    For right now, good Gawain is walking all around, right here.
    If any man wants anything, let him appear at once,
    It’s now or never, if he intends to get this business done.”
    “Wait!” shouted somebody on the bank up above his head,
    “And you will quickly have it all, that I once promised you.”
    He kept on making that rushing sound, for a while more rapidly,
    As he turned back to fi nish his whetting before he would come down.
    And then he picked his way past a crag and emerged out of a hole,
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    Whirling from a nook nearby, armed with a dreadful weapon:
    A Danish axe that was freshly forged to pay the return blow,
    With a mighty blade curving back on itself until it touched the helve;
    It had been honed on a whetstone, and it was four feet wide—
    No less than that if measured by the