After the sesoun of somer | with the soft wyndes,
When Zeferus syfles himself | on sedes and erbes,
Welawynne is the wort | that waxes thereoute,
When the donkande dew | dropes of the leves,
To bide a blysful blusch | of the bryght sunne.
Bot then hyes Hervest | and hardenes him sone,
Warnes him for the wynter | to waxe ful ripe.
He drives with droght | the dust for to rise,
Fro the face of the folde | to fly ful highe.
Wroth wynd of the welkyn | wrasteles with the sunne,
The leves lausen fro the lynde | and lyghten on the grounde,
And all grayes the gresse | that grene was ere;
Then all rypes and rotes | that ros upon firste,
And thus yernes the yere | in yisterdayes mony,
And wynter wyndes agayn, | as the world askes
No fage,
Til Meghelmasse mone
Was comen with wynter wage.
Then thenkes Gawan ful sone
Of his anious vyage.
(After the season of summer with gentle winds, when Zephyrus [the west wind] blows himself upon seeds and vegetation, most joyful is the the plant that grows out of them, when the wetting dew drops off the leaves to take a happy glance from the bright sun. But then rushes Harvest, and urges the plant on, warns it to grow fully ripe before the winter. With drought he drives up the dust from the surface of the ground, to fly very high. Turbulent wind wrestles in the sky with the sun; the leaves loosen from the branch and fall upon the ground, and the grass that was green before wholly greys; then all that rose up before ripens and rots, and so runs the year, in many yesterdays, and winter winds round again, as—no kidding!—the world demands, till Michaelmas moon was come, with signs of winter. Then Gawain thinks most quickly of his troublesome journey. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 516–35.)
The second stanza of the famous turning of the year passage in the poem we now call Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. My translation is rough work, done one cocktail deep, and aims to get at meaning rather than beauty; it's not the sort of thing you'd publish, and I'm sure it's open to question.
Some stray notes:
- From what I understand we think fourteenth-century English had both a two-season and a four-season model of the year. This passage seems to use the two-season model, so when it says 'the sesoun of somer' it means the subdivision within the whole warmer half of the year that has gentle winds.
- 'donkande' is, like, endankening, making dank. Can't really preserve the root in translation without modern associations which don't fit, but this is very funny, to me. It appears almost exclusively in alliterative poetry, very frequently collocated with dew.
- The Gawain stanza involves an indeterminate—internally stichic—number of alliterative lines in a frons, followed by a bob, and then four alternating-metre three-beat lines in a cauda. The bob always joins syntactically to what precedes it, but always rhymes with the cauda's second and fourth lines. Because the bob follows an indeterminate number of lines, it always comes as a slight surprise.
- No other extant Middle English poem uses this form.
- 'No fage' is actually an emendation of the manuscript reading 'No sage', which most editors think doesn't make sense, and which could easily be a scribal misreading of an exemplar's f as a long s (ſ: ſage versus fage). Translating it as 'no kidding!' is a little mischievous, but not an idea original to me.
- The Middle English text here has also had its spelling lightly modernised, with some spelling regularisation and the removal of letters no longer used, for readers' convenience. And I've marked the caesurae. The manuscript version of the first line, the second line copied on the page in the photo above, reads 'After þe sesoun of somer wyth þe soft wyndez' (the italicised bits are abbreviated).
Image: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x/2, folio 102 recto.