Gawaine and the Pale Lady?
Hmmm. I've finished the Castle Anthrax bit, and I'm torn.
I made the lady sympathetic by making her unhappy, lonely. I'm glad she has a motivation -- she wasn't working without one. But I had had her in mind as a Belle Dame Sans Merci, the beautiful woman without mercy, a usual figure in courtly poetry -- a figure of power. And she's lost that. Will it be possible to keep her sympathetic, and yet give her her power back?
The other thing it changes is the contrast between her and Barbarossa, her husband. In the original, the hunting scenes are much bigger and bloodier. I wanted to bring in some of that back into this version. But as I worked towards it I found I started to fear for the lady a bit... alone with this violent man. I haven't decided what I'll do.
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Are you doing it for fun or exploration or publication or? I read Gawain fairly frequently, but that’s in ME. Is there a market for a verse translation for children? Schools?
I’m hoping to sell it as a picture book, though I’m honestly not sure if its salable. There was a magnificent Beowulf picture book by Welwyn Wilton Katz a few years back, and that give me hope. It wasn’t in verse, but it did have wonderful emotional and thematic complexity, which is too often missing in kidlit.
But if my Green Knight isn’t salable, that’s okay. Saying this is for kids (whether or not it is) and using the inhereted story let me play with all sorts of poetic tools I’ve never played with before — end rhyme, accentual meter, inversion, etc. I needed to get a handle on those, I think.
I almost feel, having written eight hundred lines in nonce quatrains, that I might try a sonnet — something I couldn’t have done last year.
On the other hand, my mother says: “This one will make you rich. Write it on the wall.”