Over the weekend, I read Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight. I have the Tolkien translation, but haven't read it yet, so I don't have anything to compare it against. Having said that, I really enjoyed his translation. Although Armitage took some liberties with the a a | a x alliterative scheme, it seems that the Gawain poet did as well, and Armitage mostly manages to work in three alliterations per line, even if they're not on the first three stresses.
My biggest complaint was the weakness of his bob-and-wheel translations. In these sections, the poet switches to a rhyme and meter prosody that should be ababa, but Armitage often loses one of the a's, and sometimes even two of them. He does keep the rhythm, though, and I liked the way that it feels like a contrast to the longer lines above.
Speaking of alliterative lines, I finished the third part of Portrait, and it seems that Joyce added alliteration to Stephen's arsenal. There are a lot of alliterations, and I think they reflect Stephen's growing sense of the sound of words will become important as he decides to become a poet. In part 4, at least as far as I've read, both the compound words and alliterations have declined, because Stephen is going through a much more plain portion of his life, having renounced worldly pleasures. It'll be interesting to see if they resume as he abandons the priestly life.
Also, a note on the Penguin edition footnotes: they're godawful. There's one on "From the door of Byron's publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel... he had paced," that tells us that Clontarf Chapel is on Clontarf Road. What I want to know is how far that is from Byron's public house (because it might tells us something about Stephen's state of mind), or at least something about the neighborhood. (Or, if those things aren't particularly important, just don't have a footnote!)
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