Christopher Tower (1915–1998)

I confess I've only read small parts of this, jumping from place to place hoping it would improve. It reads like a bad translation. Of course, genuine English translations of genuine medieval epics often read like bad translations -- are bad translations -- so I suppose in that sense this epic adaptation is authentic...

This book contains poetry so dreadful that it's actually infectious - afterwards you'll be looking at new scepticism with any other poetry you come across for the next few days and construing it in the worst possible light. I mostly keep it as a 'reset' button for my critical faculties, and as a dreadful warning. As those two things, it is quite effective.