by Tom Birkett
7 Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf (London, 1999).
8 For a recent study of some of these reworkings, see Chris Jones, ‘From Heorot to
Hollywood: Beowulf in its Third Millennium’, in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 13–30, and Siân Echard, ‘BOOM: Seeing Beowulf in Pictures and Print’, in the same collection, pp. 129–45.
Neil Gaiman, who wrote the screenplay for the most commercial y successful of the on-screen reworkings – Beowulf, Dir. Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, 2007) –
also inventively reworked the poem as ‘Bay Woolf’ in his Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Il usions (London, 1999), pp. 219–25, and his retelling of Norse Mythology has recently been published by Bloomsbury (London, 2017).
9 For both projects, see the website http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/resources/mpvp/, hosted by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. Accessed June 2016.
10 Lawrence Venuti, ‘Introduction: Poetry and Translation’, Translation Studies 4:2 (2011), 127–32, at p. 127.
11 This is a phrase adapted from Paul St-Pierre’s seminal study of the conditions under which translations are undertaken, and ‘when, why, how and for whom’ they are made
available, ‘Translation as a Discourse of History’, Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 6:1
(1993), 61–82, at p. 62.
Introduction
3
disciplinary lines. As Boyle points out in her contribution to this collection, the
preoccupations of the relatively few medieval Irish scholars working on a large (and
partly un-translated) corpus are natural y rather different to those of the Anglo-
Saxonist looking to cover well-traversed material in new and increasingly novel
ways. However, Cronin’s opening assertion in his 1996 survey Translating Ireland
that the role of translators as ‘inventive mediators who have shaped every area of
Irish life for centuries’ has ‘largely been ignored’ has been at least partly addressed in the intervening decades, not least by his own work.12 It is also clear that medieval Irish poetry is enjoying its own popular renaissance, ranging from graphic novel
interpretations of the Táin Bó Cúailnge 13 to the impressive roll-call of contemporary poets reworking an (albeit conventional) assemblage of medieval poetry in Maurice
Riordan’s compendium The Finest Music.14 However, it is also evident that the creative possibilities afforded by certain less-celebrated medieval Irish texts treated in this volume (for poets working in both the Irish language and English language
traditions) are only beginning to be recognised. On the other end of the scale, the
translation and adaptation of the Old English Beowulf has become a field of study in its own right, as well as a productive site of postcolonial and feminist ‘writing-back’ at a reception narrative that is in many ways paradigmatic of English literary
history as a whole. The extensive corpus of Old Norse poetry, much of which can
still be read and understood by the average speaker of modern Icelandic, presents a
rather different set of challenges to the translator, compounded on the one hand by
the intricacy of the meters, word order and imagery of skaldic poetry (described by
Gordon as the verse form ‘most aloof from translation’),15 and on the other by the
ease of access to dated nineteenth-century translations and entrenched ideas about
Norse and Viking cultures in the popular imagination. Three poetic corpuses that
have much in common with one another, including their relationship as vernacular
literatures to a concomitant Latin tradition, are thus subject to rather different
linguistic, cultural and historical considerations. There is much to be gained in
comparing the experiences of translators working in three such dynamical y related
medieval traditions, and in taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding
the transmission, reception and remediation of medieval poetry in our current
literary and cultural environment.
12 Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork, 1996), p. 1.13 Including Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn (Dublin, 2013) by Marvel Comics graphic novelist Will Sliney and an Irish-language treatment by Colmán Ó Raghal aigh in An Táin: Úrscéal Grafach, with artwork by The Cartoon Saloon (Clár Chlainne Mhuiris, 2006).
14 Maurice Riordan, ed., The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics (London, 2014).
15 E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford, 1927), p. xli, quoted by Lee M.
Hol ander, ‘The Translation of Skaldic Poetry’, Scandinavian Studies 18:6 (1945), 233–40, at p. 233.
4
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
The Challenge of Translating Early Medieval Poetry
Poetry has long been recognised as posing the most profound questions to the
translator, including whether its translation is possible at al .16 Indeed, Robert
Frost’s definition of poetry itself as ‘that which is lost … in translation’ has come to serve as a shorthand to express the particular difficulties encountered by translators of a literary form that relies more than any other on the subtle interplay of
sound and meaning.17 The difficulties of translating poetry are only compounded
by cultural and linguistic distance, particularly when the culture that produced the
source text is separated from us by a millennium and only partial y recoverable, and
when the language – with its shades of significance – is no longer in current use.18
Few would disagree that the act of translating an Old Norse, Old English or medi-
eval Irish poem is first and foremost an act of linguistic transformation requiring
some familiarity with the original language. Yet, as Venuti points out, translating
poetry ‘has often meant to create a poem in the receiving situation’,19 necessitating
a poet’s feeling for the temper of the target language. Translating these products of
the medieval imagination for a new audience also means understanding the world
behind the words, and the very different role(s) of poetry within early medieval
society. In order to capture the essential quality of the original poem the translator must attempt to inhabit the text’s historical moment, but also find a contact point
within their own, considering the context in which the medieval poem was circu-
lated and performed and how it will be received in its new moment of transmission,
as well as how to avoid ‘plunging [the poem] into the obscurity of the present’ in the very act of recovery.20
In addition to bridging the cultural space between the medieval past and the
present day, there are also challenges common to all interlingual translations of
poetry: the approximation of metrics and poetic style in a language which may lack
the capacity for rendering of particular forms or effects found in the original; the
decision about whether to foreignise or familiarise the lexis of the poem; and the
wider question of fidelity, and what one is being faithful to (style, meaning, rhythm, 16 Roman Jakobson’s suggestion that ‘poetry by definition is untranslatable’, and that ‘only creative transposition is possible’ is a sentiment echoed in many translators’ prefaces, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (Cambridge, MA, 1959), pp. 232–9, reprinted in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London, 2004), pp. 138–43, at p. 143.
17 The quote itself has lost something of its original nuance: Frost said ‘guardedly’ that he
‘could define poetry this way: it is that
which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation’,
‘Conversations on the Craft of Poetry’ (1959), reproduced in Robert Frost on Writing, ed.
Elaine Barry (New Brunswick, NJ, 1973), p. 159.
18 Friedrich Schleiermacher reminds us that the lack of exact correspondence between
words in any two languages is always problematic, and simply becomes more evident ‘the further removed they are from one another in etymology and years’, Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersezens (Berlin, 1813); trans. Susan Bernofsky, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, in The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 43–63, at pp. 45–6.
19 Venuti, ‘Introduction: Poetry and Translation’, p. 128.
20 R. M. Liuzza, trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON, 2000), p. 46.
Introduction
5
or that which makes the nerves ‘tingle’ and ‘skin flush’).21 Though poetic translation differs from original composition in acknowledging its derivative status, it is no
less an act of creation for that. Indeed, it can be argued (as this collection does) that translation represents ‘the most precise, intimate reading’ of the original:22 an act of interpretation that deserves to be studied as a critical discourse in its own right. As Borges – himself an accomplished translator of medieval poetry – reminds us, ‘no
problem is more essential to literature and its small mysteries than translation’, the history of a text’s translation ‘destined to il ustrate aesthetic debates’ and providing us with ‘a partial and precious document of the changes [a text] inevitably suffers’.23
The contributions to this collection put these partial and precious documents centre
stage, reflecting on the challenges posed by the translation of poetry, and asking what it means to translate medieval literature for a twenty-first-century audience.
In addition to the proliferation of translation activity itself in recent years, there has also been a marked development in the degree to which translators offer access to
their methods and reflect on the process of translating medieval poetry into modern
languages. Whilst the translations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
often present versions free from discussions of the translator’s individual approach,
leaving scrutiny and evaluation of its merits to the astute reader, recent literary
translations are typical y prefaced by extensive notes (even manifestos) about the
translation process. Perhaps most il ustrative are translations of Beowulf from the latter half of the twentieth century. Reflection on the process of rendering the poem
in Modern English range from Roy Liuzza’s notes prefacing his fine student edition
– where he echoes Frost in musing that translation is ‘a gesture towards an empty
space where a text used to be’ and modestly proposes his version as a ‘sketch’ of the
original, ‘somewhat quieter than most others’24 – to Edwin Morgan’s bold and quite
brilliant critique of former translators’ ‘assaults’ on the poem in setting up his own efforts at a different kind of translation more sensitive to the art of the original.25
However, it is Seamus Heaney’s ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to his 1999 translation of
Beowulf that is most quoted and perhaps most indicative of the reflective turn in the translation of early medieval poetry. At times self-consciously scholarly, and at
times anecdotal and personal, his extended foray into the nature of the poem and his
own journey towards understanding Beowulf as his ‘voice-right’ is as conspicuously constructed as the translation which follows.26 Its impact on the study of the poem
as an accessible entry-point for a generation of students of Old English literature
cannot be denied, and his re-casting of the poem in the ‘familiar local voice’ of his
Ulster forebears can be understood as establishing a new contact zone between past
21 Edwin Morgan, Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English (Aldington, Kent, 1952), p. vi.
22 Fiona Sampson, ‘On Translating Old English Poetry: Solomon and Saturn’, in The Word Exchange, pp. 535–6, at p. 536.
23 Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘Some Versions of Homer’, PMLA 107:5
(1992), 1134–8, at p. 1136.
24 Liuzza, trans., Beowulf, pp. 46–7.
25 Morgan, trans., Beowulf, p. vii.
26 Heaney, trans., Beowulf, p. xxiii.
6
Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
and present,27 or even as a reversal of what Spivak terms ‘the old colonial attitude,
slightly displaced’ that has characterised much translation into English.28 However,
along with his claims to have been ‘writing Anglo-Saxon from the start’, such care-
ful y constructed fictions of the translation process need critiquing in their turn.29
The great deal that is found anew in a translation such as Heaney’s needs to be
measured against what is always and inevitably lost: as Alison Killilea points out,
when the poet gives us the problematic ‘monstrous hel bride’ for ides aglæcwif, he not only offers an interpretation of the poem, but presents the next generation of
students with a baseline for their understanding of the monsters which instruc-
tors are required to respond to.30 Certainly, the role that creative translation and
adaptation has played in the history and direction of the three disciplines – in terms of the way the subject is taught, studied and conceptualised – has too often been
downplayed, and the ‘contact zone’ between scholarly and creative approaches to
the text demands the sustained exploration that this volume affords.
The challenge of understanding the ‘new medieval’ and its influence on contem-
porary literature has been taken up in recent years by several important critical
studies of translating Old English,31 medieval Irish32 and Old Norse33 poetry. Most
of these studies have been concerned with a backward glance at the twentieth
century and with the long view that is necessary to understand broad trends in the
27 Ibid., p. xxvi.
28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, pp. 369–88, at p. 377.
29 Heaney, trans., Beowulf, p. xxiii.
30 ‘ Ides aglæcwif – “Monstrous ogress” or “female warrior”? Translation and Gender in Beowulf’, Oral Presentation, ‘ Eald to New’ Conference, University College Cork, 2014.
31 Critical studies of the translation and reception of Old English include Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, eds, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2000); Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006); and the collected essays in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. For twenty-first-century studies of translating Beowulf in particular, see the essays in Mary K. Ramsey, ed., Beowulf in Our Time: Teaching Beowulf
in Translation (Kalamazoo, MI, 2008) and Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf : Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge, 2011).
32 For an extended study of the translation of medieval Irish literature into English, see Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester, 1999); Kaarina Hollo discusses the tradition of intralingual translation in ‘The Shock of the Old: Translating Early Irish Poetry into Modern Irish’, Eire-Ireland 38:1/2 (2003), 54–71. Most recent critiques of translation have focused on individual works, for example, Heaney’s Buile Suibhne, read in the context of his other medieval translations by Conor McCarthy in his Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008), and by Maria Tymoczko in li
ght of the wider tradition of translating Irish poetry in
‘Wintering Out with Irish Poetry: Affiliation and Autobiography in English Translation’, The Translator 6:2 (2000), 309–17.
33 The majority of studies of Old Norse literature in the English tradition have been concerned with evaluating earlier periods of translation and reception activity; see, for example, Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820 (Trieste, 1998); the collected essays in Andrew Wawn, ed., Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock, Middlesex, 1994); and David Clark and Carl Phelpstead, eds, Old Norse Made New (London, 2007). Heather O’Donoghue’s English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford, 2014) traces this history of reception to the present day. Critical
Introduction
7
uses of the past. Whilst the current collection of essays is primarily concerned with
the landscape of translation and reception in the twenty-first century, and with the
way that translated poetry creates meaning in the present, it takes up the discussion
of earlier trends and milestones in translation at several key points, looking back
to the twentieth century and to the translation models that continue to influence
recent engagement with the same material. Indeed, if early medieval poetry has
been in particular focus in the first decades of the twenty-first century, it is of course neither a new horizon nor an endpoint for an inheritance that Heaney reminds us
is ‘wil able forward / again and again and again’.34 In each successive translation and adaptation of the poetry we see both the traces of its particular historical moment
and also the continuation of a long history of reception and transformation. Several
essays in this collection trace the chain of influences and connections – including
the replication of mistranslations – which underpin contemporary engagements