Translating Early Medieval Poetry
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the path inescapable.
Haunted by hardships, the death of her house,
its bitter extinctions,
this wanderer says: ‘Most days I wake
like a stone in the stillness,
one hour before dawn.
There’s not a single survivor now
to whom I could unhinge my heart,
heave out this hurt.
Yet this is how the best of us must live,
with love locked up
in the battered bone-box of the heart,
however we may suffer, grown weary
of this word “fate”. Grief brings no help.
To live like a heroine
is to hold such hurts lightly. So must I,
with ice in my heart,
lost to my old life, the man that I loved,
seal up this evil star’27
Clearly the poem’s structure is based around two distinct hemistichs, usual y bound
by alliteration. Some of these hemistichs have two strong stresses, but plenty do
not, and Hol and further develops her version of the Old English line by enjambing
heavily, something the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonist poets tended to do much
less; already we can hear a move away from (although nevertheless still from) the more uniform performance of the sound of Old English that we saw in the twentieth-century cut-up.
Obviously this is a very free translation of The Wanderer, translating almost at the level of the idea, rather than phrase: ana (‘alone’, line 8) becomes ‘like a stone in the stillness’, for example; ‘unhinge my heart’ is a striking way of translating
modsefan minne […] sweotule asecgan (‘to speak clearly my heart’, lines 10–11), but not one that comes from a word-by-word approach. Furthermore, a number of new
possibilities fall out of the decision to make the speaker female; the goldwine of the original (‘gold-companion/lord’, line 22) here becomes a lost lover, for example.
Although this poem initial y looks as if it is translating the Old English line in a
manner familiar from twentieth-century precedent then, it actual y represents a
much freer approach than even Pound’s re-performance of The Seafarer; we have
here a re-writing of the source text almost in the way that Dryden re-writes the
Roman satiritic poet Juvenal, for example.
This use of an Old English source as the jumping off point for (re-)writing a new
work is also evident in this extract from a poem by Susan Stewart (2008):
27 Jane Hol and, Camper Van Blues (Cambridge, 2008), p. 33. Reproduced by kind permission of the author.
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Variations on <
In the wood there stood a tree and in the tree there lived a wood
that was a cross without form
until it stood upon a hil ,
bleeding like a man
and in the man there lived a god.
In my dream, I thought, wait –
I can’t yet
cease for a while, so midnight
give me some
order, some rest.
Inside me stood a dream and in the dream there was a treasure,
a chest drenched with jewels that spilled
as slow as blood,
unmeasured, sticky strands
of pearls and silver
beads along
a vein. Along
a
vine,
dewy
strung.
If a tree speaks, it says “bear me down
shouldering, bear me,
then stand me up
up like a tree again.”28
This is even further from its source text than Hol and’s Wanderer, and has completely foregone the shape of the Old English line, instead improvising structures out of the
material of The Dream of the Rood in the post-Ezra Pound tradition of ‘projective verse poetics’, as practised by poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
Words and phrases from the Old English poem are sometimes brought over into
this text, but in new contexts and combinations, so that The Dream of the Rood
suggests language, but does not predetermine the poem’s sense. ‘Stood’, for example,
is a surprising verb for a dream to perform, but its proximity to the jewels in the
treasure chest indicate it was probably suggested by The Dream of the Rood’s stodon (‘they stood’, line 7), whose subject is the less unusual gemmas, from which it is here syntactical y uncoupled, but redeployed nearby. While gemmas and stodon are separated by Stewart, the two aspects of Christ’s being, represented in The Dream
of the Rood allegorical y, by the victory-tree alternately drenched in blood and then adorned with treasure, are here combined into one single figurative image: a slow,
28 Susan Stewart, Red Rover (Chicago, 2008), pp. 70–1. Reproduced by kind permission of Chicago University Press.
24
Chris Jones
sticky flow of jewels, which, if we follow the logic of this compounded metaphor,
implicates the treasure chest as Christ’s body.29
That use of an Old English poem as a platform to compose is even more evident
in ‘The Seafarer Poet in Newcastle’ (2012) by Alistair Noon, a poet who does not know Old English at first hand.30 The poem comes early in a sequence called ‘The
Holidays of the Poets’ and is essential y an extended unpacking of the kenning
waeg-hengest (‘wave-horse’, i.e. ‘ship’), which is translated in the poem’s penultimate line, although hwaelweg (‘whale-path’, i.e. ‘sea’) is also re-made in the poem.
I had ridden a cloud-horse to that kingdom
but the gate-guards wouldn’t let me ride home.
So voyage-worn were the edges of my mirror-book
that the reflection might not’ve been my own.
A Friday in early March, around sundown,
and the local women were out in their bikinis.
All I had till the wheel-beast rumbled off to London
was a Guinness and a song-bag of Seamus Heaney’s.
So I boarded the rail-whale to Jarrow
and strolled to the sea’s fingertips where I found
enough flotsam to hammer up a water-arrow
that would’ve humbled any Anglian mound.
It was my quick Kon-Tiki to re-state
a theory whose truth I already knew.
Back the route some of us came, I sailed
on a brine-flight no longer quite new.
It was cold in that life-image in March,
and my stomach read each trough and crest.
It was damp in that wave-steed and I started
to feel its hooves moving below my chest.31
Again we see there is no real interest in imitating the Old English line in this stan-
zaic, rhyming poem. Like the speaker of the Old English Seafarer the speaker of this poem is also a kind of exile, forced into solitary, seaborne travel due the poor
condition of his passport. The comforts of those who dwell in burgum (‘in cities’, line 28), wlonc and wingal (‘proud and wine-flushed’, line 29) have been here translated into the women of Newcastle, bikini-clad in early winter (and giving us perhaps one
of the funniest rhymes in English history: ‘bikinis/Heaney’s’). But our speaker is not 29 The editors of this present volume have also kindly pointed out to me that the detail of the ‘dewy-strung’ ‘vine’ in Stewart’s poem may well be an al usion to the vine-scroll foliation of the Ruthwell Cross, a monument whose runic verse inscriptions are frequently discussed in relation to the Vercelli Book text of The Dream of the Rood.
30 Pers. comm. with author. Noon reads parallel-text translations of Old English, such as in The Word Exchange, and has also read Jones, Strange Likenes
s.
31 Alistair Noon, Earth Records (Rugby, 2012), p. 51. Reproduced by kind permission of the author and Nine Arches Press.
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interested in them either, recalling The Seafarer’s stoic ne to wife wyn, ne to worulde hyht (‘nor [to him is there thought] of the joy in a woman, nor of worldly pleasure’, line 45). Rather, he wishes to conclude his peregrination. Where the Seafarer-
speaker remarks hungor innan slat (‘hunger tore within’, line 11), this narrator is inwardly tormented not by a basic physical need, but by the Old English metaphoric
compound itself, as the hooves of the waeg-hengest are literalised in the final line.
This highly al usive and playful poem also makes knowing nods to the Sutton Hoo
burial site (‘would’ve humbled any Anglian mound’), as well as to the migration
myth recorded in Bede’s Historia (the speaker attempts to return to the continent by sea, ‘back the route some of us came’).
Clearly we cannot even begin to make line-by-line comparisons between ‘The
Seafarer Poet in Newcastle’ and the Old English The Seafarer, although at the atomic level of the individual word, we do find more literal translation of a couple of items from the Old English poetic word-hoard, deposited within the new composition
(the aforementioned waeg-hengest and hwaelweg). Rather, this poem represents a form of translating its source text at the level of the whole poem, shifting a set of
ideas the original poem has come to represent, in part through translations like
Pound’s, into the world of the twenty-first-century traveller.
That incorporation of a small nugget of translated Old English within a new
poem is also a tactic we find in ‘Ashburnham House’ (2009) by Jane Draycott (a
recent, highly accomplished translator of the Middle English Pearl), which ends with a translation of Beowulf’s heofon rece swealg (‘heaven swallowed the smoke’, line 3155b). In its own way as al usive as Noon’s poem, ‘Ashburnham House’ opens
by making a Heorot of the Cotton Library’s disastrous temporary home. Voices of
other Old English poems, including The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, Maxims I, and the Geatish woman at the end of Beowulf, are all overheard in the resulting funeral pyre of manuscripts:
Within that mansion, many men sleeping.
Caught between darkness and dawn
they dream of a mansion, a hal
where all are safe and speak the language.
In the library, Beowulf, Genesis,
songs within songs and the start
of a flame sparked by something
still live in the hearth beyond curfew.
Then, monstrous il umination, an invasion
of gold like a heat-seeking missile tracing
a line through each manuscript blown
like a seafarers’ beacon into the oil-dark air
from which arise voices, trapped
in the heat like speech in a sandstorm.
Wherefore look you so sadly? A woman’s lament
at the pyre of her homeland: Alas!
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Chris Jones
Of the men who had dreamed of the mansion,
their night-shirts were sails. As fire begat fire
each Englishman watched from his small boat
out on the lawn. Heaven swallowed the smoke.32
While Noon and Draycott place words or small phrases of translated Old English
into their compositions, elsewhere we find Old English words ‘translated’ by being
untranslated, deposited as a nugget of foreign strangeness within a Modern English
poem. Canto 49 of John Haynes’s Letter to Patience (2006), which I have discussed in detail elsewhere and so will not quote here,33 incorporates the Old English words
uhta (‘dawn’, The Wanderer, line 8) and anhaga (‘the solitary one’, The Wanderer, line 1) within his long terza rima poem concerned with Nigerian politics in the decolonising post-war world.34 This has the effect of foregrounding the process of
translation itself, which for a time becomes the subject of Haynes’s Canto 49, as its
narrator debates within himself how best to find equivalents in Modern English for
these terms.35
Other examples of ‘New Old English’ that could be considered alongside these
examples, given more space, include J. O. Morgan’s re-writing of the events described
in The Battle of Maldon as a sequence of free verse poems,36 and Jacob Polley’s adaptation of The Ruin to speak to the post-industrial landscape of Wal send in north-east England,37 as well as the ‘twiddles’ that Polley is writing in col aboration with the present author: multiple versions of the Exeter Book riddles in 140 or fewer
characters, poems which bring both an early twentieth-century imagist aesthetic as
well as a twenty-first-century sense of digital mouvance to the thousand-year-old
body of ænigmata.38
In terms of the source texts directly referenced then, the Old English of the
twenty-first century is so far not much bigger yet than that of the twentieth century; it still comprises Beowulf, the Exeter Book, The Dream of the Rood and Maldon. Yet as this survey has demonstrated, the range of styles, forms and registers evident in
performances of Old English as a category of poetic ideas is far more varied than
was the case in the twentieth century. We have entered a new phase of assimilation
which is less fixated with the Old English line as understood by modern editors, and
32 Jane Draycott, Over (Manchester, 2009), p. 17. Reproduced by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited.
33 Chris Jones, ‘“No word for it”: Postcolonial Anglo-Saxon in John Haynes’s Letter to Patience’, South African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (2010), 63–90.
34 John Haynes, Letter to Patience (Bridgend, 2006), p. 63.
35 Other passages from The Wanderer are translated in this canto: the seabirds to which the Wanderer wakens in lines 45–8 are transformed into the ghosts of the dead in Haynes’s Canto before disintegrating in the coming dawn; the speaker of The Wanderer’s memory of laying his head in his lord’s lap (lines 41–4) is translated into an altogether more sinister image of the comitatus: ‘And you dream. That the Führer’s hand rests on your hair again.
You’re his, you’re his, you swear. Then wake remembering high stone wal s gone to ruin, the work of giants.’
36 J. O. Morgan, At Maldon (London, 2013).
37 Jacob Polley, ‘The Ruin’, in The Havocs (London, 2012), pp. 14–15.
38 Some of these have been tweeted at @ExeterTwiddle.
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less concerned with learning modes of sound patterning from Old English. This is
an exciting development and one that sees poets to some extent in advance of schol-
arship at the moment in what can legitimately be imagined as ‘Old English poetics’.
Conclusion
This chapter started by asking ‘what is Old English poetry?’ and ‘how large is the
body of work we are translating?’ It ends with the recognition that answers to those
questions are currently undergoing revision. That being the case, in conclusion it is
worth reflecting on some of the larger issues that are called into play whenever we
translate a narrative fiction such as a category like ‘Old English poetry’. It is not too obvious to mention that the translation of ‘Old’ English into ‘Modern’ is an exercise in trans-historical but intra-lingual translation. Arguably then, certain archaisms, particularly archaisms which are otherwise embedded in ultra-contemporary
idiomatic language, such as Noon’s ‘wave-steed’ may be regarded as justifiable in
foregrounding these twin processes.3
9 Translating ‘Old English’ (however we choose
to understand that term) is always about holding up an image in language of English
at an earlier stage of itself; it ports an imagined past into the present of English.40
This activity is always attended by literary historical arguments about English tradi-
tion, ideas of teleology and aetiology, as well as metaphors of evolution and myths of origin. Such ideas and tropes are, in turn, always political at some level, as a number of the poems quoted or mentioned in this essay are well aware.
Furthermore, to translate Old English is to deliver something back to English
from across a break, a rupture. The usual models of influence that we think through
when we talk of things such as ‘the English literary tradition’ rely on notions of
continuity and contiguity. The word ‘influence’ invokes in its etymology a river,
whose earlier or younger parts flow into the broader channels of the present. By
this metaphor Chaucer can influence Spenser, can influence Keats, can influence
Tennyson, can influence Eliot, and so on. Old English cannot be configured as part
of this living stream; loss of knowledge of the language demanded its recovery, and
although Old English (and indeed later medieval poetry too) is inarguably an influ-
ence among today’s poets, it does not flow down through the ages to them from
poet to poet. Instead tropes of archaeology – burial, rediscovery and excavation
– govern the kind of narrative that we can tell about this form of influence. This
loss and subsequent recovery of a body of poetics available for widespread use in
39 Lawrence Venuti might term such archaisms examples of ‘ethical translation’. See The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London, 1998).
40 I accept entirely that the notion that ‘Old English’ (usual y called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ when mobilised in this kind of argument) cannot simply be assumed as the earliest form of what we now call ‘English’ as an historical, and non-politicised fact, but is itself an ideological y driven presumption (just as its rejection is also ideological). To this extent, at least, I do not disagree with one of the main points that Richard Watts is keen to establish in Language Myths and the History of English (Oxford, 2011), although I do take issue with much of his ‘working out’. I simply believe that in turning to Old English in significant numbers, English-language poets are themselves either making or accepting that ideological presumption, and that to trace its workings out in their poetry is a rewarding exercise in cultural and aesthetic history.