The Complete Old English Poems

by Craig Williamson

  The headnote to each poem provides a brief introduction to some of the critical issues that have been raised about the poem, often citing recent editors of the poem whose work has been helpful to me in making the translations. In composing the headnotes, and indeed in assembling this entire work, I have made use of several important surveys of OE literature, both old and new, including (but not limited to) the following: A New Critical History of Old English Literature by Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder (the sections on Old English poetry are by Greenfield), A History of Old English Literature by Michael Alexander, A History of Old English Literature by R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain, and Old English Literature: A Short Introduction by Daniel Donoghue. The Fulk and Cain book was an especially valuable resource and guide; without it I could not have undertaken this work.

  In a book of this scope, it is finally impossible to mention all of the editors, lexicographers, scholars, and translators who have shed light on these texts over the years, but I want to acknowledge and thank them for their many insights into these magnificent poems. I could not have accomplished these poetic translations without them. A number of scholars, having read my translations in earlier books, have encouraged me to keep steadily at work on this larger project. Their kind words have been the best of incentives to keep me committed to this task.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ASPR

  The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, edited by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53.

  Klaeber 4

  Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. 2008. Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. Foreword by Helen Damico. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; based on 3rd ed. by Klaeber, Boston: D. C. Heath, 1950.

  MS

  Manuscript

  OE

  Old English

  ON TRANSLATING OLD ENGLISH POETRY

  INTRODUCTION

  When poets are asked to describe the act of writing or translating poetry, they often turn to metaphor to unravel or explain a process that remains in part mysterious. If writing poetry is like dancing solo with the world, translating poetry is like dancing with a partner you get to know over time. My partner usually comes from a different homeland with a different personal or cultural way of perceiving and performing in the world. Our rhythms, our dances, our expectations are different. We do, however, share a sense of rhythm, and we both utilize bone, muscle, sinew. We do different dances on similar legs. We have brains that process music, rhythm, movement. This is true for any translation dance—it’s a shared movement between worlds.

  My dance with the Old English poet is special in that his or her language is part of my linguistic inheritance. The poet says ban where I say “bone” and hus where I say “house,” but the meanings remain largely the same (even if the Anglo-Saxon house is quite different from my own). On the other hand, when the poet says dom, drawing upon a complex linguistic and cultural storehouse, he or she means something like “judgment, reputation, honor, glory,” which is a far cry from the meaning of “doom” that I have inherited, meaning “fate, destruction, death,” which first arises in the fourteenth century. So we speak a different but related language. Some of our words mean the same thing; the great majority do not. My partner’s language is vastly more inflected than my own, though we share similar inflections that have survived the centuries. We come from different worlds but we are both human, and what we share makes the act of translation possible, even if finally what we recognize is a strange but human otherness together. We are both poets who love the written word. We dream up worlds with these words which reflect the worlds we inhabit. We cherish human connection (though we connect in different ways) and lament the loss of loved ones (though our lamenting rituals are different). We dance together what we might call a dance of difference. My Old English poetic partner may be a court composer or a Christian monk. His or her natural mode of dancing out rhythms is alliterative strong stress, where mine is metrical feet and rhyme. In order to make this dance work, we must share ideas and languages—or at least I must do this since I’m the living partner doing the translator’s choreography, but sometimes it seems, in the middle of a line, when we are sitting poetically together with warriors at the meadhall table, that my partner is communicating movements, inviting meanings, teasing me and my world with differences in language and culture or tongue-in-cheek ambiguity. We communicate together across the long space of time and shape the dance.

  When the dance is done, I can analyze the movement and the steps, as I’ve done below, but something of this dance remains a mystery. This is as it should be. We can use critical language to understand the language of poetry, but this has its limitations. There is always an unconscious element to the process that remains hidden like some mysterious force in some unknown place. Sometimes after a hard night’s work on my own lines or lines in Beowulf, the right words, both beautiful and true, just pop into mind without prompting. This is what makes writing and translating poetry both a transcendent experience and a true delight.

  OLD ENGLISH POETIC METER

  Old English poetry is built on an alliterative, strong-stress pattern. Each line normally contains four strongly stressed syllables, for example:

  The words that are stressed depend on their nature and function in the sentence (verbs, for example, are more important than adverbs) and in their placement (the first word in a poem or section is often important). The initial consonants of accented syllables normally alliterate only with themselves (b alliterates with b, m with m, sp with sp, etc.); any vowel can alliterate with any other vowel (a alliterates with a, e, i, etc.). The third stress in the line always alliterates with the first or second stress or both. The fourth stress in a line never alliterates (or almost never alliterates), but it can sometimes alliterate with a stressed syllable in the preceding or following line. Thus the possible alliterative patterns in a particular line are stresses 1 and 3; 2 and 3; and 1, 2, and 3.

  Each line is also divided into two half-lines, each with a syntactic integrity, and is separated by a relatively strong caesura or pause, and the half-lines fall into a number of possible patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. Each half-line normally has two stressed syllables and a somewhat flexible number of unstressed syllables. Sometimes there also occurs a secondary stress, midway in weight between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. The basic half-line patterns, with illustrations in modern English, are as follows:

  ´ x ´ x

  Type A

  grim and greedy

  x ´ x ´

  Type B

  his mighty band

  x ´ ´ x

  Type C

  the ship waited

  ´ ´ ` x

  Type D1

  high horn-gabled

  ´ ´ x `

  Type D2

  bold, battle-famed

  ´ ` x ´

  Type E

  wind-waters roll

  In this scheme, the sign ´ represents a stressed syllable or lift; x represents an unstressed syllable or drop; and ` represents a secondary stress or half-lift. Some but not all of the drops can be expanded into more unstressed syllables, and there are several subtype variations for each of the major types. Occasionally there are longer lines called hypermetric lines, which have three stressed syllables in each half-line instead of two; they seem to follow the pattern types above but add an extra foot (translators vary on whether or not to try to imitate these). There is only rarely rhyme in Old English poetry. This is a somewhat simplified summary of Old English meter; those readers interested in a more detailed explanation should consult the Old English grammars or handbooks on style such as those by Baker (2007) and Mitchell and Robinson (2007).

  What was common to the literate Anglo-Saxon, the controlled strong-stress line, often proves strange to modern readers of poetry who are used to the iambic rhythms of later poetic traditions or the free verse of many modern writ
ers. Occasional modern poets hearken back to the ancient Old English rhythms—for example, Pound in the Cantos, Auden in The Age of Anxiety, and Tolkien in his poems and songs (see Jones for examples of modern poets using Old English methods). Mainly the strong-stress rhythms remain a medievalist’s delight.

  Translators deal with Old English meter in different ways. Some attempt to keep to the strict Old English meter and dredge up archaic words to meet the alliterative demands. Some scuttle strong stress for the more comfortable iambic pentameter or free verse or resort to syllabic verse. Some struggle to make compromises. My own compromise represents a cross between the traditional Old English strong-stress meter and a looser form, sometimes approaching a style used by Ælfric in what is called rhythmical prose. It retains the four-stress line in a loosely alliterative pattern. It builds in substantial cross-line alliteration—especially to bind to the rest of the poem an occasional non-alliterative line. It plays with the possibility of assonance and adds the close repetition of words and morphemes. It occasionally uses rhyme or off-rhyme to bind the lines where alliteration seems impossible.

  Take, for example, the Bookworm riddle (Riddle 45), which I quote here in Old English, in a straightforward translation (with some indication of the ambiguities in the original), and in my own poetic rendering:

  Moððe word fræt—me þæt þuhte

  wrætlicu wyrd þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,

  þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,

  þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide

  ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs

  wihte þy gleawra þe he þam wordum swealg.

  A moth ate (devoured, consumed, gobbled) words (speech, sentence, story)—to me that seemed

  A strange event (weird fate, odd happening, pun on “strange saying”), when I heard of that wonder (miracle, horror),

  That a worm (bug, snake, dragon) should swallow (mentally imbibe, consume, absorb) the songs of a certain one of men,

  A thief in darkness (mental darkness, ignorance), his glory-fast sayings (pun on “cud or munchings”),

  And their place (intellectual foundation) of strength. That thief-guest

  Was no wiser for having swallowed (mentally imbibed) words.

  A moth ate songs—wolfed words!

  That seemed a weird dish—that a worm

  Should swallow, dumb thief in the dark,

  The songs of a man, his chants of glory,

  Their place of strength. That thief-guest

  Was no wiser for having swallowed words.

  My poetic translation is written in strong-stress meter with four stresses to each line. It contains two primary alliterative stresses each in lines 1, 2, 3, and 6. The stresses of line 4 are linked by the assonance of “man” and “chants” and “songs” and “glory”; of line 5 by the assonance of “strength” and “guest” (or “place” and “strength,” depending on the individual pronunciation). Lines 2 and 3 are also linked by the cross-line alliteration in “dish” and “dumb”; lines 4 and 5 by the alliteration in “guest” and “glory” and “songs” and “strength.” All six lines have some form of s stress; three lines have a double w stress. The sinuous s pattern produces some of the ominous overtones of the wyrm complex (worm–snake–dragon) in Old English. Verbal repetitions include “songs” (1 and 4), “words” (1 and 6), “swallow”/“swallowed” (2 and 6), and the double “that” of line 2 and triple “of” of lines 4–5. There is also the imperfect rhyme of “weird” and “word(s)” which reproduces that of the original word and wyrd, even though the meanings are significantly different.

  All of these devices help to tighten the translation and in some sense compensate for the loosening that takes place with the loss of primary alliteration in lines 4–5. The translation is occasionally iambic, as in “A moth ate songs,” or “Their place of strength,” which sounds more modern (though this Type B half-line pattern of x ´ x ´ is one of the five basic Old English types). But this momentary pattern is almost always followed by the shock of dense stress, as in “wolfed words,” and “thief-guest.” This clash of accented syllables of a primary or secondary sort is typical of half-line types C, D, and E above, and it may also occur when one half-line ends with a stress, and another begins with a stress. I hope my translation technique produces a rhythm that rolls back and forth between an ancient and modern mode. It is a rhythm that is influenced by Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, which is characterized by the primary importance of accentual stress combined with heavy alliteration and assonance, and which was itself probably based in part on his reading of Old English (see Vendler, 9 ff., and Plotkin, 18–19, 149 ff.). This is the method I have used in translating all of the Old English poems that follow, from the smallest riddles to the 3,182 lines of Beowulf. Of course, the longer poems have more of a tendency to shift styles, sometimes moving from a looser conversational or prosaic tone to quite dense and compact poetry in a short space of time, and I have tried to capture these tonal shifts in the translations.

  Catching the complex meanings and ambiguities of the original Old English poems is often difficult, and sometimes a translator must repeat a phrase with variation to include different semantic possibilities in the original or pick up in one phrase or line what was lost in a previous one. Occasionally it takes two lines to capture the meaning of one especially complex line, and this is why the line numbers in the translations will not always agree exactly with the line numbers in the original texts. Riddle 45, “Bookworm,” is a typical example of a poem containing ambiguities that cause difficulties for a translator. Building into any translation what Fred C. Robinson calls the “artful ambiguities” of this riddle proves a challenging task (1975, 355 ff.; I am indebted to Robinson for much of the discussion of this riddle). The word-gobbling wyrm that steals man’s songs from their vellum foundation may mean “bug, worm, snake, reptile, or dragon” in Old English. The dragon that destroys Beowulf is a wyrm, but so is the larva that spins silk. Building the bug into a dragon and bringing him down is part of the mock-epic game of the riddle, but most of this is lost in the innocuous “worm” of modern English. (For more on the parodic devices in the riddle, see Stewart, 1975, 227 ff.). Taking the ravenous possibilities of fræt, a word that implies unnatural gobbling, I try to recapture the dragon’s ferocity with the phrase, “wolfed words,” which repeats with variation the initial “ate songs.” Thus in order to capture some of the original ambiguity, I’ve had to use the Old English poetic device of repetition (verb + object) with variation (word choice). Whenever I have to add something to catch a bit of lost meaning in the original, I try to do this in an Old English way, thus imitating the poet’s method of composition.

  Robinson points out a number of possible puns in the riddle. Wyrd is a word whose meaning ranges from “terrible fate” (epic dragons) to “what’s happening” (mocking the bug). In the riddlic context, it is also a pun on gewyrd, “speech.” The ambiguous tone is echoed by cwide, “songs, sayings,” a pun on cwidu, “what is munched” (cwidu or its other forms, cwudu and cudu, can mean “cud” in Old English). The grotesque irony of this is perhaps conveyed in the “weird dish,” since for moderns not only a hard fate but also hot lasagna may be “dished out.” Finally, modern English “weird” derives from the Old English wyrd and has gone from meaning “fact, fate, destiny, Providence” to “strange, uncanny.” The addition of “dumb” is also an attempt to catch the bovine level of cwidu as well as the unspeaking idiocy of the worm. The word þystro means either physical or mental “darkness”; swealg, “swallow physically” or “imbibe mentally.” These ambiguities are kept in modern English (e.g., “That book left me in the dark.” “Don’t swallow that old line.”). These are just some of the semantic problems any translator must deal with, even in the short space of a six-line riddle. The difficulties in a long, complex poem like Beowulf are only compounded (see below for examples).

  Some readers may object to the trade of a wolf for a wyrm or the intrusion of a dish.
And yet, a translator must attempt to reproduce not only primary meanings, but also ambiguities, textures, and tones. St. Jerome says that often “word for word” translation must give way to “sense for sense” translation and notes that “it is difficult, when following the text of another language, not to overstep the mark in places, and hard to keep in the translation the grace of something well said in the original” (29). A safe translation is often one that does an injustice to the complexity and spirit of the original. My goal in translating these poems has been to recreate faithfully the Old English and to shape modern English poems as beautiful, startling, and compelling as the originals—to bring across the bridge of time something of that original grace.

  ON TRANSLATING TRANSLATIONS

  The difficulty of translating poetry from Old English into Modern English is compounded in some cases because the OE poems are themselves translations from earlier Latin texts. The two most important instances of this are The Meters of Boethius and The Metrical Psalms of the Paris Psalter. The Meters of Boethius is a collection of OE poetic translations of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy). The original Latin text contains sections of both prose and poetry. The OE translation exists in two major manuscripts. The first of these translates all of the Latin prose sections and most of the Latin poetry sections into OE prose; the second, which probably derives from the first or from an earlier OE prose translation like it, translates the Latin prose and poetry into OE prose and poetry, respectively (see the introduction to the OE texts by Godden and Irvine for a discussion of the relationship between the manuscripts). In trying to discern what the OE poet-translator means in his poems, the modern translator must occasionally consult the source texts, in this case both Latin and OE prose, to elucidate difficult passages or capture elusive tones, while at the same time recognizing and respecting the differences between the various texts and translations.