But there was no point! One bold warrior
After a long wait decided to enter the tent—
The need was too great. Sprawled on the bed 300
He found his headless lord separated from life,
His gold-giver gone, his spirit missing.
Fear chilled his heart—he fell to the ground,
Ripping his hair, rending his robes,
His great body groveling, his mind frenzied, 305
Wailing these words to the warriors outside:
“This broken body is the sign of our doom—
Our glory is undone, our destruction at hand.
Our pride has perished, our terror turned upon us.
Here lies our headless lord hacked to death 310
In his lusty bed by some dreadful sword.”
The heavy-hearted warriors threw down their weapons
And fled from that bloody bed. The Hebrew forces
Followed the heathen host, hacking them to the ground,
Leaving a feast for voracious wolves and war-birds. 315
The survivors fled the shield-strength of their foes.
The Hebrews pursued them, favored by God,
Given the victory. Bold heroes began
To hack their way through the enemy’s guard
With savage swords, splitting the shield-wall. 320
Spears were thrown, thrusting through wood,
Embracing bone. Hebrew hearts burned
With war-frenzy, an unbound fury.
That cruel contest had no Assyrian winners—
Most of their nobles dropped dead in the dust. 325
Not many went home with their heads.
Hebrew warriors came back through the carnage,
Returning home through the reeking corpses.
They took back their land from the unliving enemy,
Brought back bloody war-booty, shields and swords, 330
Burnished helmets, and beautiful treasures.
The guardians of the land had gathered glory,
Conquered the Assyrians with their battle-swords,
Put the tyrant’s power and the occupation to rest.
What remained on the road was the wretched host 335
Of heathens, the most hated people alive.
The Hebrews with the braided hair began to celebrate
In their shining city of Bethulia—it lasted a month.
They carried their trophies—helmets and hip-swords,
Gray mail-coats, the war-gear of soldiers, 340
Battle vestments adorned with gold,
And treasures untold—home to their fair city.
They won this war-booty by bravery in the battlefield
Through the wise counsel and cunning of Judith,
The courageous maiden. Her just reward 345
Was the gory helmet of the headless Holofernes,
His mighty sword and broad mail-coat
Adorned with red gold, everything the arrogant
General owned, from riches to rings,
Trinkets to treasures, gemstones to gold. 350
All of this they gave to the wise woman,
The bright and beautiful warrior maiden.
Judith gave all the glory to God, the Lord of hosts,
Who had granted her victory, a warrior’s worth
In this wide world, and also a place in heaven, 355
A righteous reward for one who held faith
In the almighty Lord. She longed for this gift
Throughout her life. At the end of her days
There was never a doubt about her reward
As a holy maiden in God’s eternal home. 360
We give him our thanks as his glory thrives—
Our Maker’s grace figures forth all creation,
Shapes wind and sky, uplift and downdraft,
Heaven and earth, furious seas and solid ground,
All might and meaning, all measure and mercy, 365
All earthly wonder, all heavenly bliss.
THE METRICAL PSALMS OF THE PARIS PSALTER AND THE METERS OF BOETHIUS
INTRODUCTION
We are parchment songs lifted from Latin,
Transformed in time to an English tongue.
One of us sits tucked in a bed of prose;
The other runs beside her sacred sister.
One of us barely escaped a fierce blaze;
The other sailed south to a foreign home.
One of us arises from a trial in Rome
And offers solace to a suffering prisoner.
The other hearkens back to ancient Israel,
Reshaping Hebrew hymns and prayers.
One of us is full of lyric philosophy,
Consolation and comfort, healing the heart.
The other offers up songs of praise,
Faith and wisdom, judgment and joy.
One of us may have been written by a king
Who saved a country and secured a language.
The other was written by an unknown poet
Who looked through Latin at the sacred songs,
Some of them sung by the sire of Solomon.
We were not sewn together in sheaves of skin
But bound in a book by a modern editor.
One of us lives in a London library;
The other exists in a Paris bibliothèque.
Say who we are who bring together songs
Of suffering and solace, lore and learning,
In praise of Providence, in honor of the Lord.
The fifth volume of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, published in 1932, combined the metrical psalms from the Paris Psalter manuscript, located in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Fonds Latin 8824) and the meters in the OE version of De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) by Boethius, contained in a damaged manuscript in the British Library in London (MS Cotton Otho A.vi). For the damaged portions of the Boethius text, the editor drew upon a seventeenth-century transcription of the original made by Franciscus Junius and located in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Junius 12). The OE poems of the Paris Psalter and Boethius were presumably combined in the edition in part because each is a translation (or an adaptation of a translation) of a Latin text, and each deals with religious or philosophical materials that were important to the life of the Anglo-Saxon church. The Consolation of Philosophy contains patristic ideas that often draw upon the writings of the church fathers. Psalters like the Paris Psalter were part of the learned and liturgical religious tradition at the heart of Christianized Anglo-Saxon England.
THE METRICAL PSALMS OF THE PARIS PSALTER
The Paris Psalter is an unusual shape, about 53.5 centimeters high and 18 centimeters wide. Some eleven folios and a picture of David playing the harp have been cut out of the manuscript (Krapp, 1932b, viii). The manuscript contains in facing columns a variety of religious materials, including the psalms in Latin and Old English, and a number of Latin liturgical texts—including biblical canticles, the litany of saints, and nine prayers (see Krapp, ix–x, for a full description of these). There are also some pen drawings in the manuscript in the spaces at the ends of the Latin psalms that take less space than the Old English versions (Krapp, x–xi; Colgrave, xiv–xv). At the end of the manuscript is an inscription that names the scribe as Wulfwinus Cada, about whom little is known, and the owner of the manuscript, John, duke of Berry (1340–1416), who was a collector of manuscripts and art (Krapp, xii–xiii). The date and origin of the manuscript are uncertain, but Krapp argues that “the very general metrical irregularity of the verse translation may be taken as indicating a relatively late time of origin, perhaps the latter ninth or early tenth century,” noting, however, that “metrical variations are just as easily explainable on personal as on chronological grounds” (xvii). O’Neill argues that “the cumulative evidence points to a date after 1030, perhaps ca. 1050” (2001, 21).
The Paris Psalter contains a Latin version of the psalms and OE translations of the p
salms in facing columns. The Latin text is a “Roman Psalter corrected with Gallican and Hebrew variants” (S. Harris, 298). The first fifty psalms are translated into OE prose, attributed to Alfred (O’Neill, 2001, 73 ff.). The last one hundred psalms are translated into OE poetry by a later unknown poet. The Latin text of the psalms, however, is not the one used by the Anglo-Saxon translator. The correspondence between the OE text and the fragments of psalms in the devotional materials in MS Junius 121 in the Bodleian Library indicates that both verses were based on the same Latin psalter, which is now lost (Krapp, xix–xx; Jones, 288–89). For the “Fragments of Poems,” see the “Minor Poems” section of this volume. An OE poetic version of Psalms 90–95 is also found in a Trinity College manuscript, “Eadwine’s Psalter,” and provides a number of alternate readings (Baker, 1984). The numbering of the psalms in OE is slightly different than that of most English Bibles translated from the Hebrew because of the ways in which the psalms are sometimes combined or divided (see Krapp, xiv).
After the OE metrical psalms were published in ASPR in 1932, they received little scholarly attention. No modern editions or translations were forthcoming until O’Neill’s 2016 edition of all of the Old English prose and metrical psalms in the psalter. Another edition by Jane Toswell and Mark Griffith is in progress with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press.
The metrical psalms have rarely been translated into modern English or included in anthologies probably because the quality of the OE poetic translations is mixed at best and hardly up to the standard of poems like Beowulf or Genesis. Toswell identifies a number of significant issues involved in the translations: “the status of the psalms as a sacred text; the potential for cultural shift from a Hebrew original, by way of several intermediate translations into an Anglo-Saxon context; the difficulty of analysing the translation as a process, and determining the characteristics of that process; and the question of the content of the psalter being transferred into a very restrictive poetic form” (2014, 320). Greenfield argues that the OE verses “are not very distinguished as poetry: meter and alliteration, however regular, are mechanical and uninspired, common adjectives and adverbs as well as unusual words are overworked as verse fillers, and the traditional poetic vocabulary finds little place therein” (Greenfield and Calder, 232). Diamond (1963) notes that the poet must have followed this dictum: “If he added any words in order to satisfy the requirements of meter and alliteration, they must add little or nothing to the sense of the original” (7), and the Dictionary of Old English notes numerous examples of fillers, mainly common adverbs, that probably have little or no significant meaning. Griffith argues similarly that the metrical psalms are “a pedestrian and unimaginative piece of poetic translation” (1991, 167). He contends that the translator knew much of the traditional Old English poetic vocabulary, but that “his decision to translate closely and to follow in many instances the conventional and prosaic translations of the psalter gloss tradition, coupled with his apparent distaste for the heroic, inevitably led to restricted use of this vocabulary” (182). Toswell summarizes the translator’s work as follows:
The psalter poet was not, on the face of it, an adventurous soul. He produced a vernacular version of the Roman psalter as nearly as possible word by word to create a slavish equivalent to the sacred original. Where he ran into difficulties, he used a number of expedient measures to avoid error: simply omitting the difficult bits; accepting the difficult Latin word straight into his Old English text; or even making use of the other two versions (Gallican and Hebrew) of the Latin psalter, and translating from them…. Rarely, even, does the psalter poet give any hint of allegorical interpretation of the psalms. He is far more likely to expand the literal—and obvious—meaning of a verse than to add layers of interpretation to it. The metrical psalms are a workmanlike translation of a text which, although it was used as an elementary reading book throughout the Middle Ages, and was sung by every Benedictine monk weekly, had many “hard places” [see Sisam and Sisam in Colgrave, 1958, 17]. The psalter poet was more successful at rendering these difficult passages than many of the Anglo-Saxon glossators and explicators of the psalms. (1994, 394)
To the extent that critics are correct in characterizing these OE psalms as mediocre poetry, a modern translator is faced with the choice of whether to make modern poetic translations that accurately reflect that original mediocrity or to assume that the originals were in some respects more interesting than we can see in the twenty-first century and to try to rediscover and recreate that quality of interest in a modern translation. Sometimes a translator simply has to take a strange delight in the OE translator’s odd misreadings or muddled additions, such as when he translates the Latin reference to panting with longing for God’s commandments in Psalm 118 into foaming at the mouth for them, or when in Psalm 108, he takes the Latin image of a wicked man’s wearing his cursing like a garment that seeps like oil into his bones, presumably with a deleterious effect, and adds that these oily curses function to heal his mysteriously broken bones (for more on this passage, see the section “On Translating Translations” in the essay “On Translating Old English Poetry” at the beginning of this book).
Another complex issue for a modern translator is what constitutes the “original text” for the OE translator who used a Latin psalter text (the exact form of which is now lost) and may have referred occasionally to a Septuagint Greek or Hebrew text to which he had access. Toswell argues that the translator must have been influenced by a vernacular psalter-gloss tradition (1997; see Keefer, 1979, for lists of psalter glosses). Tinkler details a number of instances where patristic commentary on the psalms influenced the poet’s vocabulary and syntax. A modern translator is often tempted to pick up shades of meaning from the Latin, or in some cases the Hebrew, to determine just what an odd OE word or phrase might have meant. Indeed, dictionary makers often refer to the Latin word as evidence for the OE meaning, though this assumes a reasonable understanding on the part of the OE translator of the original. The process of consulting “original texts” can become a complexity of cultural (mis)readings—as of course every translation is in part a faithful reading of the original and in part an unavoidable misreading in another language with its own different denotations and connotations. The form of the Paris Psalter itself, with side-by-side Latin and OE versions, invites us to consider the texts in relation to one another. As a modern translator dives down into the murky waters of one language and culture on top of another (on top of yet another, etc.), the subtle beauty and complexity of each referential or “reaching-down” translated text becomes more apparent. I have tried to capture some of this complex beauty in my own translations by occasionally bringing up from the textual depths of the sources a partly buried meaning or reference or in some cases a needed meaning missed by the OE translator. This means that if I have occasionally “misread” the OE translations, I have done so with an eye to previous readings and meanings that ebb and flow beneath the surface of the OE translation. As elsewhere in the book, I have translated not word for word but sense for sense, as St. Jerome advocated, allowing always 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). If I have occasionally translated gracefully things unwell said along with things well said in the original, I can only claim a poet’s prerogative and beg the reader’s indulgence. Part of the joy of translating these psalms resides in the poet-translator’s taking his own place at the end of a long line of translators and poets as languages, meanings, and cultural implications continue to shift and flow. For more on the complexities of translating the psalms, see the section “On Translating Translations” in the essay “On Translating Old English Poetry” at the beginning of this book.
The form of a psalm is difficult to define. Some of the psalms are praise-songs; others are songs of thanksgiving or songs recounting holy history. Some are sta
tements of longing or supplication; others seem to switch modes or to defy them altogether (see Alter, xviii, on the flexible subgenres in the original Hebrew). The metrical psalms vary widely in length. The shortest is Psalm 116 (7 lines), which is a praise-song to God and an affirmation of faith. The longest is Psalm 118 (535 lines in OE and 522 in the translation), which contains twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each. In the Hebrew this long psalm is built on an elaborate alphabetic acrostic (all the verses in each stanza begin with the same letter, and the succession of letters from one stanza to the next follows that of the Hebrew alphabet) that cannot be reproduced in the translations and a complex set of terms for God’s teaching or Torah or law, one of which occurs in each of its verses. The terms are variously translated into modern English in different Bibles as “word,” “saying,” “law,” “statute,” “decree,” “ordinance,” “judgment,” “rule,” “precept,” “testimony,” “witness,” “commandment,” “promise,” “teaching,” “learning,” “truth,” “righteousness,” and “justification.” The OE poet uses some of these verbal techniques but less rigorously than the Vulgate Latin or the original Hebrew, sometimes repeating a term like bebod, “command, decree,” or gewitnes, “witness, testimony, revelation” (see O’Neill, 2016, 691, note to verse 2, for the latter meaning) in more than one verse in a stanza or using two terms in a single verse. This elaborate psalm has often been viewed as needlessly monotonous and pedantic, but it is now recognized as being somewhat skilled in the way it repeats the central terms in slightly shifting contexts in order to catch and communicate their complexity of meaning. The repetitions also have an important ritual effect, as each verse in one sense repeats and in another reshapes the central concerns of the psalm. This pattern of repetition with variation is a primary poetic device in both the Hebrew psalms and the OE metrical psalms.
In the translations below, I have not kept to the individual verse parameters or indicated these numerically as is normally done in editions of the Bible and of the various psalters. The demands of poetic translation require some flexibility in moving from line to line or verse to verse so that elements lost in one verse may be recovered in the next and the integrity of the whole psalm as a poem can be maintained. The psalms here are marked out in poetic line numbers as is the case with most other edited OE poems and their translations.
The Complete Old English Poems Page 81
