Translating Early Medieval Poetry
Page 3
with the poetry, and several others take us back to a point in translation history
which resonates with contemporary developments. At a point when medieval litera-
ture and history is drawing sustained attention from a new generation of novelists,
Heather O’Donoghue, whose English Poets and Old Norse Myth surveys the long and complex history of poets writing under the influence of eddic and skaldic poetry,
presents us with a new insight into just how deep this tradition of remediating the
poetry goes, whilst Hugh Magennis reflects on Edwin Morgan’s translations of Old
English poems in Scotland at a point when questions of national self-determination
and the politics of translation are once more being placed centre stage.
The essays chosen for inclusion in this collection together present a series of
informed and at times provocative perspectives on the translation and reception of
medieval poetry in the present academic, literary and cultural climate that speak
to one another across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the first essay of this
collection, Chris Jones asks a fundamental (and deceptively simple) question: what
exactly do we mean by ‘Old English poetry’? He makes the point that the source
texts were not necessarily considered Old English poems by their creators, and by
problematising the notion of a defined corpus, he draws attention to two funda-
mental considerations of translation as a discourse of history: the delimitations of
matière and custom, and the notion that Old English can itself be thought of as a
narrative fiction that adapts to prevailing fashions and preoccupations. He il ustrates these changing preoccupations through considering the differences between trends
in twentieth-century translation, and examples of ‘New Old English’– twenty-first-
century translations of Old English poetry such as those by John Haynes, Alistair
Noon and Jane Draycott that have contributed to ‘a renaissance [of Old English] in
contemporary culture’.35 In doing so, he also initiates the discussion of diachronic
translation which later chapters develop: translating early medieval poetry into a
modern language thrusts the poem out of its cultural and historical milieu, and
studies of the practice of translation are rarer, though see Hol ander ‘The Translation of Skaldic Poetry’ and Carolyne Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’, in Old Norse Made New, pp. 21–42.
34 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Settle Bed’, in Seeing Things (London, 1991), pp. 28–9.
35 See p. 13.
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Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
necessarily introduces effects and meanings which transform our interpretation
of the verse. The response of the poet-translator to the issues of equivalence and
linguistic decontextualisation is at the crux of many of the essays in this collection.
The interrelationship between translation, identity and language-politics is
another reoccurring theme throughout the collection, first broached in Hugh
Magennis’s discussion of Scotland’s first ‘national poet’ (or Scots Makar), Edwin
Morgan, and his lesser-known translations of Old English poems, and in Rory
McTurk’s critical revaluation of Seamus Heaney’s translations of medieval poetry.36
Writing during periods of heightened nationalist sentiment in Scotland and
Northern Ireland respectively, Morgan and Heaney both translated into Modern
English rather than Scots or Irish. The political and social implications of writing in English depend on the outlook of the translator. For Morgan’s contemporaries, Alexander Scott and Tom Scott, writing in Scots as opposed to English was an expres-
sion of their nationalist politics. However, as Magennis demonstrates, for Morgan,
producing an English translation of Beowulf was no less an expression of patriotism than rendering a passage from this poem (his ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’) in Scots,
as both languages belong to a shared linguistic and literary past.
Building on Magennis’s discussion of Scots as an alternative target language for
poets in Scotland, contributions by Inna Matyushina and M. J. Toswell show the
subtleties of translating Old English poetry into other modern languages: Russian
and Spanish respectively. Before delving into the intricacies of translating Old
English into Russian, Matyushina discusses the use of alliteration in Old English
poetry and the difficulties it poses for ‘transplanting alliterative verse into modern soil’,37 difficulties that Matyushina regards as insurmountable in the case of Modern
English (attempts by writers from Tolkien to Armitage notwithstanding). Maty-
ushina’s contribution is one of the first discussions in Anglophone academia of the
difficulties and possibilities afforded by the translations of Old English poetry into Russian, focusing particularly on translations by the poet Vladimir Tikhomirov,
who ‘managed to recreate both the elaborate sound organisation of alliterative
poetry and its extreme lexical richness’.38 Russian as a target language has several
advantages for translators of Old English: as a similarly inflected language with
grammatical genders and free word order, Matyushina argues that it is less restric-
tive than Modern English for the translator attempting to replicate certain features
of the original. But as Matyushina explains, because stress in Russian is not fixed,
Tikhomirov could not strictly replicate alliterative verse and so used devices such as consonance and assonance to achieve much of the same effect. The chapter demonstrates that there are advantages and disadvantages to translating medieval poetry
into any language, and that while Modern English might be the natural successor
36 For a direct comparison between Heaney’s and Morgan’s translations of the most
famous of Old English poems, see Hugh Magennis, ‘Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney’, in Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, ed. Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 147–60 as well as the chapters dedicated to these two poets in his Translating Beowulf, pp. 81–108 and 161–190 respectively.
37 See pp. 60.
38 See p. 53.
Introduction
9
to Old English it does not follow that it is the most productive target language for
approximating the formal devices of the poetry.
The Argentine poet, essayist and translator Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated more
than a passing interest in early medieval Germanic literature: indeed, its influence
is present throughout his career, particularly his recourse to Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied.39 Borges even translated, along with his wife María Kodama, a short anthology of Old English poetry ( Breve Antología Anglosajona ( Short Old English Anthology)) into Castilian, dated 1978.40 Though Borges viewed his translations of Old English in the Breve Antología as literal and straightforward, Toswell demonstrates that they are anything but, his application of the gongorismo style to some of his poetry creating a disconnect between the medieval and modern material. The
writer’s interest in Old Norse and Old English is something of an enigma to scholars
of Borges who often ‘find his passion for this material so inexplicable’.41 But, for
the Argentinian poet, Old English was (as Toswell quotes), ‘una experiencia tan
íntima como mirar una puesta de sol or enamorarse’ (‘an experience as personal as
watching a sunset or falling in love’).42 Toswell demonstrates that Borges’ skill as
a trans
lator allows Old English poetry to cross boundaries of language and time,
becoming accessible to a linguistical y distinct and distinctly modern audience.
No translation has been more effective at bringing early medieval poetry to
a new audience than Heaney’s Beowulf, and it could be argued that his policy of adhering to the ‘overall music of the work’ rather than the letter is what gives his
translation the immediacy that has made it so popular.43 However, in his contribution to the volume, McTurk sounds a valid note of caution about this most lauded
of translations. He assesses Heaney’s understanding of the syntactical and metrical
systems of Robert Henryson’s Middle Scots poem The Testament of Cresseid and
the Old English Beowulf, arguing that replicating these systems (as Heaney mostly fails to do) is key to the integrity of the translation. McTurk also considers Heaney’s assertion, ‘Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland’ and argues that what is needed to further this end (a translation of Beowulf into Modern Irish) is in fact a much more literal rendering of the poem into English. Such a translation ‘showing clearly
how the words of the original relate to each other syntactical y’ could in turn aid
translators looking to render Beowulf into a language other than English by helping them appreciate important features such as parallelism in the original.44
Bearing in mind the relative scarcity of translations of certain parts of the medi-
eval Irish corpus, Elizabeth Boyle’s contribution (in common with Jones’s opening
chapter) discusses trends in translation and the confines of a traditional corpus,
and dares contemporary poets to think beyond a narrow definition of medieval
poetry as lyric poetry, presenting prospective translators with a series of alternative 39 See M. J. Toswel , Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work (New York, 2014).
40 Reproduced in Jorge Luis Borges–Obras Completas en Colaboración (Madrid, 1981), pp. 787–801.
41 See p. 73.
42 Jorge Luis Borges, Autobiografía (Buenos Aires, 1999), pp. 134–5.
43 Heaney, trans., Beowulf, p. xxvi.
44 See pp. 90.
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Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
texts and asking ‘what about this?’. Boyle contends that poets return time and again
to the same source material for inspiration, particularly when it comes to Modern
English anthologies of Old Irish poetry, many of which cover the same forms (lyric
and nature verse) and subjects (the local and particular) exemplified by Murphy’s
much anthologised ‘Blackbird by Belfast Lough’. Boyle’s essay explores different ways
of approaching Old Irish poetry, demonstrating its versatility and drawing attention
to the opportunities that lesser-known genres provide for productively challenging
modern assumptions of what a poem should be.
The inclusion of the translator’s individual experience in this volume, including
reflections on translation decisions and the inevitable compromises that result, is
vital for understanding the translation process and documenting its evolution over
time. Lahney Preston-Matto is the first contributor to directly engage with her own
experience of translating, in this case with reference to the humorous Middle Irish
prosimetric text Aislinge Meic Conglinne, including an extraordinary vision of a land made of food that may seem familiar to many from a scene in T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King.45 One of the goals of Preston-Matto’s English translation was to bring the text to a new audience by preserving the oddities of the text
while ensuring its readability. She discusses some of the more problematic passages
encountered while translating Aislinge Meic Conglinne, focusing especial y on the difficulties posed by ambiguous terms for food and drink (what do you call a food
that has no contemporary counterpart?) and the difficulty of replicating Middle
Irish metre in English. These issues, il uminated by a wonderful portrait of medieval
Irish food and feasting, will be recongnised by translators of any medieval poem
employing specialised vocabulary, when the source language is often far richer in
both synonyms and subtle inflections of meaning.
Tadhg Ó Síocháin similarly discusses the issues of translating Middle Irish from
the perspective of the translator, though in this instance translating into Modern
Irish rather than English, using his own translation of the Middle Irish poem known
as Find and the Phantoms as a case study. Ó Síocháin decided to translate the poem intralingual y as he felt that Modern Irish would permit him to retain the ‘strangeness’ and keep the ‘aesthetic quality’ of the original text which is absent from more
literal, philological y-focused English translations (an idea also discussed by Boyle).
Though he does not claim that translation into one language has a primacy over
another (a claim argued against in several of the previous chapters), in this case
translating into modern Irish enables ‘a sense of closeness to the old poem’.46 Simi-
larities between Old and Modern Irish allowed Ó Síocháin to draw heavily on poetic
convention and avoid some of more involved metrical problems faced by Preston-
Matto and in some instances meant only a slight modernisation of the original text.
The inclusion of the translation of this short poem alongside the medieval original
(and followed by an English translation) opens it up to readers of Modern Irish, as
45 The scene is in Chapter 11 of ‘The Sword in the Stone’, the first book in The Once and Future King (London, 1958). We are grateful to the anonymous reader for pointing out this connection.
46 See p. 133.
Introduction
11
well as il ustrating the intricate dynamic of intralingual translation that he discusses throughout.
In a similar vein to the The Word Exchange, recent Old Norse projects such as Modern Poets on Viking Poetry have had as their objective a demonstration of the relevance of early medieval poetry in the contemporary world. In her contribution to this volume, Hannah Burrows surveys translations of Hervararkviða ( The Waking of Angantýr) from its first rendering in English in 1705 to its interpretation by Rebecca Perry, Sarah Hesketh, and Adam Kirton as part of Modern Poets on
Viking Poetry, drawing on her participation in this initiative and her own authorita-tive translation for the Skaldic Poetry Project. In tracing the history of this extraordinary poem to the present day, Burrows il ustrates how translations of Old Norse
poetry respond to broader cultural movements, demonstrating the poem’s mixed
fortunes, the dialogue between translations, and ultimately its lasting appeal as
a source for new poetry. In particular, Rebecca Perry’s reinvigoration of the text
(in which she relocates the action to the modern day) weaves the linguistic and
conceptual patterns of the Old Norse poetry through a contemporary fabric and
demonstrates that this is a process of revision that offers new perspectives on texts
that always reward new readings.
The Waking of Angantýr is one of several new poems that Carolyne Larrington
includes in her updated translation of the Poetic Edda, and her chapter in this collection reflects on how cultural mores and her own attitude as a translator have
both changed in the eighteen years since she first translated this corpus of poems for Oxford World’s Classics, particularly how new approaches to the corpus and to the
stylistics of eddic poetry have altered the practice of translation. Her contribution
also moves beyond the translated text itself to consider the choices and compromises
involved in the paratext – the immediate context in which a translation circulates –
drawing attention to the important influence of publishing cultures and readerships
on the ‘repackaged’ final product. In doing so, she directly addresses the question of the commercial realities of translation and concretises a theme running throughout
the collection: namely, the importance of understanding the parameters of audi-
ence, expectation and presentation when producing a translation. Larrington also
demonstrates the continuing popularity of medieval verse, arguing that more of the
material in the Poetic Edda is cultural y intelligible now than when her first edition was published, particularly given the current penchant for historical fantasy. This is a shift that both translators and teachers will be cognisant of: a twenty-first-century readership is arguably both more informed and equipped to interpret medieval
poetry, and also reading ‘under the influence’ (to borrow Heather O’Donoghue’s
useful phrase) of previous engagements with the same material.
O’Donoghue’s own contribution demonstrates just how deeply these influences
resonate in English literary history, as she examines the intriguing parallels between the Old Norse poems concerning the valkyrie Brynhildr and Thomas Hardy’s novel,
The Return of the Native. Hardy’s intimate knowledge of the narrative of Sigurðr and Brynhildr is evident, and O’Donoghue makes a compelling case for direct borrowing
from the poetry, particularly in the characterisation of his heroine Eustacia Vye. Yet she also questions why he never makes the debt explicit, and tries to ‘efface any
specifical y Norse element in his narrative’, suggesting that he did not want his novel
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Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons
to be received as a version of the narrative like Morris’s ‘Sigurd the Volsung’, and that he took pains to avoid offending the sensibilities of his audience.47 O’Donoghue’s
chapter thus foregrounds the notions of remediation, cultural translation and elided
influence, as well as tracing the blurred line between the concepts of translation,
adaptation and influence. With the narratives of Norse poetry permeating English