by Tom Birkett
literary culture to this extent, the notion that any creative translator approaches the material free from cultural and literary preconditioning must surely be discounted.
The final contribution in the collection, by Gareth Lloyd Evans, takes up the
question of remediation and cultural translation posed by Hardy’s reworking of
Norse myth in novel form, and brings it firmly into the twenty-first century with
a focus on the transformation of Old Norse poetry for the screen in History Chan-
nel’s Vikings. In this series, in which poetry is performed in both the original language and in translation, both eddic and skaldic verse is deployed for a range
of effects, from creating a sense of separation and alterity to adding ‘multimodal
texture’ to both the on-screen world and our appreciation of the poem. The various,
often sensitive, ways in which the poetry is translated and performed in the series
– including the ‘contextual translation’ of the original Old Norse by virtue of the
accompanying visuals – clearly ‘pushes the translation of Old Norse poetry into new
territory’, and hints at some of the ways the poetry may be encountered and trans-
mitted in our multimodal age.48 Evans’s chapter ends the collection on a prescient
note, acknowledging that the landscape of reception is continual y evolving and that
every translation is an invitation to further engagement: what Larrington, quoting
Thorpe, cal s ‘a stop-gap until made to give place to a worthier work’.49
The final chapter of this collection thus challenges us to re-visit a traditional definition of translation and to understand what can be gained in continual y re-making
and re-mediating the eald for a contemporary audience. It also makes explicit a question posed by the collection as a whole: namely, what role the translation of
medieval poetry plays in our contemporary culture at large, and how it will continue
to influence literature and popular cultural forms in the twenty-first century. Despite, or perhaps because of, their varied approaches to Old English, medieval Irish and
Old Norse poetry, this collection bears witness both to the absolute centrality of
translation to the experience and interpretation of early medieval literature, and to
the relevance we continue to find in the creative products of the past. If a translation is always an imperfect interpretation, or a ‘partial document’, it is one that continues a critical dialogue across languages, traditions, cultures and media: whether responding by degrees to a scholarly discourse or deliberately repackaged to speak new truths
in a new political climate, this collection as a whole demonstrates that each act of
translatio – of carrying across – brings us ever closer to that ‘alleged original’ and the continued value of medieval poetry in the modern world.50
47 See pp. 197.
48 See pp. 212.
49 See pp. 182.
50 This is a term used by Borges when comparing the ‘lapse of memory spurred by vanity’
which characterises a detached, reverential (and ultimately obscuring) approach to the text and the act of translation which does not seek to ‘cast a veil over the alleged original’, Borges, trans. Levine, ‘Some Versions of Homer’, 1136.
1
From Eald Old to New Old:
Translating Old English Poetry
in(to) the Twenty-first Century
Chris Jones
Old English poetry is currently undergoing something of a renaissance
in contemporary culture.1 Whereas several decades ago only a minority of
nevertheless important and influential twentieth-century poets had taken a
direct interest in Old English verse in their own work,2 so far the twenty-first century has seen a far larger number of poets turning to Old English at least occasional y
in their writing, to the point (unimaginable during the 1960s, 70s or 80s), where
Old English is becoming part of mainstream practice in contemporary poetics. This
chapter will survey and close read some of the poems of this ‘New Old English’ for
the first time, and in doing so will offer several observations about the differences
between twentieth- and twenty-first-century practice. While a primary focus of this
chapter is therefore on contemporary literature, I will also seek to advance argu-
ments about the nature of Old English poetry itself, arguments which I intend to
be provocative.
Although some of the poets considered here translate, either partial y or whol y,
examples of Old English poems, many cannot be said to ‘translate’ Old English in
the line-by-line, poem-for-poem sense in which that word is most commonly used.
Instead, as we will see shortly, contemporary poets often move ideas from, or even
ideas about, Old English poetry, taken from a select group of source texts, into
their own work. In this chapter then, I am interested in ‘translation’ in its broadest etymological sense (a bringing or carrying over) and in the translation not only of
1 While I deal here exclusively with poetic manifestations of this renewed interest, it should be noted that in recent years Old English literature has also resulted in several films, one a blockbusting Hol ywood movie ( Beowulf & Grendel, Dir. Sturla Gunnarsson (Truly Indie, 2005); Beowulf, Dir. Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, 2007); Outlander, Dir. Howard McCain (The Weinstein Company, 2008)); informed the language and style of a novel long-listed for the Man Booker prize (Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (London, 2014)); and has provided the basis for a new UK ITV flagship mini-series, Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, Dir. Jon East et al. (ITV, 2016).
2 For which, see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006).
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Chris Jones
individual poems, but also of a whole body of poetry, a set of texts: the wholesale
translatio of Old English poetry from the first millennium CE into the third. That being the case, it is necessary to begin by delimiting that set of texts, and that in turn begs the seemingly stupid question: what do we mean by ‘Old English poetry’? It is
indeed an ingenuous question, but ingenuousness can often expose unquestioned
assumptions, and this particular question is not asked often enough, especial y as
both scholarship and (more arguably) practising writers are changing the kinds of
answers that might be given to this inquiry. After al , we cannot sensibly discuss the translation of ‘Old English poetry’ until we know what we mean by that term.
The Nature of Old English Poetry
Commonly it is assumed that the term ‘Old English poetry’ describes, with but few
difficulties, the vernacular poetry of the Anglo-Saxons (which is why I do not write
‘Anglo-Saxon’, a term which can useful y encompass both the vernacular and Latin
literature of pre-Conquest England), and so of all that vernacular verse written in
England or any of the kingdoms of the so-called Heptarchy before AD 1066, or
perhaps for a few decades after that date. This brings us to our first problem of
definition, that of a satisfactory terminus ad quem for ‘Old English poetry’.3 Anglo-Saxonist scholars are seemingly agreed that one can sensibly talk of a continuation
of ‘Old English prose’ for at least seventy years after that famous date (and for longer, in the eyes of some scholars), in part due to the fact that the Peterborough Chronicle is kept up continuously for many decades after the end of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’
(until AD 1154 in fact),4 but also because so much of our manuscript evidence for
the great prose literature of the Benedictine R
evival dates from after, not before, the battle of Hastings;5 somewhat inconveniently, linguistic changes refuse to move in
sync with political institutions. R. W. Chambers may have been slightly sending up
himself and other period-minded scholars of a philological bent when he wrote:
3 As an aside, the same question could theoretical y be asked of the beginnings of the category (when does Old English poetry start; what is its terminus a quo?), were there to be sufficient surviving evidence of a poetic culture dating from before the widespread concept of an ‘Anglo-Saxon England’. I suppose the vernacular version of Bede’s Caedmon’s Hymn is precisely that, especial y in its earliest, Northumbrian version. This is ironic given that Bede is keen to deploy the text as an origin myth for ‘English’ poetry. However, no one has ever seriously suggested that the Northumbrian version of the poem represents a ‘pre-Old English’
poetry (as ‘Old English poetry’ is – de facto – essential y an expression of Late West Saxon literary culture). In any case the textual history of Hymn is too fraught with uncertainties for any weight of this kind to be placed on it: is the vernacular based on an exemplum or a memory of an ‘original’; if so, how accurate? Is it a ‘back-translation’ from Bede’s Latin; if so how authentic is Bede’s text?
4 Susan Irvine, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Col aborative Edition, vol. 7, MS. E
(Cambridge, 2004).
5 Ker lists twenty-seven manuscripts written after 1100, almost half of which may have been worked on in the second half of the twelfth century: N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), pp. xviii–xix. See also Elaine Treharne, ‘Reading from the Margins: The Uses of Old English Homiletic Manuscripts in the Post-Conquest
Period’, in Beatus Vir: Studies in Early English and Norse Manuscripts in Memory of Phil ip Pulsiano, ed. A. N. Doane and K. Wolf (Tempe, AZ, 2006), pp. 329–58.
Into the Twenty-First Century
15
If a line must be drawn between Old English and Middle English, it would, I think,
have to come between the man who wrote the Peterborough Annal for 1131, and the
man who wrote the Peterborough Annal for 1132.6
Nevertheless, this view remained more or less an orthodox one for most of
the twentieth century.7 By rights then, vernacular poetry written until around the
middle of the twelfth century ought also to be considered part of ‘Old English’. Yet
as Old English poetry is so notoriously hard to date reliably, and is not preserved
in texts which, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, are handily rubricated with annus markers, identifying exactly which ‘late’ English poems might form part of this
post-Hastings literary continuity is, to say the least, difficult.
One clear-cut example of such a ‘long Old English’ tradition is the encomium
Durham preserved in the late twelfth-century manuscript Cambridge, University Library, MS. Ff.1.27, as well as in a transcript by George Hickes of the now lost Cotton Vitellius D. xx. Whether composed after the translation of Cuthbert’s body (the
traditional view) or not,8 Durham can nevertheless be seen as sufficiently late as to be analogous with the prose tradition represented by the continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle. But should we also include as ‘Old English’ the poems preserved
in (but probably pre-dating) the early thirteenth-century manuscript Worcester MS
F. 174, the so-called Worcester Fragments?9 That manuscript’s second, fragmentary
poem, The Soul’s Address to the Body, has been thought to exhibit some verbal parallels with the two texts of the ‘genuine’ Old English Soul and Body,10 although its structural form does not obey the alliterative ‘rules’ of Old English verse as they
have been understood by Sievers and his adaptors.11 The First Worcester Fragment
6 R. W. Chambers, ed., On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, EETS o. s. 191A (London, 1936), p. lxxxvi.
7 It is an orthodoxy that has been more recently challenged by several scholars, most prominent among whom is Elaine Treharne, who advocates the use of ‘Early English’ as a way of avoiding having to create dichotomous terminologies based on ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’. See, for example, the introduction to Elaine Treharne, Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English 1020–1220 (Oxford, 2012).
8 The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols, ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York, 1931–1953), VI, pp. xliv–v; D. R. Howlett, ‘The Shape and Meaning of the Old English Poem Durham’, in Anglo-Norman Durham 1093–1193, ed. David Rol ason, Margaret Harvey and Michael Prestwich (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 485–95. For a revisionist argument, placing the poem’s composition between 1050 and 1083, see Thomas O’Donnel ,
‘The Old English Durham, the Historia de sancto Cuthberto, and the Unreformed in Late Anglo-Saxon Literature’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 113 (2014), 131–55.
9 Worcester Cathedral MS F. 174, ff. 63r (beginning fourteen lines down)–66v.
10 Douglas Moffat, ed., The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments (East Lansing, MI, 1987). On parallels with Old English poetry, see J. P. Oakden, Al iterative Poetry in Middle English, 2 vols (Manchester, 1930–1935), II, pp. 3–4. Elsewhere Moffat, who perhaps knows the body-and-soul tradition in medieval literature better than anyone, argues that the relationship of Worcester’s Soul’s Address to the Old English poems is not close: Douglas Moffat, ed. and trans., The Old English Soul and Body (Cambridge, 1990), p. 35.
11 Sievers’s still influential ‘five types’ metrical theory was first published in Eduard Sievers, ‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10 (1885), 451–545. In fact Conybeare had understood that alliterative pair-bonding of two- and three-stress accentual verses was the essential quality
16
Chris Jones
seems, on the face of it, even further from traditional Old English poetry as has been understood to date (assuming it is a poem distinct from the Soul’s Address and not some form of prologue),12 and critics have often had difficulty in writing about the
poem without taking it to task for failing to be a conventional ‘Old English’ poem.13
Yet one could also see it as a poem aware of Old English literary culture in a number
of genres (including prose literature) and innovating from within those inherited
traditions.14 These fragments are post-Conquest poems which could, with sufficient
argument, be included and translated within an anthology of ‘Old English literature’,
but which, to my knowledge, have so far not been.15
A poem which the Victorians often did include in such anthologies, as an
example of ‘late Saxon’ poetry, was the lyric from MS Bodley 343 known as The
Grave.16 Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Studies is coming round again to seeing this poem as an example of ‘long Old English’, but we are still some way from seeing it
included in any of the standard textbooks, anthologies or other tools which serve to
represent the state of the discipline to a wider audience.17 As David Matthews has
noted, the category of ‘Semi-Saxon’, ‘late Saxon’, or ‘New Anglo-Saxon’ was once so
capacious that not only The Grave but even Layamon’s Brut and the Ormulum were of Old English poetry sometime prior to 1826. John Josias Conybeare, Il ustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. William Daniel Conybeare (London, 1826), p. xv, fn. 1; see also p. vii, fn. 1
and pp. xi and xxxvi–xxxvii.
12 The most up-to-date and sympathetic edition of the poem can be found in S. K. Brehe,
‘Reassembling the First Worcester Fragment’, Speculum 65 (1990), 521–36. Franzen refers to the same poem as the St Bede Lament: Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Ol
d English in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1991). It has also been called The Disuse of English and The First Worcester Fragment.
13 E.g. Derek Pearsal , Old and Middle English Poetry (London, 1977), p. 76, and Mark Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN, 2004), p. 83. This now orthodox view revises the early twentieth-century position, which did tend to see the Worcester Fragments as continuous with Old English: Oakden, Al iterative Poetry in Middle English, I, pp. 138–40, and Eleanor K. Heningham, ‘Old English Precursors of the Worcester Fragments’, PMLA 55 (1940), 291–307.
14 As argued in Chris Jones, ‘Old English after 1066’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 313–30.
15 Elaine Treharne includes the first Worcester Fragment in her anthology of Old and Middle English literature, the capaciousness of her represented periods meaning that she does not have to ‘decide’ the poem as either ‘Old’ or ‘Middle’: Elaine Treharne, ed., Old and Middle English c. 890–1450: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2010), pp. 363–5.
16 The poem begins on the recto of folio 170. Arnold Schröer, ed., ‘ The Grave’, Anglia 5 (1882), 289–90. It was included in Conybeare’s Il ustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826), p. 270, as well as Analecta Anglo-Saxonica: A Selection in Prose and Verse from Anglo-Saxon Authors of Various Ages, ed. Benjamin Thorpe (London, 1834), p. 42. Longfellow also accepted The Grave as an example of ‘late Saxon’ poetry, including a translation of it (suspiciously similar to that of Conybeare) in his long review article on Anglo-Saxon poetry: [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], ‘Anglo-Saxon Literature’, The North American Review 47 (1838), 90–134 at pp. 124–5. This translation was later included in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 1845), pp. 28–9.
17 An anonymous reader of this chapter has helpful y informed me that this will be
rectified in 2017, when Craig Williamson’s translation of The Complete Old English Poems will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and will include The Grave and several other late poems.
