Translating Early Medieval Poetry

by Tom Birkett

  Into the Twenty-First Century

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  commonly regarded as representing its latest manifestations;18 the early history of

  Anglo-Saxon literary scholarship flirted with longer period boundaries and a corre-

  spondingly larger canon than that which has been settled for presently.

  As hardly needs pointing out, the construction of a period boundary is always

  an exercise of artifice, and one subject to later revision. Stil , wherever we might

  decide to best place the arbitrary line between ‘Old’ and ‘Early Middle’, it is certainly curious that while scholars are happy to debate the issue in relation to Old English

  prose written after the Conquest, with regard to poetry the question has not been

  ful y engaged with by the discipline as a whole. Who today would be so bold in

  poetry – as Chambers was with prose (albeit tongue somewhat in cheek) – as to say

  ‘the poet who shaped this line was an Old English poet, and s/he who composed this

  one, a Middle English poet’? Yet nevertheless, the persistence of Old English poetry

  for a while after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, however hard that ‘while’ is

  to measure, is, quite apart from the inarguable limited evidence of the survival of

  Durham, mere common sense.

  So our first problem in deciding what is meant by the term ‘Old English poetry’ is

  an historical question: one that is simple to ask, but hard to answer satisfactorily. In short: when are we translating? Within that historical issue we have already come up against a second problem, which is one of formal definition of the structure of ‘Old

  English poetry’, although it was not explicitly articulated in those terms: what are we translating? For if The First Worcester Fragment/ St Bede’s Lament tries but fails to maintain the form of ‘Old English poetry’, as some critics believe, then a formal

  model exists for ‘Old English poetry’, against which texts are being benchmarked

  and results of pass/fail issued correspondingly. In the case of the Worcester Fragments the identity check is performed on texts composed after the traditional end of our historical period, and in part in order to reinforce and entrench that received sense of period as literary as well as political fact, but the same check can also be

  performed (and frequently is) on texts dating from within our period construct.

  A formal model is, natural y, a descriptive theory, not a descriptive fact. The

  currently dominant theory holds that Old English poems are built of pair-bonded

  alliterative verses (two ‘half-lines’ which constitute ‘the line’) which themselves form

  ‘verse paragraph’ sequences. Three patterns of alliteration across the stress-bearing

  syl ables in the line are considered ‘correct’: aa ax, ax ax and xa ax (where a represents an alliterating stress-bearing syl able, and x non-alliterating). Certain kinds of metrical patterns in the verse are deemed legitimate, while others are considered

  ‘illegal’. In fact, there is currently wide disagreement as how best to describe these patterns, and as to which are and are not permissible, but the attempt to describe

  the legal and illegal patterns is common to all prosodic theories. This is a model that well describes most of Beowulf and a good number of poems from the other three major poetic codices (although not so well that emendations are not sometimes

  required to bring wayward verses into line). That is to say, the model describes well

  the teaching canon of poems from the period, and not without good reason, for the

  model is derived from that canon, to the exclusion of other poems which behave

  18 David Matthews, The Making of Middle English: 1765–1910 (Minneapolis, MN, 1999), pp. xxix–xxxi.

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  in a less conformative manner; the circularity with which we have developed and

  defined the corpus of ‘Old English poetry’ ought to be more troubling to us, and

  impacts directly on the way we translate and have translated. As we will see shortly,

  twentieth-century translations of Old English Poetry are surprisingly homogenous

  in their stylistic and prosodic effects, and even though this fixity is beginning to

  shift in the twenty-first century, the canon of poetry translated is still relatively

  unchanged and predictable. These outcomes, are in large part, I suggest, due to the

  nature of our dominant theory of Old English poetic form.

  Certainly, our model is less efficient at describing the metrical psalms, the Old

  English metres of Boethius, or the metrical charms, although they are close enough

  that we still extend (sometimes apologetical y) the category ‘poetry’ to include

  them. Even more poorly does it map the form of several of Ælfric’s saints’ lives,

  which Skeat nevertheless felt to be poems and lineated as such.19 Subsequent edito-

  rial tradition rejected Skeat’s decision, although only for the reason that the texts

  in question stray further from the model derived from Beowulf et al. than most scholars have been comfortable with. The question that surely must be asked is

  ‘could Ælfric have written saints’ lives in verse, but in a different genre of verse from Beowulf?’ There were, after al , more types of poems written in the 1590s than just sonnets. This is indeed a question that Tom Bredehoft has posed again, and to which

  he has persuasively suggested an answer in the affirmative.20 If our current model

  of vernacular verse patterns in the pre-Conquest period is inadequate to describe

  possible poems by Ælfric, it is of course conceivable that there are other poems

  that survive to us, but which we have previously failed to recognise because they

  do not conform to the alliteratively pair-bonded verses described by the ‘five types’

  of Sievers and his variants. This is to say that even before we consider the possible

  evolution of Old English verse structures in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries,

  the category of ‘Old English poetry’ before 1066 may have been much broader than

  we currently permit. Again Bredehoft is leading the way in widening our canon

  here, identifying and lineating poems previously unrecognised – unrecognised in

  part because they behave differently from our most canonical poems – such as the

  Prayer at the end of Bodley 180, or The Legend of the Seven Sleepers.21

  19 Walter W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881–

  1885; reprinted as 2 vols, 1966)

  20 Thomas A. Bredehoft, ‘Ælfric and Late Old English Verse’, Anglo-Saxon England 33

  (2004), 77–107. It is only fair to point out that there is controversy over Bredehoft’s claims; for a counter argument see Rafael J. Pascual, ‘Ælfric’s Rhythmical Prose and the Study of Old Metre’, English Studies 95 (2014), 803–23, and Bredehoft’s response ‘Rereading Ælfric and Rethinking Early English Metre’, English Studies 97 (2016), 111–16. In truth there is presently no real consensus about whether these particular texts of Ælfric are verse, prose or as some scholars suggest, they occupy a kind of ‘inbetween ground’ of ‘rhythmical prose’. It is also only fair to point out that for a number of scholars, the Sieversian metrical model, or at least a modified version of it, is still regarded as adequate for the job of formal y describing Old English poetry.

  21 See Thomas A. Bredehoft, Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto, 2001), pp. 72–118; ‘The Boundaries between Verse and Prose in Old English

  Literature’, in Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context, ed. Joyce Tal y Lionarons (Morgantown, WV, 2004), pp. 139–72; Authors, Audiences and Old English Verse (Toronto,
>
  Into the Twenty-First Century

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  Our sense of what ‘an Old English poem’ actual y was, then, has in fact been

  very strongly determined by the type of poems found in the four great codices (the

  Exeter Book, the Nowell Codex, Junius 11 and the Vercelli Book), which Krapp

  and Dobbie’s ground-breaking edition ASPR, notwithstanding its apologetical y

  titled final volume The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, served to buttress and reify.22

  Krapp and Dobbie’s edition has given us good service for almost a century, but now

  embodies a number out-of-date ideas about Old English poetry, perhaps the most

  significant being its highly influential sense of the limits of the corpus of surviving poetry. It is in fact quite possible that those massive codices were outliers in the

  textual transmission of pre-Conquest poetry, rather than being broadly representa-

  tive of verse culture, and the inclusion of poetic texts in manuscripts that also record prose texts was at least as typical as the kind of exclusively verse anthology that

  the Exeter Book constitutes. I predict that our category of ‘Old English poetry’ will

  widen over the next few decades, both through recognition of forms of verse other

  than the Beowulf ian line, and through more widespread acceptance of the extension of the historical period into the twelfth century. When it does so, it is possible that as a consequence this widening will gradual y become visible in the type of compositions that are undertaken according to the rubric ‘translating Old English poetry’.

  More provocatively, our historical category could even be extended well beyond

  the twelfth century. Highly politicised Old English poems were written in the seven-

  teenth century by Abraham Wheelock and William Retchford.23 They certainly do

  not obey Sievers’s prescriptions, but what is ‘an Old English poem’, if not a poem

  written in Old English? Wheelock and Retchford translate ideas about Old English

  Poetry as they compose it. Still more contentiously, Walter Scott wrote two hymns,

  one ‘pagan’ and one Christian, to be spoken by his Saxon characters Ulrica and

  Rowena, and which, according to the fiction of Ivanhoe (their frame text), had been translated from Saxon, into Anglo-Norman, and thence Modern English.24

  Few Anglo-Saxonists, I imagine, would be prepared to concede that these are ‘Old

  English poems’, yet they embody and perform historical y situated ideas about what

  ‘Old English poetry’ is, and about how it is ‘translated’ from one age to another, just as much as does ASPR or our other modern editions.

  Usual y when we say ‘Old English poetry’, however, we mean something consid-

  erably less than the range of possibilities for inclusion I am surveying here. Often I would contend, what we have meant, and what modern poets have most commonly

  turned to translate, has been Beowulf, the lyric portions of the Exeter Book, and a couple of other items such as The Battle of Maldon and The Dream of the Rood. That is to say, we have had a relatively small idea of ‘Old English poetry’ within contemporary culture. The most capacious ‘Old English poetry’ to have been translated for

  a long time was presented in 201o by Delanty and Matto’s The Word Exchange, which 2009), pp. 185–8 and 208–15.

  22 Krapp and Dobbie, eds, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols.

  23 Irenodia Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1641), n. p. See also F. L. Utley, ‘Two Seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon Poems’, Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1943), 243–61, and Jones, ‘Old English After 1066’, pp. 319–21.

  24 [Walter Scott], Ivanhoe: A Romance, 3 vols (Edinburgh; London, 1820), III, pp. 29–30

  and 296; Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 269–70 and 373.

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  at least included more poems from the Chronicle, more religious poetry, metrical charms, and Durham, although it stopped short of including Psalms, or Metres of Boethius, or any of the other poems proffered in this essay as representatives of ‘big’

  Old English.25

  Whether or not The Word Exchange marks the furthest limits of Old English

  within contemporary poetic culture, or is rather a stepping-stone towards a larger

  conception of the canon, remains to be seen. The broader point I hope to make here

  is that ‘Old English poetry’ is not some sort of objective body of historical facts, but rather a category, or, to use Foucauldian language, a discourse formation. Poems in

  the vernacular before 1066 did not know that they were ‘Old English poems’; they

  were just poems. ‘Old English’ is something that we have done to them: a conceptual

  framework we have placed over them. Put another way, Old English poetry did not

  exist before 1066. Old English poetry did not, in fact, exist until a long time after

  1066. When we translate Old English poetry then, it is important to realise that we

  translate a narrative fiction, and that narrative can change over time, and indeed has already changed several times since it has been called into being.

  Old English from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

  This is perhaps best il ustrated if we briefly consider a few examples of Old English

  poetry translated in the twentieth century, before going on compare those with

  twenty-first-century translations of Old English poems. The following is a cut-up

  poem of chronological y sequenced found material, deriving from the work of six

  twentieth- and (just) twenty-first-century poets:

  May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

  Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

  Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

  While she tossed close to cliffs.

  Now the news. Night raids on

  Five cities. Fires started

  By fanatical Nazis. Canal crossed

  By heroic marines.

  Worldhauled, he’s grounded on God’s great bank,

  Keelheaved to Heaven, waved into boatfilled arms,

  Wind-called clouds crowd up to cover

  The grey wave-waste. Wheeling between

  the pride of the cloud and the press of the sea

  Is the proud petrel, black-lightning-bolt.

  It is hel ’s handiwork,

  the wood not hickory,

  The flow of the grain

  not faithful y followed.

  25 Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, eds, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in

  Translation (New York, 2010).

  Into the Twenty-First Century

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  And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof

  Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man

  Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

  In order, the poems used are: ‘The Seafarer’ (1911) by Ezra Pound; The Age of Anxiety (1947) by W. H. Auden; ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’ (1948) by W. S. Graham; ‘A

  Song of the Petrel (1952) by Edwin Morgan; ‘Junk’ (1961) by Richard Wilbur; ‘Helmet’

  (2006) by Seamus Heaney.26 Only one of the texts used to make this cut-up is a trans-

  lation of a specific Old English poem, but al , I would argue, translate the category

  or discursive formation ‘Old English poetry’ that this essay has been describing.

  Moreover, as is evident from the linguistic and prosodic texture of this cut-up,

  the sense of Old English poetics translated into modern poetry over the course of

  roughly a century was as remarkably consistent as it was strikingly recognisable. The

  poems from which the cut-up was made, and which are typical of ‘twentieth-century

  Old English’, are characterised by four stress lines, often marked by a
caesura, incorporate many instances of secondary stress through the common use of kenning-like

  compound vocabulary, are usual y marked by alliteration even if not in ‘legal’ histor-

  ical patterns, tend frequently to exhibit falling rhythms (trochaic and dactylic ‘feet’

  in accentual-syl abic terminology) and also to allow ‘clashing’ proximate-stressed

  syl ables: that is to say they sound like a Sieversian system of prosody, even if they do not obey all the rules of that system. Poems such as these could be seen to represent

  a first phase of assimilation of translated Old English into modern poetry.

  To turn now to more twenty-first-century examples (and to our first female

  poet), we encounter less often the attempt to translate the phonetic contour of the

  Sieversian Old English line, although occasional y poets flirt with its prosody, as is audible in this extract from Jane Hol and’s ‘The Lament of the Wanderer’ (2008), a

  version from the Old English Wanderer which also translates the speaker from male to female:

  Far out, a solitary drifter falters; fal s

  to her knees, feels one arm plunge

  up to the elbow in water, left numb

  by frozen wastes and endless ice.

  She’s always waiting for her stars to change,

  for that chill tide to turn

  as she travels this earth, forced into exile,

  26 Of course I accept that Heaney’s ‘Helmet’ is, strictly speaking, an example of a twenty-first-century Old English poem, but Heaney learns and practices his Old English poetics over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and is representative of that tradition.

  I chose ‘Helmet’ rather than one of his earlier Anglo-Saxonist poems merely to demonstrate that the Sieversian model of Old English in modern poetry lasts approximately a century from Pound’s influential translation of The Seafarer. Ezra Pound, The Translations of Ezra Pound, ed. Hugh Kenner (London, 1953), pp. 207–9; W. H. Auden, Col ected Poems, ed.

  Edward Mendelson, 2nd edn (London, 1991), p. 454; W. S. Graham, New Col ected Poems, ed. Matthew Francis (London, 2004), p. 87; Richard Wilbur, Col ected Poems 1943–2004

  (Orlando, FL, 2004), pp. 261–2; Edwin Morgan, Col ected Poems (Manchester, 1990), p. 57; Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London, 2006), p. 14.

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  Chris Jones