Translating Early Medieval Poetry

by Tom Birkett

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  Chris Jones

  contemporary composition may constitute a unique case in European vernacular

  literatures; certainly it must be rare on the scale we are currently witnessing the

  new medieval revival. English poetry is currently engaged in translating its own

  origins, and its origin myths, into radical y different new forms. And to say that is to say nothing short of the fact that, through Old English, English poetry is currently

  engaged in translating itself.

  2

  Edwin Morgan’s Translations of

  Anglo-Saxon Poetry:

  Turning Eald into New in English and Scots

  Hugh Magennis

  In a recent survey of verse translations of Beowulf I highlighted that by the

  Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, published in 1952, as one of the most significant

  of the very many produced since the initial recovery of the Old English poem

  in the nineteenth century.1 Morgan was the first translator who set out to render

  Beowulf in an authentical y modern poetic idiom, in a version written specifical y for readers of poetry.2 Previous verse translations, produced primarily for popular

  audiences or for students, had general y adopted some kind of archaising register

  and, with the exception of the startling attempt by William Morris,3 were the work

  of uninspired versifiers. By contrast, Morgan’s translation used the medium of living

  poetry in a sophisticated way and in doing so succeeded in conveying, as never

  before, an enabling sense of the power and artistry of the original poem.

  Morgan produced his Beowulf translation early in a career that would prove to

  be a long and highly distinguished one, to the extent that in 2004 he was honoured

  as the official national poet of Scotland, the ‘Scots Makar’. He died in 2010 at the

  age of ninety.4 Morgan’s literary output is recognised as endlessly varied in form

  and content but also as highly crafted, a characteristic evident in his experimental

  1 Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf : Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge, 2011); the present chapter draws on and reworks some of the discussion of Morgan there (esp. pp. 80–108) and in my essay ‘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.

  2 Edwin Morgan, Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English (Aldington, Kent, 1952).

  3 William Morris and Alfred J. Wyatt, trans., The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Weder Geats (Hammersmith, 1895).

  4 On Morgan, see esp. Robert Crawford and Hamish Whyte, ed., About Edwin Morgan

  (Edinburgh, 1990); Colin Nicholson, Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity (Manchester, 2002); Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 122–81.

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  Hugh Magennis

  as well as his more conventional work and apparent not least in his translations and

  appropriations, including his Beowulf.

  By 1952, when he published his Beowulf, Morgan was a lecturer in English at

  the University of Glasgow, where he had also graduated in 1947, his studies having

  been interrupted by the Second World War. As an undergraduate he had developed

  an interest in Old English under the guidance of Ritchie Girvan.5 Morgan would

  spend his whole academic career in the department at Glasgow and he remained

  connected to it to the end of his life. Though he was far from parochial in taste and

  experience, Glasgow was very much Morgan’s base, and Glasgow’s literary scene

  provided the context in which he worked.

  Beowulf was not the only Old English poem translated by Morgan, nor indeed

  was Morgan the only Scottish poet to engage with Old English poetry in that post-

  war period that saw the publication of his Beowulf. As highlighted below, the post-war period was an important one for questions of literary and linguistic identity in

  Scotland, and the treatment of Old English poetry in this context reflects relevant

  concerns of the time. What I seek to do in this chapter is to offer an appraisal of the Old English translations of Morgan in this literary and linguistic context of mid-century Scotland and later, focusing primarily, however, on poems other than his

  Beowulf. I was drawn to this topic in light of the fairly recent death of Morgan but perhaps some kind of currency has also been provided for it by the 2014 constitu-tional referendum in Scotland. The referendum campaign urgently sharpened the

  focus of questions of identity for Scots, questions that had been bubbling away in

  cultural discourse for many decades, growing out of and responding to the devel-

  opment of nationalist ideas in the twentieth century. Such ideas were particularly

  pertinent for writers of the period when Morgan was growing up, and of Morgan’s

  own period. Morgan himself was sympathetic to nationalist ideas, and his attach-

  ment to nationalism seems to have increased as he grew older; in fact, he ended up

  leaving the bulk of his estate to the Scottish National Party.6

  Translation and Language

  Issues of cultural (or indeed personal) identity were never simple for Morgan,

  however. When he returned from the war, in which he had served as a non-

  combatant conscientious objector, he had engaged in the debate going on about

  whether Scottish poets should write in Scots or in English and had advocated a

  permissive attitude rather than the kind of dogmatic approach insisted upon by

  Hugh MacDiarmid and others, especial y of MacDiarmid’s own (earlier) generation.

  MacDiarmid, leader of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ movement of cultural nationalism

  which had developed in the pre-war period, advocated the cultivation of a Scot-

  tish literary language referred to as ‘synthetic Scots’ or ‘Lal ans’, an elevated form of Scots, not based on a particular spoken variety but drawing upon a mixture of

  5 See Chris Jones, ‘Edwin Morgan in Conversation’, PN Review 31.2 (2004), 47–51, at 47

  and 50.

  6 As reported on The Guardian website, 20 June 2011.

  Edwin Morgan’s Translations

  31

  dialects and incorporating archaisms and rare words – ‘adventuring in dictionaries’,7

  as MacDiarmid put it – thereby enriching the language and giving it an appropriate

  literary register: it was a new literary language. MacDiarmid and his associates even

  drew up a Scots Style Sheet to facilitate composition.8

  Contributing in the correspondence columns of The Glasgow Herald in 1946 to a discussion on the subject of the proper language of poetry in Scotland, Morgan

  stressed that the choice of language should be made with attention to the preferred

  audience that the poet has in mind and that Scottish poets should be free to write

  either in ‘a Scots mixture’ or in ‘a northern variant of the standard language’,

  enriching it from their own experience.9 Later he wrote, with specific reference

  to translation, ‘To a Scottish translator, the use of Scots may be a relevant option,

  particularly if a lively speech basis is wanted, but also because the “adventuring in

  dictionaries” which MacDiarmid spoke about can, if judiciously used, induce the

  creative freshness of a re-minted vocabulary.’10 Morgan’s own choice in the Beowulf translation was for ‘the standard language’, with very little in the way of ‘northern

  variant’ elements. This was a choice he made not only because of his preferred audi-

&nb
sp; ence for the translation but also because he wished to place himself in the wider

  tradition of poetry in English, which for his purposes was more enabling than Scots.

  Morgan was also characteristical y more outward-looking as a poet than some of his

  contemporaries. He was very much a Scottish poet but one attracted to internation-

  alism: in the 1960s he would become co-editor of the journal Scottish International.

  His attraction to internationalism earned him the displeasure of MacDiarmid, who

  would later refer to him as a ‘beatnik cosmopolitan’.11

  In the translation of Beowulf into English (and published in England) Morgan

  is placing himself in the wider tradition of poetry in English. In 1953, however,

  the year after his Beowulf came out, he produced a translation of an extract from Beowulf into Scots, aiming at a different audience. This is ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’, a rendering of lines 2444–62a of Beowulf, the famous passage that describes the grief of an old man whose son has died on the gallows. Morgan’s Scots version,

  which I would like to look at in some detail, was published in The Glasgow Herald.12

  It is an intimate and deeply lyrical piece of work, capturing the sense of numbed

  desolation characteristic of the Old English elegiac mood, to produce a compelling

  free-standing short poem. The overwhelming proportion of Morgan’s poetry is in

  English but this is an interesting example of writing in Scots, produced in the period of controversy about which language Scottish poets should write in.

  7 See note 10, below.

  8 As referred to by Tom Scott, and discussed later in the chapter.

  9 The Glasgow Herald, 26 November 1946. See further Nicholson, Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, p. 21.

  10 Edwin Morgan, ‘The Third Tiger: The Translator as Creative Communicator’, in

  Channels of Communication: Papers from the Conference of Higher Education Teachers of English, ed. Philip Hobsbaum, Paddy Lyons and Jim McGhee (Glasgow, 1992), pp. 43–59, at p. 55, quoted by John Corbett, ‘ The Seafarer: Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy into English and Scots’, Translation and Literature 10:2 (2001), 157–73, at p. 167.

  11 David Robb, Auld Campaigner: A Life of Alexander Scott (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 127.

  12 Edwin Morgan, ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’, The Glasgow Herald, 8 August 1953.

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  Hugh Magennis

  Old English into Scots: Alexander Scott and Tom Scott

  In translating a passage of Old English poetry into Scots Morgan was following the

  lead of his exact contemporary Alexander Scott (both poets were born in 1920).

  Scott had produced Scots versions and freer adaptations of a number of Anglo-

  Saxon poems immediately after the war. These were written in 1945 and 1946 when

  he was completing his BA at Aberdeen. Like Morgan at Glasgow, he had resumed

  his degree after being demobilised. Initial y sceptical about the use of Scots, Alex-

  ander Scott went on to be a true believer in the ideals of MacDiarmid’s Scottish

  Renaissance and an enthusiastic practitioner of poetry writing in the Scots language.

  Having become ‘mad keen on everything Scots’ in the 1940s, as he put it himself,13

  he wrote prolifical y in Scots for the rest of his career. Interestingly, however, after the moment of initial encounter with Old English poetry when he was at university,

  he never returned to it.

  Despite his commitment to Renaissance principles, in practice Scott cultivated a

  fairly natural-sounding register rather than the aggrandised language advocated by

  MacDiarmid. He wrote literary Scots but, as his biographer David Robb observes,

  ‘He had not swallowed the MacDiarmid doctrine of “synthetic Scots” in its entirety’;

  unlike other poets, he did not favour ‘drastic, individualistic innovation’.14 And so, typical of his work, the Old English translations and adaptations are accessible and

  direct.

  Scott produced translations of The Seafarer, ‘Seaman’s Sang’, down as far as line 64a of the Old English text (i.e., omitting the Christian homiletic second half), and

  of The Wanderer, ‘The Gangrel’, omitting the (explicitly Christian) last five lines.15

  Both translations are styled in their titles as ‘Frae the West Saxon’. The relative

  restraint of Scott’s writing is il ustrated in the opening lines of ‘Seaman’s Sang’, which have a level of formality appropriately suggestive of the original but also make use

  of colloquial language:

  Anent myself I’ll tell ye truly:

  hou stravaigan the sea in trauchlesome days, [stravaigan: wandering]

  aye tholan the dunts o time,

  I’ve borne strang stouns in my breast, [stouns: aches, pangs]

  kennan my ship the hame o monie cares.

  Here Scott presents in loosely alliterating four-stress lines an imaginative close

  paraphrase of the original, keeping fairly faithful to the sense but sharpening the

  imagery: dunts o time particularises (and slightly changes) the less explicit earfoð-

  hwile ( The Seafarer, line 3a) and stounes in my breist, ‘aches in my breast’, intensifies the less explicit breostceare ( The Seafarer, line 4a) (in fact, incorporating the intensity of bitre into the noun; the Old English has bitre breostceare). There is no ‘adventuring in dictionaries’ here, as most of the language of these lines is in common use

  in everyday Scots.

  13 See Robb, Auld Campaigner, p. 130.

  14 Robb, Auld Campaigner, p. 101.

  15 See The Col ected Poems of Alexander Scott, ed. David S. Robb (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 13–15 and 16–18.

  Edwin Morgan’s Translations

  33

  A passage at the end of ‘The Gangrel’ contemplates ruined buildings and imagines

  the violent fate of those who once possessed them:

  There stands here nou instead o the sodgers

  a skailit waa that’s smored wi edder-shapes. [skailit: scattered, broken up;

  smored: smothered]

  The strang steel has skaithit the lairds, [skaithit: harmed]

  bluid-hungert iron’s hackit out their wierd,

  and storms gae dunt on scaurs, [scaurs: crags, precipices]

  the snaw faas and slounges yirth [slounges: drenches]

  in dreich winter. [dreich: dreary]

  In this passage the alliteration and the use of monosyl ables/disyl ables is even more insistent and verbs expressive of violence present concrete images of destruction in

  the past, juxtaposed to a dreary winter present. Particularly striking is bluid-hungert iron for wæpen wælgifru (‘weapons greedy for slaughter’, The Wanderer, line 100a).

  The language is expressive but not far-fetched, drawing upon the rich resources of

  a heightened vernacular speech with some use of literary vocabulary. The title, ‘The

  Gangrel’, makes use of a word that goes back to medieval Scots and is also used by

  Burns, among others.

  In these direct translations from the Old English, Alexander Scott consciously

  seeks to recast the Anglo-Saxon originals as works of Scottish experience. The two

  adaptations from Old English that he produced at about the same time as the transla-

  tions take this recasting even further. The adaptations (written ‘eftir the West Saxon’, as Scott refers to them) are the ‘Sang for a Flodden’, which renders short extracts of The Battle of Maldon, and ‘Makar’s Lament’, a version of Deor.16 ‘Sang for a Flodden’

  associates lines from The Battle of Maldon with the famous Scottish defeat of 1513.

  The battle of Flodden, a heroic failure for the Scots, had parallels with the battle of Maldon, which Scott was picki
ng up on: the Scottish armies moved rashly from

  their superior position, King James IV led bravely from the front and was killed in

  battle, and his men suffered enormous casualties. It was a heroic defeat, but a defeat in which, complicating the parallel with The Battle of Maldon, the Scots had been the invaders, unlike the Anglo-Saxons at Maldon. The title of the poem, ‘Sang for

  a Flodden’, with its use of the indefinite article, suggests its applicability to other battles and the fact that the poem is dated 6 June 1946 evokes the D-Day landings

  of the same date two years earlier and Scott’s own (very active) wartime experience.

  The allied expeditionary forces, to which Scott belonged, had also been invaders,

  and Scott presents them as heroic as they suffered immense numbers of casualties.

  The poem includes a version of the heroic words spoken by the old retainer

  Byrhtwold in the original Old English:

  ‘Thocht maun be the harder, hert the keener,

  Smeddum the mair, for aa that oor micht is dwynan. [smeddun: fine (malt)

  powder, mettle; dwynan: dwindling]

  ‘Makar’s Lament’ presents a thorough Scotticising of Deor not only in terms of 16 The Col ected Poems of Alexander Scott, pp. 26–7 and 30–1.

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  Hugh Magennis

  language but also because Scott boldly substitutes for the Germanic al usions of

  the original poem references to Scottish history: Welund becomes William Wal ace,

  Beadohild Mary Queen of Scots, and so on. The speaker, a makar whose place has been usurped by another, finds consolation in the refrain, ‘Thon dule [sorrow] has

  dwynit awa, as this maun dae’ (translating Þæs ofereode; þisses swa mæg! , ‘That passed away; so can this!’).17

  Another mid-century poet who translated Old English into Scots was Tom Scott.

  Tom Scott was two years older than Alexander Scott and Edwin Morgan but he

  came to Old English later when he went to Edinburgh as a mature student in the late

  1950s. In about 1960 he produced versions in Scots of The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rood.18 Tom Scott was an uncompromising follower of MacDiarmid’s literary principles; he wrote that he ‘came to accept, more or less, the Scots Style Sheet drawn up in 1947 by a dozen or so colleagues in the interest of creating a standard literary Scots, distinct from the dialects’.19 Interestingly, no other Scottish poet seems to