Translating Early Medieval Poetry
Page 8
have translated Old English into Scots after Tom Scott. Indeed Scott lamented that
younger Scottish poets were turning their backs on Scots from the 1960s onwards.20
Tom Scott’s poetic register is a markedly synthetic one, as is apparent in his Old
English translations. The Seafarer (as with Alexander Scott, down to line 64a) is translated under the title of ‘The Seavaiger’, a word that Scott has coined on the basis of stravaige [wander], and the translation is notable for its energetic, muscular style, using insistent alliteration and ‘aggrandised’ language. It begins,
A suthfast sang I can sing o my life,
Vaunt o vaigins, hou I vexious tyauvin [tyauvin: labouring]
In days o sair darg hae dreeit aften. [darg: work; dreeit: suffered]
This is hardly everyday Scots speech. In fact, Scott’s version is a tour de force in which he pul s out all the literary stops to produce a poem that imitates and even exag-gerates features of Old English poetry but has a very different feel from that of the
Anglo-Saxon original, which is restrained by comparison. The original is also highly
complex, while the Scots poem, though powerful in its effect, does not real y get
beyond the contrast between the harsh life of the seaman and life on land.21 It repre-
sents a lively reworking, however, presenting The Seafarer in Scottish terms while at the same time evoking a strangely different world. As John Corbett writes, ‘It does not attempt to assimilate the Anglo-Saxon original seamlessly into a Scottish canon: it is resoundingly alliterative, it does not domesticate references to Anglo-Saxon material
culture, and its lexical density and grammatical complexity might be seen as a means
of … conveying the strangeness, the foreignness of the original text.’22
17 The Old English text is quoted from Anne L. Klinck, ed., The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal, 1992), p. 90.
18 See Tom Scott, The Col ected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 83–4
and 84–8.
19 Scott, The Col ected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott, p. 11.
20 See Robb, Auld Campaigner, p. 127.
21 See Lilo Moessner, ‘A Critical Assessment of Tom Scott’s Poem The Seavaiger as an Exercise in Translation’, Scottish Language 7 (Winter 1988), 9–21, esp. 14.
22 Corbett, ‘ The Seafarer: Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy’, p. 166.
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
35
Scott is even more daring in his ‘A Dream o the Rude’, a version of the first ninety-
four lines of The Dream of the Rood, in which the Old English poem is recast in an elaborate experimental stanza form (that Scott had previously used in his long poem
‘The Paschal Candil ’). In ‘The Seavaiger’ Scott had imitated Old English verse in his Scots reworking; here there is no attempt to build on the poetics of the original.
Scott’s version begins,
A dream o dreams I’ll tel ,
That smooled intil my mind while I wes sleepan, [smooled: glided]
Juist or midnicht fel ,
And cuist owre me a spel ,
When aa mankind ablow the claithes were creepan.
There seemed to come in sicht
A selie tree that in the lift was leamin, [selie: blessed; lift: sky; leamin:
glowing]
Byordinarly
bricht
Of a supernal licht
That fludit the hail carry wi its beamin. [carry: sky]
This is clearly written in a high style that ranges far in vocabulary and even has
suggestions of Dunbar’s aureate register. In contrast to ‘The Seavaiger’ all is smoothness here, and the quintain structure with its resolution-bringing rhyme scheme
imparts a sense of reassurance as well as of wonder – in contrast, it must be said,
to the perturbation of the narrator in the original. Scott is exploring the capacity of Scots to express a sublime subject. He produces an interesting and moving poem, if
again one that simplifies the richness of the original.
For Alexander Scott and Tom Scott, writing in Scots was a key means of expressing
their nationalist principles and they were very much involved in language politics.
Edwin Morgan always refused to get hung up on the issues of language politics
that exercised them and their like-minded associates. As reflected in his Beowulf, he eschewed the nationalist appropriation of Anglo-Saxon poetry that can be
discerned in the works of Alexander and Tom Scott. But in ‘The Auld Man’s Coro-
nach’, Morgan did essay one translation into Scots, and in a literary register that in some ways recal s that of Alexander Scott.
‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’
Morgan’s ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach reads (in full),
Waesome, waesome the hert that is his,
Faither wha sees his only laudie
Waive i the widdie on gallows tree. [widdie: gallows rope]
Dowie, dowie the sang he maun mak; [dowie: sorrowful]
Corbies’ disjune is a son hangit; [Corbies’ disjune: ravens’ breakfast]
5
Thole it he maun, help him he canna,
Auld and wice, help him he canna.
He minds him on ilka morn that daws [daws: dawns]
36
Hugh Magennis
But his son has stravaig’d to the morn-come-never, [stravaig’d: wandered]
And he winna abide the thocht o waiting
10
For anither boy to cairry his name:
Ane swack o daith’s eneuch and mair. [swack: blow]
Sorrowfu, sorrowfu the een he casts
On his laudie’s chaumer; toom the wine-haa, [toom: empty]
Joyless the bed-neuk; whidders and whidders [whidders: gusts]
15
The wind; lairds and their horses ligg
Dumb i the mools; reverbs nae harp [mools: earth, soil]
To gledden the place wi a bygane gledness.
The auld man gaes to his chaumer, he murns:
Anerly coronach murns the anerly. [coronach: solitary lament]
20
And cares for his acres and castle-waa –
Naethin ava. [ava: at all]
‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’ is very much a reworking of the famous Old English
lament of the bereaved old man in Beowulf, and it does not seek to transport the reader to ancient Germania but to present emotion with dignity (as suggested by the
Scottish-Gaelic word coronach itself, meaning ‘lament for the dead’) and also with idiomatic immediacy. There is dignity but also a visceral quality to the speaker’s
expression of the father’s emotion.
The translation mixes down-to-earth language with more recherché elements. It
has a number of common Scots words deriving directly from Old English though
not in use in the standard language: examples are dowie (‘sorrowful’, line 4), thole (‘suffer’, line 6), maun (‘must’, line 6), minds (‘remembers’, line 8), daws (‘dawns’, line 8). Corbie (‘raven, crow’, line 5), is in current use but is a medieval French borrowing.
But combined with words familiar enough in Scots speech today is vocabulary with
a distinctly literary and/or archaic feel: widdie (‘gallows rope’, line 3), disjune (‘breakfast’, line 5) (from medieval French), stravaig’d (‘wandered’, line 9) (from medieval French, ultimately from Latin extravagare), swack (‘blow’, line 12) (from Dutch), chaumer (‘bed-chamber’, line 14), mools (‘earth, soil’, line 17), ava (‘at al ’, line 22), and coronach itself (line 20), meaning ‘lament for the dead, dirge’ (introduced into Scots in the medieval period). From Old Norse, as well as ‘ordinary’ casts (line 13) and ligg (line 16), is the more striking whidders (‘gusts’, line 15). Toom (‘empty’, line 14), is fro
m Old English but its survival in Scots and northern English was likely
reinforced by the existence of the Old Norse cognate tómr. This rich lexical ‘mixture’
is an indication of Morgan’s adoption of a mildly synthetic Scots for the transla-
tion, a register that provides what he refers to in a quotation cited above as a ‘lively speech basis’ and an enabling ‘creative freshness’ (p. 31, above). There is nothing too outlandish in this accessible poem but the vocabulary is varied and appropriately
expressive.
‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’ is highly crafted but comes across as unforced and
idiomatic in expression. Its rhetorical features – most notably repetition, antithesis, omission of the verb ‘to be’, inverted word order and looseness of syntax – serve to
emphasise the emotion and to lend dignity to the expression of that emotion, as in
the opening three-line sentence:
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
37
Waesome, waesome the hert that is his,
Faither wha sees his only laudie
Waive i the widdie on gallows tree.
The second sentence parallels the structure of this first one, with an opening repeated adjective – dowie in the second sentence – followed by arresting explanatory material, but the structure is varied this time by the sentence’s extension to a fourth
line, incorporating the repeated ‘help him he canna’ (line 6) after an antithetical
adjectival phrase, ‘auld and wice’ (line 7) (Old English ‘eald ond infrod’, Beowulf, line 2429a); ‘help him he canna’ translates closely ‘he him helpan ne mæg’ ( Beowulf, line 2448b) but the phrase is not repeated in the Old English (nor are the words
corresponding to waesome and dowie: geomorlic, line 2444, and sarigne, line 2447, respectively).
Flowery language is avoided and the nakedness of the emotion emphasised
by the near ubiquity of monosyl abic and dissyl abic words – ‘Ane swack o daith’s
eneuch and mair’ (line 12): unadorned desolation is conveyed here in the terms
of a categorical gnomic utterance. In fact the only trisyl abic simplex forms in the
whole poem, apart from the unmarked anither in line 11, come in the third-last line, with coronach and the repeated anerly (‘solitary’). Extravagant compounds of the kind employed by Morgan in his Beowulf are not cultivated. There is one striking triple compound in the poem, the un Beowulf ian morn-come-never, but the other compounds are not remarkable: wine-haa (line 14) and castle-waa (line 21).
Though free in his treatment of the original, Morgan is restrained in his sense
additions. Most striking perhaps is his filling out of the Old English image of the
father remembering every morning the ellorsið (‘journey elsewhere’) ( Beowulf, line 2451) of his son:
He minds him on ilka morn that daws
But his son has stravaig’d to the morn-come-never. (lines 8–9)
Also he reworks yrfeweardas (‘heir’) ( Beowulf, line 2453a [genitive singular after to gebidenne]), in the line ‘For anither boy to cairry his name’ (line 11), and the heartfelt
‘Ane swack o daith’s eneuch and mair’ (line 12) simplifies the more elaborate and
mannered formulation in the original, in which the old man ‘does not await an heir’
‘þonne se an hafað / þurh deaðes nyd dæda gefondad’ (‘now that the one [son] he
has had has completed the trial of his deeds through a violent death’, lines 2454b–5).
In this sentence Morgan also strengthens the understated Old English ‘ne gymeð
/ to gebidenne’ (‘he is not concerned to wait’, lines 2451b–2a), in the direct and
powerful ‘he winna abide the thocht o waiting’ (line 10) (in which abide responds to to gebidenne).
As in Morgan’s Beowulf, the verse is underlain throughout by a steady four-stress metrical structure, based on Old English metre, with pronounced caesura and an
alliteration that is unobtrusive but highlights key images and thoughts. Morgan opts
for short phrases and there is little sense of forward movement, as reflects the all-
encompassing emotion. The closing lines work to a climax with reference to the old
man’s desires, which turns out, however, to be only the bleakness of Naethin ava
(‘nothing at al ’).
38
Hugh Magennis
To indicate the contrast in approach between ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’ and
Morgan’s Beowulf, I quote here the text of the passage from the Beowulf translation corresponding to the Scots version:
Such is the affliction, such is the endurance
Of the grey-haired man whose own young son
Twists on the gallows; then may he keen
In a song of pain, when his boy is hanged
For the raven’s joy, and his years and wisdom
Are void of power to bring him any aid.
Morning after morning he is for ever recalling
His son in the far marches; he has no anxiety
To live on in longing for another inheritor
Within these courts, where one has met
Destiny’s blows in embattled death.
Anguished he scans in his son’s dwelling
Desolate wine-hall and wind-vexed resting-place
Wasted of gladness; heroes and horsemen
Sleep in the darkness; no harp sings there
Of happiness to those wal s, as they resounded once.
He goes then to his couch; solitary is his elegy
Sung for the solitary: all his castle and country
To him too empty.
The Standard English passage is a fine one but very unlike the Scots version. It sticks much closer to the grammatical structures of the original Old English and it reflects
Old English imagery more literal y. It is elegiac but not raw, having a steady rhythm
with iambic and anapaestic patterning that engenders a smoothness of tone; the
Scots version is much more abrupt in its phrasing. There are plenty of monosyl ables
in the English rendering, including as elements of compounds: wind-vexed resting-
place (offering an interpretative unravelling of the cryptic windgereste, Beowulf, line 2456b), but also an embracing of longer words, typical y of Romance origin: affliction, endurance, anxiety, inheritor, desolate. Several of these are abstract nouns, whereas in the Scots translation there is only one abstract noun altogether, ‘gledness’, in the highly-wrought line ‘To gledden the place wi a bygane gledness’ (line
18). In the English version, vocabulary along with the flowing syntax and the prefer-
ence for enjambment creates a decorous register, though graphic images forestall
any suggestion of easy sentimentality: ‘Twists on the gallows’, ‘his boy is hanged’.
Published as it was in The Glasgow Herald, ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’ is aimed
at a Scottish readership and draws upon the rich associations of vernacular literary
language to produce a powerful and moving poem, in which the Old English has
been ‘made new’ and (in terms of translation theory) imaginatively ‘domesticated’
as Morgan appropriates it to a new cultural setting.23 It is a mood piece rather than
a developed narrative work, however, and Morgan did not seek to extend the use
of Scots with reference to more complex or intractable material in Old English. The
23 See Corbett, ‘ The Seafarer, Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy’.
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
39
artistic success of ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’, however, shows that if he had been
interested Morgan could have produced other effective versions of Old English
poetry in Scots. But for Morgan the future lay i
n different directions.
The approach to translation in the passage from Morgan’s Beowulf quoted above
is very much in line with that of the rest of the translation, eloquently formal but
accessible and always technical y accomplished. In the passage from the Beowulf
translation repetition is deftly used, as in the opening ‘Such is the affliction, such is the endurance’, which accompanies repetition with variation of abstract nouns.
The passage builds to a strong climax with its contrast between ‘gladness’ and lonely
grief: we might note the adoption of the Old English image of the sleep of death, the
metonymy of the harp singing of happiness, and the complex dynamics of
He goes then to his couch; solitary is his elegy
Sung for the solitary: all his castle and country …
In this, the chiasmus of ‘solitary is his elegy / Sung for the solitary’, with its s alliteration extending across the line break, is in turn enveloped by the chiastic c alliteration of the surrounding phrases. The repetition of solitary is prompted by the Old English phrase an æfter anum ( Beowulf, line 2461a), and elegy represents a striking cultural transfer of sorhleoð (‘song of sorrow’, line 2460b). Couch (translating the rare poetic word sealma, Beowulf, line 2460a) has distancing connotations, while castle and country (translating wongas ond wicstede, ‘fields and dwelling-places’, line 2462a) bring associations of a medieval world. Morgan chooses only nouns and
adjectives of Romance origin in these lines ( couch, elegy, solitary, castle, country), turning arrestingly to the Anglo-Saxon plainness of ‘To him too empty’ only in the
final half-line. Here in ‘too empty’ Morgan stretches modern usage by modifying
the absolute adjective empty (how empty is ‘too empty’?), taking his lead from Old English practice and translating directly to rum ( Beowulf, line 2461b).
Further Engagement with Old English
A similar approach to that observable in his Beowulf can be seen in the Old English elegies translated by Morgan into Modern English: The Ruin, The Seafarer and The Wanderer. In particular, these translations mostly share qualities evident in the quoted passage from Beowulf, which is itself highly elegiac, of course. The elegies were written for Morgan’s 1952 (original y unpublished) collection Dies Irae, thus at around the same time as the Beowulf translation ( Dies Irae was eventual y printed in Morgan’s Col ected Poems).24 As mentioned below, also included in Dies Irae are four lively translations of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book (Riddles 57,