Translating Early Medieval Poetry
Page 9
‘Swallows’, 7, ‘Swan’, 47, ‘Bookworm’, and 3, ‘Storm’, respectively).25
Dies Irae also contains a translation of the Early Middle English poem The Grave, and Morgan drew upon his study of Old English to write ‘Harrowing Heaven 1924’
24 Edwin Morgan, Col ected Poems (Manchester, 1990), pp. 21–40.
25 For the riddles, see Morgan, Col ected Poems, pp. 37–9.
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Hugh Magennis
for the same collection.26 And he kept up his interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry in
occasional pieces produced over the rest of his career. Notable among later works
is his poem ‘Grendel’, from Uncol ected Poems (1976–81).27 ‘Grendel’ presents an unflattering consideration of the life of warrior society, and by extension of human
life in general. It is spoken from the point of view of a self-reflective Grendel,
disgusted but fascinated at the ‘hideous, clamorous brilliance’ of humanity. Grendel
asks, eloquently,
Who would be a man? Who would be the winter sparrow
that flies at night by mistake into a lighted hal
and flutters the length of it in zigzag panic,
dazed and terrified by the heat and noise and smoke,
the drink-fumes and the oaths, the guttering flames,
feast-bones thrown to a snarl of wolfhounds,
flash of swords in sodden sorry quarrels?
This is based on Bede28 but ‘Who would be a man?’ suggests, unsettlingly, Shake-
speare’s Hamlet, ‘What a piece of work is a man’.
Morgan also produced the freely composed ‘found poems’ (constructed from
newspaper cuttings) ‘Cædmon’s Second Hymn’ and ‘New English Riddles’, both in
Themes on a Variation (1988).29 And late in his life he would return to translating Old English poetry in his versions of two Exeter Book riddles, Riddle 38, ‘Bullock’, and
66, ‘Creation’, for the anthology The Word Exchange (which came out a few months after he died).30 Poetry translated from or based on Old English must be seen as a
relatively minor part of Morgan’s prolific oeuvre, but it is a not-insignificant part, and, as Chris Jones has shown, his engagement with Old English informed his work
more general y.31
Morgan’s Translation of The Ruin
To return to Dies Irae, one of the most interesting of the translations there, in my view, is that of The Ruin, a translation that I would like to give particular attention to here.32 Chris Jones touches briefly on Morgan’s ‘The Ruin’ in Strange Likeness, noting that Morgan’s translation disguises the fragmentary state of the Old English
text. Jones writes, ‘one would hardly know from Morgan’s translation that there
26 ‘The Grave’, in Col ected Poems, p. 39; ‘Harrowing Heaven 1924’, in Col ected Poems, p. 30.
27 Col ected Poems, pp. 427–8.
28 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), II, xiii (pp. 182–5).
29 Edwin Morgan, Themes on a Variation (Manchester, 1988), pp. 92, 93–4.
30 Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, eds, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in
Translation (New York, 2010), pp. 277, 449, respectively.
31 Jones, Strange Likeness, pp. 170–81.
32 ‘The Ruin’, Collected Poems, p. 31; the other elegy translations in Dies Irae have been discussed il uminatingly by Corbett, ‘ The Seafarer, Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy’, and Jones, Strange Likeness, pp. 151–9.
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
41
is much difficulty at all in piecing together the poem’s fragments’, and he argues
that Morgan, not believing in preservation of the past for the past’s sake, ‘does
not so much translate the poem as restore and renovate it’.33 In Morgan’s 33-line
text ellipses are indicated after line 11 and at the end, but rather than as accidental lacunae these might be read as deliberate ellipses, in a poem that is intended to be
taken as complete. In accordance with the poem’s theme, the ellipses suggest the
inevitability of the passing of time.
Morgan appropriates the Old English poem to make what is eald something new;
unlike in ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’, he is not Scotticising the original this time,
however. Indeed he adopts a notably formal Standard English register, including
the cultivation of poetic vocabulary – riven (line 3), sundered (line 16), rapt (line 17), bereaver (line 17) – and abstract nouns. The recourse to abstract nouns is evident in the opening lines:
Wonder holds these wal s. Under destiny destruction
Splits castles apart. Gigantic battlements are crumbling,
Roofs in ruin.
Morgan parallels the concrete imagery of the Old English here but by means of
abstract nouns recasts its strongly adjectival mode. The Old English reads (lines
1 – 3b):
Wrætlic is þes wealstan! Wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc;
hrofas sind gehrorene.34
(Wondrous is this masonry! Fates shattered it; the fortified places fell apart, the works of giants decay; roofs are fallen.)
From the beginning the translation redirects the theme of wonder. In the first half-
line it substitutes the arresting idea that ‘Wonder holds these wal s’ for the notion
in the original that the buildings themselves are wondrous to the beholder. Does
Morgan mean that it is a wonder that the ruined wal s are standing to the extent
that they are?
However we interpret his opening half-line, the Anglo-Saxon perspective of
wonder at the great stone buildings of the past is not taken up by Morgan. Though
adapting resources of Old English poetry (strong alliterative patterning, half-line
structure, mostly with two stresses per unit, and some compound words), Morgan
elides the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic perspective of the original and makes his poem
into a more universal contemplation of the transience of splendour. The opening
lines already combine the specificity of ‘wonder’ holding these wal s with the general statement ‘destruction / Splits castles apart’. Morgan’s rendition presents a vivid
image of the ruins of a former civilisation and an evocation of the magnificent life
lived by its inhabitants. The ruins in Morgan’s version seem to be those of a great
stone citadel, with battlements, turrets, spires and war-ramparts; the details suggest 33 Jones, Strange Likeness, both quotations p. 157.
34 The Old English text is quoted here from Klinck, The Old English Elegies, pp. 103–5.
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Hugh Magennis
a later medieval world. In the Old English, the ruins are surely from Roman Britain
and the very fact that they are of stone is a source of wonder: there is a strong sense of the superior technology and ingenuity of the people who built them as compared
with Anglo-Saxon capabilities. These buildings are seen as enta geweorc (‘the works of giants’, The Ruin, line 2), whereas in Morgan it is the battlements themselves that are ‘gigantic’. Morgan focuses entirely on the devastating effects of time and does not suggest that greater people lived in the past.
Interestingly, three lines in the original that admire the cleverness and engi-
neering prowess of the builders are omitted altogether by Morgan as part of the
ellipsis after line 11. The Old English reads (lines 18–20),
Mod mo[nade m]yneswiftne gebrægd;
hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond
weall walanwirum wundrum togædere.35
(The mind instigated a keen-witted device; ingenious in rings, the r
esolute one bound
the wall wondrously together with strips of wire.)
The precise sense is difficult to pin down here, and different translations would
be possible, but the emphasis is certainly on ingenuity and technological exper-
tise, an emphasis that also comes through in the damaged closing section of the
poem, where the speaker is admiringly observing the remains of Roman baths: ‘þæt
is cynelic þing’ (‘that is a splendid thing’, line 48b). Morgan, though mentioning
the baths, omits the closing section and he steers clear of the three quoted lines,
including its Anglo-Saxonising reference to the builders being ‘ingenious in rings’
(if that is the right translation); he also excludes the Anglo-Saxonising detail of enta geweorc and later ignores the reconceiving of the Roman buildings of the original as horngestreon (‘having an abundance of horned gables’, line 22) and meodoheal (‘meadhal ’, line 23), suggestive of the great hal s of Germanic tradition.
The translation refers to destiny and fate but rather than being understood in
Germanic terms these concepts function as expressions of the inevitability of time
and its effects. The destructive effects of time are suggested by Morgan’s verbs of
violent action and the hammer-blows of his rhythm, incorporating plosive allitera-
tion and monosyl abic words: ‘Rain-bastions beaten, cleft, pierced, perished’; ‘The
broad wal s were sundered, the plague-days came’. A sense of the impersonality of
the destruction is suggested by the fact that the verbs of violent action are mostly in the passive voice or have abstract or impersonal subjects, as in ‘destruction / Splits castles apart’, ‘Death crushed that place’ (line 22). The language used to describe the glorious past is more flowing and Latinate:
Magnificent rose the fortresses, the lavish swimming-hal s,
The profuse and lofty glory of spires. (lines 12–13)
The inhabitants were ‘brilliant’, ‘adazzle with costliest war-trappings’ (line 24).
What happened to them is not specified, any more than in the original Old English.
35 Old English text from Klinck, The Old English Elegies, p. 104, but Klinck omits the comma after hringas.
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
43
‘Plague-days’ are mentioned (translating woldagas, ‘days of pestilence’, line 25) but specific causes are not pursued; the people have been swept away, taken by the same
forces that also would destroy their untended monuments: ‘The restorers lie asleep’
(line 19).
The tone in Morgan’s version of The Ruin is elegiac but, as in the original, there is no sense of personal emotion of the kind that is visceral y present in ‘The Auld Man’s Coronach’ or, more decorously, in the corresponding Beowulf passage. In Morgan’s translation and in the Old English the perspective is impersonal, observational and
contemplative. And yet Morgan has taken The Ruin out of the Anglo-Saxon world
and re-presented it to make a new poem in its own right.
Riddles
As mentioned above, also included in Dies Irae are four translations of Old English riddles. The riddle versions range in manner from high seriousness to playful fun
and they demonstrate strikingly the principle of ‘energy in order’, a phrase Morgan
himself used with reference to Dunbar but one that applies to his own poetry.36
Using free metrical patterns and with light alliteration or none, Morgan writes these
translations in a Standard English that enables the sibilant stateliness of the ‘Swan’
riddle – ‘My garment sweeps the world in silence’ – and the gravity of ‘Storm’, a
translation that conveys the power and danger of its subject in graphic description,
rich in compound words:
Sometimes from above I shake the waves,
Wreathe the ocean-stream, throw to the shore
The flint-grey flood: foam’s in the fight
Of wave against sea-wal .
Alliteration is noticeably more insistent in this higher-style rendition.
Morgan has fun with the contradictions of the ‘Bookworm’ riddle, relishing its
paradoxes:
A meal of words made by a moth
Seemed to me when I heard the tale
Curious and phenomenal.
This poem combines a bookish tone with more idiomatic touches – ‘that such a mite
like a thief in the night’ – echoing the playfulness of the original. And in ‘Swallows’, which has a joyful, dancing rhythm, Morgan is even more colloquial, incorporating
some Scots elements into his Standard English register. He depicts his subject as
‘Borne over the braesides, / A tiny folk, a swarthy folk’, and challenges the reader,
‘Name you them!’ ‘Name you them’ is an idiomatic Scots form of the imperative,
with the personal pronoun expressed.
Morgan came back to the Old English riddles in his final years in his contribu-
tions to The Word Exchange. His two contributions to this collection are short pieces 36 Edwin Morgan, ‘Dunbar and the Language of Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 2:2 (1952), 138–75, at p. 138.
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Hugh Magennis
but his characteristic ‘energy in order’ is still exhilaratingly very much in evidence in them. His version of Exeter Book Riddle 38, ‘Bullock’, is a free translation of its original, in which alliteration is mostly absent and the verse is free-flowing. It has an arresting interpretation of the opening line, ‘Ic þa wiht geseah wæpnedcynnes’:
‘I watched this big well-hung laddie’, which is both imaginative and resolutely
vernacular in its register. ‘Watched’ brings out the observational aspect of the riddle, which is later re-emphasised in the modern-sounding phrase ‘An onlooker said’
(translating mon maþelade, ‘some person said’); ‘laddie’ in the first line is everyday Scots, and ‘well-hung’ presents a cleverly inventive take on wæpnedcynnes (‘male’, literal y ‘weapon-bearing gender’), while ‘big’ is Morgan’s descriptive addition.
The translation combines the colloquialism of the earlier ‘Swallow’ riddle with the
relishing of paradox of the ‘Bookworm’ one, and like these earlier versions removes
the Anglo-Saxon feel of the originals. There is no attempt to transport the reader
to an Anglo-Saxon world, and yet the sense of delighted wonder and witty teasing
of the Old English riddles is captured pleasingly. Morgan also allows himself the
licence here of incorporating into the translation an added interpretative coda of
three short lines. After the clues about the bullock breaking the earth while alive and providing leather when dead, he adds, as part of the onlooker’s speech,
And all this is well –
For both use and joy
Meet in this boy.
These lines celebrate the animal’s existence and resolve the poem’s puzzles in a
concluding rhyme.
Morgan’s version of Riddle 66, ‘Creation’, also conveys joy and wonder, though,
in keeping with the poem’s subject, here the language is consistently formal rather
than colloquial. This translation imitates and even takes further the cumulative
structure of the original in its series of one- or half-line statements made by the
first-person narrator about itself, thereby suggesting the sheer scope and variety of
creation. Eight of the poem’s ten lines begin with the pronoun I. There is no imitation of Old English metre, however, or cultivation of alliteration, and again Anglo-
Saxon cultural associations, present in words like middangeard (‘middle earth’), eþel (‘homeland’) and merestream (‘sea stream’)
are eschewed ( merestream, for example, is simplified to ‘ocean’). And the Christian framework reflected in the phrases
wuldres eþel ‘(homeland of glory’) and engla eard (‘land of angels’) is disregarded.
The Old English riddle, which is insistently Anglo-Saxon in outlook and register, is
reworked as an uncluttered modern poem. Indeed something of Morgan’s science
fiction interest may be apparent in the mystery-laden opening line, ‘Up beyond
the universe and back’, translating ‘Ic eom mare þonne þes middangeard’ (‘I am greater than this middle earth’). The opening line suggests immensity, which is
juxtaposed to the smallness of ‘Down to the tiniest chigger in the finger’ in line 2,
translating læsse þonne hondwyrm (‘smaller than a handworm’, a hondwyrm being an insect). The surprising chigger may sound like a dialect term but in fact is a word for a mite causing a nasty irritation.
As in the ‘Bullock’ translation, Morgan incorporates a short addition just before
Edwin Morgan’s Translations
45
the end, which in this case fil s out the sense of the sublimity of the speaker. The
poem concludes, summing up the claims that the speaker has made in its speech,
I claim this honor, I claim its worth,
I am what I claim. So, what is my name?
The speaker inspires awe in these appropriately enigmatic lines before bringing
readers down to earth with the cheeky rhyming challenge, ‘So, what is my name?’
Morgan had not added such interpretative details in his Dies Irae translations.
That he does so here and in the ‘Bullock’ rendering demonstrates the confidence
with which he appropriated the Old English material for the Word Exchange
commission.
Conclusion
Edwin Morgan’s preferred literary language throughout his career was English. He
could and did successful y write in Scots where he thought that language appro-
priate and enabling for his subject, but, unlike some of his contemporaries after the