by Tom Birkett
18 ‘A boat with a ringed neck rode in the haven, icy, out-eager, the aetheling’s vessel’
( Beowulf, lines 32–3), ‘Bleeding from its wounds, // lords and aethelings are laid on the field’
( Waldere, lines 4b–5), Alexander, trans., The Earliest English Poems, p. 26 and p. 38.
19 ‘Weird is set fast’ ( The Wanderer, line 5), ‘No weary mind may stand against Weird’
( The Wanderer, line 15), ‘Their Weird is glorious’ ( The Wanderer, line 100), ‘Weird’s will changeth the world’ ( The Wanderer, line 107), Alexander, trans., The Earliest English Poems, pp. 48–51.
20 ‘and it is said that no boat was ever more bravely fitted out with weapons of a warrior, war accoutrement, bil s and byrnies’ ( Beowulf, lines 39–41), Alexander, trans., The Earliest English Poems, p. 26.
21 The text of The Wanderer is quoted from G. P. Krapp and E. van Kirk Dobbie, eds, The Exeter Book, ASPR III (London, 1936), pp. 134–7.
22 Hickey, trans., The Wanderer, p. 11.
23 Treharne, ed., Old and Middle English c. 890–1450, p. 45.
24 Hickey, trans., The Wanderer, p. 8.
25 Hamer, trans., Anglo-Saxon Verse, p. 176.
Gains and Losses
51
with the load of years, burdened by old age’,26 is rendered in Modern English by
the etymological y related word ‘wintersaddened’, meaning ‘upset by the coming
of winter’, as in Hickey’s ‘And I, sore stricken and humbled / and wintersaddened,
went’,27 and the word-combination hrimcealde sæ, meaning ‘icy-cold sea’, is translated by Emily Hickey as ‘rimecold sea’, in spite of the fact that in the modern
language ‘rime’ no longer means ‘ice’.
If the individual components of an Old English compound word do not retain
etymological equivalents in Modern English, translators seldom use paraphrases
explaining the meaning of the Old English word, but prefer to construct their own
compounds, according to the word-building models which were highly productive
in Old English but are less so in Modern English.28 Frequently they just resort to the simple orthographic device of hyphenation: ‘sorrowful-face’, ‘gold-giver’, ‘warrior-comrades’, ‘glory-grasper’, ‘glee-songs’, ‘firm-minds’, ‘hail-storms’, ‘hot-hearts’, ‘hall-retainers’, ‘frost-covered’, ‘wind-blown’, ‘tear-stained’, ‘blood-greedy’. It seems to be the view of modern translators that a hyphen is endowed with a special cementing
force capable of moulding combinations of words into poetic compounds similar to
those of the original. The translations of Michael Alexander are most consistent in
this respect, as they retain the models of compound words but not their meaning
and imagery. Thus ‘grasshopper’ is used instead of the word eardstapa, meaning ‘a land-stepper’, ‘a wanderer’; ‘winehal ’, inevitably carrying associations with ‘wine-house’, replaces the word winsalo (‘a hall where there is feasting’); and ‘drearcheeked’
is used instead of Old English dreorighleor, meaning ‘sad of countenance’.
The use of compounds in modern translations does not commonly lead to a rich-
ness of poetic language. Ancient poetic vocabulary emerges as extremely unstable
in the course of the development of the language. The greater part of the poetic
word-stock goes out of use, leaving no trace in the modern language. In contrast
to poetic vocabulary, many neutral words belong to the main body of the language
even to this day. However, modern translators closely associate the word-stock of
Old and Modern English, and substitute the expressive ranges of Old English poetic
synonyms with one word lacking specific nuances. Thus, the six synonyms with
the meaning of ‘relative, companion, comrade, protector’ ( winemæg, geselda, maga, freomæg, gefera, gehola) that occur in The Wanderer are translated by a single word
‘kinsman’. The majority of translators employ a few stylistical y neutral words ‘lord, 26 As is well known, years were counted by Germanic people by winters, as seen in one of the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘And ða agangen wæs / tyn hund wintra, geteled rimes / fram gebyrdtide bremes cyninges, / leohta hyrdes, buton ðær to lafe þa get / wæs wintergeteles, þæs ðe gewritu secgað, / seofon ond twentig’, (‘By then had passed, reckoned by number, ten hundred years, from the time of birth of the il ustrious King, Shepherd of Lights – except there remained twenty-seven of the number of years, as the writings say’),
‘The Coronation of Edgar’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. and trans. M. Swanton (London, 2000), p. 118.
27 Hickey, trans., The Wanderer. p. 8.
28 Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bone Dreams’ in his North (London, 1975), pp. 27–30, can be used as an example of how unproductive the models for kennings are in modern poetry, for he borrows kennings which already existed in poetic tradition (e.g. ‘bone-house’ or ban-hus is used in Beowulf at lines 2508 and 3147; cf. also other kennings with the same meaning: ban-cofa 1445, ban-fæt 1116, ban-loca 742, 818).
52
Inna Matyushina
protector, patron’29 to convey the key concept in the poem, ‘lord’, rendered in the
original with the help of ten highly expressive synonyms: goldwine (literal y ‘a golden friend’, ‘a kindly prince’), winedryhten (‘friend and lord’, ‘a friendly gracious lord’), manndryhten (‘a lord of men, liege lord’), swæsa (‘dear, gracious, kind, pleasant’), waldend (‘ruler, governer, possessor, master’) and þeoden (a word used exclusively in poetry to mean ‘prince, king, ruler, chief’).
Trying to reflect the richness of poetic synonymic stock using the resources of
a modern language, some translators substitute different modern words instead of
Old English poetic synonyms. Charles Kennedy, for instance, renders synonyms
meaning ‘relative, protector’ with the help of such words as ‘companion’ – OE gefera (‘friend’); OE gehola, (‘kinsman’); OE maga (‘comrade’); OE geselda (‘kin’); and OE
compound nouns winemæg, from wine + mæg, and freomæg from freo + mæg. This can hardly be viewed as a substitute for Old English poetic synonymic systems,
as the synonyms of the modern language belong to everyday vocabulary and have
different denotative references.
It is hard to expect that any efforts to pursue the development of the poetic vocab-
ulary of alliterative verse in modern poetry could be productive: neither the use of
Old English lexemes nor the imitation of Old English models of word-composition,
nor the desire to preserve synonyms brings the word-stock of a modern translation
close to that of the original. An attempt to preserve in the translation the word-stock of the original might result not only in the loss of stylistic connotations but also in the introduction of false associations and deviations from the meaning.
On Translations of Old English Poetry into Russian
In the case of translations into a different language, the obvious absence of identity between the source and the target languages guards translators from the temptation
of attempting to preserve isolated elements (metrical, phonetic or lexical) of the Old English original. Unexpectedly perhaps, the resources available to translators into
other languages combining principles of diachronic and cross-lingual translation
can be more extensive. This is the case with translations of Old English texts into
modern Russian because of the proximities between the syntactical and morpho-
logical structure of both languages. Like Old English (and unlike Modern English),
Russian is a highly inflected synthetic language in which the grammatical relations
between words are expressed primarily inside the
word with the help of internal
markers such as inflections or, more rarely, suffixes. As in Old English, analytical
forms do occur in Russian (e.g. in the future tense of verbs of imperfective aspect,
forms of subjunctive mood etc.) but considerably less frequently than synthetic
forms, which potential y reduces the number of unstressed syl ables in a line of
translation and therefore makes more audible and noticeable any sound devices
29 For example, the stylistical y neutral words ‘lord’, ‘friend’ or ‘patron’ occur in
translations by Benjamin Thorpe and Emily Hickey. The inadequacy of the word ‘patron’ is realised and specifical y commented on by Richard Hamer: ‘The use of such words as “patron”
for a military leader may seem strange, but the Germanic chief was indeed general, patron, distributor of treasures and friend’, Anglo-Saxon Verse, p. 22.
Gains and Losses
53
used. Old English and Russian share a number of verbal and nominal grammatical
categories, which were not retained in Modern English, such as grammatical gender
for adjectives and a lexical-grammatical category of gender for nouns, which enables
a translator to render the imagery of the original. The number of categorial forms
constituting grammatical categories in both Old English and Russian is vastly more
numerous than in Modern English (the nominal category of case, for instance, is
constituted by the opposition of four case forms in Old English and six case forms in
Russian) which helps the translator to render the minutest distinctions of the gram-
matical meaning without using auxiliary words. Word order in both Old English
and Russian is free and not fixed as in Modern English, which gives considerable
freedom to a translator. Means of word-derivation in both Old English and Russian
are in many respects similar, for example, the role of prefixes in word-formation is
very significant, which facilitates the use of any sound-devices. These similarities
are, obviously, of immense help to a translator of Old English into Russian.
The translations of Old English poetry into Russian made by Vladimir Tikhom-
irov30 are especial y successful in that, without trying to copy, he managed to
recreate both the elaborate sound organisation of alliterative poetry and its extreme
lexical richness. In his translations Vladimir Tikhomirov gave up from the very
start any attempt to imitate the sound organisation of the original. The main reason
for this lies in the Russian stress system, which makes it impossible to retain the
original function of alliteration. Whereas in Old English alliterative verse a strong
expiratory stress was fixed on the initial syl ables of words, which nearly always
coincided with root morphemes, in Russian the place of stress is not fixed and is
not necessarily confined to the root morpheme. Therefore the intimate connection
of sound and meaning characteristic of alliterative verse, in which the lifts are not
merely phonetic stresses but also root morphemes, cannot be preserved in Russian.
It is equal y impossible to retain in a Russian translation the semantic function
of the contrast between the lifts and the drops which existed in alliterative verse.
Old English alliterative verse required a special manner of recitation (or, perhaps,
singing) and was meant for oral performance (probably accompanied by a musical
instrument, whose rhythmical sounds marked the accentual lifts),31 whereas any
translation into a modern language is obviously meant for reading and therefore
uses sound devices aimed not so much at the ear as at the eye.
The difference in the sound devices used in the alliterative original and in
Tikhomirov’s translations is at least partial y compensated by their functional
proximity. Alliteration is obviously an integral part of the Russian translations, but it is very seldom used by itself. It is usual y enriched by additional sound devices
such as assonance, either within a half line,32 as in the following examples from
The Wanderer: ‘on, do bryi, v do me’, ‘þone þe in meoduhealle’ (line 27a); ‘ pa myat o 30 Древнеанглийская поэзия, Издание подготовили О. А. Смирницкая, В. Г.
Тихомиров (Москва, 1982) [ Old English Poetry, ed. and trans. O. A. Smirnitskaya and Vladimir G. Tikhomirov (Moscow, 1982)].
31 J. C. Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf (New Haven, 1966), pp. 88–95.
32 Sound devices within half-lines are used in addition to alliteration in organising the structure of long lines.
54
Inna Matyushina
pa vshem’, ‘sare æfter swæsne’ (line 50a), or within a long line: ‘ du shu svoyu uder-zhivat, / esli du my odolevayut’, ‘healde his hordcofan, hycge swa he wille’ (line 14);
‘otle te vshie te ni, te shat ego nedolgo’, ‘fleotendra ferð no þær fela bringeð’ (line 54).33
More frequently alliteration is enriched by consonance, for example, in the lines ‘on
m e r yat vzmahami m o r e ledyanoe’, translating ‘hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ’ (line 4), and ‘ rod nye pered glazami, // rad on vstreche’, translating ‘mod geondh-weorfeð; // greteð gliwstafum’ (lines 51b–52a); or by both assonance and consonance
together, for example, ‘no muzh u mu drost / mozh et dostatsya’ for ‘forþon ne mæg weorþan wis wer, ær he age’ (line 64), as well as internal root morpheme rhymes,34
for example, ‘vozhdya-so rat nika / nadolgo ut rat iv’, in the translation of ‘Forþon wat se þe sceal his winedryhtnes’ (line 37), and ‘vetram ot krytye / po krytye ineem’, translating ‘winde biwaune weal as stondaþ’ (line 76). Internal rhyme on the word
boundaries – such as ‘sirota, o sta rom: / ne osta los’ nyne’, translating ‘mine ceare cwiþan. Nis nu cwicra nan’ (line 9) – is frequently used in the Russian translations, helping the translator to join the lexical units through their phonetic simi-
larity. Thus, with the help of internal rhymes, consonances and assonances added
to the regular alliteration, Tikhomirov endows his translations with an increased
sound regularity which was characteristic of the Old English originals.
Using internal root morpheme rhymes alongside alliteration, Vladimir Tikhom-
irov is not in any way deviating from the tradition of Old English alliterative verse.
In The Wanderer, just as in Tikhomirov’s translation, internal rhymes additional to alliteration occur both within half-lines (cf. ‘goldwine minne’ (‘my golden friend’, line 22b); ‘clyppe ond cysse’ (‘embraces and kisses’, line 42a) and within long lines:
‘forðon domgeorne dreorigne oft’ (‘this is why eager for glory sad thoughts often’, line 17); ‘hwær ic feor oððe neah findan meahte’ (‘whether I far or near can find’, line 26); ‘ond þis deorce lif deope geond þenceð’ (‘and about this dark life deeply thinks’, line 89)). In nearly a third of the extant lines of Old English poetry alliteration is enriched by additional sound devices, whose structure and function appear
to be crucial in the development of Old English metre.
In Old English poetry the distribution of full internal rhymes of root morphemes
and of consonances in half-lines (which were always used in addition to allitera-
tion in binding long lines) is similar to the system of internal rhymes which was
canonised in another Germanic poetic tradition; in skaldic poetry consonances
( skothendingar) were used in odd lines, whereas full rhymes ( aðalhendingar) were restricted to even lines. This peculiarity of the distribution of co
nsonances
and full rhymes is on the whole observed in the Russian translations; full rhymes
tend to prevail in even half-lines, forming the second part of a long line, cf. ‘vm est e spl et ayuas’ for ‘somod ætgædre’ (line 39b); ‘gos ud arya kak b ud to’ for ‘þæt he his mondryhten’ (line 41b), whereas consonances are more frequently used in odd
33 Quotations from Vladimir Tikhomirov’s translations are given here and elsewhere
in this chapter not in the original Cyrillic spelling as they occur in the publication Древнеанглийская поэзия ( Old English Poetry) but in transliteration into Latin characters for the benefit of those who are not familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet.
34 It is important to underline that the rhyme used in translation is the repetition of sounds of root morphemes binding words inside long lines and is entirely different from the end rhyme used in modern poetry at the end of poetic segments (lines).
Gains and Losses
55
half-lines, constituting the first part of long lines, cf. ‘odi n o k ii izgnan n i k’ for ‘wadan wræclastas’ (line 5a); ‘ s i r o t a, o st a r om’ for ‘mine ceare cwiþan’ (line 9a), vzy sk al, to sk uya po krovu’ for ‘sohte seledreorig’ (line 25a); ‘o d a r il by r a d ostyu’ for ‘wenian mid wynnum’ (line 29a), and ‘ ost aviv svoi z ast olya’ for ‘flet ofgeafon’ (line 62a).
However sometimes internal full rhymes occur in the Russian translations not only
in even lines but also in odd lines, cf. ‘v z emn uyu leg t emn izu’ for ‘hrusan heolstre biwrah’ (line 23a), ‘zah ote l by osir ote vshego’ for ‘oþþe mec freondleasne’ (line 28a),
‘m uzhi dr uzhi nnye’ for ‘modge maguþegnas’ (line 62a), ‘ gord aya vozle gor o d a’ for
‘wlonc bi wealle’ (line 80a). This peculiarity of the sound organisation of half-lines enables them to acquire greater independence in the Russian translation, which
is confirmed by their graphic representation – unlike Old English poetry, always
divided by the publishers into long lines, the Russian translations have half-lines
printed directly under each other with even lines moved slightly to the right.35
As is clear from the quoted examples, in the Russian translations the main organ-
