by Tom Birkett
him greatly was the elegiac genre’).27 The end of Beowulf involves an elegy by twelve riders (lines 3169–82), without question as far as Borges is concerned. And Hadis,
like Borges, considers The Seafarer to be the first manifestation of the English attraction to the sea, as later developed in very many poetic texts as a nostalgia for the
ocean. This interpretation of The Seafarer as largely being about nostalgia for the ocean is unusual for the Modern English-speaking reader, but it may be worth
pursuing Borges’ thinking. In the note appended to the translation, Borges and
María Kodama argue that the poet is describing both the horror and the attraction
or fascination of the ocean, a behaviour pattern typical of England throughout the
generations of English literature, they say.28 They open the possibility that the poem is allegorical, referring to the life of a human being by way of a metaphor of naviga-tion. They note spiritual connections to the poetry of Walt Whitman, and comment
that Ezra Pound turned the poem into English repeating less the meaning and more
the sounds of the original, and Gavin Bone also produced an admirable translation.
The translation that Borges and Kodama produce renders less than the first half of
25 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, trans. Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed.
Venuti, pp. 15–25.
26 For easy access to the Israeli school of polysystem analysis see Itamar Even-Zohar,
‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, pp. 192–7, and Gideon Toury, ‘The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation’, pp. 198–211, both in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti.
27 See Martín Hadis, ‘Borges y el anglosajón’, El Lenguaraz: Revista del Colegio de Traductores Públicos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2003), p. 3.
28 ‘El Navegante’ is p. 795, the lengthy note is p. 796.
Borges and Old English Poetry
71
the Old English poem (lines 1–52), focusing on the concrete images. They also write
in Spanish prose, in a single long paragraph:
Puedo cantar sobre mí mismo un canto verdadero; puedo narrar mis viajes. En días
de opresión padeció mi pecho rigores. Las naves fueron para mí cárceles de ansiedad.
Terrible era el tumulto de las olas. Me encorvó muchas veces la estrecha guardia de la noche en la proa del barco, al golpear los acantilados. Atravesados por el frío fueron mis pies, atados con helados vínculos por la escarcha.
(I can sing about myself a true song; I can tell my journeys. In days of oppression my heart endured great suffering. The ships for me were jails of anxiety. The tumult of the waves was terrible. Many times the constricting guard of night buckled me in the prow
of the boat, struck by the cliffs. My feet were marked by the cold, tied with freezing chains by the hoar-frost.)
Borges and Kodama state that they worked entirely from the Old English in this
translation. There is certainly no sign here of Ezra Pound’s ‘own self song’s truth’
or his ‘journey’s jargon’ or ‘dire sea-surge’. Nor do they depend on Gavin Bone, the
poet and translator at St John’s College, Oxford who died in 1942, presumably not as
a direct result of trying to teach Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis some Old English.
They might well have read his translation since they refer to it in their commentary
but their approach is very much their own, and focused on the weather and the sea,
avoiding all allegorical overtones.29 Thus, for example, bigeat, the third preterite singular of bigietan (‘to keep, occupy’) translates as me encorvó (‘I bent myself down, I buckled, I sagged’) in ‘þær mec oft bigeat nearo nihtwaco æt nacan stefnan’.30
Borges and Kodama suggest a physical analogue of that emotional reaction as their
first-person narrator col apses, curving downwards as a result of the pressure of
the night-watch. Making the emotion more direct and the personal engagement
through the use of a reflexive verb is not uncommon in Spanish, and is a technique
used to good effect here. Similarly, El navegante emphasises and highlights the imagery about frozen feet as feeling chained by the frost, so that the travails of the seafarer are very physical, direct and painful in purely bodily terms. They are also
emotional, but there is no hint that they might be spiritual or theological in any way.
Two unexpected choices in this short collection are the late Old English poem
The Grave and the prose exchange from The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.
Although Borges and Kodama make it clear that they are translating directly from
the Old English in every case, for all the other texts here there are several possible translations available for them to consult. Borges certainly knew of Richard Hamer’s
A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, because when he visited Oxford for an honorary
doctorate in 1971 he asked to meet with Hamer to talk about Old English, and
29 Gavin Bone, ‘Seafarer’, Medium Aevum 3 (1934), 1–6.
30 Ida Gordon in her edition (which may perhaps have been a source for Borges and
Kodama) states that bigeat offers ‘an unusual use of bigietan with an emotional connotation to describe a circumstance or state of mind taking hold of, and affecting, a person’; see The Seafarer, ed. Ida Gordon (Manchester, 1979), p. 33, note to line 6.
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explicitly mentioned the book.31 It has, for example, The Fight at Finnsburg, Deor and The Seafarer. As for the Old English from which they worked, Hamer’s reader offers a facing-page Modern English version with the Old English, and these texts
are relatively frequently anthologised in textbooks for students of Old English. Even
the passage describing Scyld’s burial is frequently anthologised in introductory
texts; thus Cook and Tinker have Scyld’s burial, The Seafarer and Deor. The passage from the beginning of ‘The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan’, as it is now known,
from the Old English Orosius, corresponds to materials found in Bright’s Reader, in the Old English Handbook of Marjorie Anderson and Blanche Colton Williams,
and in Sweet’s Reader.32 The source of the twelfth-century short poem The Grave, added below the end of the homilies and other texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS
Bodley 343, is a much more difficult problem. Its most readily available edition in
English is that of Louise Dudley in Modern Philology in 1914.33 This does not seem the most likely source; perhaps Borges had the earlier version by J. J. Conybeare in
his Il ustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.34 Conybeare also prints texts with a facing rendition into Modern English and also one in Latin, which may well have been
useful for Borges.35 However, Conybeare does not provide the title under which
Borges rendered the text, calling it a ‘Norman-Saxon Fragment on Death’.
A clue for the source of The Grave and for the Solomon and Saturn material
comes from the last note in the collection, which refers to the Solomon and Saturn
dialogue: Debemos esta cita a las curiosas anotaciones que Longfel ow agregó a su
versión inglesa de la Comedia , publicada en 1867 (‘We owe this reference to the curious annotations added by Longfellow to his English version of the Comedia, published in 1867’).36 The reference, a lengthy one, discusses the chronology of
31 For this story, see James Woodal , The Man in the Mirror of the Book: A Life of Jorge Luis Borges (London, 1996), pp. 235–6. For the possible source see Richard Hamer, trans., A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London, 1970).
32 See F. G. Cassidy and Richard N. Ringler, Bright’s
Old English Grammar & Reader, 3rd edn (New York, 1971); Marjorie Anderson and Blanche Colton Williams, Old English Handbook (Boston, 1935); and Henry Sweet, Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, 15th edn, rev. Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford, 1967).
33 Louise Dudley, ‘The Grave’, Modern Philology 11 (1914), 429–42. She connects the poem to the body and soul tradition in Old English and early Middle English, and judiciously considers its possible connection to the Worcester ‘Fragments’ but concludes that The Grave does not belong to that tradition because it is ‘calmly descriptive and universal, philosophic in tone’ (p. 439). She suggests that the poem is not a fragment, pace Conybeare, but a poem with a haunting quality in its last lines, a quality which allies it with the poetry of death and burial, not the penitential genre of body and soul poetry.
34 Conybeare, Il ustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, pp. 270–73. Conybeare had previously edited the fragment, its editio princeps, in Archaeologia 17 (1814), 173–5.
35 Lavender, ‘The Snorra Edda’, argues on pages 10–11 that for the Gylfaginning, Borges used as a major source the translation of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Poetic Edda (New York, 1916). Lavender’s argument is convincing, and agrees with my own thinking as developed here, but it could well be the case that Borges (and, in my view, Kodama as an equal partner on this project) would work from the Old Norse directly and make their translation from it, consulting Brodeur’s text in difficult places. Their declaration that the translation is their own work is complicated only slightly by this kind of translational procedure, something which most translators admit (if quietly).
36 Breve Antología Anglosajona, p. 801.
Borges and Old English Poetry
73
Adam as believed in the Middle Ages and references Dante and the Talmud. Long-
fellow’s translation and commentary on Dante’s Divina Commedia is clearly a rich source for Borges and Kodama. A second clue is the fourth note after the story
of Ohthere passage, which reads: Longfel ow ha usado este relato para escribir el
hermoso poema que se titula The Discoverer of the North Cape (‘Longfellow used this story to write the beautiful poem entitled ‘The Discoverer of the North Cape’).37
As Borges and Kodama point out, Longfellow had great interest in Anglo-Saxon
England and in thinking about the spiritual and physical world of early medieval
Europe. Final y, and most obviously, Longfellow’s Complete Works lists three texts explicitly translated from the Old English. They include Beowulf’s passage to Heorot,
the Soul’s Complaint against the Body ( Soul and Body I), and The Grave.38 In other words, despite the clear declaration that they were working directly from the Old
English texts, it seems likely that Borges and Kodama used other translations and
read other commentaries and comments on this material. Intriguingly, the person
who may have been most influential on the translations from Old English of a man
often credited with inventing modernism and showing the way to postmodernism
may have been one of the most conservative and reactionary figures of nineteenth-
century American literature: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Conclusion
Umberto Eco perhaps provides a useful way to draw these ideas together with his
idea of translation as a negotiation involving original text, publisher, economic
matters, the target text, various kinds of approaches to the translation and reader
responses.39 He points out that translation involves common sense, but that when
a great poet translates another great poet, the interest lies in seeing how that poet
handles the material and enhances it. The translator’s invisibility, a major issue for most translation theorists, does not apply to Borges for two reasons:40 first, he is a far more visible presence than are the Old English and Old Norse writers that he
addresses; and second, he interpolates himself into his work so forceful y (Borges
himself is always his own best character) that the reader of his work in Old English
is constantly confronted with the fact of Borges’ interest. That is to say, Borges
advertises his own engagement with Old English at every opportunity. It remains,
therefore, a striking and particular irony that this most visible of thinkers should
be essential y invisible both among Anglo-Saxonists for his engagement with their
material and among modern scholars of Borges himself, who find his passion for
this material so inexplicable. With Borges’ translations, even those made more
precise and careful by his final col aborator María Kodama, the situation is more
complicated yet. Borges presents as a particular kind of scholar of Old English
37 Ibid., p. 799.
38 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston, 1893).
39 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London, 2003), p. 34.
40 See, for example, Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995), and Douglas Robinson, Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason (Albany, NY, 2001).
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(and Old Norse, a subject for another day), in a sense a scholarly first responder,
the scholar who first opens up a field for a new audience and introduces its riches.
But real y he is a kind of enthusiast; Eco would argue that common sense requires
that he be understood in this context, as a passionate lover of the material who
wants to engage with it and should not have to answer for misunderstandings or
extravagances. And this certainly has some valence. At the same time, since Borges’
monographs about ancient Germanic literature and the history of English literature
are available as textbooks for the teaching of this material in Hispanic circles, his
scholarly acumen does perhaps also need to be probed and dissected. If his work is
treated as scholarly, then he should face the slings and arrows of scholarly analysis.
Or, then again, since we should be grateful to him, in the same way we should be
grateful to Seamus Heaney for his treatment of Beowulf, perhaps we should open a new category of literary-scholarly translation and put Heaney, Eco and Borges all in
that slot of our translational skopos. As Eco would argue, this would be a successful translational negotiation.
5
‘Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland’:
What Would Henryson or Tolkien Say?
Rory McTurk
The quotation in my title is taken from a lecture delivered by Seamus
Heaney in Aberdeen in 2001 and published the following year.1 After making
the claim for Beowulf that I quote, Heaney goes on to cite Bede’s account of
Ireland in the Preface to his Ecclesiastical History, as follows:
There are no reptiles, and no snake can exist there; for although often brought over
from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die.
In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of
books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading
poison and reduced the swelling.2
It is not entirely clear what Heaney means by this, but he seems to be suggesting
that his translation has turned Beowulf into something distinctively Irish that will have, to judge from what he says elsewhere in his lecture, a healing, palliative effect, allowing Beowulf to be seen as part of a ‘Britannic’ body of literature which includes literature in the Celtic languages as well as English, and so c
ontributing to increased understanding among the peoples of Ireland and its neighbouring islands.3 If this is
indeed Heaney’s claim, it is a large one, and I should like to question in this paper his competence to make it. I am not competent myself to discuss in detail the supposed
‘Irishness’ of Heaney’s translation, though I would note that it has been pointed out, by one who is competent to do so, that ‘the use of Irish vocabulary’ in his translation is ‘actual y quite limited’ (‘Irish vocabulary’ is meant here in the sense of words
1 The lecture, titled ‘Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and
Britain’, is published in Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers. Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London, 2002; paperback edn 2003), pp. 364–82, see pp. 380–82. I am grateful to Adam Wyeth for drawing my attention to it.
2 The quotation is evidently from Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 39–40.
3 See Heaney, Finders Keepers, pp. 378–9.
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characteristic of Hiberno-English, some of them derived from the Irish language).4
What I shall do is concentrate on certain details of two of Heaney’s translations with the following conviction in mind: that whatever innovations a translator intends to
introduce into the work he is translating, he must approach the task of translation
with a clear understanding of the syntactic and, where poetry is concerned, metrical
workings of his original. I shall suggest that in translating Robert Henryson’s Middle Scots poem, The Testament of Cresseid,5 Heaney fails altogether to recognise an important metrical feature of his original, and that in translating Beowulf he shows only a partial appreciation of the parallelism characteristic of its syntax and style.6
I shall introduce my discussion of his Beowulf translation with an account of the poem’s parallelism as analysed by J. R. R. Tolkien7 and Alistair Campbel ,8 and with some remarks on Tolkien’s recently published translation of Beowulf, completed as long ago as 1926.9 In this way I hope to answer by implication the question raised
