Translating Early Medieval Poetry
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in my title. While it is not certain that Heaney would have made the same claim for
the ‘Irishness’ of his translation of Henryson as he does for that of Beowulf (though this is perhaps suggested by Conor McCarthy’s use of the term ‘Hiberno-Scots’ in
connection with it),10 I shall suggest in conclusion that, in the case of Beowulf, at least, there may be better ways of making it ‘a book from Ireland’ than what Heaney
has to offer.
Henryson and Heaney
In a recent article I have drawn attention to the fact that in The Testament of Cresseid, a response if not quite a sequel to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson differs from Chaucer in varying the scansion of the name of the poem’s
female protagonist.11 Whereas Chaucer allows stress to fall on the second syl able of
the name Criseyde in all but one of the 166 times the name occurs in his poem, thus presenting the name, metrical y speaking, as iambic, Henryson, in whose poem the
name occurs thirty times (in the form Cresseid), presents it in eleven of those thirty 4 Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf : Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 166–7.
5 In Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables, trans. Seamus Heaney (London, 2009), pp. 1–47.
6 I have used the first edition: Heaney, trans., Beowulf (London, 1999).
7 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of “Beowulf”’, in Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, trans. John R. Clark Hal , rev. and introd. C. L. Wrenn (London, rev.
edn 1950, rpt 1967), pp. ix–xliii, at pp. xxxvii–xliii.
8 A. Campbel , ‘The Old English Epic Style’, in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn (London, 1962), pp. 13–26, see pp. 20–23.
9 J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sel ic Spel , ed.
Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014).
10 See Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008),
pp. 127–35. I say ‘perhaps’ because it is not certain that McCarthy uses the term ‘Scots’
correctly, witness his confusing use of the term ‘Scots Gaelic’ (as opposed to ‘Scottish Gaelic’).
11 Rory McTurk, ‘Redemption through Iambic Reversal? The Case of Henryson’s
Cresseid’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 41 ( Essays in Honour of Oliver Pickering, ed. Janet Burton, William Marx, and Veronica O’Mara) (2010), 134–45.
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instances as trochaic, i.e. with the accent on the first syl able. In the remaining nineteen instances he presents it as iambic, as Chaucer does. Whereas Chaucer departs
from the iambic presentation of the name only once out of 166 times, in circum-
stances which are exceptional (where the name occurs at the end of a line and has
the trisyl abic form Criseyda, in which stress fal s on the first and the final syl able, thus facilitating end rhyme in a subsequent line),12 Henryson’s departure from it in
as many as eleven out of thirty instances can hardly be called exceptional. It raises
the question of whether Henryson’s variation between the two metrical forms of
the name is in some way significant for an understanding of his poem’s meaning,
and I have in fact argued that the difference between the two forms, as it appears
in Henryson’s poem, reflects a difference between Chaucer and Henryson in their
treatment of the character of Criseyde/Cresseid, the iambic form reflecting Chau-
cer’s treatment and the trochaic form Henryson’s.13 I shall not repeat this argument
here, but will note a point that I made only briefly in the earlier article: that Heaney, in the introduction to his translation of Henryson’s poem, speaks of ‘his Cresseid
(stress on second syl able)’, the ‘his’ clearly referring to Henryson.14 This indicates that Heaney has read Henryson’s presentation of the name as consistently iambic,
and that he intends Cresseid to be read with stress consistently on the second syl able in his translation. This has several disadvantages, both for Heaney and for readers of his translation. The main disadvantage for Heaney is that it shows up with merciless
clarity his insensitivity to the scansion of the original; some of the disadvantages for his readers will be discussed below. A summary of Henryson’s poem now follows.
The Testament of Cresseid relates what happened to Cresseid after her desertion of Troilus, her Trojan lover, for Diomeid, a Greek warrior, the story of which is told in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which ends with an account of Troilus’ death. The Testament is not quite a sequel to Chaucer’s poem, as noted above, since its action takes place before the death of Troilus. Abandoned by Diomeid, Cresseid resorts to
promiscuity (if we may believe what ‘sum men sayis’, line 77), and reproaches Venus
and Cupid for her predicament.15 She then has a dream in which Cupid accuses
her of blasphemy against himself and Venus, his mother, before an assembly of the
gods, here represented as the seven planets. Both Saturn and Cynthia (the moon)
condemn her to physical ugliness and beggarhood, and Cynthia explicitly imposes
on her a sickness that will reduce her to begging like a leper (‘lyke ane lazarous’,
line 343). She awakes to find herself disfigured (line 349), with her face showing
the symptoms of leprosy (line 372), and in shame retires to a leper house where she
12 The lines in question are Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, lines 169 and 171. The rhyming element at the end of line 171 is capital A, the name of the first letter of the alphabet. See The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, general editor Larry D. Benson (based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson) (Oxford, 1988), p. 475.
13 See McTurk, ‘Redemption’, pp. 141–5.
14 See Henryson, The Testament, trans. Heaney, p. ix.
15 Quotations from The Testament are from the text facing Heaney’s translation in Henryson, The Testament, trans. Heaney. The edition on which that text is based, Selected Poems of Robert Henryson and Wil iam Dunbar, ed. Douglas Gray (London, 1998) has not been accessible. The line numbering (not supplied by Heaney) is that of the text in Robert Henryson: The Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1987), pp. 111–31.
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recites a lament, blaming her drastical y changed circumstances on Fortune (lines
412, 454, 469). She goes begging with the lepers, and the climax of the poem comes
when Troilus rides past her with a group of victorious Trojan knights. Not recog-
nising her, but reminded by something in her appearance of his beloved Cresseid,
he throws a purse of gold and some jewels into her lap and rides on. She herself
does not recognise Troilus, but when informed of his identity by one of the lepers
she recites another lament, this time applying the fickleness of Fortune to herself
(lines 549–552; cf. line 574), and thrice contrasting herself with Troilus in respect of her faithlessness and his constancy: ‘O fals Cresseid and trew knicht Troylus!’ (lines 546, 553; cf. line 560; note the iambic scansion of her name in this instance). She
then makes her ‘testament’ (line 576), leaving to Troilus the ring he had given her in exchange for hers (in Troilus and Criseyde, III. 1368),16 and dies.
It may first be noted that Heaney’s apparent insistence on an iambic reading of
Cresseid’s name forces on the reader the need to apply trochaic substitution (or
iambic reversal) in reading, whether mental y or aloud, the name as it appears in his
translation of some of the lines where it is presented in the original as trochaic.17 In the following five instances the line reads awkwardly in the translation if an
iambic
reading of the name is applied, as Heaney seems to require, but smoothly and
satisfyingly if it is read trochaical y. I give in each case the line as it appears in the original, to make clear Henryson’s trochaic presentation of the name in each case.
With Henryson’s line 299, then:
The pane of Cresseid for to modifie –
we may compare Heaney’s
Decide how painful Cresseid’s fate should be –
and with Henryson’s line 310:
And passit doun quhair cairfull Cresseid lay,
we may compare Heaney’s
And coming down to where sad Cresseid lay.
With Henryson’s line 332:
And red ane bill on Cresseid quhair scho lay,
compare Heaney’s
And read decrees on Cresseid where she lay.
With Henryson’s line 497:
Quhair Cresseid sat, not witting quhat scho was18
compare Heaney’s
Where Cresseid sat, not knowing who she was;
and with Henryson’s line 537, final y:
16 See The Riverside Chaucer, p. 531.
17 By ‘trochaic substitution’ (or ‘iambic reversal’) is meant here the placing of stress on the first syl able of Cresseid in defiance of Heaney’s requirement that it should be placed on the second. See further Donka Minkova, ‘Chaucer’s Language: Pronunciation, Morphology, Metre’, in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 130–57, at pp. 153–5.
18 On the question of whether the participle ‘witting’ should here have as its subject
‘Cresseid’, mentioned earlier in the line, or ‘Troylus’, mentioned two lines earlier, or whether ambiguity is intended, see McTurk, ‘Redemption’, p. 143.
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79
Quhen Cresseid understude that it was he,
compare Heaney’s
When Cresseid understood that it was he.
The awkwardness of reading the name as iambic in most, if not al , of these cases
is surely obvious. It is possible that Heaney would have allowed a trochaic reading
of the name in these instances, but the words in his introduction, quoted above,
suggest otherwise. There can be no doubt that he intends the name to be stressed
on the second syl able in the two cases now to be discussed, where the stress in the
original is clearly on the first syl able. The first such case is at Henryson’s line 380: Quod Cresseid: ‘Father, I wald not be kend;…’,
translated as:‘Father,’ said Cresseid, ‘I cannot bear
To be recognised, …’
and the second at line 522:
And in the skirt of Cresseid doun can swak;
translated as:And threw them down into Cresseid’s skirt.
In each of these two instances Heaney produces a line of nine syl ables in place of
the ten-syl able line in the original, and appears to use the stressed, second syl able of Cresseid, as he reads it, to compensate for the syl able thus lost. Again, this makes for awkward reading in the translation.
Particularly awkward are two further instances of Heaney’s failure to reproduce
Henryson’s trochaic scansion of the name. The first of these is at Henryson’s line 402: God wait gif Cresseid was ane sorrowfull gest,
translated as:Cresseid, God knows, must have been a stricken guest …,
and the second at line 526:
The lipper folk to Cresseid than can draw
To se the equall distributioun
Of the almous, …
which is translated:
The lepers, to make sure the alms were doled
Equal y among them, pressed together
Around Cresseid, …
In each of these two cases Heaney seems to have gone out of his way to find
a context in which Cresseid’s name can be read iambical y, in the first case by
producing a line which sags in the middle with a succession of four unstressed syl a-
bles, and in the second by moving the name to a different place altogether in the
sequence of lines. Does this mean that in these two cases he has noticed the trochaic
scansion of the name in the original and chosen not to adopt it?
Of the eleven cases in which the name occurs trochaical y in Henryson’s
poem, two remain to be discussed. These are at lines 408 and 490. Here, it may be
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admitted, Heaney’s iambic presentation of the name reads smoothly enough. One
may compare Henryson’s line 408:
O cative Creisseid! For now and ever mair
with Heaney’s
O poor Cresseid! Now and for evermore …;
and Henryson’s line 490:
The way quhair Cresseid with the lipper baid
with Heaney’s
Past where Cresseid with lepers made abode.
In the first of these two instances, however, it is questionable whether metrical
smoothness reflects the original accurately. In this line (408), spoken by Cresseid
herself in the first of her two laments and reflecting her point of view, the trochaic scansion of her name in the original19 gives a hint that she has begun to learn a
lesson in humility and self-awareness as a result of her dream, which is focalised
through her, i.e. narrated in terms of what she perceives, and in which sentence
is passed on her by Saturn and Cynthia, as shown above.20 In the account of the
dream, moreover, her name occurs three times in trochaic form (at lines 299, 310,
332). The smoothness of Heaney’s translation here, and his disregard of the trochaic
scansion of Cresseid’s name in this and the earlier instances, mean that the subtlety
of the original is lost on the reader.
The second of the two instances just quoted, line 490, needs to be seen in the
context of its placing in the poem. It is in fact the fourth in a sequence of five
trochaic instances of Cresseid’s name (the others occurring at lines 380, 402, 408
and 497, all of them quoted above) which occur without any intervening iambic
instance of the name, the last two of them in the account of Troilus riding past the
group of lepers among whom Cresseid is begging. These two instances occur in the
final lines of two successive rhyme royal stanzas, the second of which immediately
precedes the stanza in which it is told how Troilus fails to recognise Cresseid but
is reminded by her appearance ‘Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling’ (line
504), where the iambic scansion of the name is plain. Troilus is here reminded of
his beloved Cresseid, the ‘iambic’ Criseyde of Chaucer’s poem and most especial y
Book III of that poem, in which the story of their mutual love reaches its climax.
The change here in The Testament to an iambic form of the name from the trochaic form given in the preceding stanzas is an extraordinarily beautiful and subtle touch
on Henryson’s part, the effect of which is altogether lost in Heaney’s translation if his preferred scansion of the name is accepted.
I have concentrated here, as envisaged above, on just one aspect of Heaney’s
19 In Denton Fox’s reading of line 408, where the word ‘For’ following the name ‘Creisseid’
is lacking, giving a line of ten rather than eleven syl ables, the trochaic scansion of the name is even more pronounced than in the quotation above. See Fox, ed., Robert Henryson, p. 124. For Fox’s argument that ‘For’ here may be ‘a mistaken addition’, see his earlier edition, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981), p. 370; cf. p. 124.
20 On focalisation see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Jonathan Culle
r (Oxford, 1980), pp. 189–94; and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1988), pp. 72–8.
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translation of The Testament of Cresseid, a poem of 616 lines. In discussing his translation of Beowulf, a much longer poem (of 3182 lines),21 I shall also concentrate on just one aspect of the translation: its treatment of the use of parallelism by the
anonymous Beowulf-poet. Some account of this parallelism, seen by Campbell as
characteristic of ‘the Old English epic style’22 and discussed by Tolkien in relation to Beowulf,23 must first be given.
Beowulf and Tolkien
For consistency’s sake I give a summary of Beowulf, adapted here from the very brief summary by R. W. Chambers.24
Beowulf, a prince of the Geats, voyages to Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, king of
the Danes; there he destroys a monster, Grendel, who for twelve years has haunted
the hall by night and slain all he found there. When Grendel’s mother in revenge
makes an attack on the hal , Beowulf seeks her out and kil s her also in her under-
water abode. He then returns to his own country with honour and is rewarded by
King Hygelac, his uncle. Ultimately he himself becomes king of the Geats, and fifty
years later slays a dragon and is slain by it. The poem closes with an account of his
funeral.
In his prefatory remarks, first published in 1940, on John R. Clark Hal ’s prose
translation of Beowulf, Tolkien gives two translations by himself of lines 210–228 of the poem, in il ustration of its metre and style. The first of them is a confessedly ‘free’
translation into verse, conveying convincingly the content of the lines and imitating, no less convincingly, the metre and alliteration of Old English poetry.25 His fitting
of Modern English phrasing to Old English metrical patterns in this translation
means, however, that the patterns in question do not always correspond, line by line,
to those of the original, and that the characteristic style of the original is somewhat misrepresented. The second translation, which follows a quotation of these same
lines in the original, is ‘a literal rendering’ of them, ‘word by word and in the same order’, and is followed by a penetrating discussion of their style.26 It is with this