The Old English Verse Line in Translation: Steps Toward a New Theory of Page Presentation

In How to Read an Oral Poem, John Miles Foley (2002:104–05) produces an ethnopoetic translation of the opening lines of Beowulf, focusing on a structural approach that highlights the poem’s major units and patterns in an effort to make today’s audience more fluent in the traditional register.¹ Considering the poem’s previous presentations, he writes (104):

These conventional editions and translations aren’t moving toward Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetics, but rather toward a “party-line” or consensus concept of what poetry ought to be—how it ought to look and how it ought to work. Since Anglo-Saxon poetics overlaps with this modern concept to some degree, since its terms converge in some ways with our terms, any such presentation can claim ethnopoetic progress. But along with that illusory progress comes the distortion inherent in converting a poem to something it isn’t, in reading it into submission.

Anyone who visits a major library and looks through the dozens of translations of Beowulf or anthologies of Old English poetry more generally can easily see that verse translators usually give little attention to the page presentation of the poem, despite the great differences in prosodic systems employed in the target language (heroic couplets, blank verse, free verse, attempts at recreating the alliterative meter of the original, and so on), and in terms of visual lineation most translations of Beowulf resemble the stacked whole-lines of Chaucer or Milton. The questions I wish to pursue in this short essay center therefore on the presentation of Old English verse in translation (rather than on the presentation utilized by critical editions): with respect to lineation, what are the default presentations typically employed by verse translators, and how might new directions in graphic representations enhance our understanding of Old English poetics in translation? To pursue these questions, I will use the short lyric Cædmon’s Hymn as an example text, briefly illustrating my process of translation and then suggesting some new ways to format the translated text.²

The initial task of the verse translator of Old English is to determine what if any rearranging of verses (half-lines) and smaller grammatical constituents is necessary. While it is possible to produce a verse-by-verse rendering of Cædmon’s Hymn, some minor adjustments allow the clauses to be recast into more familiar syntactical units. Whether or not Old English meter can be reproduced in present-day English is a difficult question.³ While the short answer to this question is no, it is possible to re-create a likeness to the original meter. What follows is a verse translation in which I have used a base pattern of two stresses per half-line, though by necessity about a third of the verses contain three primary stresses in translation.⁴ Alliteration is generally present, but it is no longer meter-governing. The half-lines are fused together in this presentation and I have indicated in brackets to the right my slight syntactical adjustments. Other choices are too minor to warrant comment.

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc, weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,  3 ece drihten, or onstealde. He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;  6 þa middangeard moncynnes weard, ece drihten, æfter teode firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.⁵  9

Now we must praise the protector of heaven’s kingdom,  [1a / 1b] the might of the maker and his mind’s purpose,  [2a / 2b] the labors of the glorious father—everlasting Lord—  [3a / 4a] because he brought about each wondrous thing’s beginning.  [3b + 4b] At first he fashioned heaven as a roof  [5a / 6a] for mankind’s children. Then he—holy creator  [5b / þa + 6b] and protector of people—prepared this middle ground,  [7b / 8b + 7a] the whole earth, for human beings—  [9a] everlasting Lord, God almighty.  [8a / 9b]

This is the point where the work of the verse translator of Old English often seems to stop. Whether presentation choice occurs before, during, or after the translation process...