The Translatability of Manuscript Pages Containing Old English Verse (with an Illustrative Translation of The Exeter Book, Folios 98r–101r and 124r–124v)

Is a manuscript translatable? Those of us who study and interpret texts written before print culture are used to thinking of manuscript pages as things that are photographed, transcribed, and edited. And we use these manifestations variously in our work as researchers and teachers. But are manuscript pages translatable? That is, are the physical and visual features that bind folio and language translatable things? Within the field of Anglo-Saxon studies I wish to point this question toward codices containing Old English verse. Although images accompany some vernacular writings, most Old English poems were copied without images. This study will focus on the translatability of those folios filled with text only and concerns itself specifically with the visual fusion of poem and page rather than the sensory connections elicited by the material of the manuscript. I argue that translating the visual substance of the manuscript page along with the language of its poem has the potential to direct the Old English poem in translation back to the original work in a more genuine manner than most translation practice accomplishes.

I ask the opening question within the context of Walter Benjamin's notion of Übersetzbarkeit:

Übersetzbarkeit eignet gewissen Werken wesentlich—das heißt nicht, ihre Übersetzung ist wesentlich für sie selbst, sondern will besagen, daß eine bestimmte Bedeutung, die den Originalen innewohnt, sich in ihrer Übersetzbarkeit äußere.¹

Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.²

For Benjamin a text's degree of translatability matches the ripeness of its language. A text that is information based might be easy to translate from one language to another, but the original work would have a low degree of translatability and therefore would not inspire many translators to take up the task of re-creating it in a new language. Evaluating the corpus of Old English poetry, we might say that an especially enigmatic poem like Wulf and Eadwacer has a high degree of translatability, though it is arguably one of the most difficult Old English poems to translate. In this language-centered discussion the translator selects a text to work with not because it can be translated but because it should be translated. The numerous versions of Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, and many other Old English poems attest to the vitality of their language. When language is mined from manuscripts and placed in critical editions or transcriptions, the material of the manuscript is necessarily left behind. The material, importantly, creates sense experiences for the handler and reader of the manuscript, most notably through its physical touch and its visual arrangement, and to differing degrees the physical object can be re-created in an attempt to capture a portion of those sense experiences.

Alongside Benjamin's idea of translatability, his notion of the aura enveloping an original work is also an illuminating concept when one considers the visual dimension of Old English poems, which survive predominantly in single copies and therefore have an especially vital connection to their pages.³ In the cases of poems surviving in single copies, the work—which is the page and its verses—is the original for us even if the poem may have had numerous older versions. It is the singularity of the work that gives it the quality we might describe as aura-like, and it is from the singular work that we must create other versions.⁴ The full life of each poem extant in only one copy is unknowable to us. These poems would have appeared in other written displays and would have existed in different forms in people's minds, and each glimpse of those former manifestations must be mined and imagined from the (usually) single copy of each poem;⁵ likewise, the later life of each poem includes numerous manifestations through editions and translations. Translation is in fact the...