A Somber Glory: Two Books of Translations from the Old English

Before me on my desk are two ambitious new works of translation. The first, slimmer and less compendious, is Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited and translated by Craig Williamson, a professor of English literature at Swarthmore College. Professor Williamson has previously published Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book—a book of translations from the Old English with accompanying commentary. Tom Shippey, the distinguished Anglo-Saxonist, has contributed a foreword to this new book, which describes the cultural and historical milieu of Old English poetry. The volume's glossy black dust jacket bears the iron-toned image of a horseman hurling a javelin, "a detail from the replica of a battle helmet found at Sutton Hoo." Above that image Beowulf is written in gray medieval script. Of roughly double the heft of Williamson's text is The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, edited by Greg Delanty, a well-regarded Irish poet who teaches at St. Michael's College in Vermont, and Michael Matto, a linguist and medievalist who teaches at Adelphi University. The jacket of this tome, which was published by Norton, has a modern look: it is cream-colored, the lettering of the title and editors' names are set in modern fonts. At the top, above the title, is the significant information—the name in bold font, as if an imprimatur—Foreword by Seamus Heaney. The book is massive, with the Old English text of each poem facing its translation. Between the title and the editors' names is a small reproduction of the "gold plaque with entwined stylized arms from the Staffordshire hoard." The front flap of the dust jacket informs the reader: "The 123 poems collected here [are] freshly translated by an exciting roster of contemporary poets." As one of the twenty or so living translators of Beowulf, I am keenly interested in the first text, but as a poet with a background in Old English, I have some interest in the second text as well.

Translation is, at best, a benign shipwreck. A poem suffers a sea-change at the hands of the translator, but not always into "something rich and strange." Yet excellence, I think, is possible; some few translations are works of genius. The reader may have his or her touchstones of that excellence: Gregory Rabassa's translations of Cortazar and Marquez and Edith Grossman's recent translation of Don Quixote are two of mine.

Translation is a vexed affair, especially if one's goal is absolute fidelity. Languages being the idiosyncratic and separate semantic systems that they are, exact synonyms between two languages are rare. So the translator must traffic in equivalences rather than in exactitudes. Yet this humbling understanding is also liberating—the translator no longer needs to skulk in the shadows, invisible, with her magic tracing paper; she can be a poet, a maker, in her own right. Ekphrasis, rather than copy work, is the better metaphor: Auden before Breughel's "Icarus," Rilke before the "Archaic Torso of Apollo." The translator must attempt to create a poem in response to a poem—or, rather, in response to his or her most intimate and comprehending reading of the original text. Thus, as Edith Grossman puts it, "translators scour the dictionary, many dictionaries, in fact, and rummage diligently, sometimes frantically through thesauruses and encyclopedias, and histories as well, for definitions and meanings."

The fidelity is to the translator's clairvoyant reading of the text, fostered by ardent scholarship. The space of creation for a translator is that liminal dimension between texts and languages, that fertile intertidal zone where words metamorphose and metaphorical thinking multiplies possible renderings; the translator's imagination is the catalyst and the surface on which the languages interact. Thus the translator is a creator of a peculiar sort. Always in view is the original text. One remembers Vermeer used a camera obscura...