The Nibelungenlied: with The Klage ed. by William T. Whobrey (review)

In the more than eight centuries since it was first composed, the anonymous Nibelungenlied, often referred to as Germany’s national epic, has attracted abundant scholarly attention, particularly in the past 150 years. There has been no shortage of translations of the Nibelungenlied’s 2,379 four-line stanzas into both English and modern German. This most recent English-language rendering, by William T. Whobrey, will unquestionably occupy a position of significance, in no small part because of the authentically new and valuable features that Whobrey brings here to the Anglophone world.

Arguably the single most substantial new ingredient is Whobrey’s inclusion of the so-called Klage (or Lament). Present in each of the twelve essentially complete Nibelungenlied manuscripts, this sequel to the tale documents the aftermath of the death and destruction that characterize the conclusion of the Nibelungenlied. Given the ubiquity of the Lament in the Nibelungenlied manuscript tradition, Whobrey correctly conjectures that medieval scriptoria and patrons must have viewed this coda as a ‘companion text’ (p. xxi) to the more celebrated work that it accompanies. Thus it is actually surprising that Whobrey’s presentation of both texts marks the first time they have ever been made available to an English-language readership together in the same volume.

Chief among the goals that Whobrey sets for himself is to ‘provide a readable, prose translation . . . that does not rely on anachronistic language to create a kind of faux medieval texture’ (p. viii). Whobrey’s evident competitor among currently in-print translations is the sparkling 1965 version by A.T. Hatto (The Nibelungenlied [New York: Penguin]), which, even after over half a century, is still the most affordable and readily available English rendering of the Nibelungenlied. Whobrey refers to Hatto’s English, not inaccurately albeit without citing specific evidence, as ‘now somewhat dated’ (p. viii). Even a cursory side-by-side examination of these two translations reveals sporadic passages where Whobrey’s updating of the English will be welcome to modern readers. For instance, Hatto depicts Siegfried as ‘a gay and valiant knight’ (p. 131), a noun phrase that Whobrey renders as ‘[t]hat bold and noble knight’ (p. 83). Or in the pivotal passage where Siegfried ‘drew a golden ring from [Brunhild’s] finger and then took her girdle’ (p. 93), those same two objects—symbols of Brunhild’s virginity—appear in Whobrey’s text, more appropriately, as a ‘ring’ and a ‘belt’ (p. 57). The problem here and elsewhere is not the meaning of the Middle High German text (which, with very few exceptions, is clear enough, having been pored over by scholars for well over a century), but rather Hatto’s occasional use of outmoded vocabulary.

Nonetheless, Hatto infuses his rendering of the text with a stylistic elegance that to a certain extent compensates for the utter loss, endemic to any prose rendition of a verse text, of the sublime formal aspects of the original poem. For the Nibelungenlied is written in verse format—stanzas complete with rhyme and meter—and must inherently have sounded vastly different to medieval audiences than does any modern prose translation. One example will illustrate the efficacy of Hatto’s intermittently elevated diction. During the journey to King Etzel’s court, the Burgundians pause briefly at night, and we are told that ‘the gleam of the bright moon peeped above the clouds’ (Hatto, p. 202). Whobrey renders this same passage, ‘The moonlight was partly visible through the clouds’ (p. 133)—an entirely accurate translation, but one that seems unnecessarily flat, particularly given that the imposing verse form of the original has been completely stripped away. On a more strictly grammatical level, certain of Whobrey’s renderings also come across as incongruously colloquial. To cite one example, Whobrey recurrently uses the indicative mood, in place of the more appropriate subjunctive, in ‘as if’ clauses: ‘as if there was no tomorrow’ (p...