"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

ON TRANSLATING OLD ENGLISH POETRY

ON TRANSLATING OLD ENGLISH POETRY INTRODUCTION When poets are asked to describe the act of writing or translating poetry, they often turn to metaphor to unravel or explain a process that remains in part mysterious. If writing poetry is like dancing solo with the world, translating poetry is like dancing with a partner you get to know over time. My partner usually comes from a different homeland with a different personal or cultural way of perceiving and performing in the world. Our rhythms, our dances, our expectations are different. We do, however, share a sense of rhythm, and we both utilize bone, muscle, sinew. We do different dances on similar legs. We have brains that process music, rhythm, movement. This is true for any translation dance—it’s a shared movement between worlds. My dance with the Old English poet is special in that his or her language is part of my linguistic inheritance. The poet says bān where I say “bone” and hūs where I say “house,” but the meanings remain largely the same (even if the Anglo-Saxon house is quite different from my own). On the other hand, when the poet says dōm, drawing on a complex linguistic and cultural storehouse, he or she means something like “judgment, reputation, honor, glory,” which is a far cry from the meaning of “doom” that I have inherited, meaning “fate, destruction, death,” which first arises in the fourteenth century. So we speak a different but related language. Some of our words mean the same thing; the great majority do not. My partner’s language is vastly more inflected than my own, though we share similar inflections that have survived the centuries. We come from different worlds but 2 | ON TRANSLATING OLD ENGLISH POETRY we are both human, and what we share makes the act of translation possible, even if finally what we recognize is a strange but human otherness together. We are both poets who love the written word. We dream up worlds with these words which reflect the worlds we inhabit. We cherish human connection (though we connect in different ways) and lament the loss of loved ones (though our lamenting rituals are different). We dance together what we might call a dance of difference. My Old English poetic partner may be a court composer or a Christian monk. His or her natural mode of dancing out rhythms is alliterative strong stress where mine is metrical feet and rhyme. In order to make this dance work, we must share ideas and languages—or at least I must do this since I’m the living partner doing the translator’s choreography , but sometimes it seems, in the middle of a line, when we are sitting poetically together with warriors at the meadhall table, that my partner is communicating movements, inviting meanings, teasing me and my world with differences in language and culture or tongue-in-cheek ambiguity. We communicate together across the long space of time and shape the dance. When the dance is done, I can analyze the movement and the steps, as I’ve done below, but something of this dance remains a mystery. This is as it should be. We can use critical language to understand the language of poetry, but this has its limitations. There is always an unconscious element to the process that remains hidden like some mysterious force in some unknown place. Sometimes after a hard night’s work on my own lines or lines in Beowulf, the right words, both beautiful and true, just pop into mind without prompting. This is what makes writing and translating poetry both a transcendent experience and a true delight. OLD ENGLISH POETIC METER Old English poetry is built on an alliterative, strong-stress pattern. Each line normally contains four strongly stressed syllables, for example: 1 2 3 4 Ic . swiftne g . eseah on swa3e fēran I a swift (thing) saw on the road travel The words that are stressed depend on their nature and function in the sentence (verbs, for example, are more important than adverbs) and in their placement (the first word in a poem or section is often important). The ON TRANSLATING OLD ENGLISH POETRY | 3 initial consonants of accented syllables normally alliterate only with themselves (b alliterates with b, m with m, sp with sp, etc.); any vowel can alliterate with any other vowel (a alliterates with a...