E L E A N O R J O H N S O N
________________________________________________TRANSLATIONS FROM OLD ENGLISH
Translation: literally, a carrying over. Thus, a lifting up and a moving over. Poetic translations lift up form and meaning and carry them over linguistic obstacles. Most often, these obstacles are cultural, ethnic, or national. All of these are latently spatial, as the image of the carry-over implies. But I have become increasingly fascinated by the carryings over that take place through time, rather than space, and by the problems of carry-over that arise not between different languages that co-exist simultaneously, but between versions of the same language as it flexes and morphs over time. More specifically, I am enthralled (made thrall, or slave) by the poetic forms of Old English—their bizarre tendency toward elision, their eerie musicality, their affective range, and their sometimes eye-crossing proximity to, sometimes vertiginous distance from, modern English poetics.
Old English is deeply weird to the speaker of Modern English, and I mean that in the most Anglo-Saxon sense: wyrd in Old English means simply “fate,” not our modern meaning of “strange.” Shakespeare straddles these two meanings in MacBeth, calling the witches who tempt MacBeth, “the weird sisters”—at once bizarre and fateful. Old English is the weird sister of contemporary English: alien and bizarre, yet strangely predictive and determinative of the ways of meaning available to modern English.
This is not just true on the level of diction and vocabulary, but also on the level of poetic genre. Old English poetic genres range from lamentations through sagas, but also include some smaller and less familiar forms: versified recipes, medical prescriptions, laws, and riddles show up in the Old English corpus. These paradigmatic prose genres in modern English signified poetically a thousand years ago. The verse may have functioned mnemonically, but I believe it also served an aesthetic purpose. Indeed, perhaps that the aesthetics served the mnemonics—do we not, still, tend to remember that which is beautiful more easily and readily than that which is drab and unadorned? Of course. But, since the advent of the Rx pad, the post-it, the recipe book, and (lest they ever be forgotten) the printing press and its dreaded offspring the internet, memory has become a quasi-vestigial limb of our cultural body. Perhaps as a result, prose is everywhere, while poetry and its wrought genres are in exile.
But, think and hope, we can recover some of the exiled potential poetic genres by reaching back in time, into the genre-hoard of Old English.
Doing so, of course, and carrying these forms forth into modern English, creates a problem of tone. How to render a prescription that is phrased as a possession narrative? How to render the eeriness of a verbal charm against dwarf possession? To say that there is no potential for humour in these poems is to close down on the power of translation itself, to unduly chasten the play available to the translator in her native (modern) language. The multiplicity of tone in Old English poems has led me, at times, to do a simultaneous translation into two tones of the same original piece—one comical, one straight. One such poem is included in the following. In some poems, clearly meant in Old English to seem eerie and disquieting, I have attempted to maintain that sense of creepiness, even when the explicit content of the poems would ring ludicrous in a modern English poem taken wholly out of context. The problem of tone is irresoluble, but weirdly generative.
The main poetic form—broadly speaking—of Old English poetry is that of alliterative verse, the rules of which I have tried to reproduce as consistently as possible, without too badly torturing the syntax or diction of the original. Perhaps because this verse form lies at the very root of English poetics, and because maturation involves a certain rejection of the past, alliteration has become disfavored in contemporary poetic practice and criticism. It can feel lame, jokey, and obvious. It seems the poetic call-sign of adolescence. Part of what I want to achieve with my translations is a reclamation of alliterative verse as a powerful, mature form in its own right. Simply linking together two alike sounds is unimpressive; linking them to a supervening system of stresses, syllabic counts, pauses, and sense-breaks, is entirely other.
A final difficulty of translating through time is archival. Since many of the poems of Old English survive in only one—often very tattered—manuscript copy, any process of translation is also a process of coming to terms with holes and lacunae in the physical text. In the translation below of “The Ruin” I have decided to represent the illegibilities of the manuscript as white spaces on the page, to let the wormholes and wear-marks function in tandem with the poem itself, rather than in contravention of it.
The second poem “The Lament of the Woman” may have been written by a woman, and is thus something of an outlier in the Old English corpus. “Deor,” the title of the third piece, is the name of a perhaps fictional renowned court poet. The poem he tells is his attempt to comfort himself during a period of unemployment. In it, he reminds himself of the examples of other great mythic heroes who have survived worse calamities than his own. He uses his tale-hoard to ease his personal struggles, and marks off segments of his grieving process with a refrain, which is repeated identically each time in the Old English, but which I have rendered with a slight difference each time, preserving the original for the last go. The final three poems are medical instructions, one for treating water-elf illness, one for dealing with dwarves, the other for ridding oneself of bees. “Around-goers” are “bees.”
[ page 1 of 6 ]