A Sense of Embattled Polemic: Liam Guilar on translations from the Old English by Chris McCully and Michael Alexander

Chris McCully, Old English Poems and Riddles (Carcanet, 2008), £9.95
Michael Alexander, The First Poems in English (Penguin Classics, 2008) and Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book (Anvil Press, 2007)

Chris McCully’s Old English Poems and Riddles is a collection of new translations from Old English. The best-known Anglo-Saxon poems are here, along with substantial extracts from Beowulf and a welcome selection of minor pieces. Though why the title needs to distinguish between poems and riddles, when the distinction is dubious and McCully’s translations ignore it, is the first of several inconsistencies in this book.

Given Fyfield’s aim to ‘make available some of the great classics of British and European literature’, a selection of Old English pieces in translation would appear to be a logical choice. However, this collection seems uncertain about the identity of its intended audience. This uncertainty is evident from McCully’s introduction: ‘The diction of these translations will likewise be found unsatisfying by those who have never read, and do not intend to read the originals.’ Why someone who has read the originals would need these translations, or why anyone would publish a translation described by the author as ‘unsatisfying’ for the likely buyer are interesting questions.  Nor is it clear from the introduction exactly what is on offer.  Early on, we are told ‘These are metrical translations’, but later warned to ‘note version, not “translation”.’ [His italics]

Any non-specialist reader, who might expect at least a quick overview of the period and the literature, is going to be disappointed. On the other hand, there is a lengthy and detailed discussion of metrics which assumes both knowledge of the originals and some patience on the part of the reader; at this point, we are no longer reading an introduction but eavesdropping on an unresolved technical argument.

What distinguishes this collection from other translations is immediately obvious in the layout of the poems: two columns, separated from each other by a blank space. Once the visual shock, and the inclination to read each column separately, have been overcome, the pace at which these poems move becomes their most distinctive feature. Whether you like Old English poems rattling along at this speed is a matter of personal choice. It is possible to argue that prosody is everything; it is difficult to imagine that many people would agree.

Perhaps the best way to discuss the collection as a whole is to look at one section as a translation; not to find fault or argue for correct readings, but to illuminate choices made by the translator.

‘The Wanderer’ is the first piece in the book. The first seven lines:

Oft him anhaga         are gebideð,
metudes miltse,         þeah þe he modcearig
geond lagulade         longe sceolde
hreran mid hondum         hrimcealde sæ,
wadan wræclastas.         Wyrd bið ful aræd!
Swa cwæð eardstapa,         earfeþa gemyndig,
wraþra wælsleahta,         winemæga hryre:

The prose sense of these lines is given in R.K Gordon’s deliberately prosaic Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Everyman, revised ed, 1954): 

‘Often the solitary man prays for favour, for the mercy of the Lord, though sad at heart he must needs stir with his hands for a weary while the icy sea across the watery ways, must journey the paths of exile; settled in truth is fate! So spoke the wanderer, mindful of hardships, of cruel slaughters, of the fall of kinsmen.’

McCully’s translation reads:

‘Wanderer, one-treader:          care-worn often,
mind-torn in mercy                 of Measurer’s grace,
struggles ocean streams –        long the estranging –
stirs ice-locked seas                with aching hands,
and wretched his spoor,          forceful fate’s wrath.’
So spoke the earth-stepper,    agony in mind’s-eye:
cleft brood of killing,               kinfolk fallen.

The first thing that should be noted is that this doesn’t make sense in Modern English, while the Old English does. Semantic and syntactic choices produce something that looks self-consciously archaic and is needlessly tangled. This is a version of Dark Age poetry which the poem itself doesn’t support.

The absence of references to the historical or cultural context for these poems in McCully’s introduction has carried over into his translation. Logically, if there is no attempt to represent Anglo-Saxon beliefs and attitudes, it does not matter if ‘Metudes’ is translated as ‘Measurer’s’ or the more common ‘Maker’s’ (though theologically they are miles apart). So the choices here, and throughout the book, have not been made on the basis of any concern for the poem as the artifact of a particular society and culture - which is a legitimate approach.

As McCully notes in his Introduction, alliterative verse puts a strain on the vocabulary if the translator is to avoid repetition. I’m not sure what a ‘one-treader’ is, nor why it is necessary in the first half line, but there are many similar word choices which call attention to themselves: some seem wrong-describing Grendle, for instance, who is all rage and appetites, as a necromancer; some are either archaic or obsolete (according to the OED). McCully’s argument that this was necessary to represent the diction of the originals is unconvincing, especially since it is not a consistent feature of his translations. There is nothing particularly archaic or formal about ‘when his battle dress    began to embrace me’ (‘Wulf and Eadwacer’).

The phrase ‘cleft brood of killing’ in the seventh line above signals another set of choices. Sense and melody are sacrificed to metre. So the beautiful lament for Beowulf ends with the clunky ‘and couth in fame’.  Whatever McCully’s theory, the result too often seems ugly and awkward in Modern English, an awkwardness not found in the originals.  

However, if you survive the Introduction and the first poem, there are plenty of good things in McCully’s book. For instance, his ‘Seafarer’ would stand comparison with any extant translation. ‘The Wife’s Lament’ is also particularly good. Here, as in some of the riddles and other poems, including several of his passages from Beowulf, the syntax, semantics and metrics all work together to achieve something that both makes good sense and is poetical. Anyone who knows these poems in Old English will find this book challenging their assumptions and sending them back to the originals. For the general reader who might be curious about Old English without experiencing any desire to learn it, there are many fine passages, but overall this is an uneven collection, consistent only in its concern for metrical patterns.

By contrast, aimed at ‘the widest possible audience’, Michael Alexander’s translations have served as an introduction to Old English poetry since The Earliest English Poems appeared in Penguin Classics in 1966.  That book balanced a collection of readable translations with a wealth of historical and literary information. Whether you were a student struggling to translate the poems, or simply curious about them, it was the book to buy.

The First Poems in English is a revised version of that classic. The layout of the book hasn’t changed. The poems are supported by a general introduction which sets them in their historical and cultural contexts. There is a separate discussion of the problems of translation and a list of suggestions for further reading. Each poem or group of poems is prefaced by a short introductory essay and there is also a section of detailed notes and a helpful index of names. It will probably remain the ideal first book for anyone curious about the poems, or struggling to translate them. 

However, a shift in emphasis in the introduction reflects two significant developments since the first edition. The first is that much more is known and understood about Anglo-Saxon poetry, particularly its relationship with Latin literacy. Alexander explores this relationship in the brief introductions to each poem. The other change is to the possible audience for this book.

In the 1960s a year of Old English was compulsory in most undergraduate English courses and the poems were as welcome as Grendle was in Heorot. Some attempt had to be made to overcome that resistance. The original introduction was a complex mixture of defiance and apology: “Anglo-Saxon will never be considered one of the great literatures of the world”. Despite this, there were people who read the book and went on to study the poetry, never understanding the need to apologise for their interest. Academic snobbery, prejudice and incomprehension are no reasons for not reading poetry. What Alexander’s translations suggested was that alliterative verse is valid as poetry despite its modern unpopularity. 

Today, as the formal teaching of English literature shrinks towards the twentieth century, the period before 1066 becomes increasingly remote. What was a general introduction to the period and its literature in the first edition has become an essay on the literature’s reception and an argument that this is poetry in English. The argument needed making, but whether or not this is the right place for it is debatable.

The real evidence for the value of these poems rests on the translations themselves. In Alexander’s version of Old English metrics, the alliterative line provides a flexible framework which formalizes a speaking voice, providing it with a rhythmic structure.  The translations honour the alterity of the originals and still capture this sense of voices speaking:

It was rainy weather, and I wept by the hearth,
thinking of my Wulf’s far wanderings;
one of the captains caught me in his arms.
It gladdened me then; but it grieved me too.   (‘Wulf and Eadwacer’)

This personal voice can give way to an elegant, formal tone:

they said that he was of all the world’s kings
the gentlest of men, and the most gracious,
the kindest to his people, the keenest for fame. (Beowulf)

Given the amount of rewriting that's gone into the introductions and notes it seems strange that the poems haven't been revised. As long ago as 1977 Alexander was pointing out that his use of ‘-eth’ endings was an attempt at a consciously archaic vocabulary which he now believed ‘no longer practical'.  The usage sounds strange in modern English, an anachronistic mixture of two styles from different periods in the past: ‘Who liveth alone longeth for mercy’ ('The Wanderer'). Although he has taken time to reword his comments, claiming that ‘As I went on the –eth forms died the death', those early, unsatisfactory ‘-eth’ endings mysteriously remain.

Both Alexander and McCully translate a selection of riddles. These are short poems, playful in tone but grounded in the everyday world of Anglo-Saxon farmers, traders and clerics as neither heroic verse nor elegies are. If you think they are attractive as small poems, respond to their humour or find yourself addicted to trying to solve them, then Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book (Anvil Press) provides translations of 56 riddles from the Exeter Book, of which the following is a well-known example:  

I’m the world’s wonder, for I make women happy:
A boon to the neighbourhood, a bane to no one,
Though I may pain a little the one who picks me.
I am set well up, stand in a bed,
Have a roughish root. Rarely (though it happens)
A churl’s daughter more daring than the rest –
And lovelier! – lays hold of me,
Rushes my red top, wrenches at my head,
And lays me in the larder. She learns soon enough,
The curly-haired creature who clamps me so,
Of my meeting with her: moist is her eye!

What the First Poems in English has in common with McCully’s Old English Poems and Riddles is a sense of embattled polemic.  In McCully’s book the argument is about metrics; in Alexander’s it is about the poems’ place in the history of English poetry.

Perhaps in another thirty years there will be no need to apologise for enjoying the literature composed in England before 1066. If that should happen, it will be partly because both translators have demonstrated the variety and strengths of Old English poetry.