Throughout its modern history the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has inspired translations into Modern English. In the last century and a half or so, some forty verse translations have appeared in print, producing a range of different takes on the Old English poem, in everything from iambic pentameter, to jaunty ballad rhyme, to strict Old English metre, and even more prose translations have been produced.1 Meanwhile, Beowulf has been a source of interest too for literary translators/adaptors in a broader sense and for other creative artists, though interestingly it has only entered into popular culture to a significant degree in recent years.2 The present study focuses most closely on verse translations in English, particularly those produced in the last sixty years, though it also pays attention to prose translations and to previous verse translations, as well as referring to other creative adaptations.
The verse translation by Edwin Morgan (1952) is argued here to be of special significance in its own right but also as the beginning of translation of Beowulf into a genuinely modern poetic idiom, leading the way for many later followers down to and beyond Seamus Heaney (1999). With the exception of William Morris’s uncompromisingly strange version (1895), discussed below, which creates its own – medievalizing – idiom,3 Morgan’s may be seen as the first serious sustained poetic engagement with the poem in Modern English. As explained below in Chapter 3, Tennyson had translated ten half-lines from Beowulf as early as 1830 and Longfellow included translated extracts from it in a publication of 1838, but, like the majority of people generally, other poets of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century ignored Beowulf; the verse translations of the time were mostly done by scholars and amateur enthusiasts. The situation changed in the second half of the twentieth century, during which period a significant number of poets joined the scholars and the Beowulf enthusiasts in the enterprise of translating the poem. The version by Heaney is now the best-known translation, and the form, indeed, in which most contemporary readers experience Beowulf, but other later-twentieth-century versions too were also widely read in the years after their publication, and some have acquired enduring popularity, being republished over a period of decades. And the verse translation of Beowulf continues unabated today.
Writing from personal experience and from a specific literary and cultural context, each translator produces an individual take on Beowulf and presents a particular interpretation. All translation, as all reading, is interpretation, by nature always partial and incomplete, and also singular. As Kathleen Davis puts it, referring to translation in general, ‘The source text for a translation is already a site of multiple meanings and intertextual crossings, and it is only accessible through an act of reading that is itself a translation.’4 Stanley B. Greenfield shows conscious recognition of translation as being based on interpretation when he describes his own translation of Beowulf as ‘simultaneously a poem and, by virtue of the nature of translation, an act of criticism’.5
At a more general level, however, it should also be borne in mind that, like all works from the past, Beowulf itself has changed down the years, as the scholarly agenda has changed and as the cultural climate has changed. Poststructuralism has taught us that texts are unstable and infinite anyway, whether new or old, but the interpretation and translation of works from the past in particular take place in a context of cultural relativism in which the text does not remain an objective entity. The influential student of biblical interpretation and translation Stephen Prickett writes,
Translation, especially from one period of time to another, is not just a matter of finding the nearest equivalents for words or syntactic structures. In addition it involves altering the fine network of unconscious or half-conscious presuppositions that underlie the actual words or phrases, and which differentiate so characteristically the climate of thought and feeling of one age from that of another.6
Different reception contexts will do this in different ways.
Each translation is thus of its time and context not only in its approach to poetry but also in basic aspects of the understanding of the original poem that the translation expresses. If, in Greenfield’s words, translation is an act of criticism, it is an act of criticism situated in its own time and context, an act of criticism that reflects an aspect of the instability of the source text, its instability over time. The Beowulf that Seamus Heaney translated in 1999 is not the same as that translated by A. Diedrich Wackerbarth in 1849 (the first full translation into English verse) or even quite the same as the versions of more recent translators. The very text of Beowulf has been modified in the light of advances in scholarship, including in recent decades: Michael Alexander in his revised edition of his translation (2001), published twenty-eight years after his original version, incorporates ‘newly accepted readings’ and adjusts his original phrasing in about forty places.7 A broader difference between the Beowulf of Morgan, for example, and that of later translators concerns the whole question of the nature of the work’s poetic language. As later translators would have been aware, but not Morgan, or at least not in the same way, the language of Beowulf is now understood to be not only traditional (which had long been recognized) but ‘formulaic’ in a very systematic way, being made up of patterns of recurrent phrases and phrase systems, recurrent, that is, not only in Beowulf itself but also in other Old English poems. And throughout a large part of its modern history translators would have known Beowulf as one of the great canonical monuments of English literary history, which it would not yet have been for Wackerbarth and his readers in 1849 or for other nineteenth-century translators and readers. Like all translations, translations of Beowulf ‘age’, therefore (to pick up on an observation by Umberto Eco8), because the historical moment and cultural context of the translator affect how he or she writes and also how he or she interprets and relates to the poem.
Verse translators of Beowulf make choices at the local level as part of the negotiation that the translator engages in, the ‘gaining and losing’ (to quote Eco again) of translation.9 But, aware of the radical differences between Old English poetry and modern poetry,10 they also make choices at the macro-level of their whole relationship with the poem and its poetry, engaging, consciously or not, with basic issues in translation theory. It is their attitude to these that will determine, for example, whether to go for a natural-sounding modern register (as Burton Raffel does, say) or one that is more insistently ‘poetic’, perhaps even archaic (as in Michael Alexander’s version, for example). Beowulf itself is composed in the highest register available, as appropriate to the seriousness of its concerns.11 Its language is lofty and formal, conveying delicate social nuance,12 and it is archaic. In a recent article on the deployment of rare words in Old English poetry, with particular reference to Beowulf, Roberta Frank has observed, ‘Anglo-Saxon poets courted the pleasures of language – the noun burnished by time, the gleaming verb, the aged but unwithered adjective’, and she refers to the use of words that ‘sounded old, northern, and pre-Christian to Anglo-Saxon ears’.13 A fundamental question that arises for translators, therefore, particularly verse translators, is how are they, writing for a modern readership, to respond to words in the original that, as Frank puts it, ‘lend a sheen that reveals the pastness of its multi-storied past’?14
Related to choice of register is the vital issue of a suitable metre, about which verse translators have to make basic decisions. Most verse translators of Beowulf in the past half century or so have based their metre on the (stress-based) metre of Old English, but with varying degrees of flexibility; a number of previous translators, as some modern ones, preferred syllabic metre (i.e., with a fixed number of syllables to the line). And, within the parameters of metre and register, translators devise their particular ways of approaching issues of diction and grammar, while also always having to balance what Edwin Morgan refers to as ‘the care of accuracy’ against the imperative of establishing ‘a contact with the living verse of their time’.15
What should a verse translation of Beowulf be like? In the light of the previous discussion it will be seen that there can be no right answer to such a question. Most modern practitioners would probably agree with Morgan’s principle of combining accuracy with producing ‘living verse’, though they would each apply that principle differently. By using the language of poetry verse translations can present the original poem anew in a way that prose cannot. Verse translations do not serve the subordinate function of aiding readers struggling with the Old English text but stand instead of the original, making it available to readers who cannot access that original, as well as to those who can (the issue of verse versus prose is explored below, later in this chapter). That being the case, as an Anglo-Saxonist I should say that, while admiring radical retakes of Beowulf and of other works from the past, I particularly value those translations of the poem that suggest the quality and artistry of the verse of the original, a difficult feat to achieve while producing poetry that is alive. There is no set way of doing this, and there will always be gaining and losing, but a good translation can enablingly provide for its readership a sense of what it is like to read the original. The second chapter of this book will explore essential features of the poetry of Beowulf itself, thus supplying a basis for exploring the response of modern translators to those features.
Much attention has been paid in recent translation-studies writings to the theory and practice of translating literary texts, though usually with reference to modern foreign-language texts rather than ‘archaic’ ones. Many of the relevant issues also apply to the translation of texts from that other country, the past, however. Old English presents a particularly interesting case in that its texts are from an earlier form of the target language of its modern English translations. The English language has changed enormously since Anglo-Saxon times but some underlying common features, exploitable by translators, can still be recognized in its widely separated stages.
As it has developed in recent decades, one of the issues that translation studies has focused on is that of why particular texts are chosen for translation. Attention has been paid to the ideological, institutional and political basis of the selection and canonization of texts for translation. Beowulf has been one of the most frequently translated of all works from the past in the last fifty years or so, with nearly thirty translations into Modern English verse appearing in print since the Second World War, in addition to a substantial number of prose translations. This high number of translations of Beowulf has to do to a significant degree with the perceived importance and interest of Beowulf as a monument of English literature, as referred to above. The ‘canon’ of English literature has been acutely problematized and revised by many literary theorists, but in the larger institution of English studies, as reflected, say, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and as experienced by continuing generations of students, it lives on. In this canon as received in recent decades (as earlier), Beowulf has been, and continues to be, perceived as institutionally important – but not accessible to most people in the original language. Beowulf has been one of the ‘great books’ which are (to echo a phrase of King Alfred) most needful for all people to know, and so translators and publishers have sought to provide suitable versions, particularly in the potent medium of poetry. For non-specialists translations substitute for the original poem, and even students specializing in Old English are unlikely to read the whole of Beowulf in the original; they typically supplement their Old English edition with a translation. Many translators themselves first came across Beowulf as students on university Old English courses.
Translations of Beowulf have had a healthy potential market, then, particularly among university students, whose instructors compare versions and make their recommendations, based on perceptions of accessibility, reliability, user-friendliness and literary effectiveness. Students need translations of Beowulf. Some versions have proved more popular than others but by definition no version can be regarded as final or universally satisfactory and so there has been a steady stream of fresh attempts. Since its publication Seamus Heaney’s version has been very much the market leader but the poetic translation of Beowulf continues (as described below in Chapter 8).
The translator may be participating in an economy and responding to institutional forces but, as many translators of Beowulf explicitly insist, their personal motivation in translating arises from their engagement with the poem itself. Translators have experienced the poetry of Beowulf and they wish to respond to it imaginatively, and, whether embarking on translating it without external prompting or (as in the case of Heaney) in response to a publisher’s invitation, they seek to produce versions for modern readerships that convey something of the power of the original poem. In some cases dissatisfied with available existing translations, they are drawn to Beowulf as an interesting and challenging poem to translate, challenging but not too vast to contemplate as a manageable project.
Many translators of Beowulf would view their work of translation as taking place straightforwardly within the canonical world of English literature but it is interesting that the producers of some of the most high-profile versions have more complicated relationships to the English studies institution. Michael Alexander’s translation, for example, may be seen as emanating from a traditional British literary-scholarly background and Roy Liuzza’s from the world of current academic scholarship, but Burton Raffel writes from a very different perspective that seeks, one could say, to rescue Beowulf from the academic world. And the non-English backgrounds of Morgan and Heaney complicate the question of Beowulf as ‘English’ literature. Heaney’s version in particular has been perceived as repositioning Beowulf in a new post-colonial cultural setting. Heaney’s version raises in a striking way the question of whose Beowulf is it anyway. As argued below, it is an unsettling text with which to start off the orthodoxly canonical Norton Anthology.
The interest in translating Beowulf, however motivated, is something that Anglo-Saxonist critics must applaud in principle, not (or not only) because they value Beowulf for its canonical position in the institution of English studies but because they value the art and emotion of its poetry and the depth of its exploration of the significance of the heroic world in an Anglo-Saxon context; poetic translation in particular offers the possibility of some experience of this for new readers. All translation is problematic, however, and we have seen that Beowulf offers particular challenges to the translator. This being the case, the danger that an Anglo-Saxonist fears is that in representing the poem for a modern audience the translator will also misrepresent it. Not all users of translations worry about this danger, especially in a context of perception of the source text as inherently unstable. It is argued, indeed, that even renderings based on error can be valid and can produce exciting work.16 To the extent that the original of Beowulf is accessible to scholarly study and appreciation, however, I would insist from my Anglo-Saxonist perspective that a key function of its verse translations is to convey a sense of the poetry of that original, though inevitably transforming the poem in the process as all translations necessarily do.
In this context of representing the source text, one key question that has penetratingly been opened up again in the past couple of decades, particularly by Lawrence Venuti, has been that of ‘foreignizing’ versus ‘domesticating’ translations. Venuti challenges the dominance of the domesticating tradition, a dominance that in English-speaking cultures he traces back at least as far as Dryden (in fact, a domesticating approach is already there in Tyndale, and medievalists and classicists are familiar with domesticating translation and its theoretical justification in writers as various as Cicero and King Alfred, to name but two). Venuti writes,
[T]ranslation practices in English cultures (among many others) have routinely aimed for their own concealment, at least since the seventeenth century, since John Dryden. In practice the fact of translation is erased by suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, assimilating it to dominant values in the target-language culture, making it recognizable and therefore seemingly untranslated. With this domestication the translated text passes for the original, an expression of the foreign author’s intention.17
The debate about the conflicting claims of ‘source’ and ‘target’ languages that Venuti here participates in was instigated by the theologian and philosopher F. E. Schleiermacher in his 1813 essay ‘Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersetzens’.18 Long anticipating Venuti’s taxonomy of ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ translations, Schleiermacher makes the classic distinction in approaches to translation between bringing the (in his case, German) reader to the original text and bringing the original text to the reader:
[I]n the first case the translator is endeavoring, in his work, to compensate for the reader’s inability to understand the original language […] thus moving the reader to his own position, which is foreign to him. […] The other method, however, showing the author not as he himself would have translated but the way that he as a German would have written originally in German, can hardly have any other standard of perfection than if one could claim for certain that, if the German readers were transformed one and all into connoisseurs and contemporaries of the author, the work itself would appear to them as now, the author having been transformed into a German, the translation does.19
Schleiermacher would not allow any combination of the two: ‘These two paths are so very different from one another that one or the other must certainly be followed as strictly as possible, any attempt to combine them being certain to produce a highly unreliable result and to carry with it the danger that writer and reader might miss each other completely’20 – though in practice translators can be seen as attending to both sides of the equation.
Schleiermacher’s own strong preference was for the foreignizing method. As Venuti points out, however, it is the domesticating approach that has held sway, certainly in English tradition. As described influentially by Matthew Arnold, according to this approach the reader ‘should be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work’.21 Venuti quotes the contemporary translator Norman R. Shapiro as expressing what has been the prevailing ideal:
I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections – scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.22
The desired effect is fluency and naturalness. Fluency brings access to the translated work to a new readership, but, as Venuti stresses, it does so by effacing the essential otherness of that work and reconstituting it in the terms of the culture of the target language: ‘Fluency is assimilationist, presenting to domestic readers a realistic representation inflected with their own codes and ideologies as if it were an immediate encounter with a foreign text and culture.’23 The domesticating model is to be seen as an imperialist one, with the target language colonizing the source language.24 Venuti accepts that domestication is inherent in all translation but argues that the translator should work to resist it by using the resources of the target language to suggest differentness and alienation:
Translations, in other words, inevitably perform a work of domestication. Those that work best, the most powerful in recreating cultural values and the most accountable in accounting for that power, usually engage readers in domestic terms that have been defamiliarized to some extent, made fascinating by a revisionary encounter with a foreign text.25
The poet Ciaran Carson would agree. Writing in the introduction to his 2002 translation of Dante’s Inferno, Carson declares, ‘But then some of us expect translations to sound like translations, and to produce an English which is sometimes strangely interesting. Especially translations of poetry.’26 One could go further and argue that the language of poetry is by definition differentiated from the language of ordinary speech (thus it could be said that all of Ciaran Carson’s writing is ‘strangely interesting’) and indeed, with Viktor Shklovsky, that it is a function of art in general to render things unfamiliar: ‘The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.’27 Venuti’s concept of ‘foreignizing’ translation may be seen as relating to this larger aesthetic principle of defamiliarization and the differentness of poetic language, but for Venuti the stakes are particularly high in translation since in his view to domesticate is to violate.
As in other areas of translation, the issue of domesticating versus foreignizing translation has been of concern to translators of Beowulf and of other Old English poems. There have been a few dramatically striking examples of foreignizing translations from the Old English, most famous among which must be Morris’s translation of Beowulf and, a work evidently influenced by Morris, Pound’s translation of The Seafarer,28 while at the other extreme some translators have been assiduously domesticating in their approach: David Wright’s prose version of Beowulf, discussed below, is a prime example. Some nineteenth-century (and later) versions of Beowulf are notable for a kind of (pseudo-)medievalizing with conventional archaizing diction, which might look like foreignizing at first sight but in fact accommodates the poem to models popular in the period of the translations, and may be seen therefore as another kind of domestication. One nineteenth-century verse translator, J. L. Hall, declares of his own version, ‘though many archaic words have been used, there are none, it is believed, which are not found in standard modern poetry’.29
This kind of archaizing may be briefly illustrated by quoting a passage from Wackerbarth’s version30 (corresponding to Beowulf, lines 791–7, from the account of the fight with Grendel):
THE Earl’s Protector thought not meet
The Murtherer should alive retreat,
His caitiff Life to no one he
Suppos’d could ever useful be.
Then quick Beówulf’s Liegeman true
Great Weland’s antient Relic drew
For his Lord, that princely Wight,
The Life he sought, (as there they might,)
From Danger to protect.
Eschewing the use of imitative alliterative metre as not suiting the taste of the time, Wackerbarth adopts a form of romance verse – and romance vocabulary – familiar to nineteenth-century readers, particularly (with reference to vocabulary) those who have read their Scott: this is what romance is supposed to look like. ‘I wish to get my book read’, Wackerbarth declares, ‘that my Countrymen may become generally acquainted with the Epic of our Ancestors wherewith they have been generally unacquainted.’31 Wackerbarth wishes to get his book read and so adopts an easy, recognizable poetic style, though it is one that, with its breakneck narrative and obtrusive rhyme-scheme, might be thought to end up turning Beowulf into something resembling Chaucer’s Sir Thopas.32
Genuinely foreignizing is William Morris’s version of Beowulf (produced in collaboration with the Anglo-Saxonist A. J. Wyatt),33 which ‘medievalizes’ the poem but not in a way that its readers would have come across before. The distinctive quality of Morris’s register is immediately apparent at the beginning of the translation:
WHAT! We of the Spear-Danes of yore days, so was it
That we learn’d of the fair fame of kings of the folks
And the Athelings a-faring in framing of valour.
Oft then Scyld the Sheaf-son from the hosts of the scathers,
From kindreds a many the mead-settles tore;
It was then the earl fear’d them, sithence was he first
Found bare and all-lacking; so solace he bided,
Waxed under the welkin in worship to thrive,
Until it was so that the round-about sitters
All over the whale-road must hearken his will
And yield him the tribute. A good king was that.34
The breaking rhythms and irregular syntax combine here with an insistently archaizing diction and a striking literalism in translation to produce a defamiliarizing effect. Morris chooses not to assimilate Beowulf to well-established patterns of poetic expression.
Morris (whose version is discussed in greater detail in a later chapter) is exceptional in the degree of his foreignizing, but the aim of bringing out the otherness of Beowulf, and thereby suggesting its foreignness, is by no means confined to him. Throughout the history of Beowulf translation, indeed, we see translators using syntax, diction and metre to ‘suggest’, as Roy Liuzza puts it, the original poem.35 This foreignizing approach is notably evident in the stress-metre verse translations which began to be produced in the late nineteenth century at a time when stress metre was not characteristic of mainstream poetry; stress-based metres look much less ‘foreign’ today.
But, in the interest of readability, translators of Beowulf have generally tempered this desire to ‘suggest’ the original poem. As John Corbett points out, there is a conflict between the desirable aim on the part of a translator (specifically a translator of Old English) to convey the excitement and interest of the source text and ‘Venuti’s desire to acknowledge its otherness, through techniques of linguistic alienation’: ‘It is difficult to be excited by a text that is expressly designed to alienate you – you can be intrigued, yes, and intellectually satisfied, but visceral excitement is different.’36 Many verse translations of Beowulf have been targeted at a popular readership of introductory-level students and general readers and have aimed at making the original work accessibly available and congenial. Like Wackerbarth, the producers of these translations wish to get their books read. Reviews of translations have often been from the point of view of the instructor, who needs a version that will maintain the interest of students.37 The primacy of readability is indicated in the title of S. B. Greenfield’s popular version, A Readable Beowulf, while Ruth P. Lehmann approached the translation of Old English with the limited aim ‘to make a tolerable poem in its own right’.38
The majority of verse translations of Beowulf have been produced in America, where Beowulf features on canonical survey courses in many colleges, a trend that is now also widely established in British and Irish universities. The translation is intended to substitute for the original poem, or in some instances the translation is presented along with the original in a parallel-text layout, as in the bilingual edition of Heaney’s translation.39 Translators and their publishers have striven to present Beowulf in terms that their readers will understand and enjoy, with (especially in recent years) attractive layouts, supplementary information and, in some cases, handsome photographs and other illustrations. Whether they unacceptably reconstitute the original poem in their translations may be regarded as a matter of judgement in each case, as the translator negotiates between the two languages.
For Venuti all domesticating translations are ‘scandalous’. Venuti insists that foreignizing, ‘visible’, translation is ethical, whereas domestication distorts the source text by imposing the values of the culture of the target language. These are considerations of profound significance to the whole enterprise of translation and Venuti’s thinking has succeeded in bringing a new direction to translation studies in the English-speaking world. But of course foreignizing translation inevitably distorts too: Morris’s translation of Beowulf certainly does, as does Pound’s of The Seafarer. Through the visibility of its disruptions and lack of fluency the foreignizing translation announces itself to be a translation but thereby cannot convey the qualities that a text had in its source culture: a text that did not sound unnatural originally is made to do so in its translated form. It has also been pointed out, by Corbett, that ‘visible translation in Venuti’s terms is still dependent on a hegemonic model of the English language. For visible translation to exist, there has to be a notion of a standard variety, and non-standard varieties that depart from it.’40
Domesticating translation appropriates the source text, accommodating it to the experience of readers of the target language and culture. We should also bear in mind, however, that all printed representations of Old English writings in the modern period, whether translations or original-language versions, appropriate their texts in radical ways. They impose the structures and procedures essential to print technology on the products of manuscript culture (which in turn may have an oral underlay), re-presenting the original texts in a form very different from that experienced by Anglo-Saxon audiences and readers. As Martin Foys has recently written, throughout the age of print Old English and other medieval scholars have ‘refashioned what they represented in the light of their own ideologies and technologies of representation and reproduction’.41 If translation is not innocent and transparent, neither is the printed edition, even the revered critical edition, which changes the appearance, layout, punctuation and even the words of the manuscript witnesses. In the modern critical edition, ‘The medieval text now enters fully dressed in modern grammar and punctuation.’42 Modern scholars are increasingly aware of the limitations of printed editions of medieval texts but they also recognize, within those limitations, the vital service that printed editions have performed, and still do. Some critics trust that salvation from the limitations of print will come in the hypertext possibilities of the still emerging digital world,43 but electronic representations of medieval writings must also mediate, or remediate, their material, if in different ways from those of print.44
Editions give access, albeit (re)mediated, to the medieval text. Similarly, translation, though inevitably domesticating to a lesser or greater degree, gives a kind of access that is not otherwise available. How satisfactory that access is considered to be will depend on the particular translation, taken in its own context; and if the domesticating is overdone, the original poem will get lost.
Some translations of Beowulf incorporate distinctly ‘foreignizing’ elements, producing an English that is, in Ciaran Carson’s phrase (quoted above), ‘strangely interesting’, but without alienating a modern readership. As we shall see, Burton Raffel in his version boldly domesticates Beowulf, evidently catering for a young and inexperienced readership in mid-twentieth-century America, but the versions of other translators, to be discussed below, including notably that of Seamus Heaney, challenge their readers with distinctive defamiliarizing features (along with a considerable degree of domestication) and, in engaging with the poetry of Beowulf, they each in their different ways cultivate a poetic language that is far from invisible. Such versions do not disregard accessibility but they suggest the otherness of Beowulf, an otherness that derives not only from its cultural remoteness but, within that remote culture, from the special traditional register of the poetry of Beowulf, which was both ‘familiar’ and distinctively different from natural speech even in its own period. Even in its Anglo-Saxon context there is a strong element in the poetry of Beowulf of ‘visibility’, and of, if not the foreign, certainly that which is out of the ordinary. In responding to this, translators make use of different kinds of non-standard Modern English and they exploit aspects of the ‘strange likeness’ (to allude to the title of Chris Jones’s recent book45) between features of Old English and potential features of Modern English, involving stress patterns, word formation (especially compounding), alliterative play and sentence structure.
As well as the verse translations, of course, many prose translations of Beowulf have also been produced. Very often, though not always or not only, they are intended to be aids to studying the original text, and such translations mostly lack the element of imaginative engagement with the poetry of the Old English that can be achieved in verse versions. A pattern for prose translations of Beowulf was set by the first person to translate the whole poem into Modern English, John Mitchell Kemble, who produced his translation in 1837 as part of the second volume of his (second) edition of Beowulf, intending it to be used along with the text of the original poem. Kemble describes his translation as follows:
The translation is a literal one; I was bound to give, word for word, the original in all its roughness: I might have made it smoother, but I purposely avoided doing so, because had the Saxon poet thought as we think, and expressed his thoughts as we express our thoughts, I might have spared myself the trouble of editing or translating the poem. A few transpositions of words, &c. caused principally by the want of inflections in New English […] are all that I have allowed myself, and where I have inserted words I have generally printed them in italics.46
Kemble highlights here the differentness of Beowulf and he sets his face against producing an overly fluent version, preferring, he declares, to render the original literally, ‘in all its roughness’. The translation accompanied his edition of Beowulf and is clearly intended to supplement the text of the original rather than to substitute for it. A sample from the translation (corresponding to Beowulf, lines 499–510a) illustrates Kemble’s approach:
Hunferth the son of Eglaf spake, he that sat at the feet of the Lord of the Scyldings; he bound up a quarrelsome speech: to him was the journey of Beowulf, the proud sea-farer, a great disgust; because he granted not that any other man should ever have beneath the skies, more reputation with the world than he himself: ‘Art thou the Beowulf that didst contend with Breca on the wide sea, in a swimming match, where ye for pride explored the fords, and out of vain glory ventured your lives upon the deep water?’47
This may be compared to the original Old English text of the passage (lines 499–510a):
Unferð maþolode, Ecglafes bearn,
þe æt fotum sæt frean Scyldinga,
onband beadurune. Wæs him Beowulfes sið,
modges merefaran, micel æfþunca,
forþon þe he ne uþe þæt ænig oðer man
æfre mærða þon ma middangeardes
gehedde under heofenum þonne he sylfa:
‘Eart þu se Beowulf, se þe wið Brecan wunne
on sidne sæ ymb sund flite,
ðær git for wlence wada cunnedon
ond for dolgilpe on deop wæter
aldrum neþdon?’48
In his translation of this passage Kemble parallels the word order and asyndetic syntax of Beowulf and tolerates cumbersome expression, seeking to convey the literal sense of the Old English words. Later prose translators might not all agree with Kemble about the ‘roughness’ of Beowulf but they tend to follow him in sticking closely to the literal surface meaning of the Old English text, perceiving that readers need the translation to help them to understand the language of the original. Even more literal was the version by Benjamin Thorpe published in 1855 in a parallel-text format, in which the translation, though reading like prose, is (alongside Thorpe’s edited text) chopped up into short lines.49 I quote Thorpe’s translation of the beginning of the Unferth altercation (lines 1002–6 in Thorpe’s lineation), with his Old English text beside it:
Hunferð maþelode, | Hunferth spake, |
Ecgláfes bearn, | Ecglaf’s son, |
þe æt fótum sæt | who at the feet sat |
freán Scyldinga; | of the Scyldings’ lord; |
onband beadu-rúne. | unbound a hostile speech. |
Kemble doesn’t mention it in his account of his translation, which concentrates on his principle of faithfulness to the original, but his version is notably archaizing, as is the version by Thorpe.50 In the quoted passage Kemble uses the old past-tense form spake, the second-person-singular present-tense forms art and didst and the early Modern English syntactical formulations granted not and didst contend, and he displaces the adverbial phrases to him and beneath the skies away from their natural position in Modern English sentence structure; in contrast with modern usage he also accompanies disgust with the indefinite article and deploys the unidiomatic phrase for pride. The archaizing goes against his aim of preserving the ‘roughness’ of the original, since such archaizing brings associations of highly developed literary convention, but generally the style suggests something of the otherness of Beowulf. Kemble keeps literal but also fashions what he considers to be a fitting kind of literary English. Like many of his successors, he assumes that a register that archaizes to some degree is appropriate for the Old English poem, even in a version in Modern English prose. Other translators would take the archaizing further.
The dust jacket of C. L. Wrenn’s 1950 revision of the translation of Beowulf by John R. Clark Hall (originally published in 1901) – ‘Clark Hall’ being one of the most enduringly popular of all translations of the poem – declares that this version ‘will serve the double purpose of providing the general reader with a just idea of the matter of the poem, and furnishing the professional student with the material and guidance necessary for the early stages of his study of the original’.51 In the ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the volume, J. R. R. Tolkien writes that ‘the presentation of a translation into plain prose of what is in fact a poem, a work of skilled and close-wrought metre (to say no more)’ needs defence.52 He goes on to provide such a defence, insisting, ‘“Clark Hall” revised or unrevised, is not offered as a means of judging the original, or as a substitute for reading the poem itself. The proper use of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study.’53 Tolkien adds, in words that Kemble would have agreed with, ‘a good translation is a companion to honest labour’.54 Prose translations are utilitarian companions for students, and in this utilitarian context literary correspondence takes second place to fidelity to the sense. In Tolkien’s view, ‘Perhaps the most important function of any translation used by a student is to provide not a model for imitation, but an exercise for correction.’55
Hall would also go on to publish a verse translation of Beowulf, in 1914.56 His prose translation is literal in its approach but notable too for its incorporation of archaic features. In the original edition of the prose version the account of Beowulf’s exchange with Unferth begins as follows (Beowulf, lines 499–510a):
Then Unferth, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings, spoke, and gave vent to secret thoughts of strife, – the journey of Beowulf, the brave sea-farer, was a great chagrin to him, for he grudged that any other man under heaven should ever obtain more glory on this middle-earth than he himself.
‘Art thou that Beowulf who strove with Breca, contended with him in the open sea, in a swimming-contest, when ye two for vainglory tried the floods, and ventured your lives in deep water for idle boasting?’
There is no spake, granted not or obtrusive displacement of adverbials, as in Kemble, but thou and ye are here, grudged that is mannered and for vainglory parallels Kemble’s for pride. Hall’s version recalls that of Kemble in other translation choices as well and in aspects of its general register, though the overall effect is smoother and Clark Hall is more uniform in its use of Modern English syntax.
Wrenn’s 1950 revised version of Clark Hall makes some corrections in the light of subsequent scholarship and introduces minor rewordings throughout. Wrenn generally proceeds with a light touch and his revision retains a somewhat archaic feel, though the archaism is toned down, with the most egregious oddities in diction purposefully removed. As Tolkien notes, for example, ten timorous trothbreakers together (line 2846) is wisely emended to ten cowardly traitors together.57 Tolkien could also have drawn attention to such instances as to find out in what sort the Ring-Danes had quartered in it after their beer-carouse (lines 116–17), changed to to find how the Ring-Danes had disposed themselves in it after their ale-drinking; carking care (line 190), changed to the trouble of this time; and must needs flee thence under the fen-fastnesses (line 820), changed to had to flee thence among the fen-fastnesses (though Wrenn retains fen-fastnesses). Typical rewordings are dwelt for sojourned (line 9), courts for castle (line 13) and men for folk (line 24).
In the quoted passage Wrenn does away with the dash after secret thoughts of strife, starting a new sentence instead, and he corrects Hall’s punctuation when he changes the comma after was a great chagrin to him to a semi-colon, but he makes no further alterations. In the immediately succeeding ten lines there are a number of changed expressions but these are mostly instances of scholarly reinterpretation or of tightened-up translation: swam (line 512) is changed to journeyed, which is closer to the Old English reon, literally ‘rowed’; meted out the sea-paths (line 514) becomes passed over the paths of the sea, picking up on the sense of ‘traverse’ for the verb mæton, as given in Klaeber’s glossary, but also rendering the Old English more straightforwardly – while at the same time providing a more stately rhythm; battled with your hands (line 514) becomes made quick movements with your hands, a correction of Hall’s interpretation of brugdon; glided over the ocean (line 515) becomes sped over the ocean, clarifying the sense of glidon. An apparent stylistic change is the alteration of he had the greater strength (line 518) to he had greater strength, but this too can be seen as a correction: there is no instrumental demonstrative in the original. It is notable that Wrenn keeps unchanged Hall’s mannered Ye two toiled in the water’s realm seven nights (lines 516–17), including adoption of the medieval usage of ‘night’ to refer to day (as reflected elsewhere in standard Modern English only in the relic fortnight).
For Tolkien the Modern English of prose Beowulf translations should be ‘harmonious’ and should avoid ‘colloquialism and false modernity’.58 This conviction provides the rationale for an elevated register incorporating archaizing features, such as he finds in Wrenn’s ‘Clark Hall’: ‘If you wish to translate, not rewrite Beowulf’, declares Tolkien, ‘your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.’59 Here Tolkien does argue for literary correspondence between source and translation: the translation is doing more than conveying (to revert to an earlier quotation from Tolkien) ‘the matter of the poem, and furnishing the professional student with the material and guidance necessary for the early stages of his study of the original’; it is doing so in an appropriate style that suggests qualities of the Old English.
Tolkien makes his remarks in introducing Wrenn’s ‘Clark Hall’ but it is also interesting to consider them with reference to his own prose translation of an extract from Beowulf, the part referred to as the ‘Finnsburh Episode’. The translation is printed in Alan Bliss’s posthumous edition of lectures on Beowulf by the great man at Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s.60 In fact Tolkien also produced a prose translation of the whole of Beowulf, as well as a verse translation of about a fifth of the poem, both of which remain unpublished, however, and currently unavailable for study.
Tolkien’s translation of the ‘Finnsburh Episode’ extract begins (corresponding to Beowulf, lines 1063–74),
There was song and music together before Healfdene’s war-captain; harp was played, ever and anon, a tale was duly told. Then Hrothgar’s bard, in performance of his office, recounted a thing for the entertainment of those in hall upon the benches, [told how life’s ending came to] the sons of Finn.
When the sudden peril came upon them, the doughty Healfdene, Hnæf of the Scylding house, was fated to fall in the Freswæl. Indeed no cause had Hildeburh to praise the Jutish loyalty: without fault of hers she was in that clash of shields bereft of those she loved, child and brother; they fell by doom, wounded with spears; an unhappy woman was she.
Tolkien provides a mostly literal translation, though he has the (from today’s perspective, startling) confidence to supply what he argues to be a missing line. The translation is not meant to stand on its own but is intended to be used along with the Old English text and the accompanying copious interpretative notes, which were originally written as lecture notes (and which offer justification for a number of controversial textual decisions and interpretations). The language is ‘literary and traditional’ with some archaizing features in its diction (doughty, doom and, a few lines later, aforetime; recounted a thing also has an archaic feel, as suggested by the most similar usage cited in the OED, ‘telle us som moral thyng’, in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue), in its word order (no cause had Hildeburh and she was in that clash of shields bereft) and in its phrasing (the omission of articles in harp was played and in hall), but Tolkien’s writing is not quaint or overly mannered. It is notable that in his translation of the companion piece to the ‘Finnsburh Episode’, the ‘Finnsburh ‘Fragment’ (also printed in Finn and Hengest), Tolkien resists any temptation to translate the second-person-singular pronoun as thou/thee (second-person-singular forms happen not to occur in the ‘Episode’).
As stated above, Tolkien’s translation is mostly literal. Nonetheless, on stylistic grounds he allows himself some latitude in it, doubtless comforted by the fact that his readers can also access the original text: indeed in Bliss’s edition the Old English and the translation are printed in parallel-text format. The opening lines of the Old English passage, as edited by Tolkien, are as follows:
Þær wæs sang ond sweg samod ætgædere
fore Healfdenes hildewisan,
gomenwudu greted, gid oft wrecen.
Ðonne healgamen Hroþgares scop
æfter medobence mænan scolde […]
A more verbally accurate translation of these lines would be ‘There there was song and music along with each other together before Healfdene’s battle-leader, the wood of joy was touched, the tale often told. Then Hrothgar’s bard had to recount entertainment in the hall along the mead-benches …’ This is more verbally accurate than Tolkien but it is hardly literary prose. Tolkien is balancing the desirability of writing literary prose against the principle of literalness and it is interesting that where a possible conflict arises he comes down on the side of literary prose. Thus in the first line he sacrifices the locative force of Þær and removes the tautology of samod ætgædere. In the third line he clarifies the meaning of the compound gomenwudu, spells out the idea of ‘playing’ implicit in greted and moves the equivalent of oft out of its original phrase into a kind of apo koinou position (i. e., it might be taken as referring to the preceding or succeeding phrase, or to both),61 rhetorically elaborating the adverb in the process (oft becomes ever and anon); and at the same time as moving oft he introduces a new explanatory adverb (duly) in its place: Tolkien was clearly striving here to avoid a bathetic rendering of the potentially lame-looking phrase gid oft wrecen, ‘the tale (was) often told’, and was willing to modify the sense to do so. In translating the fourth and fifth lines he inserts the explanatory phrase in performance of his office, which has no direct equivalent in the original, and assimilates the abstract noun healgamen to modern usage by supplying a concrete referent (a thing) and a human audience (of those): a thing for the entertainment of those in hall upon the benches; here he also shifts the qualifier ‘hall’ to a new place in the sentence, where it refers to the listeners (those in hall) rather than the entertainment (healgamen). In these lines too he drops the element of duty conveyed by scolde (‘had to’); this verb is presumably the source of the adverb duly introduced a few lines earlier but if so it indicates the freedom with which Tolkien approaches the passage, despite his insistence on the requirement of literalness in prose translation. Something rather more complex than literal translation is going on in his rendering of this passage. Tolkien may see prose translation as merely ‘a companion to honest labour’ but he wants to write well in an appropriate literary style and his translation is carefully crafted.
This balancing of the principle of literalism against the desirability of writing literary prose is apparent in utilitarian translations from Kemble to Hall to Wrenn and Tolkien and on down to later versions aimed at aiding students studying the text of Beowulf. Among such versions are the much-used translations of G. N. Garmonsway, in Beowulf and its Analogues, completed by Jacqueline Simpson (1968), and S. A. J. Bradley, in his collection Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982). These translators work hard in their prose versions to help students translating Beowulf, and in my own experience many students value the translations particularly for this purpose. Both writers also seek to make Beowulf readable, however. Garmonsway’s style comes out in his version of the introduction to the debate between Beowulf and Unferth (Beowulf, lines 499–505):
Unferth, son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings, spoke thus, unloosing secret words to stir up strife. The venture of Beowulf, the gallant seafarer, caused him great displeasure, for he would not willingly grant that any other man on earth had ever performed more glorious deeds beneath the heavens than he himself.62
Garmonsway’s language is accessible but dignified, a heightened form of Modern English, and his rhythm is carefully controlled, the second sentence in particular having a steady cumulative sweep. In Beowulf and its Analogues the translation of Beowulf is accompanied by translations of a range of supplementary material, allowing analogues to be accessed in Modern English rather than in their original languages.
Bradley seeks, as he declares in his preface to Anglo-Saxon Poetry, to interest readers who are encountering the poetry only through his translation. In the preface he expresses the hope that his translation of Old English poems will lead readers to go to the originals: ‘In helping its readers to an appreciation and enjoyment of Anglo-Saxon poetry in its Old English form it is hoped that this book will prove to be of some transitional aid.’63 Bradley’s translation aims to serve a double purpose, as is highlighted in the cover-blurb of the first edition: ‘The translations attempt a style acceptable to the modern ear yet close enough to aid parallel study of the Old English text.’
Bradley’s account of the beginning of the altercation between Beowulf and Breca (lines 499–505) illustrates his approach – a utilitarian one but in a register that is acceptable as fluent literary Modern English:
Unferth, Ecglaf’s son, who sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings, spoke out and unloosed provocative imputations. To him the enterprise of Beowulf, the courageous seafarer, was a great insult because he did not allow that any other man on earth might ever gain more glories beneath the heavens than he himself.
Like Garmonsway’s, which it recalls in some of its translation choices, this translation is close to the original in sense and even, where possible, in word order. It lacks something of the dignity of Garmonsway’s diction but it reads well, being written in natural sounding, though distinctly Latinate, language. Notable words and phrases are unloosed (also found in Garmonsway), an example of somewhat elevated diction; provocative imputations, strikingly Latinate; enterprise (also in Garmonsway), prosaic-sounding compared to sið; a great insult is much more current in its expression than a great disgust or a great chagrin (as seen in other translations) but is less resonant perhaps than Garmonsway’s a great displeasure. Both these versions achieve readability, though this is at the expense of losing the immediacy and the rhythmical and syntactical abruptness of the Old English and a sense of the formulaicity of its verse. The reader gets an appreciation of the surface meaning and content of the Old English poem but gets little sense of the feel of its poetry.
Particularly notable among twentieth-century prose translations of Beowulf is that of David Wright. Wright’s 1957 translation, though eventually superseded by Michael Alexander’s verse one, was a popular Penguin Classics title, much reprinted. Wright expresses his literary ambitions when he writes that he has set out to produce ‘a readable version in contemporary English prose and to bring out those qualities of the original which in other translations, it seems to me, have been either overlooked or overlaid’.64
Wright, following the example of E. V. Rieu translating Homer for Penguin Classics,65 argues that prose is more appropriate than poetry for translating Beowulf. Tolkien had insisted that prose translation of poetry needed a defence and found that defence in its limited utilitarian function. Likewise, Wright’s ‘successor’ on the Penguin list, Michael Alexander, took the opposite view from Wright, asking readers who might find his own translation too free ‘to consider whether a literal prose version of a verse epic is, properly, a translation’.66 In his second edition in 2001, Alexander is more circumspect: here he asks readers ‘to consider whether literal prose does not too freely discard the potential advantages of verse’.67 On reflection, Alexander allows that prose translations can be useful, ‘and more than useful – the English of Garmonsway’s version [of Beowulf] has dignity and rhythmical shape’, but he insists on the unique potential of poetry translated as poetry:
Most prose translations, however, are drab, and make it a virtue to fall so short that the translation cannot be confused with the real thing. A poetic translation is an attempt to offer an equivalent poem to those who cannot read the original.68
Wright produced his translation not for students studying the text of Beowulf but, in line with the educative principles of Penguin Classics, for the general reader: he was bringing Beowulf to a readership that couldn’t access the poem in the original but would be interested in knowing this literary classic in translation. His choice of prose as the medium for his translation was a considered one. He argues that, like the Iliad and the Odyssey but unlike the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, Beowulf is a ‘primary epic’, in which the most important thing is the story:
In the Aeneid and Paradise Lost the story is a peg on which the poet hangs his poem, while in Homer and Beowulf the poem is the story, and vice versa. Therefore to render the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Beowulf into prose is not only feasible but in some ways more desirable than to translate them into verse. Verse which is not poetry obscures the story, and therefore the poem, without providing an adequate substitute for the style of the poem.69
The idea that the story is the essence of Beowulf was soon seen by critics to be no longer tenable, which is one reason why Wright’s translation was superseded. His major justification for translating into prose disappears once his view of Beowulf as ‘story’ is rejected. His argument about ‘verse which is not poetry’ may be valid but the whole point about the most engaging verse versions of Beowulf is that they are verse which is poetry.
In his translation Wright opts for what he calls a ‘middle style’ between the ‘queer jargon’ of archaism, which he saw as a feature of previous translations, and the ‘equally wrong’ approach of colloquialism. He writes, ‘The argument against the middle style is that in comparison with the original it seems colourless. With this I do not entirely disagree: in any case, better no colours than faked ones.’70 In adopting contemporary English prose his aim is not to try to represent the poetry of Beowulf but to maintain the interest of his readers.71 Thus he carefully ‘domesticates’ the translation to suit the experience of his modern audience. As a brief example of the domesticating approach adopted by Wright, here is his version of lines 499–505:
Unferth, son of Ecglaf, who occupied a place of honour near the feet of the Danish king, spoke up. The enterprise of Beowulf greatly annoyed him, because he could not bear the thought that any living man might win more distinction than himself. So he broached a thorny topic.
The smooth hypotactic syntax, prosaic diction (occupied, enterprise, annoyed) and use of idiomatic modern phrasing (spoke up, broached a thorny topic) are among the domesticating features of the passage. The approach of Wright is radically unlike that of Tolkien’s ‘companion to honest labour’. He provides a substitute version of the poem rather than an aid to translation and in doing so he is happy to write in a neutral style that assimilates Beowulf to modern literary experience and completely disregards its own poetry and poetics. Only the story remains.
E. Talbot Donaldson takes a more ‘foreignizing’ line in his translation (1966), another of the most widely read renderings of the poem, particularly after being adopted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Donaldson achieves admirable accuracy but also hopes ‘that the reader unfamiliar with Old English [such as the target reader of the Norton] may derive from this translation some real sense of the poem’s extraordinary qualities’,72 an ambitious aim for a prose version. Since the translation is in prose the aim can be realized only to a limited extent but Donaldson fashions a syntax and diction that seek to preserve from the original its ‘extraordinary richness of rhetorical elaboration alternating with – often combined with – the barest simplicity of statement’.73 Donaldson’s writing comes across as somewhat ponderous but achieves a dignified tone. With regard to his somewhat elevated register he has been praised for not being afraid to use ‘unreal’ English.74 His rendering of lines 499–505 is as follows:
Unferth spoke, son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the king of the Scyldings, unbound words of contention – to him was Beowulf’s undertaking, the brave seafarer, a great vexation, for he would not allow that any other man of middle-earth should ever achieve more glory under the heavens than himself.
Syntactical flexibility is in evidence here, with asyndetic coordination, more use of apposition than is normal in Modern English prose and displacement of one of the appositional phrases, the brave seafarer, away from its correlative to a position in which (strictly) it is stranded in terms of grammatical concord. The passage is formal in expression and carefully worded, with unbound words of contention and a great vexation standing out as instances of epic-sounding diction, and middle-earth (less familiar in popular consciousness in 1966 perhaps than it is today) evoking Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking; and there is a notable rhythmic resonance, particularly in the extended causal clause that brings the sentence to a conclusion. Within the limitations of prose, Donaldson’s is a worthy and accurate version which, balancing accessibility and a sense of otherness, manages to give some suggestion of the quality of the original poem. It should be said that it does not suggest the excitement of the original poem, however, and it was viewed by teachers as dull (and was eventually displaced by Seamus Heaney’s translation in the Norton Anthology). Robert Boenig, Anglo-Saxonist and discontented user of Donaldson in the Norton, complains that the translation ‘has convinced generations of sophomores that Beowulf is a dull poem’.75
With regard to the ‘queer jargon’ of earlier prose translations, Wright particularly singles out the version by J. R. Clark Hall, which had been endorsed by Wrenn and Tolkien as a useful companion to the study of Beowulf.76 Hall is no more extravagant than some other translators in his archaizing, however, such as Thomas Arnold (1876) and John Earle (1892), and some degree of archaizing is the norm.77 And it is worth pointing out in concluding this section that the use of ‘queer jargon’ in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century prose translations of Beowulf, though very evident, in most versions pales in comparison to what we find in verse (to be discussed more fully in a later chapter).
It is also interesting that even those who claim to be eschewing archaism seem drawn to it anyway. Chauncey B. Tinker, who sees his 1902 prose translation as ‘an attempt to make as simple and readable a version of the poem as is consistent with the character of the original’, and who declares, ‘Archaic forms, which have been much in favor with translators of Old English, have been excluded’,78 still ends up with a somewhat archaizing feel to his translation, as in his version of lines 499–505:
Unferth, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings, spoke, and stirred up a quarrel; the coming of Beowulf, the brave seafarer, vexed him sore, for he would not that any other man under heaven should ever win more glories in this world than he himself.
This is basically Modern English and very unlike Beowulf in syntax and diction, but ‘vexed him sore’ and ‘he would not that any other man’ sound like archaisms to me. In Tinker, as in many other prose translations, we get a wash of comforting archaizing but no sense of what Chris Jones refers to as the ‘shock of the old’.79 An opposing approach is that of Wright, who presents Beowulf in straightforward modern literary prose: ‘better no colours than faked ones’. Despite serving generations of appreciative readers in other ways, neither approach captures much of the literary quality of Beowulf itself. Which brings us to poetry.
This chapter has touched on some larger issues in translation, with particular reference to Beowulf, including the reasons why Beowulf has been so popular with translators, the debate about ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ translations, and the question of verse versus prose. One of the most eloquent responses to this last question was given by John Keats, of course, after reading Chapman’s Homer. The power of verse is compellingly conveyed by Keats when he describes the new ‘wide expanse’ that Chapman’s translation opened out for him. In ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ he writes,
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Such excitement is possible, if rarely achieved, in verse translations of poetry, but is quite beyond the capacity of prose renderings. The question remains, however, to what extent Keats was reading Homer when he read Chapman’s Homer.80
The next chapter will turn to the Old English poem itself, pointing to key aspects of its poetry and poetics that verse translators have to engage with. Beowulf will be characterized as a poem both deeply traditional and deeply original, composed in a distinctively poetic language and highly reflective in its treatment of its story. The third chapter will explore the ways Beowulf has been received and perceived in the modern era and in this context will consider in more detail approaches to translating it into verse in the first hundred years in which verse translations were produced, down to 1950. Then, building on that chapter and the previous two, in subsequent chapters I will examine the varying ways in which modern verse translators (post-1950) respond to and re-present Beowulf in modern poetic form.
1 On translations of Beowulf, see especially Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf; Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’; Liuzza, ‘Lost in Translation: Some Versions of Beowulf in the Nineteenth Century’.
2 See below, ‘Epilogue’; also Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, pp. 350–7; Staver, A Companion to Beowulf, pp. 187–95; George, Beowulf: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, pp. 115–49. On modern poetry, see especially Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry.
3 On Morris’s version, see here, here.
4 Davis, Deconstruction and Translation, p. 16.
5 Greenfield, A Readable Beowulf: The Old English Epic Newly Translated, p. ix (the translation is discussed below, pp. 198–9). On translation as interpretation, see Steiner, After Babel; Venuti, The Scandals of Translation; Venuti writes, ‘A translation always transmits an interpretation, a foreign text that is partial and altered’, p. 5.
6 Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation, p. 7.
7 See Alexander, Beowulf, revised ed., p. xi.
8 Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, p. 144.
9 Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation: ‘negotiation’, introduced on p. 6, provides the underlying principle of Eco’s view of translation (as brought out in his book’s title).
10 As Elizabeth Tyler points out (for example), ‘[if] Old English poets chose to maintain an aesthetics which took pleasure in seeking out the familiar […] [it is] the aesthetics of the unfamiliar which governs the style of so much modern poetry’ (Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 122).
11 Cf. Edwin Morgan’s comment that ‘[s]eriousness’ is ‘the [Beowulf] poet’s most obvious characteristic and the unifying and dignifying force behind the diverse material’ (Morgan, Beowulf, pp. xxxii–xxxiii).
12 On the social nuances of the language of Beowulf, see John M. Hill, ‘Translating Social Speech and Gesture in Beowulf’.
13 Frank, ‘Sharing Words with Beowulf’, pp. 7 and 9, respectively.
14 ‘Sharing Words with Beowulf’, p. 15.
15 Morgan, Beowulf, pp. vi and viii.
16 See, for example, Davis, Deconstruction and Translation, pp. 52–3.
17 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, p. 31; Venuti had developed some of these ideas in his earlier monograph, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation; other relevant recent contributions include Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation; Douglas Robinson, Translation and Taboo; Eco, Mouse or Rat.
18 Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ [‘Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersetzens’].
19 Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods’, trans. Bernofsky, p. 49.
20 Ibid.
21 Arnold, On Translating Homer, p. 2.
22 Quoted by Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 1.
23 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, p. 12.
24 See further Chris Jones, Strange Likeness, pp. 128–34.
25 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, p. 5.
26 Carson, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, p. xix.
27 Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, p. 18. On Shklovsky’s idea of ‘defamiliarization’, see further Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, pp. 68–76.
28 For Morris’s influence on Pound, see Chris Jones, ‘The Reception of William Morris’s Beowulf’, pp. 198–9; and (cited by Jones) Fred C. Robinson, ‘Ezra Pound and the Old English Translational Tradition’, pp. 259–74.
29 J. L. Hall, Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon Poem, Translated from the Heyne-Socin Text, p. ix.
30 Wackerbarth, trans., Beowulf, an Epic Poem Translated from the Anglo-Saxon into English Verse.
31 Wackerbarth, Beowulf, p. ix.
32 Wackerbarth’s version is discussed further, below, pp. 52–3.
33 Morris and Wyatt, trans., The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Weder Geats.
34 Morris and Wyatt., trans., The Tale of Beowulf, p. 179.
35 Liuzza, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, p. 46.
36 Corbett, ‘The Seafarer, Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy into English and Scots’, p. 168.
37 See further, below, pp. 132–3.
38 Lehmann, ‘Contrasting Rhythms of Old English and New English’, p. 121.
39 See also Chickering, trans., Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition.
40 Corbett, ‘The Seafarer’, pp. 158–9.
41 Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon, pp. 4–5.
42 Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon, p. 17.
43 See, for example, McGillivray, ‘Towards a Post-Critical Edition: Theory, Hypertext, and the Presentation of Middle English Works’; a note of caution is expressed by R. M. Liuzza, ‘Scribes of the Mind: Editing Old English, in Theory and in Practice’: see esp. pp. 272–7.
44 The idea of remediation is developed in Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media.
45 Jones is in turn alluding to a phrase from Geoffrey Hill: ‘Not strangeness, but strange likeness’, Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, XXIX.
46 Kemble, A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf, p. l.
47 It is convenient to select these particular lines for illustration, since they are also used by Tinker in The Translations of Beowulf; quotation of versions of these lines below from prose translations not covered by Tinker is intended to facilitate comparison for readers who may also wish to consult Tinker.
48 Kemble sets out the text in short lines but his edition of these lines is not significantly different from that quoted here (from Klaeber’s Beowulf). On Kemble’s edition, see further pp. 51–2, below.
49 Thorpe, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Scôp or Gleeman’s Tale, and The Fight at Finnesburg.
50 Thorpe’s version was also criticized at the time for its Latinate diction: see here.
51 John R. Clark Hall, Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, dust jacket.
52 Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of “Beowulf”’, p. ix.
53 Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. x.
54 Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. xi.
55 Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. xvi. As mentioned below (p. 50), the very first translation of Beowulf, by Thorkelín (1815) (into Latin), was immediately corrected in the collations of his edition with the original manuscript made by Conybeare and Madden (in 1817 and 1824, respectively).
57 Tolkien, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. xv.
58 ‘Prefatory Remarks’, pp. xv–xvi.
59 ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. xvii.
60 Tolkien, Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode.
61 On apo koinou constructions, see Mitchell, ‘Apo koinou in Old English Poetry?’.
62 Garmonsway and Simpson, trans., Beowulf and its Analogues, pp. 15–16.
63 Bradley, trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. viii.
64 Wright, Beowulf: A Prose Translation with an Introduction, p. 21.
65 See further below, pp. 158–9.
66 Alexander, Beowulf (1972 ed.), p. 49.
67 Alexander, Beowulf (2001 ed.), pp. lv–lvi.
68 Beowulf (2001 ed.), p. lvi. In the introduction to his translated collection, The First Poems in English (2008), Alexander recalls that in the introduction to its predecessor, The Earliest English Poems, he had boldly declared that he had never understood the point of translating poetry into prose; he adds sardonically, ‘this was before I had read some of the verse translations of Old English poetry’ (p. xxx). Interestingly, he himself included a couple of passages translated into prose in the third edition of his The Earliest English Poems (as mentioned further below, p. 140, n. 27).
69 Wright, Beowulf, pp. 21–2.
70 Wright, Beowulf, p. 24.
71 Wright, Beowulf, p. 25.
72 Donaldson, Beowulf, pp. xiv–xv.
73 Donaldson, Beowulf, p. xii.
74 Crane, ‘“To Thwack or Be Thwacked”: An Evaluation of Available Translations and Editions of Beowulf’, p. 327.
75 Boenig, ‘The Importance of Morris’s Beowulf’, p. 12.
76 Wright, Beowulf, p. 23.
77 Arnold (Thomas Arnold ‘the Younger’) follows the word-for-word approach of Kemble: ‘Unferth spake, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the master of the Scyldings; he unbound the secret counsel of his malice. The expedition of Beowulf, the valiant mariner, was to him a great cause of offence; for that he allowed not that any other man on the earth should ever appropriate more deeds of fame under heaven than he himself’ (Arnold, trans., Beowulf, a Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century); Earle waxes more literary, producing modern prose but with frequent archaism: ‘Unferth made a speech; he who sate at the feet of the Scyldings’ lord, broached a quarrelsome theme – the adventure of Beowulf the high-souled voyager was great despite to him, because he grudged that any other man should ever in the world achieve more exploits under heaven than he himself’ (Earle, trans., The Deeds of Beowulf, Done into Modern Prose).
78 Tinker, Beowulf, Translated out of the Old English, p. 5.
79 See Chris Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 6.
80 Matthew Arnold pronounced, ‘Chapman, like Pope, merits in himself all respect, though he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer’ (On Translating Homer, pp. 26–7).