We started this mini-series on Beowulf with a discussion of how difficult it is to translate anything from one language into another. And when the original work is removed from our own culture and our time, the translator takes on a greater burden, evoking both the original work and its culture, which is often strange to us in startling, unexpected ways.
So it is with Beowulf. The original language is unreadable without specialized training; the alliterative verse forms are complex and bespeak an artistic ethic entirely different from our own; the poet’s religious context is certainly a Christian writing of pre-Christian but not-very-distant times, but even the theology is different from what Christians follow today. The poem is removed from us in just about every way possible.
And yet, it still speaks to us.
There have been many translations of Beowulf into modern English. Some of them are, well, adequate, like E.T. Donaldson’s prose translation which was published in the Norton Anthology of English Literature and forced on Survey of British Lit students for decades. Some are just awful (most of these are early 19th century versions that you might find in your grandparents’ attic).
A few translations are stellar. They straddle a chasm, able to evoke the sound and aura of a distant past while speaking to the present. Seamus Heaney’s translation is such a one. Tolkien’s translation, alas, is not. But then, Tolkien never planned to publish his translation of Beowulf — he made one for his own private use. Having taught the poem for 50 years, he had Thoughts about what a translation should accomplish.
In his mind, his own work didn’t achieve the balance he had set for himself, and so his translation remained in notes until Christopher Tolkien put it in order long after his father’s death. Even now, to my mind the best way to read Beowulf is the Heaney edition — because it’s got a facing-page format with the original text on the left side and Heaney’s translation on the right, my Old English dictionary on one side and Tolkien’s translation with his notes on the other. This gives me the chance to veer off and dive as deeply into a word or phrase as pleases me, and I like to think that such a situation would please old J.R.R. I can imagine him doing the same in his study 60 years ago and more.
Tolkien’s prose translation is precise, and he wrote in his notes that he abandoned his idea of following the alliterative stress-verse of the original because it just doesn’t fit English any longer, not for sustained verse. Heaney came to the same conclusion, writing that “the whole attempt to turn it into modern English seemed to me like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy hammer” (1, p. xxiii). Anyone who has tried to render the whole poem into 4-stress alliterative verse has failed — not only has our language changed in its rhythms over 1000 years, our poetic ears are tuned to different measures. Except in small spare moments like some of the interludes in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, alliterative verse sound too foreign, almost twee in its hackneyed measures. Except in the hands of a master — like Heaney, or Headley, or Gerard Manley Hopkins — and then only in small doses.
So the question turns on: how to translate an alliterative poem when alliteration doesn’t really work for us anymore? By the way, for you all in the back, alliteration, which predates rhyming (brought by the French in 1066) is the repetition of initial consonants or initial vowels, like this:
Rich robes then readily men ran to bring him,
for him to change, and to clothe him, having chosen the best.
As soon as he had donned one and dressed was therein,
as it sat on him seemly with its sailing skirts,
then verily in his visage a vision of Spring
to each man there appeared, and in marvellous hues
bright and beautiful was all his body beneath.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 862-868
See what I mean? It sounds and feels artificial in modern English.
To counter that trend, Tolkien opted for prose in his teaching copy (but his Sir Gawain, quoted above, trots along in alliterative Middle English). Although he never published a Beowulf, he had certain expectations about how it should be translated. In his essay “On Translating Beowulf,” he warns against “colloquialism and false modernity” as violating the formal tone of the great poem:
Personally you may not like an archaic vocabulary, and word-order, artificially maintained as an elevated and literary language. You may prefer the brand new, the lively and the snappy. But … if you wish to translate, not re-write Beowulf, 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 the poem was made.
2, p. 54
So Tolkien requires formality, seeing that the poem used words that were consciously literary and somewhat old-fashioned in the tenth century, and says that to do anything less violates the artistic integrity of the poem and the poet’s intention (and hoo boy, will Maria Dahvana Headley have things to say about that next week!) Even so, though, he cautions against the consciously poetic and contrived; the poetry shouldn’t be artificially archaic, but rather “words that remain in literary use, especially in the use of verse, among educated people” (2, p. 55). A tightrope, if you will, neither too modern nor too artistically self-conscious, and certainly not frivolous. There are certain translators he drags in this essay, justifiably.
Because Tolkien has a point — the poem is serious, deadly serious, and we’re well-served to speak of serious things with respect. Therefore, his prose translation is precise: it says no more and no less than he finds in the original.
One area he’s particularly salient and worth heeding is in rendering kennings. Kennings are word compounds that act like similes but are compact and often startling. One of the most famous and often-used example is hwæl-ræd “whale-road,” meaning the sea. Except that hwæl refers more to a large fast fish like a dolphin or porpoise, while ræd implies riding. Implicit in the kenning is the action of dolphins riding the ocean, diving through the waves. A kenning is a visual image that’s packed with meaning, denser than a simile, elegant as a bird’s flight.
He who in those days said and who heard flæschama ‘flesh-raiment,’ ban-hus ‘bone- house, hreðer-loca ‘heart-prison’, thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in cauldron.
2, p. 60
It’s no wonder that Tolkien couldn’t satisfy his own expectations of what a Beowulf translation ought to be. Because no translation could fulfill all the requirements of an ideal Beowulf translation. Because no translation could be Beowulf — it would not be as good, as authentic, as the original.
When Seamus Heaney approached the poem (after 35 years of thinking about it) he eschewed any notion of replicating the Old English or trying to make it fit modern dress. Instead, he took a different tack:
It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator’s right-of-way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father’s, people whom I had once described in a poem as “big voiced Scullions.”
1, p. xxvii
His “big voice Scullions” speak with simple dignity and unadorned forthrightness, which is the tack that Heaney takes: plain speech whenever possible, with bows to alliteration and kennings. He keeps to the poetic line as much as he can, preserving at least some of the meter.
In the course of the translation...deviations, distortions, syncopations, and extensions do occur; what I was after first and foremost was a narrative line that sounded as if it meant business, and I was prepared to sacrifice other things in pursuit of this directness of utterance.
1, p. xxix
And it works. His version is clean and dignified; it moves, like most of Heaney’s verse, with deliberation and strength in the lines. See if you agree:
The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.
1, p. 7, lines 81-85
Simple language, the echo of alliteration in each line (w in 82, b in 83, c/k in 84, vowels in 85).
Heaney is unarguably a master of language and his verse is magnificent. Perhaps no one could do more with Beowulf and maintain that dignity of language, that tone of elegy, that shading of doom and recognition that wyrd holds sway over life no matter what one might wish. Heaney’s Beowulf is magnificent.
And yet….the poem still holds us at arm’s length, speaking across a chasm of 1000 years. We few who love the poem love the poem. Most people still find it hopelessly old and foreign. Is it possible that all of this deference to antiquity defeats the purpose and bleeds the pleasure of reading from the verse?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I’m setting you up for next week, for Headley and her firecracker of a translation. She blows all the cobwebs off Beowulf and makes it something new again, something revolutionary. Something maybe enduring.
Change of plans to accommodate the publishing schedule. Next week, Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf which, if you haven’t read it, will knock your socks off. Run out and read it, so we can talk about it! Week after, works inspired by Beowulf. If you have any artwork or poetry, etc., that you’d like to share, let me know between now and then, please! Then we’ll be finished with Beowulf, and Jeffersonian Democrat will take the helm for a while to talk about Tolkien and the Elves of Middle Earth. See you in the comments—
Previous Installments
Sources
1. Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. New York: Norton, 2000.
2. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Translating Beowulf.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. New York: Harper Collins, 1983, pp. 49-71.