On translating 'Beowulf'

These compounds, especially when they are used not with but instead of such ordinary words as scip 'ship', or sæ 'sea' (already twelve hundred years ago the terms of daily life), give to Old English verse, while it is still unfamiliar, something of the air of a conundrum. So the early scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought: to them, even when they understood Ælfred or Ælfric well enough, 'Saxon poetry' often seemed a tissue of riddles and hard words woven deliberately by lovers of enigma. This view is not, of course, just: it is a begi

The revision has as far as possible emended these things. Though hampered naturally by the fact that it is a revision, not a translation afresh, it is now a better guide in these respects. But no translation, whatever its objects - a student's companion (the main purpose of this book), or a verse-rendering that seeks to transplant what can be transplanted of the old poetry - should be used or followed slavishly, in detail or general principle, by those who have access to the original text. 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. The publisher of a translation ca

A warning against colloquialism and false modernity has already been given by implication above. 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 whatever may be the case with other poets of past ages (with Homer, for instance) the author of Beowulf did not share this preference. 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 that the poem was made. Many words used by the ancient English poets had, even in the eighth century, already passed out of colloquial use for anything from a lifetime to hundreds of years.[2] They were familiar to those who were taught to use and hear the language of verse, as familiar as thou or thy are to-day; but they were literary, elevated, recognized as old (and esteemed on that account). Some words had never, in the senses given to them by the poets, been used in ordinary language at all. This does not apply solely to poetic devices such as swan-rad; it is true also of some simple and much used words, such as beorn 211, etc., and freca 1563. Both meant 'warrior', or in heroic poetry 'man'. Or rather both were used for 'warrior' by poets, while beorn was still a form of the word 'bear',[3] and freca a name of the wolf,[4] and they were still used in verse when the original senses were forgotten. To use beorn and freca became a sign that your language was 'poetical", and these words survived, when much else of the ancient diction had perished, as the special property of the writers of alliterative verse in the Middle Ages. As bern and freik they survived indeed in Northern English (especially in Scotland) down to modern times; and yet never in their long history of use in this sense, over a thousand years, were they ever part of the colloquial speech.

This sort of thing - the building up of a poetic language out of words and forms archaic and dialectal or used in special senses -may be regretted or disliked. There is nonetheless a case for it: the development of a form of language familiar in meaning and yet freed from trivial associations, and filled with the memory of good and evil, is an achievement, and its possessors are richer than those who have no such tradition. It is an achievement possible to people of relatively small material wealth and power (such as the ancient English as compared with their descendants); but it is not necessarily to be despised on that account. But, whether you regret it or not, you will misrepresent the first and most salient characteristic of the style and flavour of the author, if in translating Beowulf, you deliberately eschew the traditional literary and poetic diction which we now possess in favour of the current and trivial. In any case a self-conscious, and often silly, laughter comes too easily to us to be tempted in this way. The things we are here dealing with are serious, moving, and full of 'high sentence' -if we have the patience and solidity to endure them for a while. We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity and just to the solemn temper of the original, if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; exquisite and artistic and prefer the 'cu

1

Several are to be found on p. 25 of that book: notably the renowned 'boss of horrors' for fyrena hyrde 750, here rendered 'master of crimes'; and 'genial saloon' for winsele 771, here rendered 'winehall'. The suggestion of Grand Guignol and less reputable 'pubs' is wholly false to the original.

2

Those who have access to texts and editions will easily find many examples. Nouns, such as guma 'man', are the largest class, but other words of other kind are also frequent, such as ongeador 1595 'together'; gamol 58, etc. 'old'; sin 1336, etc. 'his'. In these four cases the ancestors of the normal modern words ma