Some poems in Celtic languages are older, but the earliest sizable body of vernacular literature in Europe is the Old English, dating, by liberal estimation, from the seventh century to the twelfth.  It is of very high quality, especially the verse.  Altogether, these heroic monologues, Bible paraphrases, riddles, battle accounts, saints’ lives, prayers, religious allegories, moral exempla, and white-magical charms depict a society full of necessary violence that has decided—quite recently, it seems—to trust in the salvation of Jesus Christ.  This aura of conversion, dramatically attested by sudden shifts from heroic to Christian mode in some poems, by conflation of those modes in the realization of Christ as warrior (as in the justly famed “Dream of the Rood”), causes this poetry to rivet one’s attention like a brilliant light in the darkness of our time.

Perhaps following the lead of Ezra Pound, who sheared off a fifth of “Seafarer” to make it seem pre-Christian, the 20th century abounded in translations of these works that could seem entirely secular.  Until recently, few who took an undergraduate English-literature survey course could escape hearing that the Christian ideas and assertions in Beowulf were interpolations to an originally pagan text.  For the editors—the Irish poet Greg Delanty and the American medieval literary scholar Michael Matto—of this gratifyingly large selection, such distortion is unconscionable.  “Anglo-Saxon poetry is far from being a record of a pagan culture co-opted and rewritten by Christian monks,” they write.  “Christianity is the sea Anglo-Saxon poetry swims in.”  Their determination to embrace the Christianity of the poems (or simply to be faithful to them) is of a piece with other distinctive traits of their anthology that make it more valuable than most of its predecessors for conjuring Anglo-Saxon reality.

Believing that previous collections of Old English verse put into modern English by single translators seldom noteworthy as original poets have suffered from lack of both poetry and a variety of poetic voices, the editors commissioned versions from writers known best as poets themselves, though plenty of these (Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, James Harpur, and many Irish men and women who have done yeomanly service to Gaelic poetry) are famous as translators, too.  Their approach has yielded a high number of persuasive and polished translations of occasionally surprising provenance; for instance, the version of the lacunae-bedeviled “The Ruin,” a pondering of time’s depredations of an ancient city (sic transit gloria mundi), by Yusef Komunyakaa, who just may have seen similar decayed splendors during his service in Vietnam.

Many of the contributors have chosen to echo the characteristic style of Anglo-Saxon verse by observing the four stresses, three alliterations, and even, though less often, the caesura (pause) found in the usual Old English poetic line.  Many place a visible caesura in their modern English lines, while others split their modern equivalents of the Old English line into two shorter lines.  Quite often when a translator pursues a different, more individualized strategy, the results are less happy.  The immense “Riddle 40” is cast in an alternation of long and short lines rather like English versions of Hebrew biblical verse or Latin elegiacs.  But a jarringly contemporary-sounding “shit” and reminiscences of Whitman (the translator actually inserts the Good Gay Poet’s annoying clinker “I contain multitudes”) bring the effort crashing down to the asphalt.  The metrical charms, several of which are mixtures of prose instructions and verse incantations, lead some translators into unidiomatic forms, such as Nick Laird’s rendering of the prose of “Metrical Charm 1: For Unfruitful Land” into free verse that at first glance looks like loose blank verse, and the verse into three-and-four-beat-line quatrains rhymed abab.  In his more satisfying version of “The Nine Herbs Charm,” Tom Sleigh sticks with broken lines (essentially, two lines modern for one line of Old English) for the verse and prose for the prose; the broken lines, in particular, visually suggest his interpretation of the poem as “an overlap [sic] of late pagan and early Christian sensibilities,” as he puts it in the Appendix.

If the variety of voices the editors hoped to achieve through variety of translators and faithfulness to Old English form that so many of those translators practice tend to cancel each other out—if, that is, the personality of a particular poet’s voice is damned by the decision to write “like Old English”—then this compensates with so much fascination as to make a reader forget about personal voice, except when it annoys.

The volume is a dual-language edition.  The Old English original is printed on left-hand pages, the translation on right-hand pages, and what appears on the left is exactly what is translated on the right.  It is usually easy to find the corresponding lines of both versions—understanding, however, that word order within sentences often differs in modern by comparison with Old English, and that a modern line often begins with what is actually the middle or second part (after the caesura) of a line in the corresponding Old English.  And now begins the fun.  Employing the editors’ brief and limpid “Guide to Reading Aloud” (as well as the speaking example of Dr. Frank Brownlow in his lectures on the elegiac poems and Old English Christian poetry for The Rockford Institute’s 2010 Summer School), the reader may launch himself upon the harsh and powerful currents of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

The beat of the lines and the propulsion of their alliteration seize one immediately, though new readers will, of course, stumble constantly and make it through entire poems only if those are very short.  It doesn’t take long, however, before one is learning from the Old English.  Noticing that many words suggest modern cognates that translators often represent as synonyms for the modern forms, that modern English is more or less concise than the Old, and proceeding to ask why opens up the Anglo-Saxon world.  For instance, whereas God is called “the Maker” by a translator, in the Old English He is “faeder on heofonum” or “father in heaven.”  The latter reflects the patriarchal cast of the Anglo-Saxon mind, by which the Divinity is naturally best conceived as a father, the leader of a family.  The warmth of the Old English term implicitly explains the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity.

Crossing the gutter to read a poem in both languages, with lots of back-and-forthing, nearly always yields such insights.  That’s because this volume’s two tongues are only different states of the same entity.  This is all English, beautifully powerful and beautifully Christian.

 

[The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (New York: Norton) 557 pp., $35.00]