Translating Early Medieval Poetry Read online

  Volume XI

  Translating Early Medieval Poetry

  ISSN 2043–8230

  Series Editors

  Karl Fugelso

  Chris Jones

  Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world.

  New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below.

  Professor Karl Fugelso

  Dr Chris Jones

  Boydell & Brewer Ltd

  Art Department

  School of English

  PO Box 9

  Towson University

  University of St Andrews

  Woodbridge

  3103 Center for the Arts

  St Andrews

  Suffolk IP12 3DF

  8000 York Road

  Fife KY16 9AL

  UK

  Towson, MD 21252–0001

  UK

  USA

  Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book

  Translating Early

  Medieval Poetry

  Transformation,

  Reception, Interpretation

  Edited by

  Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

  D. S. BREWER

  © Contributors 2017

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

  no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,

  published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,

  recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the

  prior permission of the copyright owner

  First published 2017

  D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

  ISBN 978 1 84384 473 0

  D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

  PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

  and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

  668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA

  website: www.boydel andbrewer.com

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or

  accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred

  to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such

  websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

  This publication is printed on acid-free paper

  Contents

  Acknowledgements vii

  Contributors viii

  Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

  Introduction: From Eald to New

  1

  1 Chris Jones

  From Eald Old to New Old: Translating Old English Poetry in(to) the

  Twenty-first Century

  13

  2 Hugh Magennis

  Edwin Morgan’s Translations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Turning Eald into

  New in English and Scots

  29

  3 Inna Matyushina

  Gains and Losses in Translating Old English Poetry into Modern

  English and Russian

  46

  4 M. J. Toswel

  Borges, Old English Poetry and Translation Studies

  61

  5 Rory McTurk

  ‘Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland’: What Would Henryson or

  Tolkien Say?

  75

  6 Elizabeth Boyle

  The Forms and Functions of Medieval Irish Poetry and the Limitations

  of Modern Aesthetics

  92

  7 Lahney Preston-Matto

  Aislinge Meic Conglinne: Challenges for Translator and Audience

  109

  8 Tadhg Ó Síocháin

  Translating Find and the Phantoms into Modern Irish

  122

  9 Hannah Burrows

  Reawakening Angantýr: English Translations of an Old Norse Poem

  from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-first

  148

  10 Carolyne Larrington

  Translating and Retranslating the Poetic Edda

  165

  vi

  Contents

  11 Heather O’Donoghue

  From Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel: Old Norse Poetry about Brynhildr

  and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 183

  12 Gareth Lloyd Evans

  Michael Hirst’s Vikings and Old Norse Poetry

  199

  Bernard O’Donoghue

  Afterword 213

  Bertha Rogers

  A Translation of Riddle 15 from the Exeter Book

  217

  Bibliography 218

  Index 234

  Acknowledgements

  This collection arose from an international conference held in University College

  Cork in June 2014, organised by the editors. We would like to thank all those who

  attended and contributed to the conference, the poetry reading, and this volume.

  The conference could not have taken place without the generous funding provided

  by an Irish Research Council ‘New Foundations’ Grant, as well as financial assis-

  tance from the School of English and the Information Services Strategic Fund at

  University College Cork, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and

  Literature, and the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland. The

  editors are especial y grateful to Michael Matto and Greg Delanty, editors of The

  Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, for their support and advice. We owe a debt of gratitude to the School Manager Anne Fitzgerald, as well as the Head

  of School, Claire Connol y, and the Director of Information Services (and gifted

  poet), John FitzGerald, for their enthusiastic backing of the project. We would

  also like to thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer, the editors of the Medi-

  evalism series, Karl Fugelso and Chris Jones, and the astute anonymous readers for

  their critical help in bringing this collection together. We are incredibly grateful

  to Bernard O’Donoghue for writing the afterword to this volume, and to Bertha

  Rogers for permission to use her beautiful il ustration of Riddle 15 on the book’s cover. The vibrancy and energy of her artistic interpretation encapsulates many of

  this volume’s themes, and it demonstrates the continuing influence of early medi-

  eval poetry on the creative arts in the twenty-first century. Final y, we would like to thank our families and friends for their constant support.

  Contributors

  Tom Birkett is Lecturer in Old English at Univ
ersity College Cork, and author of Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry (Abingdon, 2017). He led the IRC-funded ‘From Eald to New’ Project in 2014.

  Elizabeth Boyle is Head of Early Irish at Maynooth University. She has published widely on medieval Irish literary, religious and intellectual culture, and on the

  history of Celtic Studies in the nineteenth century.

  Hannah Burrows is Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

  Her scholarly and creative projects bringing medieval material into modern

  contexts include: an edition and translation of the poetry from Hervarar saga

  ok Heiðreks for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project; the Financial Times Christmas Carol 2015; and performances of Bandamanna saga

  with Aberdeen Performing Arts (2016 and 2017).

  Gareth Lloyd Evans recently completed his DPhil in Old Norse Literature at the

  University of Oxford and is currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medieval Litera-

  ture at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He has published on skaldic poetry and post-

  modern engagements with medieval literature.

  Chris Jones teaches English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford,

  2006).

  Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the Univer-

  sity of Oxford and is Official Fellow in medieval English literature at St John’s

  College, Oxford. She researches into Old Norse literature, Arthurian literature

  and medievalism, and has published the leading translation into English of the

  Old Norse Poetic Edda.

  Hugh Magennis is Emeritus Professor in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on ideas and imagery in Old

  English and related literature, on saints’ lives and on the reception of Anglo-

  Saxon writings in the modern period. His publications include Translating

  Beowulf (Cambridge, 2011), a study of modern verse translations of the poem.

  Kirsty March-Lyons obtained her PhD from University College Cork and was

  co-organiser of the IRC-funded conference ‘From Eald to New’. Her research

  examines the emergence of affective piety in Old and Middle English prayer.

  Inna Matyushina is an Honorary Professor at Exeter University, and Professor

  at the Russian State University for the Humanities. She has published seven

  Contributors

  ix

  monographs and over 100 articles on Old English and Old Norse heroic epic,

  skaldic poetry, medieval lyric, chivalric sagas, and flyting in Old Germanic

  culture. She is currently working on a monograph on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  Rory McTurk, Professor Emeritus of Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds, is a translator of Old and Modern Icelandic poetry and prose, and the author of

  books and articles on Icelandic and related literature. He is currently contrib-

  uting to the col aborative nine-volume edition of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandina-

  vian Middle Ages.

  Bernard O’Donoghue is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where

  he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish literature. He has published seven

  volumes of poetry and a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Penguin Classics. He is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.

  Heather O’Donoghue is Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. Her publications include Skaldic Verse and the Poetics

  of Saga Narrative, From Asgard to Valhal a, and English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History, as well as individual articles about the influence of Norse myth on writers such as Blake, Morris, MacDiarmid, Auden and Heaney.

  Tadhg Ó Síocháin is the former Head of Examinations and Assessment at the Irish State Examinations Commission, and is currently studying for a PhD in early

  and medieval Irish at University College Cork. He has published a Modern

  Irish translation of short stories by Marcel Aimée ( Delphine agus Marinette, An Daingean, 2011) and is currently preparing an edition and English translation of

  the medieval Irish tale ‘The Abbot of Drimnagh’.

  Lahney Preston-Matto is Associate Professor of English Literature at Adelphi

  University on Long Island, New York. She has published numerous articles in

  the field of medieval studies, and recently produced a major new translation of

  Aislinge meic Conglinne: The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Syracuse, NY, 2010).

  Bertha Rogers produced the cover art and accompanying translation of Riddle 15.

  Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000; her poems and visual art have appeared in journals and anthologies and in Heart Turned Back (2010) and other collections. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddles from the Exeter Book,

  Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is forthcoming, as is Wild, a new poetry collection.

  M. J. Toswell teaches English and Medieval Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and has recently published The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Turnhout, 2014), co-winner of the International Association of Anglo-Saxonists

  award for best book; two projects on Borges, one a translation of his book on

  Germanic medieval literatures and the other a study of his interest in the subject;

  and Today’s Medieval University (Kalamazoo, MI, 2017).

  Introduction:

  From Eald to New

  Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

  When The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation was

  published in 2010, its ‘spirit of col aboration and creativity’ and produc-

  tive juxtaposition of diverse poetic voices challenged the academy to

  rethink how Old English poetry should be approached.1 Here was a collection of

  Old English poems translated by poets with very different knowledge of the mate-

  rial: some came to the project able to translate directly from Old English (or like

  Bernard O’Donoghue, translate certain poems from memory), whilst others needed

  the aid of prose translations, crib sheets and the careful guidance of the editors (the poet A. E. Stallings quips: ‘I have no Anglo-Saxon, except inasmuch as I speak

  English’).2 All of the translations sought to make early medieval poetry accessible

  and contemporary, and the collection as a whole demonstrates the full range of

  possibilities that Old English poetry offers to the poet writing for a twenty-first-

  century audience.

  This particular anthology’s endeavour to match the Old English corpus with

  ‘a word-hoard of our times’ is also representative of a wider resurgence in atten-

  tion to early medieval poetry,3 a rekindling of interest that has seen a succession of high-profile translations including Ciarán Carson’s version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for Penguin Classics;4 a new translation of the Poetic Edda by Andy Orchard for

  Penguin, by Jackson Crawford for Hackett, and a revised version of Carolyne

  Larrington’s translation of the same for Oxford World’s Classics;5 and the arrival

  1 Quoted from the book jacket of Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, eds, The Word

  Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (New York, 2010).

  2 A. E. Stallings, ‘On Translating Old English Poetry: The Riming Poem’, in The Word Exchange, p. 540.

  3 Greg Delanty, ‘Preface’, in The Word Exchange, pp. xv–xvii.

  4 Ciaran Carson, trans., The Táin (London, 2007).

  5 Andy Orchard, trans., The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore (London, 2011); Jackson Crawford, trans., The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (In
dianapolis, 2015); Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda: A New Translation (Oxford, 1996; rev. 2nd edn The Poetic Edda, 2014).

  2

  Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

  of Tolkien’s long-awaited translation of Beowulf into an already crowded market.6

  The passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013 also saw renewed attention to his merits as

  a translator, and particularly to his own much-lauded translation of Beowulf, which was serialised as BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’ following his death;7 the original

  Old English poem continues to be reinterpreted in every imaginable medium.8 The

  successful ‘Modern Poets on Old Norse Poetry’ and ‘Kennings in the Community’

  initiatives in the UK have led to some extraordinary reworkings of skaldic verse by

  contemporary poets,9 and the hit series Vikings has seen Old Norse poetry recited in living rooms across the world. Whilst poetry in general may represent the least

  commodified and certainly the ‘least translated genre’,10 it has been hard to escape

  the impression, as Chris Jones points out in the first essay of this collection, that

  something of a renaissance has been taking place in the reception and remediation

  of poetry from the early medieval period, breathing new life into old texts.

  The ‘From Eald to New’ conference from which this collection of essays arose

  was held at University College Cork in 2014, and presented an opportunity to take

  stock of this extraordinary proliferation of translation activity and to critical y

  assess the ways in which the landscape of translation has changed in the twenty-first

  century; how we arrived at this particularly productive juncture in the on-going

  discourse between history and translation;11 and what impact new translations and

  interpretations of medieval poetry are having on the study of Old English, medieval

  Irish and Old Norse literature.

  For both pragmatic and cultural-historical reasons these three literatures repre-

  sent quite distinct fields of study and specialism, and it is little surprise that the discourse on modern translation and its implications has largely continued along

  6 J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sel ic Spel , ed.

  Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014). A great number of innovative translations of Beowulf have appeared in recent years, ranging from Meghan Purvis’s experimental verse imitation of Beowulf (London, 2013), to Michael Morpurgo’s wonderful retelling of Beowulf for children, il ustrated by Michael Foreman (London, 2013), to The Grinnel Beowulf (Tempe, AZ, 2015), a col aborative teaching edition produced by students at Grinnell College and published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.