Old English Poetry and Translation (part one)

One of the books we read in the British Modernism class I was TA for last fall was A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster. I'd studied it before, in the last modern British Literature class I took, back in my sophomore year of college. I'd loved it then, too, and the chance to return to it, and to lead discussion sections on it, was something I looked forward to immensely.

From the first day of class, however, I realized I was picking up entirely different things -- it helps that, for this college class, I'd underlined everything in really bright pink pen, which makes those distinctions pretty obvious visually as well as intellectually. A large part of this was the focus of the class itself: one of my favorite aspects of grad school is that no two profs ever teach the same book in the same way. My professor in the fall set a fascinating tone for our time with Forster when she began with the observation of the plethora of negatives that open the book. Chapter 1 begins "Except for the Marabar Caves -- and they are twenty miles off -- the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary." The focus on negatives continues through the first chapter, which although it’s only about three pages long, creates an atmosphere of sorts that continues to the final words of the novel -- "no, not there." The effect -- at least for me, and I know from friends' reactions to the novel that mine is by no means the only reaction -- is that the novel seems to be in stasis, a place of expectation without promise of fulfillment, what Forster articulates when he describes India at page 150 of the Harcourt edition: "She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal."

There are, of course, a hundred problems with the novel that I'm in no way expert enough to talk about in any capacity. But what fascinated me with regards to Forster is that, when I was reading the introduction to Richard Hamer's A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (which a friend gave me ages ago and I'm only just now sitting down to look through), A Passage to India immediately sprang to mind. From Hamer's "General Account": "Only about 30,000 lines of Old English poetry survive; many of the poems which do are fragmentary, and we know the poets and places and dates of composition of almost none of them. Most of the extant verse is known from manuscripts written in Wessex at the end of the tenth century, though in many cases the poems must have been composed long before in other parts of the country, and much of the copying is demonstrably more or less inaccurate. No major works and few minor ones survive in more than one copy, so that the correction of errors and the reconstruction of originals is extremely difficult and often quite impossible. The selection of what has survived has depended entirely on the chances which have caused this manuscript rather than that to escape fire and the other hazards of time. Yet despite all these disadvantages we still possess a body of poetry which contains a quantity of work of the highest standard and whose variety is astonishing."

Aside from the value judgements (what is work of the highest standard when you don't have much to go on?), I think Hamer, writing in 1970, raises several interesting points about this poetry. The most important for me, however, is the number of negative constructions in this excerpt -- no authors, dates, places, inaccurate copying, no major works and few minor ones in more than one copy, impossible corrections. Further, the sense of the arbitrary Hamer leaves with this paragraph-- the phrase that comes to mind (and I think I'm lifting this phrase from Greenfield's work on Wanderer, but I'm not certain) is "vagaries of Wyrd." We've inherited a body of texts that is, at its most basic level, incomplete. This is certainly true of most bodies of text -- they are not whole, there are always references to works that do not survive. However, Old English is different somehow.

It's haunting, in a way -- as Hamer says "The selection of what has survived has depended entirely on the chances which have caused this manuscript rather than that to escape fire and the other hazards of time." Fire is a formidable enemy of the written word. But it's interesting for other reasons, too -- fire is a weapon of choice for the draca, the wyrm -- the dragon that kills Beowulf, in a story that itself was almost consumed by fire. Old English is, in some degree, defined by what is not -- what did not survive, what we do not know. Some of the most moving of the poems are about loss – things that do not last, a life that is irrevocably læne or lent. It's odd that a culture, and the field that studies it, can both be so defined by what is no longer -- and by what we cannot truly understand or translate (what is aelfscinu? When the Anglo-Saxons said enta geweorc, just how monstrous were those giants?).

There was a line in Forster that really registered for me this time through the novel. I'd marked it when I read the book in college, but I hadn't remembered it as important until I re-read: "Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and sqabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. They had not the apparatus for judging." The context is in a conversation between Adela and Fielding about the Marabar caves, her experience of them, Mrs. Moore's experience of them -- the caves destroy language, in a sense – reducing everything said within them to a resounding “boum.” Adela can offer no explanation of the caves, Mrs. Moore’s transformation from devout Christian to existentialist – she has not the apparatus for judging that, no more than she can understand anything deeper about life. Something about this line reminds me of the process of studying Old English literature. So much of my work is focused on gaining some sort of apparatus for understanding -- some way to measure, or explore more effectively what I'm looking at, moving beyond the instinctual love that I can't help feeling.

The poetry (and the prose for that matter!) of the Anglo-Saxons comes to us in translation. Old English, whatever PhD language requirements might say, is a foreign language, and like French or Italian or any other modern language, sometimes it's the faux amis (to recall a phrase my French teacher in high school used to use all the time) that trip you up. The valences of meaning that modern English elides somewhat or entirely. The ghostliness of gæstlic, that is combined with horror and dread is the example that comes to mind from my work on Wanderer. There are many others, some of which I'll catalog in future parts of this topic (when I can recall them -- my mind just came up entirely blank, which is a little disturbing...).

Yeah, I think I'll have fun this summer with my reading of Old English...answering this weird call that is, to use Forster's phrase, "never a promise, only an appeal." Or trying to discern an answer to the question Old English seems to ask me (were Calvino to be my muse for a moment) -- "like Thebes through the mouth of the sphinx."

to be continued...assuming I ever actually start getting work done, that is!