INTRODUCTION I. THE TRANSLATOR’S TASK IN BEOWULF Rifling by chance some old book-tumulus And bringing into light those iron-tempered Lines of its buried verse – never be careless With ancient but still formidable weapons! MAYAKOVSKY. What literary activity is more purposeful than translation? And yet, what field is more thickly cluttered with the mere monuments of industry – dry, torpid, and unread! And especially in poetry, what translator has not sometimes felt, with Ezra Pound, that ‘all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking’? – thankless, because his audience in the first place almost disbelieves in the translation of poetry even as a possibility; desolate, because of the disproportion between his own convictlike labour and the infinitesimal influence on men’s minds of the completed product. Nevertheless apologies are not offered for continuing to attempt verse translation. If poetry has no ulterior motives, the translation of it has, and it is the translator’s utilitarian zeal that keeps this difficult redoubt from falling entirely into the hands of its two enemies, happy ignorance on one side and long-term esperantism on the other. When the translator unites with this purposefulness something that was pre-existent in his mind, a secret and passionate sympathy with the alien poet – Dryden and Juvenal, FitzGerald and Omar, Pound and Rihaku, Chapman and Homer, Mathers and Bilhana, Douglas and Virgil – then we may have something memorable, some justification of the activity. The final demand to see propagandist ardour and innate poetic sympathy linked with the care of accuracy – and this is a demand which most critics of translation unconsciously make – is never met in practice, and some translators would indeed argue that any such attempts must be self-contradictory and futile. It is only too easy to stress a ‘natural’ opposition between poet and scholar, since there are plenty of examples to show that it has existed. Keats’s famous sonnet on Chapman’s Homer will not seem too strange to anyone who takes xi