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the trouble to read that translation as poetry; yet Matthew Arnold, examining the latter piecemeal with a scholarly eye, was able with honesty to pronounce it fanciful, extravagant, oblique, and over sophisticated: ‘Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation.’ The point is still, however: could Arnold? And that question remains with us after we read Arnold’s own specimen translations from Homer; because these have fidelity without vigour, and if Chapman has vigour without fidelity it is not hard to see whose version will be read, and being read is the ultimate test in such a pragmatic art. This antithesis, real though it has often been, must not be allowed to hamstring the zest of the metaphrastical perfectionist. Communication must take place; the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush, as with original poetry, but to bring this about, ‘with poesy to open poesy’ as Chapman describes it in his preface to the Iliad, is it necessary, is it inevitable that the imagination should deal with its given material highhandedly and inaccurately? Is there not here an attitude of mind, an approach, to be cultivated, a backward and elusive faculty to be encouraged: is there not an art or science of translation, still in its crudest stages, to be developed? The present version of Beowulf, for what it is worth, is offered as a step in the direction of ‘full translation’; that is to say, it aims to interest and at times to excite the reader of poetry without misleading anyone who has no access to the original. It is just about a hundred years since Beowulf translations in modern English verse began to be produced, and in that period more than a dozen such assaults have been made on the poem. It may fairly be said, however, that not one of these has succeeded in establishing itself as a notable presentation, even for its own period, of a great original. Beowulf has been unfortunate in having had no Gavin Douglas, no George Chapman, no John Dryden: the only poet to turn his hand to it has been William Morris, and this translation is disastrously bad, being uncouth to the point of weirdness, unfairly inaccurate, and often more obscure than the original (hardly, in fact, a translation at all, since Morris ‘worked up’ a prose paraphrase passed to him with increasing misgiving by the scholarly A.J. Wyatt). Nothing has been found, therefore, in these Beowulf translations to interest either the practising poet or the cultivated reader of poetry, unless his aim is simply to find out what the poem deals with, and that would be more safely and easily got from a prose xii
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version. It must be remarked that the translators themselves are only partly responsible for this state of affairs (less responsible in the years up to 1920, more responsible thereafter), since the problems of verse translation are at any period one facet of the huge general problem of verse composition, and when the existing common tradition of writing poetry, especially from the point of view of technique and craftsmanship but also in choice of subject, becomes as enervated and unworkmanlike as it did in this country between the time of Garnett’s translation in 1882 and Clark Hall’s in 1914, we can hardly be surprised that the Beowulfs of the period have an ineffectualness reflecting a wider decline. Nothing, indeed, could be farther from the mood and effect of Beowulf than the neomedievalism of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, late Victorian romanticism, the aestheticism of the Nineties, or the mild-mannered prettiness and sentiment of the pre-Georgian and Georgian poets of 1900–14. The period was necessarily at a loss, both in diction and in metre, when it attempted to recapture Old English epic poetry, and the most presentable of these early versions, that of Gummere (1909), can only be described as painstaking and close to the text: it has no poetic life, and its archaism would not now be tolerated. There is not the same excuse, however, for translators who have continued to indulge and perpetuate this essentially late-nineteenth-century undisciplined archaistic pseudopoetic style of Beowulf translation, after the first world war and the changes in poetry which accompanied that upheaval. The most noticeable fact about the post-1918 versions is that they fail to establish a contact with the poetry of their time, and therefore fail to communicate, except to those who have themselves no contact with the living verse of their time. They show no awareness of such lessons as were available and might have helped: in Imagism with its insistence on care in the choice of individual words, in the general rejection of literariness, decoration, and the obsolete or bankrupt expression, in the new situational and narrative realism which was being experimented with in poets as different as Owen, Rosenberg, Frost, Day Lewis, and Auden. Consider diction. The general principle of translators seems always to have been: use archaic diction to preserve epic dignity. Even after the twentieth-century rebellion against archaism (of words and of word-order), this tiresome and usually thoughtless (and hence often ludicrous) tone-raising device has continued to be xiii

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the trouble to read that translation as poetry; yet Matthew Arnold, examining the latter piecemeal with a scholarly eye, was able with honesty to pronounce it fanciful, extravagant, oblique, and over sophisticated: ‘Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation.’ The point is still, however: could Arnold? And that question remains with us after we read Arnold’s own specimen translations from Homer; because these have fidelity without vigour, and if Chapman has vigour without fidelity it is not hard to see whose version will be read, and being read is the ultimate test in such a pragmatic art. This antithesis, real though it has often been, must not be allowed to hamstring the zest of the metaphrastical perfectionist. Communication must take place; the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush, as with original poetry, but to bring this about, ‘with poesy to open poesy’ as Chapman describes it in his preface to the Iliad, is it necessary, is it inevitable that the imagination should deal with its given material highhandedly and inaccurately? Is there not here an attitude of mind, an approach, to be cultivated, a backward and elusive faculty to be encouraged: is there not an art or science of translation, still in its crudest stages, to be developed? The present version of Beowulf, for what it is worth, is offered as a step in the direction of ‘full translation’; that is to say, it aims to interest and at times to excite the reader of poetry without misleading anyone who has no access to the original.

It is just about a hundred years since Beowulf translations in modern English verse began to be produced, and in that period more than a dozen such assaults have been made on the poem. It may fairly be said, however, that not one of these has succeeded in establishing itself as a notable presentation, even for its own period, of a great original. Beowulf has been unfortunate in having had no Gavin Douglas, no George Chapman, no John Dryden: the only poet to turn his hand to it has been William Morris, and this translation is disastrously bad, being uncouth to the point of weirdness, unfairly inaccurate, and often more obscure than the original (hardly, in fact, a translation at all, since Morris ‘worked up’ a prose paraphrase passed to him with increasing misgiving by the scholarly A.J. Wyatt). Nothing has been found, therefore, in these Beowulf translations to interest either the practising poet or the cultivated reader of poetry, unless his aim is simply to find out what the poem deals with, and that would be more safely and easily got from a prose xii

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