employed in Beowulf translation. It gives us in Scott Moncrieff’s version1 such grotesqueries as ‘their sarks rattled’ and ‘I knew him as a little knave’; and almost damns at the outset the translation of Leonard with its hearty opening ‘What ho!’ The archaizing temptation frequently conquers the author’s expressly or implicitly disavowing it, as a few examples of this curiously prevalent wishfulthinking will show.
Archibald Strong’s rendering (1925) into ‘modern English rhyming verse’ tells us in the Introduction that ‘wherever a bold or vivid phrase occurs in the original, I have tried to render it as literally as possible, and for this purpose I have occasionally employed archaisms . . .’. It may be that the Anglo-Saxon poet’s love of litotes has influenced the choice of this ‘occasionally’; the fact remains that there is hardly a line of the translation without some more or less bizarrely uncurrent term, turn of phrase, or word-order, and the use of archaism is not confined to the rendering of something ‘bold or vivid’ in the original.
– Then Beowulf the bairn of Ecgtheow his tiding thus ’gan tell: ‘In my youth full many a mellay and foray grim I tholed, And of all at this hour I mind me. I was seven winters old When the lord of largesse, e’en Hrethel, the monarch of bounty free, From my father took me and kept me, and gave me feasting and fee . . .’
(ll. 2425–31.)
In 1940 appeared Charles W. Kennedy’s translation, in what he described as ‘authentic modern verse’. Would that phrase at that date, if it meant anything at all, cover such words and expressions as: Lo!, I ween, smote him sore, what time . . ., blithesome band, ’twas a weary while, wretched wight, wove his words in a winsome pattern,
1 Sniped at even when it appeared in 1921:
. . . another surly Scot – Moncrieff Who brings the early Saxon songs to grief, Who translates Beowulf, and then (oh epitaph!) Has on the cover his own photograph . . .
(Augustine Rivers, in Wheels 1921.)
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