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supplanted by other synonyms in prose and in common speech; nor is this different from what we find in the heroic poetry of (for example) Virgil and Milton. It is also true that modern dictionaries still include after definitions of many uncolloquial words the quasiapologetic explanation ‘obsolete except literary’ or ‘archaic and poetic’. But such dictionary descriptions are relics of a rule of English that has been (temporarily at least) suspended. The reaction against ‘rhetoric’ has been so strong that present-day readers of poetry will not now readily accept as ‘poetic’ anything that is ‘archaic’, as ‘literary’ anything that is ‘obsolete’. And here is the crux of the modern translator’s problem, which Tolkien does not estimate at its most formidable. There is no use being faithful to the poetic archaisms of the original if the result cannot be couched in terms acceptable to one’s poetic co-readers and co-writers. If it is a case of losing an archaism or losing the poetry, the archaism must go. Whatever the tradition of the original poetry may have been, the translator’s duty is as much to speak to his own age as it is to represent the voice of a past age: these are, indeed, equal tasks. If the poet of Beowulf was, like Virgil, sometimes amantissimus vetustatis, there is no fear of the flavour of an antiquity, a weight and a grandeur, and a melancholy of history, being lost in a version that uses current English; for the background cannot be modernized – the social system, the customs, the entertainments, the supernatural beings, the battles and the weapons . . . and in the inescapable bedrock vocabulary of king, lord, and retinue, gold-giving and mead-drinking, coat of mail and dragon and burial-mound, the twentieth-century reader will find enough that is remote from his own experience without any superadded linguistic crinkum-crankum and mock-epopeanism. The metrical problem has been as much discussed as that of diction has been neglected. In the main, this problem has been seen as one of carrying over a poetic tradition based on accent or stress and syllabically flexible into a basically syllabic tradition. (The distinction between ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables, important in the old metric, holds little or no aesthetic meaning for the modern reader’s ear, and is usually not taken into account; even if experimentally reproduced in modern verse, it adds no pleasure to it; its significance was lost when the Old English inflections were lost.) Solutions of the problem may be distributed into three principal groups: blank verse, rhyming syllabic metres with heroic or semi-heroic associa- xvi
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tions, and ‘imitative’ stress-metres with or without the Anglo-Saxon alliterative system. Of these, blank verse is the least likely to be successful, although at a first glance it might seem to be the obvious choice, and although it has been among the earliest ( J.J. Conybeare’s specimen extracts, 1816) and the most recent (Mary E. Waterhouse, 1949) metrical mediums employed. The latter translator argues in her Preface that Old English metric is ‘too unfamiliar to be acceptable to those who are not students’ and that blank verse is a natural alternative, ‘taking it as the modern heroic line and therefore the equivalent of the older one’. If this was the case, the translator’s task would be light! But unfortunately it is not true. There is no ‘modern heroic line’ because there is no tradition of modern heroic poetry; and blank verse is no longer a living medium for extended writing. Tennyson, Browning, and Hardy are the last important masters of it. Perhaps The Ring and the Book was the death-flurry of this 400-year-old leviathan; certainly there was not much left to be done with blank verse after Browning (not even by Doughty!), and in Browning the seeds of the subsequent disruption of the metre, to be nurtured in our century by his admirer Ezra Pound, are clearly visible. In The Dynasts (our most recent ‘heroic’ poem – 1908) Hardy did not risk a continuous use of blank verse, but interspersed it with prose and with lyric metres. And Robert Bridges, in many ways a conservative and traditional poet, showed that he was sensitive to the needs of the age (even if unsuccessful in this experiment) when in 1929 he produced The Testament of Beauty in a non-syllabic loosely 6-stress line, deliberately avoiding what would earlier have been the almost automatic choice of blank verse for a lengthy and serious work. When we come to poets who are more specifically ‘modern’ than Hardy or Bridges, the breakaway from blank verse is of course complete and unmistakable: in all the most influential poems – of Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Auden – we do not find it. This means that the adoption of blank verse in translation has the effect of a metrical archaizing, and is merely another barrier between reader and original. In addition, it involves even the wariest of translators in verbal stylizations after the manner of its great users – Milton chiefly, but also Shakespeare and Wordsworth – and these are fatal to the pre-syllabic moods and effects of the Anglo-Saxon. When an attempt is made to escape from the existing (Miltonic) heroic associations of blank verse by using it xvii

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supplanted by other synonyms in prose and in common speech; nor is this different from what we find in the heroic poetry of (for example) Virgil and Milton. It is also true that modern dictionaries still include after definitions of many uncolloquial words the quasiapologetic explanation ‘obsolete except literary’ or ‘archaic and poetic’. But such dictionary descriptions are relics of a rule of English that has been (temporarily at least) suspended. The reaction against ‘rhetoric’ has been so strong that present-day readers of poetry will not now readily accept as ‘poetic’ anything that is ‘archaic’, as ‘literary’ anything that is ‘obsolete’. And here is the crux of the modern translator’s problem, which Tolkien does not estimate at its most formidable. There is no use being faithful to the poetic archaisms of the original if the result cannot be couched in terms acceptable to one’s poetic co-readers and co-writers. If it is a case of losing an archaism or losing the poetry, the archaism must go. Whatever the tradition of the original poetry may have been, the translator’s duty is as much to speak to his own age as it is to represent the voice of a past age: these are, indeed, equal tasks. If the poet of Beowulf was, like Virgil, sometimes amantissimus vetustatis, there is no fear of the flavour of an antiquity, a weight and a grandeur, and a melancholy of history, being lost in a version that uses current English; for the background cannot be modernized – the social system, the customs, the entertainments, the supernatural beings, the battles and the weapons . . . and in the inescapable bedrock vocabulary of king, lord, and retinue, gold-giving and mead-drinking, coat of mail and dragon and burial-mound, the twentieth-century reader will find enough that is remote from his own experience without any superadded linguistic crinkum-crankum and mock-epopeanism.

The metrical problem has been as much discussed as that of diction has been neglected. In the main, this problem has been seen as one of carrying over a poetic tradition based on accent or stress and syllabically flexible into a basically syllabic tradition. (The distinction between ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables, important in the old metric, holds little or no aesthetic meaning for the modern reader’s ear, and is usually not taken into account; even if experimentally reproduced in modern verse, it adds no pleasure to it; its significance was lost when the Old English inflections were lost.) Solutions of the problem may be distributed into three principal groups: blank verse, rhyming syllabic metres with heroic or semi-heroic associa-

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