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‘straightforwardly’, the result tends to be flat, dull, and mechanical, as in the opening lines of the Waterhouse version – Lo, of the Spear Danes’ might in days of old And of the kings of men have we heard tell, How princes then their deeds of glory wrought . . . – which seems to preserve the primitive bump of Surrey’s blank verse Aeneid of the 1550s. Above all, of course, is the impossibility of satisfactorily transforming a symmetrical 4-stress line into an unsymmetrical 5-stress line. If you attempt to write good blank verse, you must give up the characteristic Anglo-Saxon midline caesura; if you try to keep a caesura (or, more likely, find it hard to avoid!), then your blank verse will rapidly degenerate into a 4-stress metre with ten syllables. The following lines are an example of the obstinate persistence of the Old English verse basis through a blank verse overlay: the flesh here was too thin to hide these strong bones: He lives in happiness; ill health and age In no wise trouble him and tribulation Clouds not his mind, nor hatred anywhere Rouses hostility, but all the world Bows to his will . . . (Waterhouse, ll. 1735–9.) These considerations seem to show blank verse as the most hazardous of mediums for translating Beowulf. Various syllabic metres, with rhyme, have been much used and well defended. The first complete translation, that of Wackerbarth in 1849, was written in a boisterous ballad measure (coupled with a ballad diction) which is so quaintly and wildly unlike the high seriousness of the original that it is almost attractive, like a double parody, first of Beowulf and then of the ballad:1 1 In fairness to Wackerbarth, one must point out some interesting remarks from his Preface which discuss the possibility of non-syllabic metre for Beowulf translation. He writes: ‘Some may ask why I have not preserved the Anglo-Saxon alliterative Metre. My Reason is that I do not think the Taste of the English People would at present bear it . . . Still, if the literary Bent of this Country should continue for some few Years longer the Course it has of late Years pursued, it will be time to give this Poem to the English People in English alliterative Metre, and I shall be thankful to see it done.’ xviii

– ‘And ill I ween, though prov’d thy Might In Onslaught dire and deadly Fight, ’Twill go with thee, if thou this Night Dar’st wait for Grendel bold.’ (ll. 525–8 ) Lumsden in 1881, and Leonard in 1923, tried to write at one remove from strophic or ballad verse (with its romantic, lyric, or short-poem associations) by disguising the 4-line stanzas as rhyming couplets and thereby creating a long and supposedly ‘heroic’ line, of seven iambic feet with floating caesura in Lumsden, and of six iambic feet with a clear medial caesura (marked by an extra light syllable) in Leonard. Strong (1925) wrote in 6-stress rhyming couplets with medial caesura and what he called a ‘swinging’ (i.e. it hovers between anapaestic and iambic) metre. And Bone’s 1945 version, irregular in line-length and uncertain in rhythm, used a mainly ‘stanzaic’ (abab) form of rhyme and assonance. In these translations rhyme is employed as the modern equivalent of the old alliteration, to ‘shape’ the verse structure, and the metre attempts to assuage modern ears distrustful of an ‘alien’ stresstradition. We read them with facility, confidence, speed: the couplets jingle, and we flash along. But is this fluency Beowulfian? Gavin Bone was surely right when he declared in his Introduction that it was ‘necessary to get away from the couplet’; and in his rhymepatterns he has avoided the trite, trivial, lighthearted and even rollicking effect inherent in the methods of Lumsden, Leonard, and Strong. But if the couplet introduces a false levity, rhyme itself encourages distortion and is indeed only thinkable in conjunction with its many hostages – the tag or the cliché, the archaic word, the inverted order, the expletive: all of which mar these versions. At the opening of Leonard’s translation – What ho! We’ve heard the glory of Spear-Danes, clansmen Kings, Their deeds of olden story, how fought the aethelings! – rhyme-exigency has displaced ‘fought’ from the position of strength it should and would have in its natural word-order, nor is this a good equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon, for the emphasis is less on the princes than on their fighting prowess (hu tha æthelingas ellen xix

Page Text

‘straightforwardly’, the result tends to be flat, dull, and mechanical, as in the opening lines of the Waterhouse version –

Lo, of the Spear Danes’ might in days of old And of the kings of men have we heard tell, How princes then their deeds of glory wrought . . .

– which seems to preserve the primitive bump of Surrey’s blank verse Aeneid of the 1550s. Above all, of course, is the impossibility of satisfactorily transforming a symmetrical 4-stress line into an unsymmetrical 5-stress line. If you attempt to write good blank verse, you must give up the characteristic Anglo-Saxon midline caesura; if you try to keep a caesura (or, more likely, find it hard to avoid!), then your blank verse will rapidly degenerate into a 4-stress metre with ten syllables. The following lines are an example of the obstinate persistence of the Old English verse basis through a blank verse overlay: the flesh here was too thin to hide these strong bones:

He lives in happiness; ill health and age In no wise trouble him and tribulation Clouds not his mind, nor hatred anywhere Rouses hostility, but all the world Bows to his will . . .

(Waterhouse, ll. 1735–9.)

These considerations seem to show blank verse as the most hazardous of mediums for translating Beowulf.

Various syllabic metres, with rhyme, have been much used and well defended. The first complete translation, that of Wackerbarth in 1849, was written in a boisterous ballad measure (coupled with a ballad diction) which is so quaintly and wildly unlike the high seriousness of the original that it is almost attractive, like a double parody, first of Beowulf and then of the ballad:1

1 In fairness to Wackerbarth, one must point out some interesting remarks from his Preface which discuss the possibility of non-syllabic metre for Beowulf translation. He writes: ‘Some may ask why I have not preserved the Anglo-Saxon alliterative Metre. My Reason is that I do not think the Taste of the English People would at present bear it . . . Still, if the literary Bent of this Country should continue for some few Years longer the Course it has of late Years pursued, it will be time to give this Poem to the English People in English alliterative Metre, and I shall be thankful to see it done.’

xviii

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