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The following two passages will serve to show something of the different effects of these poems: He looks natural, He smiles well, he smells of the future, Odourless ages, an ordered world Of planned pleasures and passport-control, Sentry-go, sedatives, soft drinks and Managed money, a moral planet Tamed by terror: his telegram sets Grey masses moving as the mud dries. Many have perished; more will. (The Age of Anxiety.) And yet I know (a knowledge unspeakable) That we were at our peak when in the depths, Lived close to life when cuffed by death, Had visions of brotherhood when we were broken, Learned compassion beyond the curse of passion, And never in after years those left to live Would treat with truth as in those savage times, And sometimes wish that they had died As did those many crying in their arms. (Brotherhood of Men.) From these remarks and examples, the conclusion reasonably emerges that a translation of Beowulf for the present period may and perhaps should employ a stress metre and not a syllabic one; and its diction should not be archaic except in the most unavoidable terms of reference. My own version attempts to fulfil these two conditions, and even if it does no more, I hope that it will make future translators hesitate before pitching their tents at Mickle Byrnie and measuring out the steps to Waxing-under-Welkin. xxviii
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II. THE ART OF THE POEM Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea . . . Wallace Stevens. Where every translation breaks down to some extent, is in conveying a close impression of the art of the original, and naturally this deficiency can reach serious proportions when the original is consciously elaborate and subtle, with part of its flavour residing in the pride of risks taken and difficulties overcome. We smile at French versions of Paradise Lost; Virgil would wince before the crudity of his Englishings; and who will put into equally coruscant Russian the whole alliterative cataract of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin? The Beowulf poet, though not a devotee of such technical extremism as we find in the Celtic or Icelandic or Provençal poems, belongs nevertheless to the group that might include Milton, Virgil, and Rust’haveli: that is to say, he was consciously an artist in an epic tradition – and not much less skilful as an artist than these writers, even if the elements of his tradition were a little clumsier and less flexible. When he ‘unlocks his word-hoard’, therefore, we see very little in the way of botched craftsmanship; indeed he can be skilful to the point of sophistication, in either verbal smithwork or verbal jewellery. This is the Miltonic ‘elaborate song to generations’: the ‘golden word’ of The Lay of Igor’s Expedition: not perhaps ‘a poetry abstruse as hedge-laying’, but certainly ‘a language serré, quick with Ithuriel’s spear’,1 where the poet, like the phoenix at midday, wrixleth wothcræfte . . . beorhtan reorde,2 ‘with his clear voice follows the winding art of song’. It must also be remembered, however, that after the manner of long poems generally, Beowulf has its depressions, plains, mesas, and peaks. The modern translator, therefore, who elaborates and involves his style on the working level, in order to indicate the continuous technical interest the poem has for anyone outside the old alliterative tradition, finds himself rather at a loss when he comes to the ‘great’ passages (since the solution of then becoming simpler 1 Hugh MacDiarmid, The Kind of Poetry I Want. 2 The Phoenix, ll. 127–8. xxix

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The following two passages will serve to show something of the different effects of these poems:

He looks natural,

He smiles well, he smells of the future, Odourless ages, an ordered world Of planned pleasures and passport-control, Sentry-go, sedatives, soft drinks and Managed money, a moral planet Tamed by terror: his telegram sets Grey masses moving as the mud dries. Many have perished; more will.

(The Age of Anxiety.)

And yet I know (a knowledge unspeakable) That we were at our peak when in the depths, Lived close to life when cuffed by death, Had visions of brotherhood when we were broken, Learned compassion beyond the curse of passion, And never in after years those left to live Would treat with truth as in those savage times, And sometimes wish that they had died As did those many crying in their arms.

(Brotherhood of Men.)

From these remarks and examples, the conclusion reasonably emerges that a translation of Beowulf for the present period may and perhaps should employ a stress metre and not a syllabic one; and its diction should not be archaic except in the most unavoidable terms of reference. My own version attempts to fulfil these two conditions, and even if it does no more, I hope that it will make future translators hesitate before pitching their tents at Mickle Byrnie and measuring out the steps to Waxing-under-Welkin.

xxviii

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