The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation is a collection of 123 translations of Old English poems by more than seventy contemporary poets. For that reason alone, the publication of this extensive compilation is a major event for students of English poetry, for students both of our oldest poetry and of our newest poets.
The question of creating poetry that speaks to current sensibilities with a full reference to origins in our oldest traditions obsessed scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture in 2000 when Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf appeared. In his New York Times review of the work, "A Better 'Beowulf'" (February 27, 2000), James Shapiro alluded to Heaney's line from his poem "The Settle Bed" in Seeing Things (1991), "willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good," as a good description for the Irish poet's achievement with the greatest English epic preceding Paradise Lost. The translation reaches out, Shapiro claimed, to the earliest Irish classics and unites excellent poetics, a good understanding of Old English grammar and syntax, and a willingness to listen to Alfred David, a scholar assigned by W.W. Norton & Co. to watch carefully for any infelicities to the linguistic dimensions of the translation of the text. Not all Anglo-Saxonists agreed, although students of modern poetry generally did; I for one have been grateful to have the Heaney Beowulf for my introduction to British Literature courses throughout the last ten years. The question is whether The Word Exchange has done as well with the shorter poems.
Certainly, it offers a noble attempt; there is a short foreword by Heaney and a translation of "Deor" by him as well. But with so many different works and so many different poets, it may be too much to ask that each contribution yield equally exciting results. Poets are of different accomplishments, as are the poems they have translated and the tastes of this volume's readers.
Because the major market for this book will perhaps be among those students of modern poetry who know of the ongoing interest in Old English poetry by serious poets--from Alfred Tennyson's publication of his translation of the "Battle of Brunanburh" in 1880 to Ezra Pound's heralding of modernism with his translation of "The Seafarer" in 1911- -teachers and students alike will want to know the catalog of poet translators included here. They are: David Barber, Eavan Boland, Paddy Bushe, Peter Campton, Ciaran Carson, David Cavanagh, Kelly Cherry, Michael Collier, Billy Collins, David Constantine, Peter Constantine, Anthony Cronin, David Curzon, John F. Deane, Greg Delanty, Paul Farley, David Ferry, Rachel Hadas, James Harpur, Lia Hills, Jane Hirshfield, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Major Jackson, Alan Jenkins, Marcia Karp, X. J. Kennedy, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eamon Grennan, Jennifer Grotz, Mark Halliday, Saskia Hamilton, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Matthew Hollis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nick Laird, Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Brad Leithauser, Phillis Levin, Patricia McCarthy, Thomas McCarthy, James McGonigal, Paul McLoughlin, Derek Mahon, Kathryn Maris, Edwin Morgan, Paul Muldoon, Gerry Murphy, Carol Muske-Dukes, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O'Donoghue, Dennis O'Driscoll, Jay Parini, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Elizabeth Powell, Lawrence Raab, Maurice Riordan, Neil Rollinson, Mary Jo Salter, Fiona Sampson, Michael Schmidt, Harvey Shapiro, Robert B. Shaw, Peter Sirr, Tom Sleigh, Gary Soto, Elizabeth Spires, David R. Slavitt, A.E. Stallings, Jon Stallworthy, Daniel Tobin, Robert Anthony Welch, Richard Wilbur, Macdara Woods, David Wojahn, and Enda Wyley.
These are some of the best contemporary poets working in the British Isles and North America today, with several poets laureate from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States, and perhaps others I have not recognized. The late Nicholas Howe said in addressing the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Palermo in 1997 that he looked forward to the day when Anglo-Saxon studies were truly international. He would undoubtedly admire so wide a selection of poets involved in this enterprise in this collection, although I suspect I speak for him when I ask whether poets from other Anglophonic traditions, such as those of India and Nigeria (e.g., Tubal Rabbi Cain from Nigeria) might not also have been included.
It will be impossible to comment on individual translations in the space available here, but the organization of the collection tells us something about the editors' aims--and therefore the translators' aims, too--in representing the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon culture. The editors have compiled seven "riddle-hoards," labeled with ordinals (e.g., "First Riddle-Hoard," "Sixth Riddle-Hoard," "Final Riddle- Hoard") with ten riddles translated in each by different poets, and in place of the numbers usually given the members of the Exeter Book's riddle collection, these translations are titled with a portion of the first line of each respective riddle: "I Crush and Compress, Ruin and Ravage the Raw," "I Saw This Creature, His Belly Arseways," or "I Watched This Big Well-Hung Young Laddie." Six elegies--"The Seafarer," "The Wife's Lament," "Deor," "Wulf and Eadwacer," "The Husband's Message," and "The Wanderer"--precede the "First Riddle-Hoard," and further sections interpolated amidst the other riddle-hoards include the all-inclusive (or so it would seem) "Poems about Historical Battles, People, and Places"; two collections of which one is named "Poems about Living" (with translations oddly enough of "The Riming Poem," "The Rune Poem," and "The Order of the World," which is translated here as "A Song of the Cosmos") and the other collection, "Poems about Dying," with, for me, the interesting placement here of "The Ruin" (which is more about the dead than the dying); then we have a collection of excerpts (except for "The Descent into Hell," which is complete) titled "Biblical Stories and Lives of Saints," and finally, following the "Sixth Riddle-Hoard," a short collection of "Remedies and Charms."
There is much to be said for the book's arrangement. The riddle-hoards establish islands of verbal delight as one sails some very alien seas on either side of them. Even though one must reference the riddle number used to title the Old English poem on the left of each two-page spread in order to find the riddle's solution at the back of the book, the poetry itself enchants even when the solution is difficult.
In teaching Vergil's Aeneid to undergraduates many years ago in world literature courses, I discovered the importance of teaching poetry in poetic translations. Those who have put up with E. Talbot Donaldson's persnickety parsing of "Beowulf" into prose know the same thing. Poetry creates repetitive patterns into which "Beowulf mathelode, bearn Ecgtheowes" and the like can be compressed and even suppressed, unlike a prose rendering of the poem that has to accommodate the commonplace and the formula. The poet's formulation of a thought is not likely to be the grammarian's, which indicates that the serious student will need to appreciate both. But I am of the opinion, as are the editors and poets represented in this collection, that a poet's rendering is where the discussion of the poem needs to begin and that is the very great service the book provides.
As one might expect of a book of modern translations by modern poets, there is established here in the aggregate a language commensurate with the economy of style that we often perceive in contemporary poetry and which complements Old English poetry well. Readers of "The Wanderer" will recognize lines 15-36 in the original poem from Greg Delanty's rendering here:
The weary mind can't fight fate
nor will grim grit help.
Driven men often harbor
chill dread fast in their chests.
So I, at sea in my angst,
(wretched outcast from my land,
far from kind kindred) brace myself
having buried my large-hearted lord
years back in black earth. Abject,
I wander winter-weary the icy waves,
Longing for lost halls, a helping hand
Far or near. Maybe I'll find
one who'd host me in the toasting hall,
who'd comfort me, friendless,
gladly entertain me. Any who attempt it
know what cruel company sorrow can be
for a soul without a single mate;
exile's path holds him, not finished gold;
a frozen heart, not the world's wonders;
he recalls retainers, reaping treasure,
how in youth his lavish liege
feted and feasted him. All is history (57-59).
Those who compare "The Wanderer" in Old English will see that this new translation is sometimes manifestly literal in the way that first-year Old English students' work is literal. The contractions and the modern uses of words like "grit," "angst," and "maybe," ought to give a severely anachronistic ring to the translation. But they don't, because each line or two has an architecture that evokes older rhythms for those who recognize them but which are loose enough so that the newest students of the poetry can immediately hear the music in the lines.
I use Delanty's translation to demonstrate a tendency rather than to represent every poem, even if that were possible. It would be a simple matter to pick infelicitous lines from many if not most of the translations. Partly, that is because I have spent the best part of my professional life reading these poems with students and I have become a bit rigid in my sense of what they mean to say. Nevertheless, many of these translations aspire to very high standards and that a large number meet those standards cannot be gainsaid. This book could very well be the next great catalyst for boosting interest in Old English poetry, just as the assumption of Beowulf into the popular culture has only strengthened its appeal to our students in literature classes, so that it now takes its place along side of the work of Harvey Pekar. Let us expect that the almost uniformly marvelous translations of the riddles will only whet literary appetites on account of their clever wordplay and the window they provide on the material history of a world distant in time. That may well lead to a new embrace of the elegies unlike any since our marveling at Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer," a poem that now is at best dated and, at worst, simply an inadequate rendering of the Old English version.
Even so, I feel I must register one niggling disappointment. There is a great deal of very good Christian art poetry in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, which is barely represented in this volume. I say "art poetry" in reference to versified hagiographies of religious figures ranging from saints to biblical figures, poetry in English that remediates liturgical materials, and generally in reference to the elaborate cross connections between a Latin-dominated church with an ascendant social position and an English-speaking aristocracy and lay community integrated with and not merely subservient to that same Church. I would like to see a translation of "Christ I," also known as "Advent" or "The Advent Lyrics," of similar quality. While "Judith" is well represented with Peter Constantine's selection from the poem on her triumphal beheading of Holofernes, this is one heroine who deserves representation by all that remains of the poem, not only because it recites an important biblical narrative, but also because it represents a complex attitude towards issues of sexuality and gender that are not easily demonstrated elsewhere. Although "Lives of Saints" is part of the label of one section, the only saint represented is Andrew. I am surprised that what is usually titled "Guthlac A" or "Elene" did not elicit interest here; both of these poems intrigue students with their eponymous subjects' radical ideologies, at least in a modern context.
Yet no single volume could hold everything anyone of us would wish and, finally, one may not ask poets of the caliber of our translators to be inspired on cue and to create under direction. Contemporary poets, unlike good tailors, do not create for a "bespoke" market, but design elegant lines for their own runways. Thus, The Word Exchange surprises us in the ways it both challenges and delights our expectations of contemporary art, making its greatest contribution a demonstration of how modern the very distant past is.