Wednesday 9 October 2013

Badwulf

From Ring Hoard

I've posted about my ambivalent relationship with Old English before (The three-part Caedmon's Dream, here, here, and here).  But that drab and baggy monstrosity Beowulf has been slouching around recently, following the death of Seamus Heaney, so -- if only to get another stamp on my "certified contrarian" loyalty card -- I thought I might add a dissenting note to the hagiographic outpourings that have ensued.

Now, just to be clear:  I think Heaney was an excellent poet.  Many of his poems are very good indeed.  A few are classics that will probably endure as long as English is a readable language and poetry understood as a means of expression.  That's pretty much how it goes for a "major" poet.  He also seems to have been a nice, approachable man, relatively uninfected by ego (which is not generally how it goes) despite the whisperings about "famous Seamus" -- poets are notoriously poisonous in their rivalries.  It's true, however, that he did love being on TV, and talking about and reading out his own work.  To adapt an old Irish joke, he may not have been an actual celebrity, but if the celebrities were short-handed, he'd certainly have pitched in.

But this is what I wanted to say: I don't think Heaney's version of Beowulf is much good.  If I'm honest, I think it's pretty poor.  It's clumsy, literal, unexciting, earnest, and adds nothing other than a smattering of dialect words to the various existing translations. I cannot understand why it has acquired the reputation it has.  I think it's probably a case of people wanting something to be good so badly that it has overwhelmed their judgement.

From Ring Hoard

Well, it had sounded so promising.  I remember the publicity interviews on the arts programmes, and even on the daily news bulletins (pay attention, it's that "famous Seamus" again).  Heaney was going to use vocabulary and rhythms that linked Anglo-Saxon to modern English via the dialect and lived landscape of rural Northern Ireland.  What a prospect!  After all, his "bog bodies" poems are among his most interesting; perfect encounters of subject and words that haul deep antiquity into the immediacy and ambiguity of the present day.  "Poised between the Bible and folk wisdom, between the Light Ages and the Dark Ages - and at the same time pulverisingly actual in its language. He has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece", opined Andrew Motion of the outcome.  Crikey!  Though, frankly, anyone who considers the original Beowulf a "masterpiece" is already halfway to self-deception.

I received a copy of Heaney's version as a Christmas present in 1999, and tried and failed several times to enjoy it.  Later, someone also gave me the audio CD, but even hearing it read in Heaney's glum sing-song voice didn't help either.  It simply fails to catch fire.  It plods.  Not surprising, as the original is a pretty damp and dull thing, too.  Don't believe me?  Try reading it.  No wonder they felt they had to sex up Grendel's Mother for a film version.

This is a shame, because there is clearly a need for some new work that captures something of the grim glitter of Old English at its best, and that can re-invent it for a contemporary audience in the way that Christopher Logue's War Music has re-invented Homer.  Now, it's just possible that a poem recently published by CB editions, J.O. Morgan's At Maldon, may be nearer the mark. I remember reading the Old English fragment The Battle of Maldon as an undergraduate, and thinking it would make a terrific graphic novel -- nervous but resolute Saxon home team vs. shield-biting Viking invaders, set in the Thames Estuary back in its day as one of the dark places of the earth.  I've ordered a copy of At Maldon, and I'll let you know if it hits the target, or flops short into the tidal mud. 

There is something there in Beowulf, of course.  If you can get past his trademark sparkly-eyed enthusiasm, TV historian Michael Wood made a programme for BBC Four (Michael Wood on Beowulf -- it appears to be available here on YouTube) which comes very close to conveying the Anglo-Saxon spirit.  Though he, too, succumbs to the desire for Beowulf to be a great poem, rather than what it is -- time-worn hunks of formulaic huffing and puffing lashed together with bits of narrative twine, and draped with some pretty unconvincing Christian garments.  Surely an honest, modern appraisal has to conclude that Beowulf is not a masterpiece, but a scarecrow.  Seamus Heaney, I'm sorry to say, did not rise to a challenge that perhaps Stephen King (or possibly Peter Jackson) might be better fitted to face.


From Ring Hoard

Curiously, this all reminded me of a piece by Seamus Heaney in the Guardian in October 2003, describing the compilation of The School Bag, the successor anthology to Heaney and Ted Hughes' Rattle Bag.  I should simply quote it:
We began with a translation of a short sixth-century Irish poem about the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. In it, the new religion and the new age it ushers in appear in the figure of a mitre-wearing bishop, and this strange wedge-like head-gear reminds the poet of the sharp edge of an adze, so the poem in English goes by that title -- "Adze-head":

Across the sea will come Adze-head,
crazed in the head,
his cloak with a hole for the head,
his stick bent in the head.

He will chant impiety
from a table in front of his house;
all his people will answer:
"Be it thus. Be it thus."
Now there is an ancient poem in a modern version that works.

19 comments:

Zouk Delors said...

Last time I heard the "short-handed" joke, it was Michael Caine (on Desert Island Discs, I think) replying to a question about whether some (mercifully forgotten) celebrity friend of his was, as rumoured, gay: "Put it this way, 'e'd 'elp out if they was short-'anded". And while we're on the subject, is "shield-biter" Old English for "rug-muncher" by any chance?

Mike C. said...

The Viking warriors known as "berserkers" were famous for working themselves up into a bit of state before battle (some think with the aid of fly agaric), when they would be unleashed and go, uh, berserk. They were known for chewing on their shields while waiting for the chance to get among the enemy -- if you know the Lewis chessmen, you'll recall that several of the warrior rooks are indeed depicted as biting their shields.

Mike

Dave Leeke said...

Personally, my favourite updating of the first part of "Beowulf" is Spielberg's "Jaws".

How do you feel about Simon Armitage's "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"? Actually, how do you feel about Armitage?

Mike C. said...

Dave,

Good point -- "We're going to need a bigger mead-hall..."

I did read the Armitage version -- it's OK, if you want to get a sense of the original (though Middle English is not a huge challenge to read if you ever did Chaucer at school).

The trouble with most translations / versions (for my taste) is that they forget their main responsibility is *not* to be true to the original but to produce something worth reading in 2013. Film adaptations rarely make that mistake.

Armitage himself I've never really read -- seems like decent enough entry-level stuff to me, ideal for teaching in schools. Am I wrong? Truly dodgy haircut, though...

Mike

Martyn Cornell said...

Mike this is Martyn's wife replying - on his account as I don't have my own account . I am no scholar of old English but certainly one of Hiberno-English being a Dubliner and studied English Lit at TCD. I utterly refute ur comments on the Heaney translation of Beowolf. I have delighted in the reading - and however scholarly and nit picking one might be, the pure enjoyment of hearing llanguage in a way to pay a huge nod to the aural tradition of storytelling In a country still feeding on that tradition cannot be written off and examined against inapplicable criteria. Irish literature is about aural tradition story telling - why not view the simplicity in the scholar as he intended-as did Kavanagh, Synge et al.

Mike C. said...

Well, yours is certainly the majority view, by a considerable margin. I am simply saying I don't agree.

A few things, though:

Nothing could be further from the Celtic languages than the formulaic alliterative grunting of Anglo-Saxon, which has certain affinities with Klingon.

I still maintain that people *want* this version to be excellent, which (IMHO) it isn't. I could open the thing at random and quote, but I won't: for me, it simply reads like a translation.

If you don't know Christopher Logue's "War Music", I recommend it as a model of how this sort of thing might be done and "made new".

I suspect that Heaney reading anyone else's version would have gone down just as well --- check out these comparative translations:

http://www.paddletrips.net/beowulf/html/mother.html

Thanks for commenting! N.B. sorry there's no salutation, but I refuse to refer to anyone as "X's wife"...

Mike

charles said...

As the publisher of Morgan's At Maldon, of course I'm looking forward to learning what you make of it. In a bookshop in Edinburgh last week, Morgan read a good part of the book in company with an actor - very much as Logue used to read his versions of Homer with Alan Howard.

Mike C. said...

Hi Charles,

I received the book in good shape and am looking forward to reading it over the weekend. I'm sensing that Morgan may be a bit of a discovery.

Hopeless to ask this, I know, but... Seeing as there is now no possibility whatsoever of you publishing Heaney (and thus less need for tact), what did you make of his Beowulf? Am I a hopeless contrarian with cloth ears or...?

Thanks,

Mike

charles said...

Heaney's Beowulf: a blind spot, I'm afraid. I don't think I've read it. Even though it's more than possible I typeset it, during my in-house period at Faber. I didn't push through the aura of worthiness it felt to be wrapped in. My loss, possibly. More recently I typeset Armitage's The Death of King Arthur, and though I do generally admire Armitage's own poetry, this 'translation' I didn't see the point of: it seemed little more than an exercise in finding modern-day alliterative equivalents, line after line after numbing line.

Mike C. said...

Charles,

Thanks for that -- yes, the challenge is surely to find contemporary equivalents of worn-out poetic effects, rather than reproduce them.

I admit to a weakness for the well-chosen anachronism, something Logue did particularly well. I enjoyed Alice Oswald's "Memorial" a lot, though the purpose of repeating EVERYTHING twice defeated me. At first I thought I'd bought a faulty copy...

Mike

Dave Leeke said...

Mike,

Spot on about Armitage. At least any students that have come into contact with his poetry at GCSE will have, at least, had contact with some fairly good poetry - even more so with Heaney. Less so Duffy (can't stand her!).

I generally have problems with more recent translations/updates but I guess modern poets are probably doing it to earn a crust rather than leaving a lasting piece of art.

Still struggling to regain the enthusiasm with which I bought "The Epic of Gilgamesh". However, the 1960 Penguin Classics translation of "Njal's Saga" by Magnus Magnusson remains my all time favourite of the genre. If, indeed, there is a genre of translated epics.

Jax said...

Hello Mike; I like Oswald's work but was hesitant about trying Memorial as I had enjoyed Logue so much; nevertheless I trusted her skill and duly found she had produced something wholly new, and I delighted in taking a very long time to read it. The doubled similes confused me too at first, but, given the quality of the lines I went with them (in what I saw to be her intention) and forced myself to read them twice, sometimes aloud, with the strange effect of reading them with a different pace/stress/intonation the second time; they worked well in that respect; the repetition did do something. I had likewise avoided Heaney's translation of Beowulf for having very much enjoyed Crossley-Holland's, but over the last two weeks couldn't help myself listening to him reading on the radio. I enjoyed listening, more than I expected; it 'sounded' like the Beowulf I remembered. Except... as time went on and not much happened per fifteen min episode I found myself thinking: was Beowulf really this long? or this slow? I recall it being at a much brisker pace. In comparing it to Crossley-Holland's book while I listened it seemed to me that Heaney had nearly two lines for every one of Crossley-Holland's. I've not checked against the original but the observation fitted with my feeling for its slowness. Did Heaney, rather than keeping to the concise short half-lines of the original, instead expand them into modern equivalents of phrasing? in a way - did he pad out the story? or rather: the words that make up the story? Yet, though it dragged, I still enjoyed listening to it/him, and will maybe even do so again - Jax

Mike C. said...

Thanks for the comment, Jax. I must revisit "Memorial", to see if the repeats work for me second time around.

At the current rate, every active reader of contemporary poetry will have commented on this post by tomorrow. Sadly, it's a small club...

Mike

Caroline M Davies said...

I'm about to embark on reading Beowulf for the first time. It was Alice Oswald rather than Christopher Logue who got me reading Homer and now I've discovered Robert Fagles translations. Memorial (repeats and all) works for me every time I go back to it.

Mike C. said...

Caroline,

So, in which tranlation will you be reading Beowulf?

Mike

Caroline M Davies said...

Hello Mike,
I am going to broach Heaney's translation. Yes I know I have been warned! It's how I found your blog.

The Kevin Crossley-Holland tanslation looks as if it's aimed at children although that may be more my level since I'm a history graduate not English.

Mike C. said...

Caroline,

Do let us know how you get on.

As you will realise, in my view, and as the very Saxon saying goes, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear... Though you *can* probably make a decent sow's-ear purse, if so inclined.

N.B. don't worry if your comment doesn't appear immediately: I "moderate" all comments.

Mike

Caroline M Davies said...

I'll definitely let you know how I get on with it. There's A group reading it on Facebook and we're due to start discussing it in mid January.

And thanks to whoever reminded me about CB Editions earlier in the comments. I've bought War Reporter by Dan O'Brien. I can only manage it one poem at a time - it is searing stuff but superb.

Caroline

Mike C. said...

Caroline,

re. CB Books -- commenter "charles" is in fact Charles Boyle, the publisher. He runs a blog, sonofabook:

http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/

On Beowulf, it's worth checking out the webpage of comparative translations I mentioned earlier in the comments, to get Heaney's "achievement" in perspective:

http://www.paddletrips.net/beowulf/html/mother.html

Mike