Giving Thanks for the English language

December 2, 2009 at 12:47 am (Translation)
Tags: , ,

Hi friends.  I’ve been scarce, I admit, mostly because of my Thanksgiving jaunt to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to spend some time with my lovely, talented, long-lost wife!

Meggy enjoys fine words and plush brunch upholstery.

Me, I am content with simple, frothy juice.

You’ll be glad to know that while I wasn’t posting, I was still hard at work on the translation project.  Meggy and I stopped by the University library, where I was finally able to get my hands on a book that I’ve been meaning to examine for years, to wit, Ursula Dronke’s magisterial edition, translation, and, most importantly for my purposes, extensive commentary on the Poetic Edda.  I’ve been spending some time as well reading through the rest of the Poetic Edda, looking for inspiration both on the poetical and artistic fronts.  I also snuck from Meggy’s shelf a beautiful little edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins which she’s too busy to read.  I’ve been meaning to write a longer post about Hopkins, and it is still simmering, but I couldn’t say enough about him the other day while lazing on an over-hard yellow loveseat and wolfing down Trader Joe’s chocolate orange sticks.

Anyway, I’m still working through Dronke’s lucid stanza-by-stanza interpretation of the poem’s structure, which can be pretty darn obscure.  It’s had a very positive effect already.  For example, you’ll hopefully recall my last post about the world’s creation out of the torn body of Ymir the giant.  It’s interesting, though, that while Ymir is mentioned, Völuspá doesn’t emphasize that particular myth, focusing on the more sedate image of Odin and his brothers lifting the land of of some primordial sea.  Here’s what the verse literally says:

Before Bur’s sons (Odin + brothers) lifted up lands

They who shaped glorious Middle-Earth

Sun shone from the south on the stones of their hall

Then was the plain grown with green leeks.

Of course, the poem doesn’t need to dwell on the Ymir-story, as the original audience would have known it inside and out, whereas the modern audience likely doesn’t.  So I made a decision to bring the violent destruction of the giant in, partially because it’s more vivid and interesting imagery, and partially because I want to make sure my readers know about it — otherwise why mention Ymir at all?  However, Dronke made me realize that the image of the land being raised from the sea is structurally more important than its construction out of the giant’s corpse, as that rising from the waters is mirrored in an apocalyptic and then a redemptive scene.  Literally rendered:

Sun grows dark; earth sinks into sea

Bright stars vanish from heaven

Earth out of the evergreen sea…

Vapor rages against fire

High heat licks against the sky itself.

She sees come up a second time

Earth from the evergreen sea

After spending twenty minutes feeling foolish and tawdry, like the Jerry Bruckheimer of Old Norse translators, all going for the splashy violence rather than the careful poetics, I decided that synthesis was possible.  After all, the original poet himself had merged two myths that didn’t map onto each other quite right; in the verse just prior to Odin’s lifting the land, he’d said that in those primordial days, there was no ocean!

All I needed was a word that implies both a tremendous flow of blood as well as a turbulent, chaotic sea.  No problem; the English language has my back.  I love you, English language; let’s always be friends.

From the OED Online:

welter, n.

2. The rolling, tossing, or tumbling (of the sea or waves).

welter, v.

c. To roll or lie prostrate (in one’s blood); hence (hyperbolically) to be soaked with blood or gore; also fig. of a nation, etc. Now only poet.


For heaven’s sake, it doesn’t get any better than that!  It’s like I went to the word-tailor and came back with a lovely tweed!  So I made an adjustment to one line, changing

You [Odin] and your brothers   broke his body

to

You broke his body  — brimless welter –

and I am feeling pretty good about life.

4 Comments

smearing brains on the sky like jam on toast

November 17, 2009 at 11:03 pm (Translation)
Tags: , ,

In translation news, I’ve been wrasslin’ with the Norse world-creation myth for the last couple of weeks.

To bring you up to speed, prior to the creation of Middle-earth, there’s mostly just the Ginnungagap, that is to say, a primordial chaos where fire and ice swirl together.  It’s pretty unpleasant, but in the middle, where the frost starts to melt from the hot breeze and sparks coming off of Muspellheim, the first of the fearsome frost giants, Ymir, is animated.  He generates descendants through his armpit sweat, making the only time on record that a stick of deodorant would have made an effective contraceptive.  Everyone knows that giants are a lot of things, but they’re not lactose-intolerant, so Ymir stays fed thanks to the great cow Audhumla, who also just kind of emerges from the ice.  You know how cows are; they just wander in from whereever, milk a-streaming.

Audhumla doesn't get enough credit for inventing ice cream.

There’s not much to do if you’re Audhumla other than squirt milk at Ymir (gets boring, plus he’s so unbelievably moist all the time) and lick all that ice.  It’s unclear exactly how many licks it takes to get to the center of the iceberg immemorial, but it turns out there’s another fellow in there!  Try defrosting your freezer sometime; according to the Norse, you’ll probably find a whole colony back behind the baking soda.

That guy’s line ends up producing Odin and his two brothers, who kill Ymir (something about not wiping off the pads after bench pressing down at the Ginnungagym) and tear his body apart.  The resulting torrent of blood gets that mandatory Flood Myth out of the way while maintaining the Norse commitment to being hella rad at all times.  Then the real craziness starts, as it becomes clear that you wouldn’t want to be the first person moving into gruesome Middle-earth, at least not without a great decorator.

From his blood they made the sea and the lakes.  The earth was fashioned from the flesh, and mountain cliffs from the bones.  They made stones and gravel from the teeth, the molars and those bones that were broken….They also took his skull and from it made the sky.  They raised it over the earth and under each of the four corners they put a dwarf.

Gross, but resourceful, considering literally the only other building substance is ice.  But then:

But further inland they built a fortress wall around the world to protect us against the hostility of the giants.  As material for this wall, they used the eyelashes of the giant Ymir and called this stronghold Midgard.  They took his brain, threw it up into the air, and from it they made the clouds.

If the place smelled bad back when Ymir was dripping all over the place, just imagine it now.

Anyhow, Völuspá alludes to this tale without recounting it directly, since its audience would have been extremely familiar.  Mine probably isn’t, so I’m trying to make the violent nature of creation a little more explicit without dwelling on it for too too long.  I’m specifically working on a way to talk about Ymir’s corpse.

After reading a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, I rather fell in love with the slightly archaic word mammock and, perhaps unwisely, have set myself to using it here:

‘Til you and your brothers  broke his body,

Middle-Earth molded  from the mammocked hulk

The repetition of an image restated slightly (the broken body, the mammocked hulk) is a ubiquitous feature of Germanic alliterative verse, so I leaned on it here to help out any reader who might not wish to run to the dictionary.

Ryan suggested that maybe hulk was not the precise word I was looking for to describe the immense, torn corpse, as to him it mostly connoted muscle mass, but not necessarily the bones, skull, etc., as well as perhaps being a bit too oblique a way of talking about a dead body.  He suggested husk, but to me that only connoted the skin, which as far as we could tell didn’t get used at all for building…maybe they made pants out of it?  I did like that it maintained the repetition of the k sound in mammocked, though.  A third option, which would add an extra weak beat to the line, but wouldn’t make it overly long, would be carcass, which maintains that k sound I like.  Plus, it appeared in an earlier draft before I decided that “carved carcass” was just being influenced by the ever-hastening Thanksgiving feast.

So, dear reader, I ask, what do you think?

 

 

 

4 Comments

a dab of poetry (bring your umbrella).

November 14, 2009 at 9:28 pm (Uncategorized)

I think we can all agree that it’s important, if you’re going to poet around, to do your best to be a good poet.  The last thing people need is terrible verse.

This reminded me of a little story I thought you might enjoy, namely, the story of how poetry came to men.

According to the Anglo-Saxons, vernacular poetry was introduced by the coming of an angel to Cædmon, an old and pretty simple brother in a community of monks.  A major thing to do if you are a monk, at least back in the day of “classic” monking, would be to sit around and drink a lot of beer at a beer-drinking party (gebeorscipe).  If you were all fighting men, then you’d probably take the opportunity to bragging and/or ragging regarding yourself and others, respectively.  But the monks would pass around a harp and sing instead, although I guess whatever they were singing wouldn’t qualify as real art, being as the angel hadn’t come to Cædmon yet.  Or, more likely, it’s Latin, because he’s yet to invent Old English poetry.  I wasn’t there; I can’t say.

ANYWAY.  Our poor protagonist couldn’t sing, so when the harp came around, he’d leave the party in shame and go sit in the stables.  Harsh, but fair.  No one likes the guy who won’t karaoke with everyone else.  Take your lumps, C.

Anyway, our boy is sleeping out with the herd when he’s visited by an angel, who tells him straight up: “sing me hwæthwugu.”  Er, “sing me something.”  Caedmon pleads off; the whole reason he’s sleeping is to avoid singing.  Mr. Dreamy insists: “sing me frumsceaft.”  That is, “sing me creation.”  The nightmare becomes a dream as Cædmon finds himself inspired to sing the most beautiful and virtuous songs.  And he soon becomes renowned for his verse, which never dwells on the “lying or idle.”  Get out of here, fiction.

That wasn’t even the story I meant to tell though.  It’s more for contrast with the Norse origin of poetry, which is quite a different matter.

Dwarves can make anything out of anything; for example, the chain that binds Fenris out of a woman’s beard and bird spit, among other things.  In this particular case, they’ve made mead not out of just honey, but also the blood of the wisest man in the world, whom they murdered for this purpose.  So not only could one get loaded off it, but also become a great poet or scholar.  I think this is what Faulkner was going for.

The mead falls into the hands of a giant family.  Odin hears of it and wants it; this is the same fellow who traded his eye and speared himself to Yggdrasill for over a week for magical knowledge, after all.  Odin, after adventures that include tricking nine slaves into slitting one another’s throats WITH SCYTHES (which I’m pretty sure just knocks your head off too) and seducing the giant’s daughter while masquerading as a workman (the origin of farmer’s daughters jokes?  could be a dissertation here.), is allowed three swigs of the mead.  He makes sure that his three swigs finish off the entire supply and, with cheeks a-puffed, he transforms into an eagle and heads for Asgard.

Now, bird-shapes are a dime a dozen in Norse mythology, so Suttung the giant is swooping after him in a flash, and since he’s not laden down with mead, he’s catching up.  The other gods set out some jugs, and as soon as Odin clears the wall, he spits the mead into them for distribution to the Æsir and human skalds.  Success!

However, as we learn in Snorri’s Prose Edda:

It was such a close call, with Suttung almost catching him, that he blew some of the mead out of his rear.  No one paid attention to this part, and whoever wanted it took it; we call this the bad poets’ portion.

I’m not sure whether the English or Norse version of the story is preferable.  With the exception of the fact that it’s a divine gift, they don’t have much in common.  But at least the Norse account for the fact that there are undeniably shitty poets.  Here’s hoping I don’t turn out to be one.

Leave a Comment

Pen pals from beyond the grave!

November 10, 2009 at 12:54 am (Translation)
Tags: , ,

Back during my senior Literary Translation course, Professor Felstiner asked us to find ourselves a Secret Sharer, by which he meant a writer whose voice spoke to what we were trying to do, who had blazed a trail we could follow, who could provide us a shoulder — if not a crutch — to lean on when we got stuck.  While he always stressed the importance of being faithful to the text, he was also acutely aware of the artistry inherent in good translation.  He would frequently present us with axioms of poetry and point out that you could just as easily substitute “translation” for “poem” without losing any meaning.  The one I recall best is Paul Valéry’s: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”  Which was true in my case, but not in the way he meant.

So who could my secret poetry pal be?  The most obvious answer was Auden, whose own translation of the poem was my constant reference.  But it was because of that propinquity that he wouldn’t work.  Not only did I disagree with some of his choices, but I was actively trying to distinguish myself from what he’d done; otherwise, what’s the point?

To my mind, the most distinctive move I was making was emphasizing the alliteration, so I wanted my friend to do the same.  Renowned chair-breaker and fascist Ezra Pound’s interest in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse had led him to translate The Seafarer, but even a cursory glance will show that he’s consciously archaizing in ways I’d really like to avoid.  My promise to you is that I will never end a verb in “-eth” just because the poem’s an old one.  My hope is to make the poem vital and engaging and harrowing and reasonably accessible while still being artistic.

As it happened, the man for the job, as you may have already guessed, was Tolkien, not only the author who basically created modern fantasy, but also the medieval philologist who rescued Beowulf itself.  You probably don’t need me to tell you that among his many influences in creating Middle-Earth (just guess whence he borrowed that word itself!) was Anglo-Saxon culture and poetry, most notably in the Rohirrim of LOTR.  For example, their king is Théoden, son of Thengel (directly translated from Old English, that’s King, son of King).  Yet more interestingly, for me anyway, is their oral alliterative poetry, best put on display at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which not surprisingly is my favorite bit.  A few examples:

Tall and proud [Théoden] seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!

Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!

spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,

a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

Ride now, ride now!  Ride to Gondor!


And again:

Mourn not overmuch!  Mighty was the fallen!

meet was his ending.  When his mound is raised,

women then shall weep.  War now calls us!

And my favorite, with an ethos straight outta The Battle of Maldon:

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising

I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.

To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:

Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

Tolkien

Yes yes with a waistcoat like that I think we can be friends yes yes

But even more useful was Tolkien’s extension of the unfinished Battle of Maldon, his The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (full text), which is almost entirely written in alliterative style imitative of its Anglo-Saxon forebear.

On top of all that, those of you familiar with The Hobbit will perhaps be interested to know that Tolkien plucked his dwarf-names directly from Völuspá itself, which includes a litany of them along with the first dwarves, Durin and Motsognir:

Nýi ok Niði, 
Norðri ok Suðri, 
Austri ok Vestri, 
Alþjófr, Dvalinn, 
Nár ok Náinn, 
Nípingr, Dáinn,
Bífurr, Báfurr, 
Bömburr, Nóri, 
Án ok Ánarr, 
Ái, Mjöðvitnir.
Veigr ok Gandalfr, 
Vindalfr, Þráinn, 
Þekkr ok Þorinn, 
Þrór, Litr ok Vitr, 
Nár ok Nýráðr, 
nú hefi ek dverga, 
Reginn ok Ráðsviðr, 
rétt um talða.
Fíli, Kíli, 
Fundinn, Náli, 
Hepti, Víli, 
Hanarr, Svíorr, 
Nár ok Náinn, 
Nípingr, Dáinn, 
Billingr, Brúni, 
Bíldr ok Búri,
Frár, Hornbori, 
Frægr ok Lóni, 
Aurvangr, Jari, 
Eikinskjaldi.
…
Þar var Draupnir 
ok Dolgþrasir, 
Hár, Haugspori, 
Hlévangr, Glóinn, 
Dóri, Óri, 
Dúfr, Andvari,
Skirvir, Virvir, 
Skáfiðr, Ái. 
Álfr ok Yngvi, 
Eikinskjaldi, 
Fjalarr ok Frosti, 
Finnr ok Ginnarr.

Phew.  The very alert may have noticed, along with old friends like Bifur and Gloin, Gandalf himself.  Literally translated, “Gand-alf” means “staff-elf,” and what better name for a wizard?  I’ve heard it said that here we have the very conception of The Hobbit, as Tolkien tries to explain how a wizard got mixed up with all these dwarves.

Well, I seem to have wandered a little off track, and now it’s getting late. I actually want to tell you about my second, newer versebuddy, but it will have to wait.

2 Comments

How to get the gods to shut up, or, “Hwaet do I do with a first stanza?”

November 3, 2009 at 10:17 pm (Translation)
Tags: , ,

An exhausting week, last week.  But, reader, I return.

Now that the translation project is back underway, I thought it might be interesting to give a glance at a couple of the issues that went into revising the first stanza.  I’ll discuss a few points, then give you my new version at the end, along with a couple of other folks’s for comparison.

Here it is in the original, in case you were curious:

Hljóðs bið ek allar  helgar kindir,

meiri ok minni, mögu Heimdallar.

Vildu at ek, Valföðr, vel fyr telja

forn spjöll fira, þau er fremst um man.

With my very literal translation, so’s we’re all on the same page:

Hearing ask I all  holy beings

Greater and lesser  sons of Heimdall

Wish you, Father of the Slain, that I  well narrate

Old-tales of men,  those which from furthest back I recall.

Actually, the biggest issue was simply deciding to make it the first stanza.  Originally, I followed Auden & Taylor’s re-ordering of the stanzas, which pushed this one back a bit, their idea being that it’s a little in medias res to open with the witch speaking without having been introduced.

Upon further reflection and research, that seems unnecessarily idiosyncratic, so I’m going back to the consensus pick that this is the opener.  It’s likely we’ll open the book with a few wordless pages showing Odin riding his six-legged horse along with his retinue down to Hel and coaxing/wheedling/dragging this witch back from beyond the grave, so the framing should be a little clearer.

Okay, second point.  If I go with this order of stanzas, the very first word in the poem means “attention,” essentially, although it’s being directed at the  Aesir, not the reader.  It’s diegetic, if you will (it took me quite a while to recall that word, so I’m using it).  Still, my mind was drawn back to the famous opening word of Beowulf, that Hwæt, that throatclearer that does nothing more than say HEY LISTEN UP A POEM’S A-COMIN’! It’s different in that it doesn’t have a role within the syntax of the line the way that Hljóðs does, but I thought I might be able to borrow the principle, to play the witch’s part for a moment and grab my reader just as she clutches at her crowd.

hwaet

I advise starting all conversations this way. "Hwaet's up, y'all?" "Hwaet's for dinner?" "Hwaet are you doing with that turnip?"

Finally, let’s look at those old tales of men.  In my original translation, “lore” was the go-to concept here, and it’s a good word for it.  It’s easy to overuse it, however, in a poem that’s all about recalling the past and telling the future.  In looking it up in the OED Online, however, I came across this miniature narrative:

In the Gentl. Mag. for June, 1830, p. 503, a correspondent suggested that Eng. compounds of lore should be substituted for the names of sciences in -ology: e.g. birdlore for ornithology, earthlore for geology, starlore for astronomy, etc. The suggestion was never adopted, though some few words out of the long list of those proposed are occasionally used, not as names of sciences, but in the sense above explained. In German, several compounds of the equivalent lehre are in regular use as names of sciences or departments of study: e.g. sprachlehre (= speech-lore) grammar.

What an Outstanding Idea, correspondent!  For my purposes, anyhow; I don’t think we need to go tearing down the facades of the local university.  But a tall order: what sort of word would sum up all of Norse cosmology/mythology in a couple of syllables?

I came up with a couple.  Worldslore is interesting, I think, because the Norse concept of the Nine Worlds is unique enough, and hopefully well-known enough, to make it identifiable while also being an interesting, appropriate coinage not unlike BSG’s godsdammit.  Reminds you what universe you’re in.

But even better is Treelore (always capitalized, y’know, to keep it distinguished from botany ‘n’ such).  Yggdrasill, the World-Tree, stands at the center of the Norse universe.  It’s a returning image throughout the poem, and its status is something of a barometer for how things are otherwise.  This association of the Tree with everything else in the Norseverse would be easy to bolster through the book’s artwork as well, so that it wouldn’t be lost on anyone.

So, here’s my old version.  It’s not very impressive, honestly.  It’s dull, and the alliteration is all jacked up and shoddy.  Definitely an unworthy opening stanza.

Heed I ask  of all you Aesir,

Of Heimdall’s bloodline  one and all;

Warfather Odin  would have me weave

The lore of men  I learned long ago.

And born anew (stressed syllables bolded)!!

Hear me!  Heed me!   Holy ones,

Heimdall’s brood in blood and bone

Odin Warfather   wills me weave

the Treelore, the tidings,   taught me long hence.

Just so you have something to compare it to (Hollander):

Hear me, all ye   hallowed beings,

both high and low  of Heimdall’s children:

thou wilt, Valfather,  that I well set forth

the fates of the world  which as first I recall.

And for something a little more poetical (Auden & Taylor):

Silence I ask  of the sacred folk,

Silence of the kith and kin of Heimdal:

At your will, Valfather,  I shall well relate

The old songs of men  I remember best.

So?  What do you think?  An auspicious beginning?  Shall we consult the entrails?

6 Comments

« Older entries