The Monster, the Critics, and the Translators

[Ecurb]

J.R.R. Tolkien translated Beowulf in 1926, and his translation is just now being published. Here’s a New Yorker review:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/06/02/140602crbo_books_acocella?currentPage=all

Highlights of the review include this comparison of Tolkien’s version to Heaney’s famous translation:


Consider the lines where Tolkien shows us Grendel eating a knight. The monster seizes the man, “biting the bone-joints, drinking blood from veins, great gobbets gorging down. Quickly he took all of that lifeless thing to be his food, even hands and feet.” In Heaney’s translation, the monster, picking up the knight,

Bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood
And gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body
Utterly lifeless, eaten up
Hand and foot.

Here, for the sake of alliteration and rhythm, we lose, among other things, the great gobbets (what a phrase!), the idea of using a man as food, and, most unfortunately, the picture of Grendel eating the feet and the hands……

I’m not enamored of New Yorker critic Joan Acocella’s speculations about why Tolkien never published his translation. It’s an interesting review, though.

[Poetaster]

Wasn't Tolkien's translation a combination of sections from his notes, lectures and essays? I think he didn't publish his translation because he never considered his translation as a 'work' in the same sense as his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I've seen this book around, though, and I've been very tempted by it. I have a keen interest in the Beowulf poem, and that Viking world in general (because of this site, actually - thank you Lokasenna!) so I will read it eventually. I'm just not sure when.

[mal4mac]

"Bone-lappings"? I think I'll be reading Tolkien's version...

[Lokasenna]

I've not read Toller's Beowulf yet (heck, The Death of Arthur is still on my shelf awaiting a reading), but I look forward to doing so - though actually, I'm more interested by the short story also included in the volume, which is apparently based on one of my favourite sagas.

That particular review has come in for much scorn amongst my friends - I'm not one for being unduly nasty, but the reviewer is an idiot. Plain and simple. She hasn't the first bloody clue what she's talking about. Beowulf's mates are 'knights'? Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are in 'Old English'? 'Few people - indeed, few literary scholars - can read Beowulf in the original'? And these are only the most obvious and glaring errors in a review riddled with bathetic and shallow assumptions, assertions, and thoughts. I expect better of The New Yorker - this is the sort of thing I'd see in The Daily Mail, if I read such a hideous thing.

[Poetaster]

I've actually only just read the review, and I agree with the above. It's very poorly written. For example:


This sounds more like German than like English. If you don’t know German, it doesn’t sound like anything at all.

... erm?

[luhsun]

Excuse me for being morbid (kids below 18 please stop reading!)... but physically how did the monster eat the man? After seizing him, the easily imagined act was to bite off the head (because the feet and hands were left uneaten until the end). Then probably the arterial blood would spurt out..i.e. drinking the blood -and how do you bolt down something not solid, or dribbles of liquid blood?. As the translators/author were laymen, the vein vs artery confusion is forgiveable.
Then only dismembering by biting through the bone-joints? I presume "bone lappings" are ligaments, joining bone to bone at the joint...which could be disarticulated by a skilled butcher with a sharp knife... but a monster should be chomping a bit more crudely (especially if he swallowed great gobbets) !

[Ecurb]

This may brand me as an anti-intellectual, but I sort of liked the review – although I admit that the errors that Loka points out show shoddy research. When I first read my New Yorker, I didn’t even notice the attribution of Gawain and the Green Knight to Old English – I assume it is old Welsh, instead. I did notice the use of “knights” which was so striking that I thought it must be intentional. After all, if there was a real Beowulf, he was probably a contemporary of the real King Arthur (if he existed). I’m not sure what Acocella was getting at by calling Beowulf’s cohorts “knights” – but it made me think, at least, because it seemed strange. Is she hinting at a comparison between Beowulf and the Round Table?

Here are some of the good things about the review:

1) After a paragraph about Tolkien’s academic career, Acocella launches into a retelling of the Beowulf story, demonstrating Tolkien’s approach to the translation. Now, I’m a reasonably big Beowulf fan – but I’m not a scholar. I read Beowulf as a child in some illustrated retelling (rather than a translation). When Heaney’s translation came out 10-15 years ago, I read it. Nonetheless, a recap, highlighting some of the drama of the story was welcome to me. Unlike (probably) Lokasenna, I don’t remember it all that well.

2) Acocella points out some of the controversies surrounding Beowulf – the “constant switching of time planes”, the “spoilers”. I thought this was interesting (although, again, I’d guess those who have actually studied the poem might find it old hat).

3) Acocella engages us with some academic gossip. I didn’t know that English Literature majors in the U.K. were required to take an Old English course. Are they still?

4) The comparison between Heaney’s and Tolkien’s translations was fun. I have read Heaney’s – but I read it quickly, I had no idea that he tried to preserve the alliterative scheme of the original. It was interesting, although, again, I have no idea if Acocella got it right.

5) OK, perhaps, Acocella could have done better than, “If you don’t know German, it doesn’t sound like anything at all.” But she made a good point here. Many lay readers of the New Yorker (including me) probably know next to nothing about how Old English “sounds”. Perhaps Acocella doesn’t either. Maybe someone here can tell us.

6) As I said earlier, I thought Acocella’s guesses about Tolkien’s motives for never publishing were iffy. That doesn’t mean they weren’t fun to read, though. I thought they were.

I’m not a big Acocella fan. She’s a literary critic and a dance critic for the New Yorker – and I like ballet so I sometimes read her dance critiques. I was a huge Tolkien fan as a boy – so of course I homed in on this review.

[Petrarch's Love]

That particular review has come in for much scorn amongst my friends - I'm not one for being unduly nasty, but the reviewer is an idiot. Plain and simple. She hasn't the first bloody clue what she's talking about. Beowulf's mates are 'knights'? Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are in 'Old English'? .

The one about Pearl and SGGK being in Old English is a real howler! I also was uncertain why we should speculate that "if he finished [the Beowulf translation] his life, or the life of his mind, would be over." I have yet to meet a scholar, let alone as prolific a mind as Tolkien, who fear their life will end if they finish a translation (worries that the life will end before finishing being more prevalent).


'Few people - indeed, few literary scholars - can read Beowulf in the original'? And these are only the most obvious and glaring errors in a review riddled with bathetic and shallow assumptions, assertions, and thoughts. I expect better of The New Yorker - this is the sort of thing I'd see in The Daily Mail, if I read such a hideous thing

Much as I thought the review rather weak and very under-researched by New Yorker standards, I do think it's accurate to say that few people can read Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon. I also don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that relatively few literary scholars can read it in the original (though certainly a larger percentage than in the general population). In most university literature departments here in the states only the medievalists (which in many departments is a singular medievalist) would be able to comfortably sit down and read Beowulf. I've never gotten the sense that it's drastically different in Britain (that is, that one could depend on a Virgina Woolf scholar to translate an Anglo Saxon manuscript for example or that this would be a standard skill of most romanticists), though maybe it's a more standard part of the scholarly training there than I know? There might be a few others in a lit. department who took an Old English course somewhere along the line, but OE readers tend to be a decided minority even among literary scholars, and a pretty tiny group when you expand this to people in general. (Note that I say this as someone who can read Beowulf in the original, though with some recourse to a dictionary).


When I first read my New Yorker, I didn’t even notice the attribution of Gawain and the Green Knight to Old English – I assume it is old Welsh, instead

Ecurb, since you asked, the distinction is that those poems are in Middle English, rather than Old English like Beowulf. Chaucer also wrote in Middle English, which designates the English spoken and written in the period roughly following the Norman Conquest in 1066 to about the 15th century. Modern English then begins from the latter part of the 15th century to the present. As these three periods are quite long, there are a lot of variations between different kinds of both Old and Middle English, depending on both what century and what region one is in, in the same way that Modern English encompasses everything from the language of Shakespeare to the language of Maya Angelou. While I wouldn't expect most people to know these distinctions, Old and Middle English are markedly different to anyone who has studied literary history in a serious way, and a publication with the fact checking standards of the New Yorker really should have known better!

A sample of Old English (OE) vs. Middle English (ME)

OE from Beowulf:

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden; he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning!

and an OE recording of someone reading Caedmon's Hymn, from the 7th century:

http://youtu.be/2SRmtbu0iXQ

For comparison, here is the text of the start of the ME poem Piers Plowman

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.
Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene--
That I was in a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where.
A[c] as I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft trieliche ymaked,
A deep dale bynethe, a dongeon therinne,
With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of sighte.

A slightly more challenging form of ME at the start of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,
Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,
Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt
Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:
Hit watz Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde,
Þat siþen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneȝe of al þe wele in þe west iles.

And here both text and recording of Chaucer's ME Canterbury Tales

http://youtu.be/3lGJntNFFqo

You may notice that you have a great deal of trouble deciphering more than a few words of the OE, whereas the ME texts will have more words that the modern reader can make out, and becomes much clearer with a little training an practice (for anyone interested in learning ME pronunciation, this is a good place to start: http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/less-0.htm) Of course all of this makes Shakespeare, who wrote in an older form of the modern English we still speak today, much less daunting to decipher. Indeed, I often read passages like those above aloud to my students at the start of a Shakespeare course or early lit. survey and it is then easy for them to see just how much easier it is to read modern lines like:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried."

[Poetaster]

(total side note, but I love what Simon Armitage said about Middle English: it's like seeing Modern English through a sheet of ice. You think that if you could just breathe some warmth onto it, it would all become clearer.)

[JHG]

""

Thank you, Petrarch, for that very interesting display of examples. I've never studied Old English, nor am I schooled in linguistics theory. I would therefore like to inquire on how much power the translator of Old English is granted. Is it like Latin-to-English, where there is more breadth of interpretation? Or (as I suspect), is it more akin to German-to-English translation?

[Lokasenna]

The one about Pearl and SGGK being in Old English is a real howler! I also was uncertain why we should speculate that "if he finished [the Beowulf translation] his life, or the life of his mind, would be over." I have yet to meet a scholar, let alone as prolific a mind as Tolkien, who fear their life will end if they finish a translation (worries that the life will end before finishing being more prevalent).



Much as I thought the review rather weak and very under-researched by New Yorker standards, I do think it's accurate to say that few people can read Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon. I also don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that relatively few literary scholars can read it in the original (though certainly a larger percentage than in the general population). In most university literature departments here in the states only the medievalists (which in many departments is a singular medievalist) would be able to comfortably sit down and read Beowulf. I've never gotten the sense that it's drastically different in Britain (that is, that one could depend on a Virgina Woolf scholar to translate an Anglo Saxon manuscript for example or that this would be a standard skill of most romanticists), though maybe it's a more standard part of the scholarly training there than I know? There might be a few others in a lit. department who took an Old English course somewhere along the line, but OE readers tend to be a decided minority even among literary scholars, and a pretty tiny group when you expand this to people in general. (Note that I say this as someone who can read Beowulf in the original, though with some recourse to a dictionary).

Well, I suppose it depends on how narrowly you define 'literary scholars' - do we mean literary scholars in general, or those who specialise in the early medeival period. If the latter, the vast majority will be fine with OE, if the former then it will be relatively few - but the same could be said of any body of literature that's not in English. Very few literary scholars, in those terms, can read ancient Chinese literature, or Finnish literature, or Russian - even if they might enjoy them in translation.

As for why Tolkien didn't finish the work in good fashion, I suspect the answer is more prosaic than him being crippled with existential doubt! Like most academics, he probably just ran out of time. Also, the man was famous for starting things and never finishing them - huge amounts of his work exists in odd fragments that Christopher has done his best to make some sense of.

[mortalterror]

(total side note, but I love what Simon Armitage said about Middle English: it's like seeing Modern English through a sheet of ice. You think that if you could just breathe some warmth onto it, it would all become clearer.)
And "German is just English spoken backwards underwater by monsters." -Penny Arcade

[mal4mac]

That particular review has come in for much scorn amongst my friends - I'm not one for being unduly nasty, but the reviewer is an idiot. Plain and simple. She hasn't the first bloody clue what she's talking about. Beowulf's mates are 'knights'? Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are in 'Old English'? 'Few people - indeed, few literary scholars - can read Beowulf in the original'? And these are only the most obvious and glaring errors in a review riddled with bathetic and shallow assumptions, assertions, and thoughts. I expect better of The New Yorker - this is the sort of thing I'd see in The Daily Mail, if I read such a hideous thing.

"Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker since 1992 and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998..."

"She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes."

The New Yorker is supposedly famous for fact checking, I guess they are lacking in the "Old English" department...

[Ecurb]

In "The Monster and the Critics" Tolkien deplored the critics' obsession with the historical and linguistic value of "Beowulf", as opposed to its artistic value.

It seems to me that Acocella concentrated on the artistic value of the poem. I suppose it's (vaguely) possible that her use of "knights" as well as her confusion of Gawain and the Green Knight with an "Old English" poem were in concert with Tolkien's thesis. Perhaps although Beowulf differs lingusitically from Gawain, it has artistic similarities. I doubt this is the case -- but it's interesting that the criticism here of Acocella's critique seems to approach the poem in precisely the manner that Tolkien inveighed against.

That being said, thanks to Lokasenna and Petrarch. I enjoyed your posts, and learned from them. Since innumerable Tolkien works have been published posthumously (as Loka points out), it can hardly be surprising to see the publication of one more. It does seem to me that if language involves steadily and organically, the sharp distinction between Old English and Middle English is artificial. The most recent Old English probably has more in common with the oldest Middle English than the oldest Middle English has with the most recent Middle English. (I know nothing about this, by the way, but that seems to be mere common sense.) So Gawain (as seen in Petrarch's example) fits somewhere between Beowulf and Piers Ploughman -- but it must be somewhat arbitrary whether we CALL it Old English or Middle English. Perhaps I'm wrong and there is some clear divide.

[Poetaster]

And "German is just English spoken backwards underwater by monsters." -Penny Arcade

Haha, that's very good.