Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation ed. by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation ed. by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons John Kennedy Birkett, Tom, and Kirsty March-Lyons, eds, Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation (Medievalism, 11), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. 250; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844730. Arising from a conference, ‘From Eald to New: Translating Early Modern Poetry for the 21st Century’, held at University College Cork in June 2014, the essays in this volume deal mainly with translation, very broadly defined, from Old English, Old and Middle Irish, and Old Norse. Sixteen contributors are listed, the majority from Ireland and the United Kingdom. The editors’ introduction strikes an encouragingly positive note, reflected in some of the other essays: they affirm that ‘something of a renaissance has been taking place in the reception and remediation of poetry from the early medieval period’ (p. 2). In a wide-ranging essay discussing relevant scholarship and the studies included in the volume, they indicate that the book’s primary focus is on twenty-first-century responses to the medieval poetry rather than the history of past responses (pp. 6–7). Five essays focus on Old English. Chris Jones raises questions about what should be considered to belong to the corpus of Old English poetry and discusses its use by modern poets, whose approach to the material is often rather free. Hugh Magennis mainly discusses the translations from Old English by Edwin Morgan, who translated into both Standard English and Scots. Inna Matyushina, focusing on ‘The Wanderer’ and the translation into Russian of Vladimir Tikhomirov, suggests that in some ways a better translation of Old English is possible into that language than into Modern English, especially if the English translator tries to imitate Old English metres and vocabulary. M. J. Toswell discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s interest in Old English and his translation work, a subject Toswell considers relatively neglected. The final, somewhat provocative essay in this part of the volume, Rory McTurk’s ‘“Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland”: What Would Henryson or Tolkien Say?’, takes a somewhat negative view of Seamus Heaney’s bestselling Beowulf translation and, somewhat surprisingly in the present context, his translation of The Testament of Cresseid by the late fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. Perhaps tongue in cheek, McTurk calls for a translation of Beowulf into Irish. The next three essays deal with translation from medieval Irish. Elizabeth Boyce argues for a need to widen the range of such poetry available in English translation: the translators’ well-established focus on nature and lyric poetry gives a misleading impression of the corpus. Lahney Preston-Matto translates [End Page 196] Aislinge Meic Conglinne, the language of which suggests a date around 1100, into English, discussing the society that produced the work and the challenges facing the translator. She claims to translate for a general audience and American undergraduates. Tadhg Ó Síocháin presents a translation into Modern Irish of the eleventh-century poem known as Find and the Phantoms. Commenting on his translation technique, he argues for the use of some archaic and dialect words as a way of vitalizing Modern Irish. The Middle Irish text is also provided, along with a reprint of an 1886 English translation. Four essays consider translation from the Old Norse. Hannah Burrows lists and discusses reworking and translations of stanzas from Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks often known as The Waking of Angantýr. Many of the works discussed date to the eighteenth century, though the twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in the text. Carolyne Larrington provides a very lively discussion of her translation of the Poetic Edda, both the first version published in 1996 and the revised edition of 2014. She outlines many changes, some of them stemming from a realization that the likely audience for the 2014 version would be undergraduates studying the poems in translation, rather than general readers. Heather O’Donoghue presents an interesting case that, without explicitly acknowledging it, Thomas Hardy was strongly influenced by the story of Brynhildr in writing The Return of the Native. Turning to television, Gareth Lloyd Evans shows that Michael Hirst’s popular...