Penguins on Parade: A Tale of Two Beowulfs!

Some Penguin Classics in their very natures embody the dichotomy of their colophon. Here indeed we have a creature of opposites - a bird, but fitted out like a seal, feathered, but flightless, comical on land, bullet-sleek in the pitch-black water: two natures, two elements fused into one. This is also Horace's problematic call to all literature, to instruct and delight, to instruct in delighting and delight in instructing.

This has been the dichotomy of Penguin Classics from the very beginning, and that split is perhaps given no starker form than that most dreaded of all concessions: a verse epic rendered in prose. One of Penguin's latest publicity tag-lines for its Classics line is some elegant - "The Best Books Ever Written" - that it can almost mislead you into thinking the company has followed a hard-line purist stance from the start, but such is hardly the case. It was a prose version of the Iliad, after all, that jump-started the whole modern idea of the paperback 'classic' volume.

The temptations are obvious in both directions. Prose versions of epic poems are infinitely more accessible to wee, sleekit, tim'rous cowrin' students, who usually so unreconstructedly stupid and arrogant that literally anything in the whole world not directly connected to themselves frightens and irritates them. The stacked-verse poetry they know comes in Hallmark cards and is nice and short - it doesn't fill whole books, as epic poems have an annoying tendency to do. Give a student the Aeneid and he'll stare at it in slack-jawed horror. Give that same student the Aeneid in nice comfortable paragraphs and chapters and he's a bit more likely to attempt to read it. Books, after all, have nice comfortable paragraphs and chapters - and Penguin Classics, after all, have always been at least partly designed with students in mind.

Take Beowulf. In its original 8th-century Old English form, it's utterly incomprehensible - not just to students, but to most everybody. In a line-by-line word-by-word translation of that Old English (like the magnificent version done by the mighty Howell Chickering in 1977), students can at least recognize the words - but it's still mighty trying to the patience. The old Anglo-Saxon alliterative line - BRAK-BRAK-BRAK-BRAK/BRAK-BRAK-BRAK-BRAK - deeply terrifies beginners accustomed to iambic pentameter, and then there are all the bits where the anonymous author is trying his best to be clever, coming up with fanciful nicknames for everything from ship-prows to shoe-straps without telling anybody what the hell he's doing ... first-year newbies have been known to faint.

Enter David Wright's 1957 Penguin Classic prose translation of Beowulf. Wright's Introduction is crystal-clear and just the slightest bit argumentative, as befits an inherently controversial performance. "Old English prose," he tells us, "is lucid and straightforward; but Old English verse is quite another kettle of fish." He decides that he cannot soar to the heights of the Beowulf poet (he asserts that those heights can't be reached in modern English), but he insists his version is not simply a trot for students - that instead it strikes a middle tone, which he adamantly defends:

The argument against the middle style is that it seems colourless. With this I do not entirely agree; in any case, better no colours than faked ones. When the leaves are off a great oak it is still possible to see the nobility and spread of its branches. It is not necessary to trick them out with imitation foliage.

And his prose Beowulf will certainly keep the reader reading - it almost entirely strips the work of strangeness, allowing the substance of the words and the essence of the story to come through. His version of the famous elegiac "Survivor's Lament" goes like this:

Earth, hold what men could not, the wealth of princes. For heroes won it for you long ago. The holocaust of battle has claimed every mortal soul of my race who shared the delights of the banqueting hall. I have none to wield the sword, none to polish the jewelled cup. Gone are the brave. They sleep who should burnish casques. Armour that stood up to the battering of swords in conflict, among the thunder of shields, moulders away like the soldier. Nor shall the corselet travel hither and yon on the back of a hero by the side of fighting men. There is no sweet sound from the harp. No delights of music, no good hawk swooping through the hall. no swift horse stamping in the castle yard. Death has swept away nearly every thing that lives.

That's straightforward enough, and therein lies perhaps a small problem, since 'straightforward' is something the Beowulf poet virtually never was. "The trouble is that Beowulf is so rich in meaning," the aforementioned Chickering wrote, "that no single translation, however excellent, can make all or even most of its poetry come across." The main strength of the Wright prose version is also its main weakness: it doesn't try to make any of the poetry come across; it concedes the fight from the outset. Naturally, there were bound to be those who found this disappointing.

One such must have been Michael Alexander, whose verse version of the poem joined the Penguin Classics in 1973 and whose Introduction features this little shot across the bow: "Just as some modern readers will find this version too slavish, there will be others more learned than myself who may find it too free. I would ask them, as scholars, to consider whether a literal prose version of a verse epic is, properly, a translation."

Here's his "Survivor's Lament":

Hold ground, the gold of the earls!

Men could not. Cowards they were not

who took it from thee once, but war-death took them,

that stops life, struck them, spared not one

man of my people, passed on now.

They have had their hall-joys. I have not with me

a man able to unsheathe this ...

who shall polish the plated vessel,

this treasured cup? The company is elsewhere.

This hardened helmet healed with gold,

shall lose its shell. They sleep now

whose work was to burnish the battle-masks;

so with the cuirass that in the crash took

bite of iron among breaking shields:

it moulders with the man. This mail-shirt travelled far,

hung from a shoulder that shouldered warriors:

it shall not jingle again.

There's no joy from harp-play,

glee-wood's gladness, no good hawk

swings through the hall now, no swift horse

tramps at the threshold. Terrible slaughter

has carried into darkness many kindreds of mankind.

There will obviously be those among you who prefer any verse to any prose. I'm not one of that number - for a very long time, I've been explaining and defending the often deceptively unassuming poetry that can be woven into prose translations by conscientious, learned craftsmen. I hold those translations no less automatically heartfelt and worthy than their verse counterparts. I think Wright's prose version of Beowulf is very, very strong - but even if I didn't: plated vessel? Healed with gold? The hilarious "it shall not jingle again"? Surely better any kind of prose version to a verse rendition that makes the audience giggle when they should be awestruck?

But whichever your pleasure, prose or verse, the long roll of Penguin Classics has you covered. Both versions come with a treasure from the Sutton Hoo hoard pictured on the cover, and both come with genealogies, maps, glossaries - all the secondary critical apparatus you need to get the gist of Beowulf. And Chickering - and the great, challenging, question-posing Seamus Heaney translation - await those who want to go on from there.

Penguins on Parade!

I took a book down off my shelves the other evening and searched for a particular passage, and in the process, I had a very familiar experience: a layered remembering. There was a paragraph underlined in faded blue ink, with a single question in the margin: “What’s this?” Two paragraphs later there was black-ink marginalia from years later: “That makes no sense at all! You’re a moron.” Covering half another page was a faded discoloration, where concentration on the page had lessened concentration on an incoming ocean wave at a crucial moment, decades ago. Here was a book I’d had for a lifetime, one I’d visited and re-visited at different ages and stages of knowledge, leaving different strata of reactions each time. Here was something far more than an item in a library: here was a permanent piece of my mental furniture.

Of course the book was a Penguin Classic.

It occurred to me then – as it has many times in many settings – that I owe an incalculable debt to those familiar black-spined paperbacks, the humble little line of reprints that constitutes the single greatest publishing venture of the 20^th century. The sheer improbability of the Penguin Classics enterprise – at least once it strays outside the familiar parishes of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope – is easy to miss, because these books have been a part of our reading lives for so long. But every time I find myself browsing my own Penguin shelves, I’m struck again by the likelihood that sheer, illogical book-passion is the only workable explanation for the vast array of titles Penguin has published over the last seventy or so years. No overwhelming commercial demand could have been imagined for the vast majority of these books (even in more literate times), and I suspect the scholars who contributed their sometimes maddening, sometimes electrifying, always fascinating introductions and notes weren’t paid princely sums for their labors, especially in the early years.

No, these books were born of bookishness, and that’s probably what makes them so irresistible.



So I thought I’d revisit them periodically here at Stevereads! And I’m starting today with a thin volume called The Earliest English Poems, published in 1966. The translator is Michael Alexander, and here he presents readers with a generous helping of the slim body of Old English works we currently possess. The Wanderer is here, and the Seafarer, and the Battle of Maldon, and the Dream of the Rood – and of course a few stirring bits of Beowulf, like this deceptively wonderful evocation of Grendel’s squalid final resting-place:

The tarn was troubled:  terrible wave-thrash

Brimmed it, bubbling; black-mingled

The warm wound-blood welled upwards.

Here the death-marked dived, here died with no gladness;

In the fen-moor lair he laid aside

His heathen soul. Hell welcomed it.

Tolkien fans will happy to learn there are also riddles, considerably tougher than the ones wretched Gollum poses:

The womb of the wold, wet and cold,

Bore me at first, brought me forth.

I know in my mind my waking was not

Through skill with fells or fleeces of wool;

There was no winding of wefts, there is no woof in me,

No thread thrumming under the thrash of strokes,

No whirring shuttle steered through me,

No weaver’s reed rapped my sides.

The worms that braid the broidered silk

With Weird cunning did not weave me;

Yet anywhere over the earth’s breadth

Men will attest me a trustworthy garment.

Say truly, supple-minded man,

Wise in words, what my name is.

And as with the best Penguin Classics, there’s also Alexander’s Introduction, which is full of learning, opinion, and snarky looniness in equal measures:

I have, then, retained as much of the metre and the traditional vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon poetry as was feasible, and in order to make this effort worth while, I must further strain the sympathy of the reader by asking him to read these translations aloud, and with as much vigour and deliberation as he finds the line warrants. I must also beg him to observe the mid-line pause, without which the metric is incomprehensible, and to pitch into the stresses. Such instructions, I am aware, are more proper to music than to poetry; and the poet cannot expect the reader to do his work for him. But Old English poetry was oral, therefore aural; and if the reader can with the aid of the poems here translated, imagine a scop, a harp, and a hall hushed, he will be more than half-way there.

The end result is an intellectually and aesthetically packed volume that can be endlessly revisited – indeed, that needs to be. We’ll be looking at many such volumes, in the coming weeks and months of 2010, in a woefully partial repayment on the debt.