Beowulf in Parallel Texts. Sung-Il Lee

      British Museum MS. Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fol. 147r (ll. 782–804)(By permission of the British Library)

      In memory of my father,

      Professor Insoo Lee

      (1916–50),

      who read Beowulf at UCL

      Foreword

      Why read this translation of Beowulf? Because there isn’t a better one to be found. Here are the reasons I say this:

      It reads so well aloud. The text did so in its oldest form, and it must do so in any translation worth reading. This translation from Old English is oral composition, first heard, and then written down to be heard again. Nothing gets in the way of oral performance of an account of heroic actions, in heroic times, shaped and tempered by wisdom of the world and reflections upon the upshot of human endeavors. It is that performance that is the poem, and it is that which the translation manages so well to give us anew, in Modern English verse.

      Nothing gets in the way. The commonest impediments to successful translation have been theories of this and that, High Principles to be upheld, or just romantic notions about “olde tyme” English poetry. Sometimes it is a choice to imitate the general sound of the original text—two half-lines separated by syntax but linked by alliteration. The one successful instance came many, many years ago from Charles W. Kennedy, but even this text tends to accelerate unfittingly as the rhythm continues unrelenting. Sometimes it is a decision to imitate the blank verse of the Renaissance. Sometimes it may be choice of a verse-form such as nine-syllable lines defended by reasoning rather than readability. Sung-Il Lee’s translation is not trammeled in any ways like these. The syllable-count is unpredictable: it is instead the phrasings that embody the verse rhythms.

      It is not merely the metrical basis of the translation that has to be right. The syntax must be right at the same time. This means simply: the flow of phrase by phrase within the clauses and sentences must move steadily and never stumble, never create a tangle that a reader has to pause and undo. Such is hard enough to manage under any circumstances, but it is often neglected—or despaired of—in translating Old English verse, chiefly because of the prominence of “variation,” “the very soul of the Old English poetical style,” as Frederick Klaeber expressed it. When a sentence-part gets re-expressed, and sometimes re-expressed again, and sometimes yet again, a sentence may move haltingly once it leaves the metrics of Old English style: “I wish to announce to the son of Halfdane, the glorious prince, my business here, to thy lord” (344−46a) is a piecemeal translation patterned on the original text. Translating verse-by-verse, half-line-by-half-line when possible, can’t keep the sentences going aright in Modern English. Sung-Il Lee’s resolution of these problems is successful consistently: the variations are not discarded, but re-folded into patterns that keep the text moving forward. Typically at least one of them is delayed—just as the Beowulf-poet always does—so that with its occurrence the syntax requires a hearer to loop back (mentally) to the syntactic slot of a prior variant, to a tacit experience yet again of the accumulated syntactic structure. It’s a marvelous device for regulating the pace of the narrative, the reading, the telling, to keep it ruminative rather than fit only for a pell-mell tale of adventure and monster bashing.

      There is something similar, though it is actually an innovation, in the repetition of a small sentence part, after a delay, which triggers reflective replay of the related portion of a sentence. It, too, controls the pace of the poem. In 930−31 it is simply “may,” or in 2158−59 “had”; in 2124−25 it is merely “could not.”

      Also regarding pace and continuity—cohesion, in fact—of the mix of a “main” narrative, reflections, “episodes,” and “digressions”: in reading this translation I had a sense of the sweep and cohesion of the source text that I have not found in other translations. The way in which the section divisions come and go is also impressive (and incidentally highlights the independence of section divisions from “natural” divisions of the poem). Similarly, in local passages, say, 1292−1311, the pace is never compromised as the topics shift here and there within the large memory that the whole poem embodies.

      The meter and the syntax—the flow of sounds and the flow of sentence-parts—can be right, and there is still the matter of the words we hear, in the translation. Imitation of the original text by trying to mimic it is a temptation to many, but always leads to inferior translations. Without an exception a compound noun or adjective in the original text is right and powerful, but enigmatic or awkward if rendered piecemeal in the lexicon of Modern English. Here is where a translator’s tact—not theory—has to be active, and his word-sense entirely in tune with the poetic texture. Unferth is going to challenge the hero in front of everyone; he onband beadu-rūne (501), which says he “unbound” his “battle-rune,” according to glossing conventions, obscure enough that Klaeber paraphrases it as “commenced fight.” Lee’s rendering: he spoke, “Revealing his revulsion.” A group of

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