Translation
After failing my Anglo-Saxon exams at Oxford, I must seem a most unlikely translator of Old English poetry. But there was a moment (I can identify it precisely - in the children's ward of the Radcliffe Hospital, aged 19, laid up after the extraction of a cartilage!) when the temper and music of Anglo-Saxon poetry got into my thick head, my nervous system and my bloodstream.
I grasped how these poems, magnificent in themselves, embody moral and physical courage (not to say Churchillian bloody-mindedness), generosity of spirit, wit, folk wisdom, an overwhelming sense of transience, fatalism, a passionate spiritual longing… And I heard their cacophonous, gravelly, haunting cadences, rather like waves running up a stony beach, playing themselves out high on the foreshore.
I was hooked, utterly hooked! And throughout my twenties, while my peers were getting high, and tuning into the Beatles, I applied myself to translating the shorter Anglo-Saxon poems, beginning with the playful metaphorical riddles, and culminating with my translation of Beowulf (1968).
What a poem this is - so entire a world in itself, so absurdly vilified by old fools like Kingsley Amis: great story-telling, great scope, great moral composure, great savviness, great irony. Once I wrote that only a very few works of art like, say, Plato's Republic or Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Beethoven's Eroica maybe, and maybe Picasso's Guernica, seem to represent the temper of a particular time, or even a particular age. Beowulf is one of their number.
It's years now since I translated from Anglo-Saxon. But when I write, it is always at my back and in my ear: an oral tradition; good, strong, quick, keen, earthed words; stress patterning as opposed to metric rhythm; alliteration and other music; the highly-wrought.
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of Beowulf: There is not much poetry in the world like this… it is written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal - until the dragon comes.
His words struck like a gong inside me when I first read them, as a student, and they still do.