Why translation matters for studying literary history
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“It was as if, on the analogy of baptism by desire, I had undergone something like illumination by philology.” Seamus Heaney
When I went to study English at undergrad, I didn’t realise how much of it would consist of translation. I had assumed that when I studied medieval literature, it would be with the warm burr of Seamus Heaney or Simon Armitage translations to guide me. Certainly for longer texts that was the case, but my tutor (the inimitable Alaric Hall) was keen for us to engage with these texts as they were actually written.
Reading Old English literature in the original meant hacking my way through forests of tangled morphology and syntax, strange metrical forms and knotted compounds. The dense linguistic woods cleared a little when I got to Middle English, with the blossoming of modern English phrasing and the familiar flutter of iambic pentameter.
In clearing a path through this history of the language I had numerous tools by my side to help: the trusty axe of historical dictionaries and grammars, the precision saw of glossed online texts, and the rather more violent hack saw of an array of translated texts when I was truly stumped. Having laboured my woodland metaphor about as much as reasonably possible, what I’m saying is that translation matters for studying English, and (I’d argue) for studying any branch of the arts and humanities. It demands that you engage intimately with an author’s creative and intellectual process. It is the act of interpretation at its purest.
Even if you think you’re bad at languages, you will have been engaging in translation of sorts since the first time you consulted a dictionary to look up a difficult word in Shakespeare, or had to figure out just what the subtle interplays of thou and you might signify about the relationships between different characters. Indeed, at the extreme end of the spectrum, theorists like George Steiner have argued that all communication and understanding is an act of translation, whether we are speaking in the same language or not.
Translating Old English
“Then I remembered how [Biblical] Law was first established in Hebrew, and that afterwards, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it wholly into their own language, and all other books too. And afterwards the Romans did the same, when they had learned it, translating it through wise interpreters into their own language. And also all other Christian nations translated some part of it into their own tongue.” – King Alfred the Great’s Preface to the Old English translation of Pastoral Care
I’m going to focus on Old English for a moment, partly because I know it, but mainly because it is that period of English where you really do have to sit and translate it to understand it. When I was still teaching, this led to a little consternation among students, most of it understandable (many thought they weren’t good with languages), some of it less so (why is this on the syllabus?). My response to this usually touched on the following.
I started with King Alfred’s quote because, despite popular perception, it wasn’t the case that the first English translation of the Bible was during the Reformation. We have translations of scripture from before the Norman Conquest, perhaps most famously in the text of the Lindisfarne Gospels where a man named Aldred wrote a gloss (effectively a word-for-word translation) of the Latin biblical text in Old English between the lines of the manuscript. As long as there has been literature in English, then, translation has been central to its history. Even today, translated literature is a roaring success in the UK, and online translation tools can change any language into English at the press of a button. We need to be mindful, therefore, of the fact that much of the English we encounter day-to-day is mediating meaning from different cultures, different times and different intentions.
Studying Old English in the original also disturbs our notion of what English actually is, making us confront our prejudices as to what counts as “proper” English or not. In discounting Old English from the literary histories of the language (as many English degrees do), we risk marginalising other voices: if Old English isn’t English, then by extension we’d have to ask whether the great variety of English dialects that have existed throughout history ‘count’ as part of the canon, not to mention the enormously diverse array of global Englishes that continue to emerge as our world grows ever more interconnected. English is interesting precisely because it is so wildly diverse across time and space.
In coming to grips with Old English for the first time (a form of our own language, after all), we are forced, perhaps more than ever, to confront the link between form and meaning, and to think about just what we mean when we say a word means anything. For me, studying Old English, scribbling notes and cribs over dog-eared editions of Beowulf, brought with it the very feeling of alterity, the strangeness, the undefinable, prickling thrill that reading any great literature—ancient or modern—should provoke. It reminded me that reading something good is often a challenge, and a worthwhile one.
Translation and Set Yet Speaking
This is the first of a three-part series that will act as a bit of a manifesto for what I want this Substack to be about. Not as in “I will write about X on a weekly basis”, but to set the mood a little. I want the subject matter to be expansive so that I can touch on a variety of topics, and translation is just one of the lenses I’ll use. The other is philology, which I’ll turn to in Part 2, and where we’ll look at a particular example from the Old English poem The Wanderer. And in Part 3, we’ll return to that Seamus Heaney quote which we started off with.
This post is based on a short lecture series I gave to undergraduate students at the University of Oxford in 2020 and 2021.
Dr Nik Gunn 
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