Auden, Translation, Betrayal: Radical Poetics and Translation from Old English

Abstract

This essay addresses the state of the translation of poetry from Anglo‐Saxon and Old English in Anglo‐Saxon and Old English studies. As an alternative to a conservative tendency in the state of translation from Old English the essay points to the usefulness of thinking about Old English poetry and its translation from the position of the more radical moments of 20th and 21st century poetics. Translation from Old English poetry tends to result in or follow the direction of dominant and conservative poetics. The essay first examines this conservative tendency as it can be made legible by relatively recent theoretical languages from translation theory with reference to deconstruction. The essay then turns to a philologically minded reading of W. H. Auden’s poem sometimes titled ‘The Secret Agent’ in its relation to the Old English poem called Wulf and Eadwacer as an example of a way to conceive of translating the medieval more broadly and radically. In the case of Auden’s poem, to employ or even to think a more radical poetics of translating Old English would demand a willingness to queerly compromise the bounds of the proper, to learn from and follow not only dominant and conservative poetics but also modern and contemporary avant‐garde and experimental poetics. The essay outlines the possibility of translating the medieval as a betrayal of globally hegemonic modern English, allowing the medieval to infiltrate the present.

Translating the Nonhuman Across Old and Modern English Verse

“…He argues that translators should instead resist the tendency to turn Old English into "consistently intelligible" Modern English. 45 As mentioned, the English language has been linked to an implicit violence within Western thought, a violence that carries responsibility for ecological destruction and that is complicit in mastering and ultimately destroying the nonhuman world it seeks to describe. Therefore, translations that convert the alterity of Old English riddles into sameness, smoothing over any moments of unintelligibility, may fail to truly evoke the "otherness" of their nonhuman voices and, more broadly, fail to trouble the anthropocentric attitudes that characterize the target language and culture of Modern English.…”

“…Other scholars of Old to Modern English translation have approached the topic from the perspectives of postcolonial, feminist and queer theory. Daniel Remein explores W.H.Auden's poem "The Secret Agent" as an example of a "queer betrayal" of Wulf and Eadwacer, opening up the possibility of a more radical way of translating Old English by queerly compromising the bounds of the proper 32. David Hadbawnik uses the concept of intimacy to critique the critical tendency to pit "faithful" translations of Beowulf against "creative" versions, arguing that Seamus Heaney creates a postcolonial intimacy with Beowulf while Thomas Meyer forges a postmodern intimacy with the poem.…”