translation: the ruin, anglo-saxon landscapes and bodies, the borders you cross when you become a broken thing

how do you translate a poem that dies and rots halfway through?

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I’m loving my Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translation a lot, but one unfortunate side effect is that putting all my translation energy into Middle English means I’m not translating any Old English. I love both very deeply and my PhD is going to involve a healthy amount of both. Middle English might own my heart very slightly more, but I loved Old English first. Choosing who I love more makes me feel trapped in the centre of a weepy teen love triangle. I love haunting elegies and I love King Arthur. You can’t make me choose when I just have so much love in my heart.

One of the things I’m most desperately excited about for my PhD is how many languages there are all together in there. For years people told me they didn’t understand how I’d manage to mash Old English, Middle English and Welsh (and now also Cornish) into one cohesive project. The fact that I’ve managed it is one of the things I’m proudest of.

Most medievalists I know identify very strongly as an Anglo-Saxonist or a Middle English-ist (is there a word for that?), and I just never have. I don’t know what that says about me. Perhaps I’m just very amateurish and still, age twenty nine, don’t have enough language skills to declare myself a specialist in either langauge. But if we’re feeling a bit more charitable towards me, I think I just love the way both look at each other backwards and forwards across time. Like an Old and New Testament, I love how they answer and fulfill each other, creating little callbacks and prophecies that get fulfilled. I love how the Middle English period reinterprets and reimagines Old English. I love, I really deeply love, the fact that even in the high Middle Ages there was still a medieval past lurking beneath English culture. I love alliterative revival poetry and medieval recreations of the earlier Middle Ages.

So it feels very on brand for me to be taking a break from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to spend a bit of time with The Ruin.

What is The Ruin? The Ruin is everything to me.

Everyone who knows me at all knows I love landscape. I love soil and I love decay. I love the dark processes that happen underground where our eyes can’t reach. You leave an object (a building, a body) alone with the soil and when you come back, it’s transformed completely. I’ll never be as fascinated by anything else as I am by that.

The Ruin is a simple poem. A ruined structure sits empty, half-reclaimed by nature. Neither the poet nor the reader can know the identities of the people who lived there, or what happened to them. It’s possible this is one of the Roman ruins that dotted Britain during the early medieval period. There’s something irresistibly melancholy and romantic about the fact the Anglo-Saxons lived in a landscape that was always, already, filled with reminders of a glorious past age that had passed out of memory and turned into nothing. Old English literature was always aware of the transitoriness of earthly beauty, and haunted by the questions of who had built the Roman palaces and the pre-Roman stone circles that they saw. Every Old English poem has something Ozymandias about it.

The well-rehearsed line about The Ruin which is basic but also gorgeous and true is this: the poem itself is a ruin. This is a poem about passage from glory into decay that ends, itself, in decay. The only manuscript of this elegy has large unreadable sections. Some of it is incomplete words, pronouns that don’t refer to anything. One line in the transcription I’m using only has two visible letters.

We all know there’s something very beautiful about fragments. The first edition of Sappho I ever read, which was this one when I was about sixteen, lovingly reproduced fragments as short as one word or a handful of letters. Most of the pages were more white space than they were writing. There’s something very poignant about seeing the exact space in which a poem has faded away.

So The Ruin brings together two of my favourite things poetry can ever do: engage creatively with the past and create a landscape that transforms and devours. It’s a challenge to translate well and I don’t back myself to blow your mind here. I’m in a cafe on a bank holiday Monday afternoon without that long to get this finished before I go back to PhD work and my office job resumes tomorrow. If you know the poem at all (hi Charlotte), this won’t be your favourite translation.

But working on it with Unknown/Nth playing in a coffee shop while I sip my orange juice means walking over the same ground that chews on empire and rebuilds it into rot. It’s worthwhile to take a walk in it and look around at the blank spaces even where our Anglo-Saxon isn’t as good as our friends’.

The language in here is so delightfully twisty. There’s a lot of body horror here, in this poem where no human beings appear. A lot of words traditionally translated as ‘ruined’ or ‘broken’ can just as easily mean ‘mutilated’. A ruin being twisted up and subsumed by the land is also an organic form. It’s an inanimate body that becomes an animate one as the fungus takes it over, surely? A ruined building both dies and comes to life as it rots, as living beings become part of the walls. Perhaps the ruined building is more of a living thing than the intact one ever was.

I might be being too liberal in translating ‘twisting’ into the second stanza. I don’t actually know if there’s an Anglo-Saxon word for twisting. I’m sure someone will message me to tell me there is. But I can’t get that concept out of my head as I read. I’m obsessed with the image of the flat plaster (lime) being overtaken by the organic form of hoarfrost (hrim), how straight lines start to turn and bend as they rot. Perhaps I just need to re-listen to seminal Magnus Archives episode Another Twist.

I love that this is a poem where bodies have architectural features and buildings have stooped and broken backs. Time blurs all the distinctions between person and building in the same inevitable whirlpool. I love line thirty three, where men explicitly have both organic hearts that beat hard and gilded gold metal chests. Sure, it refers to living people wearing armur, but these are half-metal half-organic bodies. The men rot into the earth and make it part organic. They wear mined metals and make themselves part landscape.

A lot of translations sweep up all the most broken bits of The Ruin and don’t translate them. They get to the last complete(ish) sentence and leave the rest quiet. I see why they do that, trying to make something as complete as we can and not trying to ‘translate’ individual letters and half-words. I don’t have any pretensions to my translation being useful or academically meaningful, but I want to ‘translate’ every scrap of it. If we’re following a ruin through time, I think we should follow it until it sputters out completely. We’re following this thing all the way down.

Before we begin, I’d like to credit and link Siân Echard’s online transcription and translation from the University of British Columbia (it’s a hard poem to transcribe and I’m definitely not doing it for you from scratch). I’m also indebted to Margot Lamy’s transcription and translation from Western Washington University, which I think writes up the sputtering out dying parts at the end better (though it doesn’t translate them). And of course, my one true love, the free online Bosworth-Toller dictionary. As always, this will be a scrappy free verse translation that doesn’t reproduce the beautiful, intricate rhythm and alliteration of the original. I’m aiming to reproduce the melancholy and the wide open landscapes full of whistling wind more than I am the grammar. Even if you can’t read a word of Old English, I truly truly recommend casting your eyes over the original. The alliterative patterns are just as beautiful when you have no idea what they mean (maybe more beautiful?).

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime,

scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene,
ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad

ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.
Wonað giet se …num geheapen,
fel on
grimme gegrunden

scan heo…
…g orþonc ærsceaft
…g lamrindum beag
mod mo… …yne swiftne gebrægd
hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond

weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre.
Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige,
heah horngestreon, heresweg micel,
meodoheall monig dreama full,
oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe.

Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas,
swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera;
wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas,
brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon
hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað,

ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð
hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong
gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig
glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed,
wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan;

seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas,
on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan,
on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.
Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp
widan wylme; weal eall befeng

beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron,
hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic.
Leton þonne geotan
ofer harne stan hate streamas
un…

…þþæt hringmere hate
þær þa baþu wæron.
þonne is
…re; þæt is cynelic þing,
huse …… burg….

There’s still wonder in these wall-stones, though time has ruined them,
broken the battlements. The giants’ work has rotted.
The roofs are ruined. The towers are ruined.
The barred gates guard nothing. Hoarfrost covers the plaster.

These walls are mutilated, torn, twisted up.
Age has eaten them. The earth’s hands hold tight
and the builders, proud once, are long lost now.
The soil holds on for a hundred generations
as the people pass away. The walls have withstood a lot.

They are grey-skinned with lichen, red underneath.
The storms wounded them, but they kept standing,
though the archways now are bowed.

The stones stand though they are injured.
the skin …
the ground is dark …

… ancient work still breathing …
… crust of the earth, the clay …
… the proud hearts bound now below,
the walls’ firm foundations, skilfully built.

They were built with wonder and iron.
The city was bright. It had many bathing places,
high gables gilded with gold, great roads of great men,
towards the great ecstatic mead-halls,
until time turned it upside down.

Men of the past fought, fell, sunk down. Plague rose
and carried them down, all the brave bodies,
ravaged the walls of their skin, mangled the roots,
broke the city. There was no one to repair it.
The builders lie in the soil. So the halls are still,

and the pigment peels away from the bowed arches,
tiles fall from the roof. Now the country is rotting,
it’s come apart. Once there were many warriors there,
with beating hearts in their gold chests, bright in the light,
wondrous when the wine made them flush, glowing like gems,

gathered around their treasures, jewels, shining silver,
precious things the ground gave up.
The city reached out far across the soil, beautiful.
There were stone halls standing tall and springs running warm.
The water welled wide and the walls enclosed it,

bright in the city’s centre, where the baths were,
heating its heart. That’s how it was, at one time.
Hear it now …
warm water on hoary stone …
but …

… that globe of water, inviting …

… where the baths were.

Then …

…-re. That is a kingly thing …

… the house … the city …