SpokenWeb Podcast

S5-Episode 1

As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem

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October 2, 2023

Produced by
Ghislaine Comeau

How do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts?

In this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature, brings us along on her quest to translate the “The Ruin” – a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book. In conversation with medievalists Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read and/or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed.

Quest fulfilled! The episode concludes with Ghislaine’s reading of her own translation of “The Ruin.”

(0:00)	SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:	[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.
(0:18)	Hannah McGregor	What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Theme music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor–
(0:36)	Katherine McLeod	And my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.
(0:50)	Hannah McGregor	How do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts? What is the role of the translator to create a historically accurate representation of how a poem sounded in its original contexts? Is such a thing even possible?
(01:09)	Katherine McLeod	In this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature brings us along on her quest to translate “The Ruin,” a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter book.
(01:09)	Katherine McLeod	In conversation with Medievalists, Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed again. Now here is Episode 1 of Season 5 of the SpokenWeb podcast: As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem.[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme music plays briefly and ends]
(02:31)	The Competent Mouth	[Sound effects of two people walking down a stone pathway. A door with rusted hinges opens. One set of footsteps continues, more muffled than before. The sound of keys jingling can be heard. Someone unlocks a cabinet and takes out a large book. The book’s spine cracks as it’s opened and the sound of pages turning can be heard]
(02:31)	The Competent Mouth	So. Here is the Exeter book. I’ve opened it to the specific pages that you asked to see: “The Ruin Poem,” – famously ruined itself. As you probably already know, the manuscript dates from the 10th century, and the damage, though we can’t be sure, suggests that throughout its centuries the book might have been used as a cutting board, a glue stand, and a gold and silver leaf press. As you see here, fire, possibly caused by a fallen brand, has also significantly damaged these last pages rendering some lines unreadable and making it impossible for us to know what this poem says exactly. Where the words are lost, all we readers and translators can do is speculate or be silent. Well, I’ll leave you to it. You have one hour. I’ll be right outside.[Sound effect of a person walking away, opening the same rusty door and closing it behind them]
(03:32)	Ghislaine Comeau (inner monologue)	[Soft electronic music plays and then ends] I wonder…[Soft plucked string music begins to play] Do we always need to speculate or be silent in the face of damage? Should we? To speculate, I suppose, if we are aiming to recreate the past… but it’s a past lost to us and virtually impossible to verify. To be silent then… but isn’t keeping silent contributing to a loss of a part of the text’s past? [Music ends] What about accepting, representing, and hearing the damaged text as it exists to us now – without the weight of the impossibility of the recreation of an ultimately opaque past.
(4:18)	Ghislaine Comeau	[Sound effect of someone turning the pages of a book] In the chapter Echo from Keywords and Sound, Mark Smith begins with “[a]n echo is nothing, if not historical to varying degrees. [Soft electronic music begins to play] It is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time past.” The slightly alliterative and poetic air of this passage was immediately appealing to me, and it piqued my interest. I read on, sufficiently curious in wondering where this sound chapter would go. [Soft electronic music ends] And when I, Ghislaine Comeau, student of early medieval literature, read it, I couldn’t help but think of early medieval texts, [soft drumming music begins to play] their translations, and their performances as degrees of echoes growing fainter and fainter from their original. Smith continues: “To what extent the echo can, does, or should have fidelity to the original sound is a question preoccupying historians of any period.” Indeed. I, though not a historian, do find myself so preoccupied – this preoccupation fueled by my recent fixation with the old English poem, “The Ruin” housed in the Exeter Book, a damaged 10th century manuscript, with many of its lines burned. Thinking of “The Ruin” and its ruined state, I wondered then about this idea of fidelity to an original sound that Smith speaks of. I thought about the transcriptions and translations of “The Ruin” that use ellipses or dashes or other visible punctuation to represent the physical damage and lost words, lost sounds. I asked myself, how, then, are those ellipses and dashes translated when read? For that answer, I did what any other millennial graduate student would do: I checked on YouTube. [Drumming ends] [Sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard] There I found various amateur translators, readers, and performers. The translations and sounds varied from what one commenter called “quite an awful translation” accompanied by sci-fi sounds.
(6:28)	YouTube audio (Daniel Staniforth (aka Luna Trick), “The Ruin”)	[Ominous electronic music plays in the background]…Snapped, roof trees, and towers fallen, the work of giants…. [Music fades]
(6:40)	Ghislaine Comeau	Another chose a dramatic piano background for his translation.
(6:45)	YouTube audio (Silence is Leaden, “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem”)	[Piano music plays]…The beams are bereaved, the mortars… [Music ends]
(6:47)	Ghislaine Comeau	…which a commenter hailed as harrowing for the native tribes of Britain who are today ruled by foreigners. The video creator liked this comment. Both of them seemingly missing entirely that this poem laments the ruin of a Roman city. And a third chose a Gregorian type humming as the background to an aggressive reading of R.M. Liuzza’s translation, which according to the video creator “manages to capture the zeitgeist of the poem very well.”
(7:17)	YouTube audio (The Fyrdsman, “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading)”)	[Gregorian chant plays quietly]…Holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, the hard grip of the ground until a hundred generations of men are gone. This wall, rust stained and moss covered…[Gregorian chant ends]
(7:29)	Ghislaine Comeau	None of these three addressed the manuscript’s damage specifically with their use of sounds. And the last two either agree with or themselves assert some type of privileged understanding of the poem’s context and meaning, which they then appear to attempt to express in their performance.
(7:29)	Ghislaine Comeau	A more scholarly example, The Smithsonian, also has recordings of “The Ruin” in both the original Old English and Modern English translation on YouTube. In the Old English version, the reader chooses a dramatic reading and represents the missing damaged text by an elongated silence.
(8:10)	YouTube audio, Burton Raffel, “The Ruin (Old English)”	[Man recites text in Old English. He pauses to indicated a section of damaged text before starting again]
(8:33)	Ghislaine Comeau	In the Modern English version, the reader does not indicate any silences in his reading and simply reads through the poem’s translation as if it were one whole piece.
(8:43)	YouTube audio, (Robert Payson Creed, “The Ruin (Modern English)”)	…Sank to a heap of tumbled stones, where once cheerful strutting warriors flocked, golden armor, gleaming giddy with wine. Here was wealth, silver gems, cattle, land, in the crowning city of a far-flung kingdom. There were buildings of stone where steaming currents threw up surging heat, a wall encircled that brightness…
(9:08)	Ghislaine Comeau	Coming back to Smith, he writes: “The lines of disagreement among historians are fairly well delimited. On one side, there is a very tenuous claim that we can recapture and re-experience the sounds of the past. […] The alternative argument maintains that efforts along these lines are deeply misleading and insists that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual desiccation.”
(9:08)	Ghislaine Comeau	He then goes on to say: “The line of inquiry also makes the case either explicitly or implicitly for the power of text to capture with fidelity and authenticity, the meaning of sounds to the people who were doing the listening at the time of their production.” [Drumming music begins to play] How then can these translators and readers assume to know the “zeitgeist” of the ruin poem as one mentioned, or the tone with which we should read, or how the damage should be read, seeing that we have no way of knowing what was there before the damage? I needed, then, in my journey with “The Ruin” to first decide if I wanted to represent the poem as it is – damaged, incomplete, ruined, or as it was – despite the impossibility of that. [Music ends of abruptly] [record scratch sound effect plays] But I get ahead of myself. Before starting my translation journey, I needed to consult with the experts. I needed to know more about the place and role of sound in old English literature. So I sat down with Professors Yeager and Powell to ask them some questions.
(10:49)	Stephen Yeager	Steven Yeager, chair of the Department of English at Concordia University. My research specialization is Old and Middle English literature.
(10:57)	Stephen Powell	Steve Powell, associate professor of English at Concordia University, and I study Old and Middle English literature
(11:05)	Ghislaine Comeau	In their studies, students of early medieval literature will often come across terms like “oral-formulaic theory,” and in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Hugh Magennis writes how it is thought that most surviving Old English poetic texts are literate compositions, but that they still make use of the same kind of oral derived poetic art. My question, then, is what do we mean when we talk about “oral derived poetic art”, “orality”, and “oral-formulaic theory”?
(11:40)	Stephen Yeager	[Soft choral music plays briefly and then ends] Oral formulaic theory goes back to the turn of the 20th century when there’s, a scholar named Milman Parry who’s looking at the question of Homer, and, you know, whether, as the joke goes, either Homer or the poet by the same name who wrote The Iliad or the Odyssey, and who this person was. Milman Parry noted the existence of many formulae that recur throughout the poem.
	Stephen Yeager	So, for example, a rosy fingered dawn, or much enduring divine Odysseus. These kind of little phrases that appear to be the building blocks of the lines of the poem that are sort of used continuously throughout. Parry went to study Serbo-Croat oral poets and discovered that they too used these formulae and sort of posited therefore, that Homer was a poet who had essentially, extemporaneously, working out of this poetic tradition, composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were then sort of written down as more or less a transcription of what had been originally an oral performance.And that idea then really gets enshrined by his student, Albert Lorde, who wrote a book in 1960, that really kind of makes this idea mainstream. And then one of the main places actually where it really kind of gets spread is through the University of Toronto where scholars like Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and especially Walter Ong, he extrapolates from this a whole idea of oral man [soft harp music begins to play] and literate man where oral traditions and literate traditions create fundamentally different human experiences of cognition. And so that’s kind of the big version then of how oral-formulaic theory kind of really takes off and what’s kind of at stake in the study of it in literature.
	Stephen Yeager	In old English, you have a scholar named F.P. Magoon. He essentially argued that old English poetry is similarly transcribed from oral performances. And what’s really at stake for him is that in the formulaic quality of old English verse, you have remnants of culture before the arrival of Christianity, brought with it the technology of writing and the book. So in these oral-formulae that’s how you sort of get back to the Pagan pre-Christian past.
(13:47)	Ghislaine Comeau	And what place then does oral formulaic theory have in Old English literary studies today?
(13:56)	Stephen Yeager	The current consensus revolves around Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, especially as in her book, Visible Song, and, uh, A.N. Doane also talks about this concept of scribal performance. One of the things that Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe points out is that we have very few manuscripts where there are more than one witnesses of the same old English poem. And every time we do, there are significant differences between the two texts.
	Stephen Yeager	So it seems that the act of a scribe writing something down is kind of something like Milman Parry’s oral poet, insofar as it wasn’t about reproducing an exact text, it was about kind of reproducing a kind of feeling in accordance with a kind of set of rules which, you know, allow for some improvisation. So that is, I guess my own version of what I hear in Magennis’s point is that you know, to a certain extent that division of oral and literate isn’t an entirely useful one because really kinda what we’re talking about are the rules for how texts get created, how performances take place.
(14:55)	Ghislaine Comeau	[Soft electronic pensive music begins to play] Thinking about Professor Yeager’s comment – that the division of oral and literate is not entirely useful – [Music ends] I am reminded of Dennis Cronan’s article “Caedmon’s Audience” [Sound effect of someone flipping through pages in a book]- where he similarly explains the oral-formulaic nature of Old English poetry, noting that “surviving Old English poems are, to a greater or lesser extent, transitional texts, written compositions that utilize the meter, phraseology (including formulae and formulaic systems), and vocabulary of the native oral tradition.” Keeping this transitional nature in mind, I asked Professors Powell and Yeager “what more can we say or what more do we know about early English storytellers, oral storytelling, and performances?”
(15:49)	Stephen Powell	[Soft drumming music begins to play] Well, I think the literary evidence is probably the best evidence we have, or written down records or renditions of people telling stories. So that was something that was often recorded within literary texts and historical texts from the old English period. And you’ll see for example, in Beowulf repeated interpolations of other stories. And the circumstances of the telling of those stories is, highlighted so frequently in a social setting, often in a celebratory mode or at a feast or a big communal meal, you’ll have this tradition of what we call the scop who tell stories, of the past, of the culture.
(16:41)	Ghislaine Comeau	The scop, in other words, poets and Bards who would perform poems and pales.
(16:49)	Stephen Powell	The literary texts themselves encode this kind of performance, that, whether those are the stories that actually got written down. Then once it came to putting things into manuscripts, there’s really not much evidence of that directly.
(17:04)	Stephen Powell	Another key one, as you know, is the legend of Caedmon’s Hymn. But as you also know, there’s a lot of reasons to doubt whether that’s a direct anthropological description of an event that actually happened. There’s two old English poems that are from the perspective of poets. There’s one called Widsith, where it’s basically like that Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He describes everywhere that he’s been in all of the different courts that he’s served in. [“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash plays briefly and then fades]
	Stephen Powell	Far more extensive than any single human ever could have actually attended. There’s the old English poem, “Deor”, where a guy goes through a bunch of terrible things that have happened from folklore, and then he says, “another terrible thing that happened is I lost my job as a poet and I’m looking for a new one.” Again, you know, very, very scanty evidence. It’s a lot of work to reconstruct. I mean, there’s not much anthropological, or excuse me, archeological evidence that I’m aware of beyond like lyres that existed or what have you, [Sound effect of harp music begins] but who knows how those actually figure it in the context of a performance.
	Stephen Powell	There’s a lot of conjecture there. I think there’s some information from the north sagas a bit more of these narrative sources. But you know, those are written hundreds of years later, quite a long distance away. And so who knows how useful they’re,
(18:20)	Stephen Powell	I think all the literary evidence actually does point pretty clearly to a tradition of oral storytelling. [Music ends] I don’t think that you have the story of Caedmon in which Caedmon famously leaves the banquet because he’s not gonna be able to participate. Whether or not that is a historically accurate story, it is beside the point for me. The point is that we have that record. It corresponds with records from other texts that show that there was this tradition. [Drumming music begins to play]
	Stephen Powell	And it stands to reason that this is a society where you had long, dark evenings and plenty of alcoholic beverages distributed to you. What else were you going to do except tell stories? And of course, with a relatively low level of literacy, most of those stories would’ve been told orally.
(19:11)	Stephen Yeager	That’s absolutely true. I mean, I guess I was just saying that we don’t really know much of the details about how that actually went forward or who it was who got to tell the story or how professionalized it was. Another key moment is a famous statement by, it’s Alcuin, right? Uh, “what has Ingeld to do with Christ?” Where he’s complaining about the monks who are obviously spending all their time listening to stories about guys like Ingal, who’s a, a hero who’s mentioned in Beowulf and when they should be listening to stories about Christ. But, you know, there’s only so many of those, I guess [Stephen Yeager laughs]
(19:48)	Ghislaine Comeau	[Music ends] Early in his answer, professor Yeager made reference to the scanned archeological evidence beyond the lyre. And I thought this a great place to turn the conversation back to sound and ideas of sound in early English works. [In interview]
	Ghislaine Comeau	On that note, you mentioned the lyre, despite much discussion about orality, oral storytelling, oral tradition, oral-formulaic theory, alliterative verse, and so on, all of which are notions based on sound. We seem to rarely talk about sound or sounds in early English works, except of course, the occasional reference to a harp or a lyre. So what do we know about sounds in these performances or sounds in Old English poetry more generally?
(20:33)	Stephen Powell	[Soft string music begins to play] We know precious little, really. I mean, I think that Stephen’s point about the archeological evidence being slim is absolutely on point. And even the literary evidence that I’m harping on, no pun intended, is pretty scant on what these intertext interpolations, say in Beowulf, sound like. I think that’s really hard for us to recreate here.
(21:00)	Stephen Yeager	Of the many tragic losses of early medieval culture, one of the most tragic is the loss of any music, and I think it’s with the 10th, 11th century, there’s the Gregorian reform, which includes among other things, a standardization of devotional music all across Europe. And there’s no musical notation that I’m aware of before the Gregorian reform. And so it seems like all of whatever kind of local musical traditions would’ve predated that, are eliminated by it. And so it’s extremely difficult to try to reconstruct what the structure of a song was or how music worked before for this period.
(21:38)	Ghislaine Comeau	So given that, you know, the scant evidence, to what level can we speculate about the place that sounds music or other, not necessarily just the harp. What place might they have had within these oral storytellings or these performances? You know, how can we imagine, can meaning like in the term of being allowed to speculate so far, how can we imagine the sounds of and surrounding sounds of an Early English text?
(22:10)	Stephen Powell	I think sound was important in the Old English period, and I think there’s good evidence just from the way that poetry is constructed in this period, suggests that the culture cared deeply about how things sounded. You don’t have the kind of alliterative verse that characterizes Old English poetry, where rather than rhyme poetry is connected with repeated sounds, initial sounds without being interested in sound. So I think that we shouldn’t overlook that internal evidence in thinking about the centrality of sound.
(22:49)	Ghislaine Comeau	Can you explain a bit or talk about alliterative verse and what it is and how it works?
(22:54)	Stephen Powell	[Music ends] When we think about poetry and how poetry is structured today, we tend to think of rhyme as the central feature of poetry, that we expect that the end of each line will rhyme with the next one, for example, as in a rhyming couplet. In the Old English period, rhyming was not something that was particularly important.
	Stephen Powell	It’s not that they didn’t know about rhyme, because there’s a poem that we call the rhyming poem, which is all about rhyme and there’s some internal rhymes and other uses of rhyme. But the primary way in which Old English verse in each Old English line was structured, was around alliteration. [Soft electronic music begins]
	Stephen Powell	So that in each line there was a key sound that was repeated, the beginning of the line or near the beginning of the line, and again, near the end of the line, and I’m oversimplifying here, but the important point is that a line of poetry was distinguishable in part by this alliteration. And that that pattern was incredibly important because the words whose initial sounds repeated were the words that were also stressed. And thus in many ways, probably the most important words for those poetic lines. [Electronic music ends]
	Stephen Powell	So if you think about the reception of Old English poetry and you posit, that perhaps these poems were read or recited out loud, then having those repeated words that are so important within each line suggests that they were also a cue to the audience of what to pay attention to and what to listen to maybe within a noisy audience. But again, now we’re starting to drift well away from concrete evidence and making speculations.
(24:46)	Stephen Yeager	Everything that we know about alliterative verse comes from secondary philological work. There is not, to my knowledge, much information at the time about how to write, but I’m not aware of anything in Old English that lays out the rules of Old English verse. And what made it especially difficult to reconstruct is that Old English poetry is not lineated on the page as poetry. There are the four major poetic codices in the Junius 11 manuscript.
	Stephen Yeager	There is what appears to be punctuation, which kind of marks the half lines. The beginning of reconstructing Old English verse came from that manuscript. So it’s been all this, this work to reconstruct it, but this is, I think, an important point for what you were asking about how much sound mattered and the fact that they aren’t making those distinctions graphically meant that they were meant to be heard.
	Stephen Yeager	And probably, you know, it’s another reason to think about it as being queued to music because like in a hymnal or something, right, where it’s all just sort of continuous because you hear where the verses end or what have you. [Choral music swells and then ends] I think that there’s every reason to believe that something like that might be the explanation for why Old English verse is written in this continuous script as opposed to other forms of verse.
	Stephen Yeager	I mean, among other things, it’s important to emphasize the centrality of memorization to medieval education. And of course, you know, why does poetic verse exist in the first place, right? Like, what is the purpose of patterning sounds in such and such way? It’s mnemonic. The cultural authority of poetry proceeds from that original mnemonic function, in my own view at least, you know, that if it rhymes, it sounds true effect, rhyme as reason that-
(26:28)	Stephen Powell	Or in Old English alliteration-
(26:31)	Stephen Yeager	As a reason.
(26:33)	Stephen Powell	I don’t disagree with you, I’m just thinking that in terms of thinking about sound, that, yeah, there is this memory assistance that’s provided by rhyme for us, or probably alliteration for the Old English people. But those sounds also do things for us and have an emotive effect.
(26:58)	Stephen Yeager	Well, I mean, so you take something that’s important and you really wanna make sure that it’s preserved for yourself for future generations. You write it down, in a verse form to help it stick in people’s minds. And then that strategy that you do then acquires the cultural authority of the important information that you use it to record.
	Stephen Yeager	I’ll go with Walter Wrong this far. Once you have your literate institutions of authority that really kind of take over that cultural mnemonic function, then the function of poetry changes dramatically. And so that, you know, what you can see is kind of the rise of poetry in the sense that we know it in kind of the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance into modernity, those two things are related. I think as poetry loses that mnemonic function, as it stops to be so important, then what poetry is changes as a result. [Drumming music begins to play]
(27:52)	Ghislaine Comeau	Following Professor Yeager and Professor Powell’s insightful answers on oral-formulaic theory, oral storytelling, and the possible place and importance that sound may have had in old English texts, thinking specifically about the mnemonic function of alliteration and sound, I came come back ideas on translation, come back to Magennis and ask about a certain point that he makes in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature.
	Ghislaine Comeau	Magennis states that old English poetry is inherently difficult to date given its character. He notes how another scholar, Elizabeth Tyler, refers to the quote “timelessness” of Old English poetry in that, “rather than seeking to relate their work to a specific time or place, Old English poets cultivated a quality of timelessness, a quality that is reflected, for example, in an attachment to archaic diction”. Alongside archaic diction, Magennis also notes how a “stylistic stability” ultimately lends itself to the adaptability and reappropriation of Old English poetry for quote “ideological purposes relevant to the time”. So, with my own translation task ahead, I wanted to hear Professor Powell and Professor Yeager’s comments on this idea of “timelessness” in Old English poetry…
(29:18)	Stephen Yeager	So the timelessness of Old English poetry is, you know, that comment is predicated on an assumption about a formal conservatism in Old English poetry over a long period of time, begging the question, who knows what the date was that any Old English poem was written, like the best we have are conjectures about when the manuscripts were copied. Almost all of them post-date the Benedictine reform of the 10th century, right?
	Stephen Yeager	And then the end of old English poetry is, the written record really dries up around 1066. Edward the Confessor dies, and there’s a poem called “The Death of Edward the Confessor,” and there’s not a lot of Old English poetry that’s written after that date. So in terms of, you know, the record of the manuscripts, we’re really talking 100-150 years. But there’s good reason to believe that many of these poems predate the Benedictine reform perhaps by centuries. And if that’s the case, then what we’re looking at is an extremely conservative verse form over hundreds of years, because it’s very difficult to look at Old English poetry and say, this is the early stuff and this is the late stuff.
(30:21)	Stephen Powell	All we can really do is look at, these are the early manuscripts and these are the late manuscripts.
(30:26)	Stephen Yeager	Yes. And like, maybe some of them are older, maybe most of them, maybe even all of them. But again, like if we’re thinking of it from the perspective of scribal performance, who knows how radically these texts were reinterpreted by the scribes who copied them down. [Light string music begins to play]
	Stephen Yeager	So if you’re gonna posit conservatism, you know, the evidence isn’t there necessarily. The quote that you read to me is like a nice way of saying we really have no idea when any of this stuff was actually composed. And it doesn’t give us any internal clues that help us figure it out, but I guess this is a good example of what I understood you to be kind of asking, which is what do you do in the face of all that you don’t know?
	Stephen Yeager	It’s like, well, why don’t you just work from the example of what they did, right? They didn’t understand Latin and Roman stuff that well. They definitely didn’t read any Greek. But nonetheless, there’s this, you sort of, you take it, you assimilate it, you do what you want with it. Like the spirit of Old English literature is very, as conservative as the verse forms are, it is actually extremely experimental as well, and very open to taking something and then trying to make sense of it in your own context. So there is a sense in which developing your own performance of the text in conversation with it is, you know, in continuity with the practices of scribal performance that we see in the tradition itself.
(31:46)	Ghislaine Comeau	With the certainty that we can never be quite certain of when old English texts were produced. In other words, we can never know the exact context of the cultural reception or the zeitgeist of the poems as one YouTuber had mentioned. I was reminded, again of Smith’s point, that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual sophistication.
	Ghislaine Comeau	Thinking then of old English texts as echoes, or rather their translations through the time as echoes. It then became clear to me that I wanted to shift the conversation to specifically address this issue of how we translate and how we perform these texts. [Music ends]
(32:38)	Stephen Powell	When we translate into Old English. We have at our command the entirety of the English vocabulary, which is the largest vocabulary of any language that’s ever been spoken on Earth. In contrast, when Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers were translating from Latin, they had at their disposal a very small vocabulary. And there’s nothing wrong with a small vocabulary. The size of a vocabulary doesn’t really matter for a language, because any language by definition has to serve the needs of its community.
	Stephen Powell	But what that meant was that one of the things that old English writers were tasked with when they were translating from Latin into English was creating words, finding ways to describe concepts from Latin, which had a much larger vocabulary than English did at that point. And so we don’t have to do that. And so when, you know, Seamus Heaney famously translated Beowulf, he had at his disposal all of the vocabulary of English and got in some, I would say, trouble for including in his translation parts of the English vocabulary that were not sort of English. They were more Irish, and that was sort of controversial, but it was possible for him.
(34:06)	Stephen Yeager	On the most pragmatic level, that’s what translation does, is it expands and develops some language. I mean, and think about also how, I wonder how old English verse transformed by trying to translate the Psalms into Old English, for example, which there’s both prose and poetic translations of the Psalms, which are already, you know, in the Vulgate, Jerome did these like word for word translations of the Psalms that are kind of terrible Latin, but that then become the basis of Latin education throughout the Middle Ages. The other sort of bigger example I was thinking of with this question was about how the translations of scenarios and events and from the Bible and you know, from other Latin sources, change to fit the values of the culture that they’re in.
	Stephen Yeager	But then from the perspective of a literary critic, you know, you see how that transformation reflects those values. And so the great example of that being of gender, and so for example, the Old English poem of Judith, which introduces this, this really interesting compound word elfscin, beautiful as an elf, it’s like, what the hell does that mean? You know, why is Judith an elfscin? Which then sort of leads to, which doesn’t beg the question this time, I think, leads to the question of, what is an elf? Like, what did that mean? What sorts of cultural contexts are coming to bear and why are they useful for describing this character who’s, you know, quite troubling as a character in the original context of the Hebrew scriptures? And, you know, remains a troubling one to, you know, her reception in Christian theology.
	Stephen Yeager	And then all of which then reflects in this sort of thing about like, well, if we’re going to adapt this figure into old English, does she sort of turn into a kind of Valkyrie figure? You know, are we sort of drawing from other mythological cultural contexts to try to assimilate and make sense of this character? Lots of fascinating things happen around this question, not just at the level of vocabulary, though, also at the level of vocabulary, but at the level of what gets created and then how that then goes on to influence the future evolution of the literary conventions.
(36:13)	Stephen Powell	Right. I mean, you think about the Old English renditions of the Exodus story, for example, where what seems like a biblical text without much an Old English poet normally values gets put into the mode of Old English heroic poetry. [Harp music begins to play]
	Stephen Powell	And even if it doesn’t, to come back to sound, because I know sound is the basic building block here. If you think about putting these biblical stories into the sounds that are also associated with non-biblical stories, Beowulf or the Battle of Malden or something like that, then what is that doing to the biblical story? It is putting it into the cultural context in some way. And of course, we always do that, whether it’s a biblical story or heroic story, when we translate, we’re carrying it from one culture to the other, whether that culture is early medieval England or the American Midwest of the 1970s.
	Stephen Powell	The funny thing is, not the funny thing, the complicated thing is that when we do that kind of translation, we can become more familiar with the story in a certain way, but we also, in some ways, I think, can lose understanding of the story. Putting it too much into our own cultural idiom means that we lose the original cultural idiom and we lose the sort of the original emphasis. [Music ends]
(37:47)	Stephen Yeager	It kind of comes down to, it’s one of these choices that you don’t wanna make, I think. Cause you know when you’re doing this translation, what you’re trying to do is make a text more immediate to an audience that would otherwise not be able to access it. But the question is, what is that text that you’re trying to make immediate? Is it the content and the ideas that’s in the poem, “The Ruin,” for example? Or is it the original context of reception? Like, do you want to sort of feel like you’re in the hall and listening to “The Ruin” as it would’ve been listened to? And so you’re there with like the… [Dr. Yeager’s voice fades out]
(38:16)	Ghislaine Comeau	Here, Professor Yeager has circled back to my original question and pointed out how translation is a series of choices and how we translate will depend on what we want to prioritize for our audience, meaning rhyme, emotion, an at best, speculated socio historical context?
(38:37)	Stephen Yeager	[Dr. Yeager’s voice fades back in]…Was walking around and whatever. And so the rhythmic choice is the one that’s like, I’m going to bring you into a more alien unusual world. And then the one that’s this is the more direct translation is the more here’s the information that’s in the poem, or here are the ideas or feelings or expressions. One of the things that distinguishes is, who is this audience? So like, if we’re writing for a bunch of Midwestern seventh graders, we’re not gonna bring ’em into the meat hall necessarily, right? We’re gonna really just try and make it so that they can sort of understand it and enjoy it. Whereas a more specialist audience, or especially if you’re an avant-garde or like a musician from the seventies or whatever, then you’ll choose something maybe that’s a bit more challenging, but again, it’s like, it’s back to your point about aesthetic decisions, which are often audience decisions.
	Stephen Yeager	And again, you know, at a certain point you never want to choose just one thing. Obviously there’s gonna be a compromise, but at a certain point, something has to prevail. You’re gonna run up against something where you’re gonna have two choices, one of which is the more difficult but interesting one, and one of which is the more accessible one, and there’s gonna be a pattern in the choices that you make.
	Stephen Yeager	But that’s basically what translation is. [Quiet Gregorian chant style music begins] So “The Ruin” is this poem, which is famous in part for the way it, the sort of serendipitous, you know, thing where it’s a poem that’s damaged and is ruined and it’s describing a ruin within the poem, right? It’s a completely accidental, like, there was no sort of authorial intent behind that, but it works so nicely to kind of encapsulate the mood, not only of Old English poetry, but of its reception, really the mode of especially 20th century scholarship in the wake of Tolkien and “The Monsters and The Critics” and this kind of melancholic mood that characterizes the field.
	Stephen Yeager	But you know, I mean, there’s no question you can ask about trying to connect with Old English, even though it’s impossible that you couldn’t ask about literally every other attempted communication you’ve ever done in your entire life, right? Like, when has there ever been like the true melding of minds and the intention of the original person is fully communicated so that the other person completely understood it? There are varying degrees of historical distance, of cultural distance and what have you, which complicate that further, but it’s not as if there is some kind of achievable thing that isn’t achieved, it’s just that the thing isn’t achieved in multiple ways. So in fact, part of the value of studying something like “The Ruin,” to my mind is the reminder that it gives you of that sort of basic fact about all communication, that for all you may rely on your stereotypes or your shared cultural knowledge or your sort of sense of this person from whoever long you’ve known them, in fact, there’s always this effort. There’s always this, this thing that remains, and so therefore this constant need for humility and for care, in the way that you recognize the limitations of your own understanding.
	Stephen Yeager	Arguably, there is no such thing as a written text that is not also a ruin in this sense, right? Because the author is remote, the person who wrote it down, like by the time it gets to you, that person has changed themselves, right? And so the person who wrote it is gone. So “The Ruin” is this kind of perfect poem, distillation, as we said, for these serendipitous reasons of what writing is. And so I think that the representation of those gaps, to my mind, the best will be just the ones that call attention to it. Whatever that choice is to make the listener aware of the gap or what’s missing is to make them aware of what this work is, which is, you know, powerful as a work of writing and sort of translating that into the other medium.
	Stephen Yeager	To go back to my earlier point about Milman Parry, I wanted to make one final point about that, which is, you know, that he was able to do all of that work because of recording, right? He relied on the recordings of the Serbo-Croat oral poets, which he then transcribed and then identified all of the things. So, you know, you can’t have oral formulaic theory and all of the nostalgia for the oral performance and the immediacy of it. And you know, like, this is what the show really sounded like when he was strumming on the lyre or whatever. [Soft string music begins to play]
	Stephen Yeager	You know, that nostalgia and that wish is a product of the recording technology that then makes it feel like that is an experience you could actually have because you can have it about somebody today. And there is an extent to which that desire or transparency for immediacy is the product of communications technology that promises that transparency and immediacy, but which in fact has never actually delivered on it. Because, you know, the recording then removes from the context, and then there’s suddenly a ton of stuff that you don’t know about it. And I think it’s how you represent your own relationship to the text and not about how you represent the text itself. Like, is Peter Hamill saying like, I have a PhD in old English? [“Imperial Walls” by Peter Hamill plays briefly]
(43:33)	Ghislaine Comeau	Peter Hamill adapted part of “The Ruin” poem into a song called “Imperial Walls.”
(43:42)	Stephen Yeager	You know, he’s not, he’s not that, that representation is like, I’m an artist and I’m going to take this work of art from the past and I’m gonna do my own thing with it. And so that’s completely responsible because it’s transparent about what’s happening. [Soft drumming music begins] The irresponsible is when you claim an authority that you don’t have.
(44:04)	Ghislaine Comeau	I, as the translator and scop, am essentially deciding to impose what I think the poem should sound like onto you, the reader or the listener. It is impossible for me to represent it as it was, as I’m not part of its context of reception. I can only translate, interpret, and present it as it is to me now. Who do I want it to make sense for and what sense do I want it to make? And even then, how do I want the poem to sound? Sad, nostalgic, wistful, a touch of hiraeth? The impossible… [Music ends] “The Ruin” poem. This wall Stone is wondrous/fate and fortune have broken/and shattered the city/the works of giants/decay/roofs ruined/towers toppled/spoke gates smashed/frost on mortar/cut and cleaved/The storm shelter has fallen/eaten through by time/an earthly grasp/a hard grip of ground/imprisons the dead and decayed master makers/Until 100 generations of nations have passed/the city’s red stained gray wall stood under storms/one kingdom after another/high and steep/it fell/Still, the wall stone remains/[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]num geheapen felon/grimly ground/It shone/skilled work/ancient work/lamrindum beag/mod mo … yne swiftne/[Sound effect of fire ends]The stout minded/firmly wove with wire threads/foundations, bound wondrously together/The city dwellings were radiant/Many bathhouses/a tall pinnacle of treasure/great rejoicing/many mead halls/days full of joy/until fate/it changed all that/the slain fell widely/Days of pestilence came/death devoured all the sword brave men/their rampart foundations became waste/The citadel perished/restorers yielded sacred places to the earth/So these dwellings became dreary/and the Vermilion buildings/wood work roofs thus separated from their tiles/A perishable place fell/where once many a glad- hearted/and gold-bright man/shone with war gear/wine flushed and brilliant/splendor adorned/a bright city of this far reaching realm/seen in silver and gold/blessed in curious gems/precious stone and power/broken like a heap of stones/where the baths were/stone houses stood/A wall surrounded all/brightened breast/hot in heart/surging from far with heat/stream erupted/That was advantageous/when they let poor forth hot streams over gray stone/ [Sound effect of fire crackling swells and dissipates] Un…until the ring pool hotly/where the baths were/Then this/Re,that is a kingly thing/ [Sound effect of fire crackling swells and grows] a house/a city/ [Fire crackling ends]
(48:15)	Katherine McLeod	[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.
(48:28)	Hannah McGregor	Our producer this month is Ghislaine Comeau, a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Thanks to James Healey, our sound designer for the intro and outro, and Miranda Eastwood for the sound design on Ghislaine’s episode. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to Dr. Steven Yeager and Dr. Steven Powell for lending their voices and expertise to this episode.
(48:55)	Katherine McLeod	[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]

Ghislaine Comeau

Ghislaine Comeau is a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Her SSHRC funded doctoral project, inspired by the recent Global Middle Ages movement, focuses on re-examining texts from the early medieval period to further investigate direct references and allusions to “Saracens.” In addition to her more “traditional” approaches to scholarly work, she has recently discovered that she has a great appreciation for and desire to consume and produce research-creation projects that can serve a wider audience – popular or pedagogical.

Works Cited / Featured Audio

Creed, Robert Payson. “The Ruin (Modern English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSWnfuyzyM .

Cronan, Dennis. “Cædmon’s Audience.” Studies in Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, p 336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2012.0028.

The Fyrdsman. “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading).” YouTube, uploaded by thefyrdsman9590, 9 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRny7oyLg&t=318s .

Hammill, Peter. “Imperial Walls (2006 Digital Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Universal Music Group, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KW9CMFC_E .

Magennis, Hugh. “Chapter 1 Approaching Anglo-Saxon Literature.” The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1-35.

Raffel, Burton. “The Ruin (Old English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-dtP_73WTs&t=110s .

Smith, Mark M. “Echo.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke UP, 2015, pp. 55-64.

Silence is Leaden. “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem.” YouTube, uploaded by silenceisleaden188, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68n9F8Yozc&t=25s .

Staniforth, Daniel (aka Luna Trick). “The Ruin.” YouTube, uploaded by lunatrick7098, 28 Jun. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IIoZfOR5MQ .