York
1
Eric York
Engl 523 – Dr. Yager
Spring 2013
Interpretive Translation in Pound's The
Seafarer
The Seafarer as Text
Many translations have been made of the Old English poem The Seafarer, which is
preserved in the Exeter book and dates to approximately the eighth century. Each of
these translations is different, as each grapples the fraught activity of translation in a
different way. Translating an ancient text from an all but extinguished language
presents numerous problems, not least of which, from a practical standpoint, are the
choices the translator has to make about the use of language cognates and the
preservation of rhythm. Different schools of translation value to different extents literal
representation and metrical fidelity. For example, below are four different examples of
York
2
the first two semantic unit of the poem, from translations across the 20th century,
compared with Pound's.
Pound’s Seafarer
What these translations can show us, aside from the variety of interpretations
that can be derived from the source text, is how choices the translator made about how
highly to privilege representational accuracy are played out in the translation's final
rendering. In some of these translations, meaning is elided in subtle and complex ways,
and in Pound's perhaps more than in others.
In the analysis that follows, I will examine some of the most important
differences between Pound's translation the others (from the most contemporary and
perhaps most literal of the versions presented here, to those widely separated by time
and intent) drawing from scholarship, from both the print and audio versions of the
reading, and from various translations, commentary, and dictionaries of the language.
In the course of this analysis, I will characterize Pound's translation and speculate on
the reasons for his choices.
As a result of this analysis, I conclude that, in his translation, Pound has
consistently privileged modern language cognates and the rhythmic elements of the
original text over the semantic intelligibility of his rendering, which results in a
translation that, while difficult and sometimes impenetrable, preserves what might be
York
3
called the feel of the original, and provides intimations of what it must have been like to
hear the original recited in the mead halls of its day.
The Speculative Nature of Language
It is a curious property of language that the meaning of a given word or phrase is
highly dependent on contextual factors, that its meaning is often variable rather than
fixed. Philosophers of language such as Hans Georg Gadamer have called this
phenomenon "the speculative nature of language", referring to the Latin word for
'mirror' (i.e. speculuum). For Gadamer, the speculative nature of language manifests
itself in what he calls "the mystery of the word", "the great dialectical puzzle, [that] the
word of language is both one and many" (Gadamer 415). What Gadamer is referring to
here is the same problem the translator faces at every turn: the ever-irresolvable
question of what is actually meant by a given word, in a given context. Considering this
question ourselves, in terms of Pound's translation, causes us to call into question the
representative nature of language itself.
To say that language is speculative is to say that it represents reality in a
complicated way. What is the relationship between an object, say a book, and the word
'book'? One response, which we may term 'representational, would be that when
someone says the word 'book', the listener imagines the archetypal book; when
someone says 'this book' the listener can picture a specific version of the archetype. The
other response, language as speculative, however, makes this more complicated. For
York
4
Gadamer, the relationship between word and thing is more akin to that of an object and
its reflected image in a mirror, because the status of being of both object and reflection
are augmented by each other, a phenomenon known as 'double-directionality'. As
language scholar Kathleen Wright explains,
as reflected into the mirror the object remains the same in its being as a result of its appearing. As
reflected back from the mirror the object becomes other than it was. Now, as the original, it
becomes more than its appearing, although it does so only in and through its appearing (207).
Thus, the relationship between word and thing is not merely representational, but is
rather a series of augmentations of being created by interaction between words and
things. For the translator, this creates a profound ambiguity and therefore a
proliferation of possible translations. Furthermore, the longer the object is reflected in
the mirror of language, the greater the proliferation.
“Song’s Truth Reckon”
One gets the sense that Pound attempts to slice this Gordian Knot by cleaving at
all times to the closest modern English word, a cognate, so that his translational choices
often become exercises in finding and deploying an appropriate usage of an English
term that is no longer used the way he intends (and has not been, oftentimes, for several
centuries). A good example of this occurs in the first lines of the poem, with his
problematically rendered phrase "song's truth reckon".
The Old English phrase, "soðgied wrecan", already has a somewhat
indeterminate meaning. "Soðgied" is a compound of 'soþ' and 'ġiedd'. The former as a
York
5
noun means 'truth', while the latter is used variously to mean: story, tale, song, or poem.
A literal translation of 'soðgied' then is something like "truth-song". 'Wrecan', according
to the Bosworth-Toller Anglo Saxon Dictionary, has a meaning ranging from punish
and avenge to drive or press, and is also used to mean "to express in words, to utter,
recite". Thus, the first line of the poem could be literally translated to mean: "May I
recite for myself a truth-song".
Pound's phrasing: "May I for my own self song's truth reckon" departs from this
literal translation, apparently so he can make use of the modern English word 'reckon',
meaning 'to know' or 'to measure'. Because reckon is used in the sense of knowing, the
question becomes: what shall the speaker of the poem be determining, and so Pound
must, as a consequence of the first choice, create a possessive relationship between the
two compounds of "soðgied", despite the fact there is no gramatical reason for it (songof-truth does not equate with song's truth, or truth-of-the-song, in fact, the sense is
inverted). Thus, it is fair to say that Pound has taken extensive semantic liberties in his
translation in order to make use of modern English cognates.
“Feet Were by Frost Benumbed”
Another example, though slightly different, of this same kind of translational
choice occurs around line ten. Pound translates the Old English lines "Calde geþrungen
/ wæron mine fet, forste gebunden" to read: "Coldly afflicted, my feet were by frost
benumbed." Not only is the phrasal structure distorted (Pound's version makes this a
York
6
complete sentence, with feet as a direct object of 'gebunden', rather than, as in the
original, of 'geþrungen'), but also the sense of the word 'gebunden' is altered entirely.
Two grammatical clues reveal this for us. The first is the case of the noun 'fet'. 'Fet' is the
plural, accusative declension of 'fot'. It is in the accusative case because it is the direct
object of the plural preterite subjunctive 'geþrungen', meaning pressed. "My feet were
pressed/constricted by cold", the line might be rendered. The phrase "forste gebunden"
then is a supplementary phrase that expands the meaning of the primary clause. It
means something like 'frost-bound', but, without a primary subject or verb, this phrase
is clearly a dependent, rather than an independent clause.
So Pound's translation alters the semantic structure of the original line, but that is
not all. In his version, the meaning of the word representing 'bound' is shifted to read
"benumbed" instead. This is a metaphorical shift as well as a semantic one, because the
word benumbed connotes a kind of immobility also suggested by binding. Since these
words have this in common, Pound is able to substitute one for the other, this time in
the service of recreating syllabic patterns. The word 'benumbed' is much closer in
syllables and sounds to 'gebunden' than is the word 'bound', which is short a syllable as
well as missing some important assonance.
“Corn of the Coldest”
The final example of Pound's translational preference for cognates and meter
might also be the strangest: his translation of the metaphorical rendering of hail into
York
7
grain. In the original poem, the descriptive passage in which this occurs (beginning
around line thirty) is meant to provide verbal illustration of the particular kind of
terrible beauty evident in a snow storm at sea. Both the original and Pound's translation
attempt to evoke this terrible beauty through ambivalent nature imagery, at a point in
the poem when the speaker is making a tonal shift in attitude to his subject.
In the Old English, lines 31-33 read: "Nap nihtscua, norþan sniwde, / hrim hrusan
bond, hægl feol on eorþan, / corna caldast." Literally, this might be rendered to read:
'Night shadows would deepen, snow from the north, ice would bind the ground, hail,
coldest of grains, would fall to the earth." However, Pound's translation reads instead:
"Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north, / Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
/ Corn of the coldest." Pound chooses to replace the subjunctive mood with the word
'then' and he makes somewhat opaque the deepening of night's shadow with his
translation, but by far the greatest deviation is with his choice of the modern English
word 'corn' for the Old English 'corna'. Despite the questionable effect of this choice, it is
consistent with Pound's translational preference for cognates and metrical fidelity over
semantic and poetic fidelity.
The modern English word 'corn' is typically used to connote edibles of the plant
known as maize, while the Old English word 'corna' is part of a webwork of Proto IndoEuropean roots, in various languages, meaning "seed" or "grain". In Old English, says
historian Jonathan Harper, the sense of the word was "grain with the seed still in" (a
sense still preserved in the word barleycorn). When Pound chooses the modern English
word 'corn' as equivalent to the Old English 'corna', he elides, or effaces, the distinction
York
8
in meaning between the two words, and the connotations of stifled fertility are lost. To
be sure, I do not accuse Pound of falling victim of the "false friend" fallacy of
translation, but rather of exploiting an existing similarity to maintain the alliteration of
the poetic line.
In Conclusion
As can be seen in these examples, and throughout the poem, Pound consistently
prefers modern English cognates to the more literal options, and I believe it is also clear
that he does so in order to preserve the rhythmic meter of the line (both syllabic and
alliterative), and finally, that this preference is characteristic of Pound's poetics. It is a
preference that results in a version of the poem with large gaps, that is, large inferential
spaces the reader must navigate in order to perform the act of interpretation. This
makes the poem somewhat puzzling to read, forces the reader to either simply listen
and let the poem wash over them, or to toss and turn different aspects of the phrases,
trying to assemble meaning from them.