"Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion."
(from Ezra Pound's translation of /The Seafarer/ from Old English)
I started reading the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry this morning on the subway. Today was a couple of pieces translated from the Old English, Chaucer, a handful of medieval lyrics, Dunbar, Skelton, and Wyatt. (Wyatt's one of my favorite poets: he was responsible (if not single-handedly) for adapting the Petrarchan sonnet to English usage and may have been a lover of Anne Boleyn.)
In the older poems, there's an odd tenseness to the vocabulary. It's a hard thing to show in a small quote, but here's an example from the ballad "Money, Money":
"In the hey-weyes ther joly palfreys
It makeght to lepe and praunce
It maket justinges, pleys, disguisinges,
Ladys to singe and daunce."
(In the highways, their jolly palfreys/It maketh to leap and prance/It makes joustings, plays, disguisings,/Ladies to sing and dance.)
The words feel more meaningful than most words do. Maybe I'm treating the poem as an artifact, and so reading in an extra level of historical interest that I don't find in contemporary "sing[ing] and daunc[ing]." But in reading all these poems, I kept wondering if the intensity of each word is in part a function of the (only relatively) small number of words in the language at the time.
Probably not. But what impact does a smaller language have upon poetry?
In Shakespeare, Johnson, Marlowe and others, there are clearly different registers of language, and part of the job of the poet is to deploy those languages as he sees fit. In Wyatt, too, (and in a different way in Skelton), I hear a deploying of a certain portion of the language. But in these medieval songs and ballads, there's a certain simplicity (or flatness) of linguistic register that makes me take words that have been conventionalized more seriously.
(Another theory: Wyatt, following Petrarch, made poems that play with a central metaphor. These poems use metaphor differently, to clear up a point. I'm beginning to understand why Sidney and other defenders of poetry claimed that its purpose was to illumine: they were responding to an older poetry.)
I put the Pound poem at the top of this entry because I lover the hyphen between "stone" and "cliffs". There's no need for it. Not only is it not required grammatically, there's not another word in the sentence that "stone" could fit with. But in that hyphen, there's an inherent claim about language and translation: the hyphen says that in the original, there's a single word that means "stone cliff," and Pound is translating it.
/That/ claim, in turn, rests on the idea that the intensity of the earlier poem is based on the density of vocabulary: that its words are specific and powerful. And maybe there is a single word in Old English for "stone cliff" (as opposed to "mud cliff", say), but in translating that one word into a novel English compound, he's adding an animating weirdness to the line. "Pinion", in the next line, is the same way in the 20th century.
But "The Seafarer" isn't archaic, or weird, in the original. Unless we're willing to say that words then meant /more/ (and i might be willing to), Pound's version is a touristy version of Old English.
(I don't actually think this is right, but it's an idea that i'm still figuring out. yay, blog.)
