{"id":84226,"date":"2017-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/matter-faith\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:19:11","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:19:11","slug":"matter-faith","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/matter-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Matter & faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tra<\/span>nslation, like faith, most often requires preserving scrupulous devotion amid the lurking traps of doubt and disbelief. This is true for both translator and reader alike, especially when it comes to poetry. We expect translations to be \u201caccurate,\u201d and readers often wonder just what essence or art might have been \u201clost\u201d in the process, causing us to feel cheated somehow of what we perceive as the inviolable authenticity of the \u201coriginal.\u201d Indeed, looking at a copy of a Vermeer or Rembrandt, we might enjoy or even be fooled by the painter\u2019s skill, but when knowing it to be a copy, we would never wish to substitute it for the masterpiece.<\/p>\n

And yet, for translation, this is a false analogy, one born of snobbery. Better is the comparison to music. Listening to Pablo Casals or Yo-Yo Ma or Pieter Wispelwey play a Bach cello suite, we might cling to a passionate preference for one, but to name any as being the most \u201caccurate\u201d would be silly, while even pegging one as \u201cthe best\u201d shortchanges the pleasure of listening to how a particular musician chooses to interpret, open up, and celebrate unseen or unappreciated aspects buried in the score. Translations, like performances, can indeed be faulty, even bad. But our first expectation of them should not be restricted to fidelity, just as true faith is not easily borne of mere obedience to doctrine or edict. Each must grapple with its origins, be it text or belief, for only then is the spirit of the word released.<\/p>\n

\n

For not only do we not know the name of the poet, even his language has disappeared.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All of this is particularly true when it comes to translations from languages we do not know, and even more so for works locked into a culture or time no longer immediately recognizable to anyone beyond the literary scholar. Allegedly written in the late fourteenth century, and by what we believe to be the poet who gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/span>, plus two other poems, Pearl<\/span> is just such a work. For not only do we not know the name of the poet, even his language has disappeared. Born of Britain\u2019s rural West Midlands, rather than the early modern English of his more worldly London contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, the language of Pearl<\/span> cannot be parsed by modern readers without the aid of translation.<\/p>\n

As Simon Armitage explains in his engaging and quite vibrant new version, Pearl: A New Verse Translation<\/span>, there are several ways to go about this.1<\/a><\/span><\/span> One can employ ancient terms such as \u201cspenned\u201d or \u201csweven,\u201d or use old-fashioned words in modern English such as \u201cdemesne\u201d or \u201cdescried,\u201d or introduce outlaw aberrations in the pursuit of full rhyme, or jump ship on the poetry altogether in order to opt for the solid clay of scholarly accuracy. Without looking down his nose at any of these, Armitage sets out on an alternative path. He pays homage to the heightened alliteration of the original throughout, yet he replaces the poem\u2019s tightly knit ababababbcbc <\/span>rhyme scheme by allowing rhymes \u201cto occur as naturally as possible within sentences, internally or at the end of lines, and to let half-rhymes and syllabic rhymes play their part.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the surface this might sound like a poet\u2019s loosey-goosey way of bowing the strings vigorously while producing but the echo of a tune, but Armitage makes two critical choices that sustain the poem\u2019s complex harmonies. One is to preserve the \u201cconcatenation\u201d of the original, whereby \u201ca word or phrase in the last line of the first stanza in each section is repeated in the first and last line of each stanza throughout that section, then once more in the first line of the following section.\u201d Given that this transpires across twenty sections of five twelve-line stanzas each (section XV<\/span> containing six), while the last of the poem\u2019s 1,212 lines also repeats its first line, Armitage\u2019s approach bears faith to a cohesive sense of form imbedded in the whole, rather than twisting lexical fact to cohere to linear end rhyme. Add to this the constancy of a four-beat line serving as the armature of a syntax as natural as it is contemporary, and what we have is the music of measure and meaning that aspires to the condition of poetry.<\/p>\n

Lik<\/span>e any good poem, this translation conveys a consistent mien that distinguishes it immediately from others, namely in its emotional register, the supple depth of which lies at the heart of the original\u2019s greatness. In it a father who mourns the death of his two-year-old daughter, Pearl, falls asleep atop her grave only to dream of her as an adult maidenly presence admitted to the blessed company of the 144,000 redeemed from the earth in Revelations. Beholding her on the far shore of a river, he is also moved to inquire just how she could have been admitted, despite being so young, just what her life is like there, and in what kind of dwelling she abides. These are the natural curiosities of the earthly man. The maiden\u2019s response, however, amounts to a catechism on the rewards and blessings of Heaven, as well as the faith and discipline necessary to enter it after death. The passionate but slightly too eager father cannot stop himself from trying to leap the river, at which time the force of the Lord thwarts him and he wakes up back in the garden, still awash with grief, and yet cleansed by the transformative vision granted him.<\/p>\n

The central tension of the poem lies between its resonant earthly lament and the ecstatic vision of its spiritual allegory. The latter needs the former in order to make the drama convincing, but the first also depends on the second in order for the \u201cpearl\u201d of the daughter, heaven\u2019s perfected grace, and even the poem\u2019s formal intricacy to release the aura of the sublime. Just where and how this occurs is not easily rendered, for it demands a skilled handling of the poem\u2019s competing registers, there being no single one that dominates throughout.<\/p>\n

As with any great music, there are quite different ways to achieve the proper timbre for each expressive turn. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s 1975 translation:<\/p>\n

Pearl of delight that a prince doth please<\/p>\n

To grace in gold enclosed so clear,<\/p>\n

I vow that from over orient seas<\/p>\n

Never proved I any in price her peer.<\/p>\n

So round, so radiant ranged by these,<\/p>\n

So fine, so smooth did her sides appear<\/p>\n

That ever in judging gems that please<\/p>\n

Her only alone I deemed as dear.<\/p>\n

Alas! I lost her in garden near:<\/p>\n

Through grass to the ground from me it shot;<\/p>\n

I pine now oppressed by love-wound drear<\/p>\n

For that pearl, mine own, without a spot.<\/p>\n

Here is Armitage\u2019s rendering of the same:<\/p>\n

Beautiful pearl that would please a prince,<\/p>\n

fit to be mounted in finest gold,<\/p>\n

I say for certain that in all the East<\/p>\n

her precious equal I never found.<\/p>\n

So radiant and round, however revealed,<\/p>\n

so small, her skin so very smooth,<\/p>\n

of all the gems I judged and prized<\/p>\n

I set her apart, unparalleled.<\/p>\n

But I lost my pearl in a garden of herbs;<\/p>\n

she slipped from me through grass to ground,<\/p>\n

and I mourn now, with a broken heart,<\/p>\n

for that priceless pearl without a spot.<\/p>\n

While one might be quick to think the Tol-kien awkward or fusty in its inverted syntax and Elizabethan diction, or even question the addition of those \u201cseas\u201d simply for the sake of rhyme, there are merits to be noticed. Most prominent is the maintenance of rhyme for the entire 1,212 lines. Forced as it is at times, nevertheless the strained effort at rhyme conveys the poem\u2019s sinewy tightness, while embedded in lines like \u201cNever proved I any in price her peer\u201d and \u201cHer only alone I deemed as dear\u201d lies the central tension between the poem\u2019s courtly piety and the gravity of the speaker\u2019s loss. Put another way, Tolkien\u2019s translation is played on a period instrument. The notes might be a bit murky and the tuning off, but a bygone music can still be heard and appreciated.<\/p>\n

By the same token, though Armitage\u2019s opening is much more fluid and clear, and sounds like a voice actually speaking to its longed-for subject, a couple of choices lift a thin scrim of the contemporary between us and the past. Opting for \u201cprecious equal\u201d rather than the more loyal \u201cprecious peer\u201d taps more the language of class inclusion than courtly romance, while \u201cunparalleled\u201d echoes the hyperbole we extend to athletes, fine cuisine, and natural disasters. That is not to say, however, that these are wrong choices, or that they immediately betray the translation as being too contemporary. Rather it is only to observe that Armitage\u2019s voice is as equally time-bound as Tolkien\u2019s, which it cannot help but be. All translations are mortal, for the continual evolution of language outpaces them, while even in their own time it is diction and tone that mints their coin.<\/p>\n

To note then the sprinkling of phrases such as \u201cstunned my senses,\u201d \u201clonely nights,\u201d \u201cseeing is believing,\u201d \u201cthick and thin,\u201d \u201cexceeds the limit,\u201d \u201ca just adjudication,\u201d \u201ca miracle worker,\u201d \u201cstamina and strength,\u201d and \u201cstate of frenzy\u201d is not to out verbal laxness or anachronism, but rather to note which instruments are used for this particular orchestration. The real question is in fact the degree to which they are noticed at all. Here, for instance, is the maiden reprimanding her father in Section VI<\/span> for having needed this vision to quell his grief, rather than having had faith in God\u2019s love and redemption all along.<\/p>\n

\u201cI judge unworthy of praise the jeweler<\/p>\n

who only believes what his eyes behold,<\/p>\n

and call him discourteous and worthy of blame<\/p>\n

for believing our Lord would speak a lie,<\/p>\n

who faithfully promised to lift up your life<\/p>\n

should Fortune cause your flesh to rot.<\/p>\n

You set the words of our Saviour askew<\/p>\n

by clinging to the saying that seeing is believing,<\/p>\n

an expression of a person\u2019s love of pride.<\/p>\n

It is unbecoming in a courteous man<\/p>\n

to try and to test but trust no truth<\/p>\n

beyond those facts which flatter his judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

After \u201cseeing is believing\u201d has been flagged, one hears its familiar pitch more sharply, but it is the palpable tone of spoken remonstrance that unifies the whole, while \u201cto try and to test but trust no truth\u201d lands us convincingly, and quite wonderfully, in the fourteenth century.<\/p>\n

Liv<\/span>eright has also done Armitage and the poem a decided service by including the original Midlands English on the facing page. Though most readers have no way to know if \u201cmy wretched desire writhed in despair\u201d is a fit rendering of \u201cMy wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte,\u201d it is marvelous to have the opportunity to encounter firsthand a long-lost shadowy wraith of our modern tongue. In other instances, to be able to slide from \u201cYou alone had the stamina and strength\u201d over to \u201cAl only thyself so stout & styf\u201d in fact supports the choice made, while the climactic couplet, \u201cAnd instantly I wanted to wade that water,\/ longing for her, the delight of my life,\u201d is sumptuously set off by the thick brogue of felt speech found in \u201cThat syght me gart to thenk to wade\/ For luf-longyng in gret delyt.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, too, the poem\u2019s \u201cconcatenation,\u201d for the chance to consult the original allows us to see how carefully and loyally Armitage has worked to preserve its interlacing structure. The test of such repetition is not to allow it to seem too forced and artificial, and Armitage for the most part manages this splendidly. In Section III<\/span>, for instance, we can confirm that \u201cmore\u201d is the repeating word in both the translation and the original, though it slips easily into the father\u2019s pronouncement at the beginning of stanza 12: \u201cThere was more splendor displayed in that scene\/ than time would ever allow me to tell.\u201d The start of stanza 13 provides a slight intensification when he admits, \u201cThat longing mounted, till more than ever\/ I desired to see beyond the stream,\u201d while stanza 14 ups the energy further with \u201cA more marvelous matter amazed me now.\u201d Armitage, however, saves his most clever move for last when closing stanza 15 with:<\/p>\n

Then she lifted her head toward the light,<\/p>\n

and her face was so fine and ivory-white<\/p>\n

that its wonder stung me. I stood there bewildered,<\/p>\n

as if mesmerized for evermore.<\/p>\n

A quick glance left tells us the poet ends with \u201cmore & more,\u201d which Armitage could have easily supplied, but the nod to Poe is both deft and informative. For the degree to which Poe\u2019s speaker is haunted by the prospect of \u201cevermore\u201d soon being swallowed up by the cold emptiness of \u201cnevermore\u201d is the very dilemma that the poem\u2019s revelation is meant to overcome. Thus does Armitage allow us to see how far we have traveled from such faith, while the sheer plainness of the father\u2019s culminating urge, \u201cNothing mattered more than being near her,\u201d reminds us that mortality and eternity remained also at odds for the Pearl<\/span> poet.<\/p>\n

Whe<\/span>ther what drove that poet to shape \u201ca perfect pearl that could never fade\u201d was allegorical or personal has long been debated, though both Tolkien and Armitage come down on the side of \u201clived experience\u201d as its source and genius. Armitage\u2019s real achievement, however, is in providing the \u201clive experience\u201d of poetry in a translation as nimble as it is resonant, as ecstatic as it is simply moving. In lesser hands, such a work could devolve into pastiche or be reduced to antiquarian fussiness. Great music requires a courageous and sympathetic conductor to redeem the full potential of the score. Pearl<\/span> has found its maestro for our day.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

1<\/a> Pearl: A New Verse Translation<\/span>, by Simon Armitage; Liveright, 153 pages, $24.95.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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