The following is the introduction to my translation as it appeared in my submitted thesis. Forgive bad writing, I was in a hurry.
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When I was searching for a text from the Old English corpus on which to focus my senior thesis, one recommendation from my adviser, Professor Thomas Hill, struck me as immediately appealing. Andreas, a 1722 line poem from the Vercelli Book written in the tenth century, has often been attributed – but never conclusively – to the poet Cynewulf. It recounts the story of the apostle Andrew as he sets out to rescue his comrade Matthew from the evil and cannibalistic Mermedonians. More than likely inspired by an religious Greek text from several hundred years earlier, known in English as The Acts of Andrew and Matthew in the City of Anthropophagi, it is by no means a direct translation: the Andrew of this work is somewhat different from the one of the Bible, often being described (along with the rest of his comrades) as a warrior, which runs somewhat contrary to the more traditional notion of the apostles.
Andreas’ religious implications, however, were not of especial significance to me; I am not a Christian and have only a passing familiarity with the New Testament and related characters. Far more noteworthy about the poem was its similarity to Beowulf. Beowulf too is a character who combines the pagan and Christian traditions, and it is unsurprising that some scholars have claimed Andreas to have been inspired by this older text. There are several terms used in Andreas whose only other attested instances in the corpus appear in Beowulf, such as geomorgidd, occurring only once in each poem: on lines 1548 in the former and 3148 in the later. Kenneth Brooks, in the preface to his edition, discusses numerous parallel passages between the poems which have been used as evidence, as well as metrical similarities which connect the poem more closely to Beowulf than even Cynewulf’s works, but he maintains that these passages, as well as any comparisons of single words appearing in the two texts, do not make a sufficient case for proof that this poem was inspired by Beowulf, given that the surviving corpus of Old English is only a fraction of what once existed and that there is hence no real way of differentiating between genuinely meaningful parallels and common words and phrases.
This did not concern me, though. In much the same manner that the religious aspects of Andreas were not what drew me to the poem, neither were any of its potential historical connections to Beowulf; rather, it was the thematic and syntactic similarities in the texts. What I had enjoyed most about Beowulf were two features in particular: detailed action scenes, and chilling descriptions of the ogre-like kin of Cain and the monstrous dragon. Although Andreas lacks direct references to monsters (save two passing references to ancient works of giants, commonly mentioned in Old English poetry and often referring to the Romans due to their architecture), it does nevertheless contain vicious man-eaters, a perilous adventure, and scenes of graphic brutality which are at the very least equivalent to those in Beowulf. The devil himself has a speaking role, and in the end Andrew invokes holy magic to purge the evil city of its sins. The diction of the poem is noteworthy as well: in addition to sharing certain words only with Beowulf, there is no shortage of more common words regarding death and combat. In addition to this Andreas contains several hapax legomena specifically pertaining to battles and conflict, such as deaÞreow (“death-cruel” or “death-greedy”) and gegnslege (“against-strike”; also defined as “counterattack”). There is also a fair amount of word-play in the poem (the juxtaposition of fold and flod, or the intra-line rhyming of hond with rond, for instance), which is reminiscent of some of the works which, thanks to the presence of his runic signature, have been more conclusively attributed to Cynewulf. Brooks, however, does not believe that Andreas was even necessarily inspired by the works of Cynewulf, one of his reasons being that the poet generally dealt with less interesting subject matter. Again, though, it was not so much the idea of linking the poem to Cynewulf that appealed to me as it was the presence of this word-play itself. What drew me to Andreas, then, was a combination of its compelling story and its creative language.
After a while of unsuccessfully to come up with topics I could write about with regard to these aspects of Andreas, I recalled the partial translation of Beowulf I had produced for Professor Hill’s class the previous year and realized that a translation of Andreas, a much less popular poem which has been translated far less frequently, might be a suitable project. I did not want to produce a prose translation, however, as I believe that although such works are certainly capable of a greater degree of literal accuracy, they are often sorely lacking in the poetic elements which had contributed to the impact of their original texts. I thus did not feel it would be possible to pay adequate tribute to the story and language of Andreas in anything but a poetic translation.
With that in mind, I began looking into existing translations of Andreas, of which the number is quite small, especially by comparison to the poem’s much more famous potential cousin. More specifically, though, I researched the prevalence of poetic translations, of which there were even fewer. After seeking approval from Professor Hill, I decided that I would try my hand at it.
There were a number of challenges I confronted during the course my efforts to translate Andreas. The first and perhaps most critical was in fact deciding how to go about the process. The essential crux would be to maintain an appropriate balance among faithfulness to the source text, grammatical coherency, and poetic integrity, each of which would present its own challenges. I eventually determined that the best way to produce a poetic translation would be to produce a literal one first and to use that as a framework for my final version.
In order to remain faithful to the source material, though, I would have to make sure I was translating from good source material. I would also need to ensure that my translations would be correct. Professor Hill recommended Kenneth Brooks’ 1961 edition Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles, and I used this text as the primary source of my translation. I also consulted an e-text version of the poem from Georgetown University’s website, edited by Tony Jebson. My sources for translation included Brooks’ glossary, the third edition of John R. Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and the available entries of the University of Toronto’s Old English Dictionary Online, as well as Professor Hill, who periodically corrected much of my translation as I produced it. I also consulted an e-text of Charles Kennedy’s 2000 translation. This particular work was less valuable as a tool for checking the accuracy of my translation as it was an inspirational one: it is poetic to an extent, containing a fair measure of alliteration, but at times it does diverge somewhat from the literal meaning of the original text. It was thus an excellent point from which to gauge how many creative liberties I myself could reasonably take.
My sources obtained, the most pressing issue I now faced was determining just how I was to achieve a poetic translation. Since I endeavored to create one which would retain some of the spirit of the original, I had to determine the most effective way of recreating the essence of the Old English text in a Modern English translation. Taking a hint from Kennedy, as well as my own admittedly limited experience reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I decided that the simplest and most effective way to do this was to attempt myself an alliterative translation, alliteration being the one device absolutely central to Anglo-Saxon verse, and certainly still a prominent and easily available literary device in Modern English, especially given the multitudinous foreign loan words which have entered the lexicon since the time Andreas was written.
In Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are several rules regarding the alliteration, as well as the meter; I needed to decide which ones I was going to follow, how I could best accomplish this, and to what extent I was going to do so. I did realize that whatever choices I would eventually make, I could attribute to poetic license and my personal sense of aesthetics; but I would still need to be consistent in how I employed them. The first question regarded the frequency of alliteration. Lines in Old English poetry consist of two half-lines, an A-line and a B-line. As a general rule, each half-line has two accented syllables, and the alliteration of a given line is to fall on the second accented syllable of the A-line and the first of the B-line, with optional alliteration for the first stressed syllable of the A-line. Four alliterating syllables in a line was certainly not unheard of in Old English, but it was uncommon.
As far as meter was concerned, I realized that I would probably not be able to maintain any of the five generally accepted Anglo-Saxon poetic meters consistently while still producing an intelligible translation. I decided, though, that the overall cadence of the poem would be more important than strict adherence to any specific metrical constraints, and that indeed if I were to attempt to conform to these constraints the wording of my translation would become at times unacceptably awkward. A clearly defined meter, then, was not one of my concerns.
This raised another question. With my alliteration how faithful should I be to the letters of the original language? The Old English lexicon, for instance, does not contain the fricative v, the affricate j, or several other Modern English phonemes, but as it would have been quite impossible to write an accurate translation without using these sounds at all, I opted not only to include them, but to make them, when appropriate, the bearers of a given line’s alliteration. Likewise, where as in Old English the th phoneme was prominent enough to have its own representative grapheme (Þ, the thorn), Modern English contains proportionally far fewer words beginning with that sound, making it more difficult to alliterate. It seemed inevitable then that I must resort to employing the full range of Modern English sounds if I were to reach the frequency of alliteration I wished to achieve in a coherent manner.
Charles Kennedy’s translation did contain regular alliteration, but it was not separated into Anglo-Saxon style half-lines, nor did the alliteration seem to adhere to any strict rules regarding its frequency. Additionally, it tended to avoid alliterating with the letters v and j. In another departure from Kennedy’s translation, I decided that I would attempt to maintain this format, even if I would be unable to conform strictly to the rule that there be four accented syllables per line; after all, the qualifications for which syllables may serve as stressed seem to be somewhat flexible even in the Old English text, with certain words receiving stress in some lines and not others.
I soon realized that, given the vastness of the Modern English lexicon as compared to its ancestor, alliterating only two syllables per line would not be sufficiently challenging. I thus decided that I would aim to go a step beyond the original: I would attempt to alliterate at least three, and sometimes four, syllables per line, so as to take full advantage of the possibilities afforded by the language in which I would be writing. I did initially worry that in some cases I might be forced to deviate from the original meaning of a line for the sake of my alliteration, but I found that by occasionally employing some creative synonyms and syntax, and by occasionally shuffling certain words from line to line, I could remain mostly faithful to the original text without being forced to sacrifice poetic flourish.
The problem of coherency was by no means a small dilemma either. While Old English and Modern English are certainly similar languages, they are by no means identical, and a direct word-for-word (and line-for-line) translation from Old English verse will sometimes produce resulting sentences that are either ungrammatical or nonsensical to a modern reader. My goal of creating a highly alliterative translation made such sentences even more likely to occur. The solution was a sort of compromise: for the purposes of my alliteration, words that either began with a given letter or whose stress fell on that letter would be acceptable. I thus at various times use the word depart to alliterate both with d’s and p’s, I use the word retainer to alliterate with both r’s and t’s, and so forth. This decision, I feel, preserved the essential alliterative sound to which I aspired while granting me substantial leeway in terms of the vocabulary at my disposal.
I was lucky in having chosen Andreas because, for the most part, the poem is uncorrupted, with only two lines missing. Line 1664 I chose to fill in with my own guess as to what might have been written, but with lines 1667 and 1668, which due to a missing half line from each has often resulted in their being combined into a single line, I chose to follow the lead of precedent, thereby preserving the 1722 line length of the poem. Constructing a line was likely the largest creative liberty I took in translating Andreas, but among the others was my insertion of the word viridian into line 104, as part of the description for the paradise word, neorxnawang, in line 102, for which I had reason beyond merely adding to the line’s alliteration. It was recently brought to my attention by Professor Samantha Zacher that the first letters of the word, neorx, if flipped backwards and the x is read as a runic g, become the word for green: a potential solution to the linguistic crux of the word’s literal translation (it would be “green field”). I felt that by adding this word, I was alluding to this possibility in a manner which also enhanced the aesthetics of my translation. Additionally, some of my epithets for God are not literal translations of the Old English but rather attempts to diversify the poem’s language. For example, I translated the phrase engla ordfruma, literally “lord of angels,” into “artist of angels” on line 145. I felt I could justify this through God’s having been described as the literal “shaper of angels” several times elsewhere in the poem, some of which I translated literally (line 278), and others creatively (line 119, where I substituted author for shaper, again figuring them near enough synonyms). Although I did take creative liberties, then, I nevertheless exercised care to preserve as much of the original meaning as possible.
Translating a poem of substantial length from Old English to Modern English is certainly a daunting task in its own right, given the concern of balancing accuracy with intelligibility. I learned that adding alliteration to that equation certainly complicates matters even further. Nevertheless, the English language now is so versatile that I found the task of producing a coherent, accurate and and alliterative – if not definitive – translation of Andreas quite possible, and I now have no doubt that similar translations could be produced for a number of hitherto neglected Old English works. I hope the reader shall enjoy the results of my effort as much as I did the creation.
