Interview with Michael Matto, Co-Editor of The Word Exchange

We may be doing our first-ever English-to-English translation event on Feb 8, when we'll be welcomeing poets and translators Robert Hass, Michael Matto, and Greg Delanty. They'll be discussing The Word Exchange, which has just been published by Norton and is a copendium of Old English verse, translated into modern English by a very impressive lineup of poets and translators. (Matto and Delanty edited the book, Hass translated for it.)

Here we talk with Michael Matto about just what Old English verse is, where it comes from, and some of the issues that are dealt with when working in this language.

And if you're planning on coming, give us a head's-up on Facebook.

Scott Esposito: First I'd like to ask you to describe the geographical region we're talking about when we say "Anglo-Saxon" poetry, as well as some kind of an idea what world these poems came from. Who would have read them? (And how?) What were they for?

Michael Matto: The Angles and Saxons were Germanic peoples who migrated in the 5th century to the island we now call Great Britain. One story suggests they were invited as mercenary defense forces for the Celtic people living there, but soon turned on their employers and took the Celt’s land for themselves. In any case, once there they lived mainly in the area that now comprises England (Angle-land) and southern Scotland.

Old English is the language of the Anglo-Saxons. It derives from members of a larger family of Germanic languages. Their poetry would have originally been composed orally and memorized for oral performance. Presumably these performances could vary in exact content, much like a contemporary folk or blues player might alter a song with each concert. However, which extant Old English poems were composed orally and which were written by literate poets remains a mystery, as do the specific circumstances of performance.

Still, I’d assume that poetry was welcome in a number of places, from the drinking hall to the monastery, depending on the nature of the poem. Some of the poems are beautiful expressions of intense longing or feelings of alienation; some are long narrative retellings of biblical stories; some are intended for political spin; some are compendia of gnomic wisdom; some are very clever riddles.

SE:Beowulf is by far the most widely known work of Anglo-Saxon verse, and it comprises about 10 percent of the extant verse. What other works would you say have distinguished themselves, and has everything that we know of been translated at this point?

MM: The most well-known poems are "The Seafarer," which Ezra Pound famously translated, "The Wanderer," and the "Dream of the Rood." Each is an elegant and intricate mid-length poem. Also intriguing are the nearly 100 riddles about everyday items such as tools, weapons, foods, animals, and celestial bodies. I’d venture to say all Old English poetry has been translated at one point or another, though some only into prose. Some poems are taken up regularly by translators, such as those I’ve mentioned.

SE: What's your history with Old English?

MM:I fell in love with Old English as an undergraduate English major at U.C. Berkeley, and pursued it in my graduate work at New York University.

SE: The Word Exchange includes a very useful "Guide to Reading Aloud," so that readers can try their hands at reading the original poetry (printed on the facing pages in this book). If we still know, how was the knowledge of how to speak and read Old English passed down to us today?

MM: Well, it wasn’t. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English was forever altered grammatically and phonetically by its contact with Norman French. While something akin to Old English vocabulary and grammar continued to develop in the north, the French-influenced English of London (and of Chaucer) eventually became the standard, and Old English was largely forgotten. 18th-century scholars began the resuscitation work, so our ability to read and pronounce Old English is based on the labors of 300 years of ongoing historical linguistic scholarship.

SE: Most of the poems in this collection have a distinctive format where the lines are split down the middle. For example, the first few lines of Beowulf look like this:

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena     in géardagum
þéodcyninga                þrym gefrúnon·
hú ðá æþelingas          ellen fremedon.

Can you explain what this feature is, as well as some of the thoughts behind whether or not (and if so, how) to represent it in a translation?

MM: This split is called a “caesura,” and represents the modern standard format for printed editions. But it is not what the poems look like in their manuscripts. On the manuscript page the poem is written out from margin to margin, as is prose; the lines you cite from Beowulf looks like this in the manuscript:

HWAET WE GARDE-M
na ingear dagum þeod cyninga
þrym gefrunon huða æþelingas ellen
fremedon.

It is as if the regular iambic pentameter of Paradise Lost were written in paragraphs; you’d still hear the rhythm when read aloud. The modern convention is designed to be a visual representation of what the listener would hear in oral performance, which is two compact syntactic units joined by alliteration, but with (perhaps) a slight pause between them.

SE: Lastly, in the introduction your fellow editor, Greg Delanty, mentions that The Word Exchange incorporates translations from a number of poets with no knowledge of Old English. Greg goes on to say that you would give these poets "cribs, glossaries, and interpretive direction," and then the poets would compose the translation. I'd like to ask what kind of instruction you gave and what the working relationship was like, as well as how, if at all, you think this differs from a translation only made by one person.

MM: I offered all the translators as much or as little help as they wanted. Some picked a poem and I later received their work complete; others I met with personally, chatted over the phone, or had extensive email exchanges with. But most fell somewhere in between. Many wanted to understand the meter of the poetry, even if they opted not to try to reproduce it. But interestingly, the poets needed to find their own ways into the work not based on history or scholarly interpretation. Most interesting to me were the ways in which the poets saw aspects of the poems that had never occurred to me, but were incredibly perceptive and illuminating. Still, I did not hold back when I saw moments in the translations that I felt were too loose or perhaps misconstrued the original. I usually prefaced such comments by saying “it may be that you made a conscious choice here, but you should know that the Old English actually means…”. Sometimes these notes led to revisions, sometimes not. I occasionally made stylistic suggestions when an idea occurred to me, but I tried to limit myself to questions of accuracy.

But ultimately I’d say each poem was translated “by one person”--that is, I provided information and feedback, but did not try to shape the poems in any specific way. That’s why the resulting poems are so varied and rich.