According to legend, students at Oxford University in the first class of philologist JRR Tolkien got scared. The teacher entered the room and shouted “Hwæt!” (pronounced more or less “Ruét!”), which they interpreted as “Quiet!”. In fact, that’s the first word in the medieval epic Beowulf, meaning “Listen!”
The story is, for many modern readers, a miniature portrait of the image of “Beowulf”: harsh, intimidating, and difficult to understand. A recent Brazilian translation of the poem helps to nullify much of this aura, although it makes no attempt to reproduce the form of the verses in Portuguese.
The prose translation, carried out by historian Elton Medeiros, is valuable not only because it fully contains the content of more than 3,000 verses of the epic, but also because it includes four other AngloSaxon poems such as “Widsith” and “Deor”. The language in which they are written is Old English or AngloSaxon, spoken in England towards the end of the 12th century.
Despite being a direct ancestor of modern English, AngloSaxon is much closer than its descendant to other Germanic languages such as German and the Scandinavian languages. This is partly because Norman invaders from what is north of modernday France conquered England from AD 1066.
The conquest led to a cultural dominance of the Norman language close to medieval French which fundamentally changed the vocabulary and structure of the English language from then on.
Therefore, no English speaker today can read Old English without studying many hours beforehand. And then there is the fact that the poetic tradition of England before 1066 has very little in common with what came later, and much more resembles that of medieval Scandinavia. It is indeed a strange world for someone who only knows Homer, Camões or even Shakespeare.
Medeiros’ translation and the bold afterword he wrote face these difficulties with patience and didactics. For example, he attempts to accurately render the “kennings,” compound words that act as standardized metaphors for certain very common elements in the narrative.
For example, in kennings, the sun becomes worldcandel; “swanrad”, “swan path”, is the sea, and so on metaphors are explained in footnotes.
The translated text also bypasses the often baroque syntax of the verses in order to clarify the story of the warrior Beowulf, a prince of the Geats people who may have lived in southern Sweden who travels to Denmark to confront the slaying ogre Grendel do the nobles visiting King Hrothgar’s palace.
With Herculean strength and great courage, Beowulf accomplishes this mission and later becomes king, but the awakening of a dragon in the hero’s home leads him to face his ultimate adventure.
This oneparagraph synopsis does not come close to doing justice to the complexity of the poem, which contains numerous allusions to legendary episodes from the Germanic past that recur in other epics, in Scandinavian sagas, and in the works of medieval chroniclers.
And the work also contains a deliberate fusion of Christian and pagan elements the monster Grendel, for example, resembles the giants faced by the Norse god Thor, but is portrayed as a descendant of the biblical killer Cain.
According to one of the hypotheses analyzed by Medeiros about the origin of the poem, this may indicate that the work was composed in the 10th century, when the Christian kingdom of England had absorbed descendants of Scandinavian invaders.
Thanks to its influence on Tolkien’s work key passages from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are essentially recreations of excerpts from the poem Beowulf has become one of the main inspirations of modern fantasy literature.
The hardest part, however, is confronting the peculiar structure of verse in Old English, especially in a language like Portuguese.
Rather than using rhyme, AngloSaxon verse relies on socalled alliteration, in which the same consonants or vowels are repeated in the stressed syllables of words often with two alliterations in the first half of the verse and one in the middle.. second.
As if that didn’t sound complicated enough, there are also more or less canonical patterns of stressed syllable distribution throughout the verse.
Faced with this complexity, Medeiros adopts an attitude much closer to that of a historian than that of a poet. According to him, translations that attempted to reproduce these formal features “sacrificed the meaning of the poem’s universe in favor of the sound of a word, and mischaracterized it”.
One can disagree with this position, perhaps too radically given the importance of formal elements to the greatness of “Beowulf”, but the efforts to make the poem’s world more intelligible deserve to be celebrated. The work was recognized as the best translation of 2022 by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics.