Translator’s Note

Emily Apter’s famous study The Translation Zone (2006) reveals an intellectual regime of translatability sectioned off into “regulated language parks, restricted areas of mixed use, demarcations of apartheid, cordons sanitaires” (5), places where languages can & cannot be mixed or exchanged, where the pressing impossibility of translation may be ignored. Early English texts are often sequestered in one of these “translation zones”: all around their guarded frontiers the problems of translatability, its inherent imprecision, are freely acknowledged. Within the zone, however, these problems all vanish: not only are these texts rendered according to dominant schemes of interpretation unproblematically, but examples of translation & exchange between medieval texts are seen as uncomplicated, uninflected by historical circumstances or altered linguistic contexts — heck, even irony. They are flies trapped in an amber of a nostalgic ideology. What’s more unsettling, the language of the text itself, words inscribed by a native speaker of Old English, fully aware of the contexts & implications of that text & those word choices, can be over-ruled, written over — corrected by a scholarly red pen laboring at a thousand years’ remove from the source.

The above riddles—just two of many—labor under the weight of modern critical assumptions, which constrain what these poetic relics can mean, & often hide the evidence that suggests other interpretations. The Exeter Book Riddles are inherently playful, deceptive at their core, mobilizing varying registers & figurative tactics to unlock an array of subjective lyrical experiences. They do not have to have one single answer & can look startlingly different to different readers. My recent efforts in re-translating these chittering voices locate new possibilities for their voice through deforming & queering processes, exploiting the cracks or glitches in their code, to open up their expression. Often, this scheme has discovered ways that the Riddles speak at some level about desires, acts, & experiences otherwise awkward to state aloud & therefore easily spoken over.

Riddle 23, appearing on folio 106v, usually solved as “Bow,” hinges on a cryptic initial word: “Agof” and its extravagantly contrived explanations. In these, the letter F is an older form of B & so was preserved in this text handed down untouched for generations. Backwards then it spells “Boga” & gives the solution before the riddle even begins, and then it makes sense. All that talk of dudes bending over & shooting each other full of something is rendered safe & manly. But one lone dissenting voice posited in 1910 that the “foga” is related to “fūllīc” meaning “peruersus,” perverted, shameful (Otto B. Schlutter, Englische Studien 41 [1910]: 453–4). All to no effect — early English studies often just ignores what doesn’t interest it at the time. The possibility remained unexplored yet look at the word. It should look vaguely familiar to a modern reader and suggests a different history of a pejorative term.

Two operative contexts inform my approach to retranslating EBR23. The first is that one of the five so-called “Weapon” riddles feel like the rest. Most operate on a level of metonymy that keep the vehicle very close to its tenor. If the Shield of EBR5 is seen as a warrior, then what about that warrior’s experience are we meant to hear? Here, the bow referent is definitely in operation, particularly since we can find examples of arrows likened to poison in other places. So what if we were to take the bow & arrow as a metaphor? Where would that lead? But that brings me to my second principle. The speech of the marginalized operates on a level of sly likeness & plausible deniability, as the lyrics of hip hop songs and the sociolects of queer communities make plain. Expression must hide in plain sight & either be unintelligible to those outside the community or be able to be heard in an entirely different way altogether. 

One of these tactical blurs of meaning might be found in line 13’s “man-drinc.” This term is usually interpreted as “wicked drink,” which fits the idea of death & venom & arrows. But a pun is possible here, one exploited in homiletic writing. The “mān” is an adjective meaning “evil, wicked,” yet “mann” means “human” & eventually becomes “man” in both the male only sense but also as “all humans.” I wanted to sit on that paranomasic moment as another “glitch” in the riddle’s code. Like all glitches, these gaps or cracks expose the operation of the entire program & can be exploited or opened to adjust its function.

Riddle 30, which appears in two slightly different versions in the Exeter Book (on folio 108r & 122v), has always been difficult for critics to pin down. Several solutions float about, though “Wood” seems to predominate. A major problem is that the speaker seems to change shapes as it tells its story (it’s a tree, a coal, a cup, and then maybe a cross?). The riddle speaks of an inner ignition, an excitement & a fascination, radiating out of the unusual compound adjective “lēg-bȳsig.” This entrancing word combines a word for flame (līg) with the idea of activity, busy-ness, maybe even fascination (bȳsig). “Wood” does connect the various states in the poem, but it doesn’t begin to convey their volatility, their capacity for ecstatic connection with those around it. I draw forth that rhapsody by indulging in the very material pleasure of phonemic repetition, rhyme & alliteration becoming bodily sensations shared around a group singing or speaking or listening. These sensations are promiscuous & polyamorous: and all the members of the group take their turn & pass their own kiss to the next. The capacity for shared pleasures across time cause me to wonder if the ‘solution’ is not meant to be Poetry itself, a celebration of verse as community.

Although I don’t feel any of the Exeter Book Riddles need have only one “authorized” solution. But that’s for another article…