Translator’s Note

The Ruin has always been a hopelessly tantalizing work to me, with the materiality of the manuscript in perfect harmony with its contents. Our understanding of the language is in pieces, the poem itself is in pieces, and the city it describes is in pieces. It is a fragmented relic from a bygone time about a fragmented relic from a bygone time, and in that way it asks us to encounter what cannot be recovered from the past. In translating it, I couldn’t help but think about what this work has to say to us about obscurity in the literal sense, regarding that which is blocked from view.

 Parts of this poem are completed obscured by a hole that stretches across the manuscript pages, and this is the only record we have of the work, so what is lost is truly gone. Some of the phrases burst through with complete clarity to even a novice -  “þæt is cynelic þing” easily becomes “that is a kingly thing.” Others remain stubbornly elusive in their meaning and many of the words have no other record in the Old English corpus - teaforgeapa (or teafor geapa), translated here as “red arches,” still ignites much confusion and debate. The text also uses parataxis extensively which creates ambiguity within the text. Word boundaries are debated and it isn’t always clear which parts are working together to form phrases.“Hrungeat berofen”, literally translated as something like “ring-gate bereft,” is placed before “hrim on lime.” Hrim is hoarfrost, but lime could refer to either mortar or a joint - is this a continuing comment on the gate, or have the eyes of the poem moved onto mortared walls? As I was working with the Old English, following scholarly debates on certain words or phrases, and realizing how much of the original meaning cannot be recovered, it became clear to me that one of the things that is beautiful about this broken poem is how it moves in and out of focus. This is not just a poem with missing sections, it has become a living embodiment of the theme it discusses, of beautiful things of the past that have been destroyed by time. The obscurity of the poem cannot be broken down into a binary of what is understood and what is not understood, but it is rather experienced as a question of how much can be understood of any particular line.

My initial translations - in which I had fallen for the trap of trying to make up for these gaps in our understanding rather than embracing the obscurity of the text - seemed flat and dead on the page. Removing missing sections or replacing them with ellipses, inserting modern punctuation that smoothes over the ambiguity of the phrasing, even just the black letters of the text standing in neat rows on the paper, are choices that present every word as equally known, every meaning as perfectly clear, every translator’s choice as firm and true as the original, and in consequence, the resonance of the poem disappears. There is a dimensionality to the reading experience that is lost in a static translation.

Understanding this dimensional obscurity as central to the work, the translation decisions that I have made attempt to convey that experience to the reader. To show the different levels of obscurity for phrases within the text, I have turned to opacity, using different shades of gray across the translation - white for text that is gone, light gray for uncertain meanings, dark gray for meanings that are known but perhaps imprecise, and black for clear passages. I hope that this gives the reader an experience that reflects engaging with the text in the original language, where you are so aware of the ways it cannot completely be reclaimed. One decision worth mentioning is my translation of ‘wyrd’, a word often represented as ‘fate’ that defies easy translation, as the conception of fate outlined in Old English does not align exactly with our modern ideas of it. Here, I have used the phrase “time and consequence” to try to convey the “what must happen” aspects of wyrd in both passive and active senses, as I believe the original word holds and the poem describes, though this too I find an imperfect solution. I have removed modern punctuation from the piece, which hopefully maintains some of the parataxis of the work, and asks the reader to do more work in reconstructing the meaning. I chose to structure the poem by half line, indenting the second half line to convey the caesura that Old English poetry is famous for and to pair the half-lines together. I tried to be mindful of alliteration and stressed syllables to keep some of the flavor of the Old English verse. I hope these decisions come together to create a dimensional and enigmatic reading of this beautiful work that allows the modern reader to engage with what has been lost - and in turn, helps us appreciate what still remains.