{"id":1809,"date":"2017-03-07T20:09:14","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T20:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1809"},"modified":"2017-08-29T17:30:13","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T17:30:13","slug":"comparison-of-jane-draycotts-and-simon-armitages-translations-of-pearl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1809","title":{"rendered":"Comparison of Jane Draycott’s and Simon Armitage’s translations of Pearl"},"content":{"rendered":"

REWRITING PEARL<\/em>: Translations by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage<\/p>\n

Pearl<\/em> is an anonymous fourteenth century poem of 1212 lines, very alien in some ways, piercingly moving in others. Its speaker tells how, mourning the loss of his \u201cpearl\u201d, apparently his daughter, he fell asleep in the garden where he lost her before she turned two. While his body slept, his spirit journeyed to the Earthly Paradise, a landscape of miraculous beauty and light where he saw a Maiden on the far side of a river, his lost daughter, crowned, robed in white and shimmering with pearls. No longer an infant but a saved soul speaking with the authority of heaven, she instructed him in Christian faith and salvation, and showed him the the city of heaven with Christ himself with his 144,000 pearl brides. When he tried to cross the river the vision shattered and he woke.<\/p>\n

I loved this poem as an undergraduate, struggling through it with a glossary and editorial notes. Linguistically, it\u2019s much more challenging than Chaucer, though. I never read it again till Jane Draycott\u2019s translation came out in 2011, and since then I\u2019ve only read it in translation. We can be grateful to Armitage and Draycott for presenting it in forms that make it easily accessible to a modern reader.<\/p>\n

Neither simply transmits the original in the way a scholarly translation might aspire to do. They\u2019re poets: their business is to transmit what stirs them imaginatively in the original and to make a poem that can live in the twenty-first century. This means both interpreting and building on the original. \u201cA good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body,\u201d says Dryden. Sir John Denham wrote in 1656 that \u201cPoesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum.\u201d Introducing Ezra Pound\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em>, T S Eliot wrote \u201cGood translation is not merely translation, for the translator is giving the original through himself, and finding himself through the original.\u201d<\/p>\n

An obvious difference between Armitage\u2019s and Draycott\u2019s versions is to do with pace. Reading Armitage\u2019s, we move rapidly through and between stanzas; reading Draycott\u2019s, we linger over details, and, if my own experience is anything to go by, we are much less likely to read the whole poem at a sitting.<\/p>\n

Armitage achieves his driving pace partly by writing in a rhythm that echoes the Old and Middle English alliterative tradition of writing lines that fall into roughly equal halves with two main stresses in each. This (basically speaking) is the metre of the original Pearl<\/em> itself. Many stresses are emphasized by alliteration at the beginning of the stressed word or syllable. Here are the first four lines of his version. I\u2019ve capitalized the stressed syllables, putting the first person pronoun \u201cI\u201d in lower case to avoid confusion:<\/p>\n

BEAUTiful PEARL that would PLEASE a PRINCE,
\nFIT to be MOUNTed in FINest GOLD,
\ni\u00a0 SAY for CERtain that in ALL the EAST
\nher PRECious Equal i NEVer FOUND.<\/p>\n

You easily slip into this rhythm, which helps you read rapidly and makes it easy to focus on the overall narrative arc. I think the best way of reading this version of Pearl<\/em> is surrendering to its propulsive force, absorbing it as you might a novel. I first read it on a busy train, and it gripped me even in those circumstances.<\/p>\n

As with all aesthetic choices, such a rhythm comes at a cost. It flattens variety, and makes you pay less attention to particulars. More than simply enabling<\/em> faster reading, I\u2019d say that it positively makes slower reading feel unnatural.<\/p>\n

Draycott uses pauses within the line to create a much more varied music. Here are her first four lines. You\u2019ll see that by dividing them into phrases of unequal length and by driving phrases over the line endings she makes it impossible to read them in terms of two balancing halves with two stresses in each:<\/p>\n

ONE thing i KNOW for CERtain: that SHE
\nwas PEERless, PEARL who WOULD have ADDed
\nLIGHT to ANy PRINce\u2019s LIFE
\nhowEver BRIGHT with GOLD. NONE<\/p>\n

In the original, the lines go:<\/p>\n

Perle plesaunte, to prynces paye
\nTo clanly clos in golde so clere:
\nOute of orient, I hardyly saye,
\nNe proued I neuer her precios pere.<\/p>\n

Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron translate the literal meaning as \u201cLovely pearl, which it pleases a prince to set radiantly (or<\/em> chastely) in gold so bright, I declare assuredly that I never found her equal in value amongst those of the orient\u201d.<\/p>\n

Armitage and Draycott both give life to what reads leadenly in exact paraphrase, but do so in very different ways. There\u2019s a line by line correspondence between the original and Armitage\u2019s version. He\u2019s inserted \u201cfit to\u201d, but otherwise takes very little liberty with the literal sense:<\/p>\n

Beautiful pearl that would please a prince,
\nfit to be mounted in finest gold,
\nI say for certain that in all the East
\nher precious equal I never found.<\/p>\n

Draycott changes the order in which ideas are presented and interprets them by breathing her own poetry into them:<\/p>\n

One thing I know for certain: that she
\nwas peerless, pearl who would have added
\nlight to any prince\u2019s life
\nhowever bright with gold.<\/p>\n

Rearranging the sequence of ideas, she creates an arresting opening, fraught with a sense of the speaker as an individual person in the grip of complicated feelings. The sheer emphasis of \u201cOne<\/em> thing I know\u201d creates the impression of someone clinging to such certainty as they can.\u00a0 Furthermore, ending the line with that very emphatic \u201cshe\u201d, Draycott immediately tells us that the speaker is thinking about a person<\/em> who, as the beginning of the next line suggests, has been lost. In Armitage and the original the pearl doesn\u2019t become a person till line four. This makes an enormous difference to the emotional resonance of what follows. Finally, \u201cPearl who would have added \/ light to any prince\u2019s life \/ however bright with gold\u201d doesn\u2019t merely find modern words for the Middle English ones, it adds its own metaphors, flooding the lines with radiance and emotional intensity.<\/p>\n

We see similar contrasts if we compare the two poets\u2019 translations of stanza ten. In Armitage\u2019s version, the clarity and force of the writing combine descriptions of the marvellous with an unimpeded onward flow. In a directly physical way, it\u2019s a pleasure to say the words aloud. Imaginatively, there\u2019s joy in the vividness and beauty of the imagery. These two pleasures combine to make a third: reading aloud, you feel as if you yourself are acting out the river\u2019s vigorous flow:<\/p>\n

At the water\u2019s edge, ornamenting its depths,
\nwere bountiful banks of bright beryl.
\nThe surface swirled as it swept by,
\npouring forward, murmuring as it flowed.
\nAnd the bed was studded with brilliant stones,
\nglinting and glowing like light through glass,
\nas radiance streams from distant stars
\nin the winter sky while the world sleeps.
\nBecause every pebble set into that pool
\nwas an emerald or sapphire or another jewel;
\nthe river looked luminous along its length
\nso gleaming were those gem-like ornaments.<\/p>\n

Though there are parentheses here, they don\u2019t hold up the onward movement: because each idea is easily grasped, because we\u2019re being swept along by the rhythm and because they fit snugly within the rhythmical units, we barely notice them as interruptions. We\u2019re swept on a current of verbs, too: \u201cswirled\u201d and \u201cswept\u201d, \u201cpouring\u201d, \u201cmurmuring\u201d and \u201cflowed\u201d, \u201cglinting\u201d and \u201cglowing\u201d, \u201cstreams\u201d and \u201csleeps\u201d \u2013 a very high proportion of the stressed words.<\/p>\n

Armitage\u2019s stanza\u00a0 revels in the physical, muscular power of water. Draycott\u2019s focus is on contemplation and thought. True, there\u2019s a burst of verbs in the third line, but it\u2019s contained by the stillness of contemplation. It\u2019s not what the river does<\/em> that we focus on so much as what it is<\/em>, and what it is isn\u2019t muscular and material, like Armitage\u2019s water, it\u2019s light<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Brightest of all were its banks, blazing
\nwith rays of beryl, a channel of light
\nwhere echoing water circled and swirled
\nin an eddying flood that was almost like words.
\nThe stream-bed itself was bright with stones
\nthat shone like sunlight through glinting glass
\nor stars streaming deep in the winter sky
\nwhile men in this wooded world lie asleep.
\nEvery pebble that lay in the lap of that pool
\nwas an emerald or sapphire, a storehouse of jewels,
\nso the length of the river seemed lit from within,
\nradiant with glitter and glistening.<\/p>\n

Rather than forward movement, there\u2019s a glittering stillness, animated by forceful stresses and alliteration. If the main impression in Armitage\u2019s stanza is of the river sweeping on, in Draycott\u2019s it seems to be of the water circling and swirling. The circle is a traditional emblem of eternity, so the idea of the eternity of heaven shines through the description of the river that separates heaven from mortal men. The stanza is full of other symbolic reverberations too, and by suspending our imaginations over it, Draycott gives us time to catch them.<\/p>\n

The dreamer sees the Maiden and realises she is his lost pearl. Armitage and Draycott both describe the encounter powerfully, but in very different ways. Here\u2019s Armitage:<\/p>\n

\u2018O pearl in those priceless pearls,\u2019 I said,
\n\u2018are you really my pearl, whose passing I mourn,
\nand grieve for alone through lonely nights?
\nEndless sorrow I have suffered and endured
\nsince you slipped from my grasp to the grassy earth;
\nI am hollow with loss and harrowed by pain,
\nYet here you stand, lightened of all strife,
\nat peace in the land of Paradise.\u2019<\/p>\n

The rhythm and the balancing echoes of word and sound give a swing and swiftness of movement to this, an incantatory rhetorical power of an essentially generalising kind. It\u2019s a pleasure to say aloud and the clarity and force of the expression means that the words and ideas print themselves on the memory. Draycott\u2019s speaker is more tentative and his words are less instantly memorable, but I think they\u2019re more sensitively expressive of his feelings:<\/p>\n

\u2018Young girl, all set with jewels and stones,
\nare you my pearl? The pearl I\u2019ve mourned
\nand longed for night after night alone?
\nIf you knew what silent suffering I\u2019ve borne
\nsince you slipped from me into the grass \u2013
\nI live distracted and worn down by loss.
\nYet here you stand in Paradise,
\na land past pain, past sorrow, past strife.\u2019<\/p>\n

The words seem to grow out of the speaker\u2019s situation rather than merely describing it. His feelings are caught in the texture of his speech. In \u201c\u2018are you my pearl?\u2019\u201d the stress falls on \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cmy\u201d. Two adjacent stressed syllables push apart from each other, creating a gap or block in the flow of speech. The rhythm shivers with the conflict between the speaker\u2019s doubt and his incredulous hope.\u00a0 His \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cmy\u201d are explosively fraught in their relationship to each other, too, both here and in the wider context. In a quasi-dramatic way, they\u2019re fraught with his immediate feelings and situation. Draycott intensifies this impression by inserting \u201cIf you knew\u201d so that the line seems packed with feelings the speaker is desperate for the girl to understand but can\u2019t express. At the same time, \u201cAre you my pearl?\u201d resonates in ways the speaker hasn\u2019t begun to understand with the most profound themes of the whole poem. As he\u2019ll learn, she both is and is not his<\/em> pearl, not only because she\u2019s been removed by death and transformed by her ascent to heaven but also because, as the whole poem insists, the one love that all souls truly and absolutely belong to is that of Christ.<\/p>\n

I hope I\u2019ve said enough to bring out some general differences between Armitage\u2019s and Draycott\u2019s versions of Pearl<\/em>. I\u2019d like to say a little more about its overall arc.<\/p>\n

The pearl maiden tells the dreamer that she has become Christ\u2019s bride and Queen of Heaven. He can\u2019t believe this: how can someone who died before she was two achieve such eminence? She tells him that all saved souls are equally kings and queens in Heaven, under Christ and the Virgin Mary. She takes him to a point where looking over the river he sees the Heavenly Jerusalem and watches the procession of Christ and his multitudinous brides. She warns him not to try crossing the river. Suddenly he becomes aware that she is no longer just across the river from him but herself in the middle of the city. Overcome by the desire to be with her, he tries to cross, but the dream breaks and he wakes. Lamenting his separation from heaven and his girl, he consoles himself with the thought of her salvation: that she now belongs to a love infinitely wider and deeper than his own, where he prays to join her.<\/p>\n

Without sharing the Pearl<\/em>-poet\u2019s faith, we can all be moved by what is generally human in this poem and enriched by the way it brings us closer to the mental frame of our fourteenth century ancestors.<\/p>\n

Draycott and Armitage shine differently valuable lights on it. Readers wanting a quick, uncomplicated experience of it might be advised to go for the Armitage. Those who want a poem they can read repeatedly, discovering more each time and receiving deeper transfusions of personal emotion, should go for the Draycott. I\u2019ve gained by both. However, although Armitage\u2019s version is very effective at sweeping you along on a current of broad impressions, it doesn\u2019t always stand up well to the kind of reading that focuses on the resonances of every word. I\u2019ll give two examples of writing too slack to reward that kind of attention. In a stanza describing how the dreamer gazes at the maiden before addressing her, Armitage\u2019s speaker exclaims:<\/p>\n

Oh blissful one, oh unblemished soul,
\nso flawless, fragile, so flatteringly slender.<\/p>\n

Describing the procession of Christ the Lamb through the Heavenly Jerusalem, he has<\/p>\n

The delirious delight His coming occasioned
\nwould indeed be difficult to describe in full.<\/p>\n

\u201cFlatteringly\u201d and \u201cdelirious\u201d are worse than inert (the fault I\u2019d find with the expression in these two quotations generally); they\u2019re jarringly inappropriate to their contexts.<\/p>\n

Pearl<\/em>, Jane Draycott (translator), Bernard O\u2019Donoghue (introduction); Carcanet Press, ISBN 978 1 906188 01 6
\nPearl<\/em>, Simon Armitage, Faber & Faber, ISBN 978 0 571 30295 6
\nThe Poems of the Pearl Manuscript<\/em>, eds Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, University of Exeter Press, ISBN 978 0 85989 791 4<\/p>\n

This essay appeared in issue 5 of The High Window and I’d like to thank the editors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can read my essay, published in issue 5 of The High Window, by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

REWRITING PEARL: Translations by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage Pearl is an anonymous fourteenth century poem of 1212 lines, very alien in some ways, piercingly moving in others. Its speaker tells how, mourning the loss of his \u201cpearl\u201d, apparently his daughter, he fell asleep in the garden where he lost her before she turned two. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,118,119],"tags":[120],"class_list":["post-1809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jane-draycott","category-pearl","category-simon-armitage","tag-simon-armitage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1809"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}