{"id":504,"date":"2011-06-30T11:44:02","date_gmt":"2011-06-30T11:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=504"},"modified":"2018-08-28T14:29:36","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T14:29:36","slug":"pearl-translated-by-jane-draycott-oxford-poets-carcanet-press-9-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=504","title":{"rendered":"Pearl, translated by Jane Draycott, Oxford Poets, Carcanet Press, \u00a39.95"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Draycott\u2019s Pearl<\/em> is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a crib. The original is a 2500 line long, fourteenth century dream poem, probably by the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em>. It narrates a dream vision in which a grieving father speaks to the soul of his dead two-year-old daughter, receives consolation and spiritual instruction from her, and is shown the Heavenly City, a procession of saved souls and Christ himself in the form of a lamb before he wakes again on his daughter\u2019s grave. The daughter is (at least initially) the \u201cpearl\u201d of the poem. It thrilled and profoundly moved me as an undergraduate but I\u2019ve barely looked at it since; the English in which it was originally written is far more difficult than Chaucer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

A first reason to read Draycott\u2019s version is the sheer beauty of the language. She has dramatically loosened the tight, complicated formal knots of the original, but as her readers will know, her own original work is striking for its intricate but fluid phonetic patterning. We can see how her music works in a short extract from the beginning of Pearl<\/em>:<\/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
\ncould touch the way she shone …<\/p>\n

In the original, that rhymes ABABA, with three or four stressed syllables in each line alliterating. By lowering the incidence of alliteration Draycott has heightened the distinctiveness and so the significance of the individual alliterating words, so that the thematically central words \u201cpeerless\u201d, \u201cpearl\u201d and \u201cprince\u201d jump out at you from the beginning of the poem1<\/sup>. She has supplemented alliteration with assonance so that \u201clight\u201d, \u201clife\u201d and \u201cbright\u201d stand out as a group of phonetically linked words, foregrounding from the start the imagery of light that is so central to the poem\u2019s imagery of the afterlife. There\u2019s little end-rhyme but what there is is supplemented by strong internal rhymes (\u201cone\u201d \/ \u201cnone\u201d, \u201clight\u201d \/ \u201cbright\u201d) which feel as if they\u2019re evolving spontaneously and with particular expressive significance rather than in obedience to a formal scheme.<\/p>\n

Though the short poems in Draycott\u2019s other volumes are precisely honed and clear on the level of the individual phrase, she brings these phrases together in ways that are often profoundly ambiguous, making the whole poem to which they belong seem unsettled and disorientating, hauntingly suggestive and mysterious at the same time, speaking all the more powerfully and tantalizingly to the imagination by eluding the intellect. This is very true of the wonderful Pearl<\/em>-inspired sequence \u201cMatchless\u201d in The Night Tree<\/em>. Her Pearl<\/em> itself, however, achieves different beauties by its overall clarity and transparency. Clarity gives compelling force to the dream narrative with its sumptuous medieval fantasies of the heavenly kingdom, and its poignantly contrasting glimpses of earthly life. In this way it opens the lost world of a medieval imagination very different to Chaucer\u2019s. Above all, though, transcending its medieval setting, Pearl is a poem about love, about the joys and the agonies of loss that his love for his daughter brought a particular father, and about his struggle to find consolation in religious faith. Draycott expresses the tenderness of his feelings and dramatises the way they shimmer between grief, joy, doubt and yearning hope with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity. At the same time, even for a non-believer, the poem\u2019s use of the myth of Christ\u2019s love for man and of a dream-dialogue between the father and his dead daughter allows it to extend this presentation of a particular instance of love into an imaginative and even analytical exploration of the nature and meaning of love more generally.<\/p>\n

1 <\/sup>The meaning given to these terms is to be profoundly altered and deepened as the poem develops. The casually hyperbolic idea of \u201cany prince\u201d is replaced by Christ, the \u201cprince of peace\u201d whose bride the daughter has become. The speaker\u2019s human fatherly love which makes his daughter seem \u201cpeerless\u201d to him is contrasted with the way Christ\u2019s love equally embraces all pure souls, and by the complete lack of rivalry characteristic of heaven. The original pearl of the poem is the lost daughter; by its end both Christ and all saved souls are described as pearls. In a short review there isn\u2019t time to explore how immensely these expansions of reference contribute to the reading of the poem.<\/p>\n

I wrote this for the Manchester Review, and would like to thank the Manchester Review’s editors for permission to repost it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Draycott\u2019s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a […]<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jane-draycott","category-pearl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504"}],"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=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions\/1392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}