Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso

University of Vigo

Variation in the Rituals of Poetic Translation: Some Contemporary Renderings of Wulf and Eadwacer Revisited

One of the most interesting aspects of philological studies on translation is the one that deals with its poetic perspective. This outlook has always aimed at solving the question: Can we really translate Poetry? In a linguistic environment so structured and semantically diverse, we may wonder to what extent it is possible to translate, adapt, transfer or render the elements of a poetic text X -written in a poetic language X'- to another poetic language Y -written in its poetic language Y'-. In this process critics have called "Poetic Translation", there are as many problems as solutions for those problems. Thus, the final results have to be necessarily multifarious. If the poem whose weltanschauung we want to render belongs to a period so far from present times as the Anglo-Saxon age, problems and solutions increase. Our aim with this paper is to offer a few solutions for the problems presented by translating Anglo-Saxon verse to a given contemporary language and culture, using the linguistic-statistic methodology provided by Literary Anthropology, so useful for comparative translation studies. We take as a practical example an emblematic Old English text due to its difficulty at all levels: Wulf and Eadwacer. After some brief references to our own conception of poetic translation and to the analytical method used, we shall proceed to describe -also briefly- the characteristics of the Old English source text. Next -and in more detail- we'll examine the problems that the text raises at a "Poetic Translation" level, and in what way they have been solved in eight contemporary renderings in two different target languages: six in English (Hamer 1970, Alexander 1977, Giles 1981, Bradley 1982, Crossley-Holland 1984 & Rodríguez 1993) and two in Spanish (Bravo 1984 & Lerate 1986). After the comparative analysis of the texts and their ritualistic variations, we'll collate all the given problems and solutions -as a sort of taxonomic revision- and offer some conclusions which validate the most appropriate operations and build a suitable rendering of Wulf and Eadwacer.