Meghan Purvis, my #1 translation
My poem on Grendel, ‘Scapegoat’, has been published at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
Read online.
As always, I urge people to read a poem aloud, with the mouth and the ears.
My inspiration was Algernon Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’, which I read (aloud) over and over to steep myself in its ballad rhythms, somewhat halt, its stark simplicity of words, somewhat awkward, its rough rhymes. Swinburne does a medievalist diction here and I think he found in medieval poetry a choppy quality, rough edges that in medievalism (imitation of the medieval) are a part of the charm. In his poem these aid the rude simplicity, the stumblingly sincere narrator’s voice.
‘The Leper’ got called ‘one of Swinburne’s shockers’. It describes a lady being eaten away by leprosy, rejected in disgust by her erstwhile admirers, cared for in squalid circumstances by a lowly man, always devoted to her, whom she once despised. There is suggested necrophilia and the scenario sets up a questioning of God.
Sometimes Swinburne ‘shockers’ are side-on and deliberately lurid, and are lesser works for that. Other times, they stretch empathy into its most radical positions. The perverse story of ‘The Leper’ is told straight, with a sincerity as simple as that ballad metre, and goes straight for the heart. It has things in common with my primary Swinburne poem ‘Anactoria’, which again questions God through a story of obsessive love and sadomasochism (Sappho’s for a girl who abandoned her), not a ballad but first-person and voicy, and out to do much more than shock.
I didn’t think I’d got much of that choppy sincerity to the verse, but on a pre-publication re-read, I do catch that kind of simplicity I aimed for when I set out to write a poem like ‘The Leper’. And I hope I tweak your heart on behalf of the sentimental monstrous, like Swinburne. Here’s a link to his poem.
Grendel has been my ultimate outsider for decades and I love him dearly. One of my early abandoned novels was titled Grendel in Hell, and had steampunk demons before steampunk was a thing, because the Devil stood for artificiality as Against Nature (to invoke the title of a Decadent classic by Huysmans). I snipped off a little piece of this material and got it into ergot.
And because my Beowulf translation, abandoned after 1000 lines, won’t see the light of day, have a primer/reminder of the original, the section pertinent to ‘Scapegoat’. Starting at first mention of Grendel:
The times that dawned meant only torment for one,
An estranged spirit, weary with his years spent in the waste –
Each day to hear echo the enchantment in the court.
There the harp played and the bard’s lay leapt up.
An orator, taught in the lore of the origin of life,
Talked on the Omnipotent, on the cosmos his creation:
The symmetry of earth encircled by the seas,
The proud march of sun and moon, lamps for our path,
Embroidery of boughs and leaves, living, burgeoning;
Life too quickened in the creatures that stir, each in its kind.
So the king’s company lived in celebration, blessed,
Until one inflicted his envy upon them, an unholy fiend.
This grim figure they knew as ugly Grendel,
Rumoured to wander the wild moors and marshes,
Frightening men from the frontiers of the fens.
An age he had guarded the monsters’ home ground –
Such was his dark fate since God had forsaken
The tribe of Cain’s kindred until the end of time,
Condemned in him, because he killed his brother.
That feud did not profit him; far was he pursued
By the great judge for his guilt, a fugitive from men.
Owed to his ancestry are the unnatural things –
Ogres and elves and ghouls from the dead,
Even the giants who fought against God
In an epoch of havoc… but He had his own back.
One night he intruded, intrigued, into the house,
Hushed now the Ring Danes had drunk enough of wine.
Inside he found them, and saw how those fighting elite
Slept after the feast, forgot the sad state, the dark end of flesh.
The damned one, grim and greedy, at once was urged on,
Ferocious, in frenzy, and seized thirty lives as they slept –
Then escaped, ecstatic with his catch, back the way he came,
Towards his solitudes to enjoy his spoil of slain.
Then, in the half light from under the horizon,
The danger of Grendel dawned upon men.
After the laughter uplifted yesterday
Screams and cries clamoured to the morning sky.
The king, known for honour, the old noble,
Once they had searched and discovered the tracks
Of the cursed demon, sat downcast
As his strong heart strove under his heavy grief.
Too harsh that trouble, too hard and tenacious.
No pause – the next night unleashed another onslaught,
Double the flagrant murder. No doubts he felt
About his drastic feud; he was lost too deep in it.
His gist was unambiguous, and most of Hrothgar’s guests
Disbanded to secure beds, separate from the court,
Where was no grudge against them, about the outer grounds
Or among the animals, since a devil had joined the army.
So he usurped the house from the use of men,
At war against right, one against the world.
The ideal court was empty, abandoned to the enemy.
It went on a great while; throughout twelve winters
Scyld’s childrens’ chief suffered his inflictions,
Utmost sorrow, the gamut of grief.
The tale of it travelled, heard by the tribes
In elegies for Hrothgar under Grendel’s siege –
Hostilities sustained, season in, season out,
A vendetta without end, and vengeance for no fault.
Not for him arbitration, or atonement, or a truce;
No family saw a fee for his felonies,
No victim had his due; futile to demand
Handsome satisfaction at the slayer’s hands.
The uncanny creature only hunted them like quarry,
A shadow of death stalking their footsteps in the dark,
Ambushing in the unnatural night on the misty moors;
The haunts of hell’s initiates are a mystery.
So the enemy of men sought their harm and ignominy
And up against them on his own, overawed them.
He dwelt in Heorot the jewelled while the light was out –
With no grace to know the gift throne, nor to kneel
In loving kindness at that seat in the Creator’s sight.
Heavy was his punishment, crushing the heart
Of Scyld’s childrens’ king and comrade.
His under-chiefs sat often in conclave, to consult
On a strategy, what strength of spirit might attempt
In defence, what face the fear of his rush.
Some among them sacrificed at pagan shrines,
Worshipped stones, supplicated in prayer
The slayer of souls to help, to have pity on the people.
Such was their habit, the only hope of heathens;
Their hearts’ instinct turned to hell, ignorant of heaven.
The one God was unknown to them, the wonderworker,
Our sanctuary; they had not learnt His sacraments.
Lost is his case who in his soul’s last crisis
Must feel himself fall into the arms of the inferno.
Found is his desire who after his death day
May follow his weary heart into our father’s arms.
So Scyld’s great-grandson in the sorrows of his times
Seethed with suffering that had no cease;
Nor against his anguish the sagacious hero
Saw a promise of salvation. Too harsh,
Hard and tenacious, this trouble upon his people,
Worst disaster, urgent need, desperation in the night.
[ll. 86-194]
All right, that’s up until Beowulf’s advent. I wrote a poem from Beowulf’s perspective too: you can read ‘A Monster to Fight Monsters’ in this post.
