"The Seafarer": Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy into English and Scots

Author(s): John Corbett

Source: Translation and Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2001), pp. 157-173
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40339868
Accessed: 24-11-2018 11:06 UTC

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 The Seafarer: Visibility and the
Translation of a West Saxon Elegy
into English and Scots
John Corbett

Since translation usually refers to the rendition of texts from a foreign

tongue into the language of one's own culture, Translation Studies
normally works in the contact zone between cultures, critically observing
what uses one culture makes of another, and tracing the mutual
refashioning that is the inevitable consequence of intercultural contact.
However, there are occasions when the cultures in contact are separated
not by space but by time, when the foreign country is effectively the
past. Texts in an earlier phase of one's own language are modernized,
and thus the past is refashioned according to the concerns of the present.
Such intra-cultural translation occurs, for example, in the many instances
when Old English texts are rendered into present-day English or Scots.
This article considers four adaptations and translations of the West
Saxon elegy The Seafarer, two in English (by Ezra Pound and Edwin
Morgan), and two in Scots (Tom Scott's The Seavaiger and Alexander
Scott's Seaman's Sang).1
Many of the issues that arise from cross-cultural translation are also
relevant to intra-cultural translation. In particular, intra-cultural translation
does not escape the charge that any translation is a form of cultural
appropriation, that is, no matter how it is mitigated, translation represents
a potentially 'scandalous' domestication of the essentially 'other' nature
of the source-text. The word 'scandalous' is taken from Lawrence
Venuti, whose theoretical writing on the ethics of translation has been
controversial and influential:

Translation clearly raises ethical questions that have yet to be

sorted out. The mere identification of a translation scandal is an
act of judgement: here it presupposes an ethics that recognizes and
seeks to remedy the asymmetries in translating, a theory of good
and bad methods for practising and studying translation.2

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 158 John Corbett

For Venuti, the ethical tra

the British and American t
from the source languag
incorporating into his or h
registers, awkward syntax,
translation sidesteps the n
acknowledge the strangen
should always look like a tr
Venuti praises Ezra Pound
examples) of 'visible' transl
his early rendering of The S
give an idea of how Pound
English to give a sense of
seafarer of the title is tellin

Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost
Chill its chains are; ch
Hew my heart round a
Mere- weary mood.

Pound here systematically di

going beyond the disruption
that subject-verb relationsh
hard at construing the text.
'hunger' is the subject or ob
beget the hunger, or does th
mood'? The effort the rea
sense of the translation sho
interpretative nature of a t
the translator, as the trans
Ming Xie, in a discussion o
as to call his method 'heuri

the new version is justif

reader's attention to certai
at the same time bringin
qualities in a new poem.4

As I have argued elsewhere

dependent on a hegemonic
translation to exist, there

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 159

non-standard varieties that depart from it. It is significant that

conceives of visible translations as borrowing from 'minority lan
that he characterizes as 'substandard and marginal', warning th
should not conceive of a minor language 'merely as a dialect, wh
might end up regionalizing or ghettoizing the foreign text, identify
too narrowly with a specific cultural constituency'.6 This statement
might be said to be 'scandalous' from the perspective of Sco
literature, much of which is in the 'mere' dialect of Scots. The p
of this article, then, is to review the notion of the visible translato
reference to several versions of The Seafarer: two in English, t
Scots. It is useful to begin with Pound's translation, partly because
more general influence on later poets, an influence that extends
twentieth-century Scottish renaissance and beyond.7 Pound thus p
a point of departure for a reconsideration of Venuti's concepts of
and visible translations from the perspective of two later rendering
Scots, and an English translation by a Scottish poet (Morgan) who
far from loath to translate into Scots.
In the case of The Seafarer, the source-text is a particularly un
construct. Of uncertain date and unknown authorship, the e
surviving version is in the manuscript collection of Old English
known as the Codex Exoniensis, or Exeter Book. Even the ti
relatively modern addition, coined by Benjamin Thorpe when he
the Exeter Book in 1842.8 The interpretation of the poem has stim
considerable debate ever since.9 Thorpe's title suggests a dr
monologue delivered by a single speaker, the eponymous sea
however, the poem has also been read as a dialogue between a har
sailor and an idealistic youngster.10 In the nineteenth century
widely believed that the overtly Christian ending of the poem (from
64b onwards) was an evangelical accretion to an essentially s
beginning: the seafarer laments his hard life, then curiously
forward to another, longer voyage. Finally, almost as a non sequit
is further isolated by a metrical shift, the speaker exhorts his liste
praise God. Despite the surface inconsistencies, twentieth-century
preferred to treat the text as an organic whole. The secular ele
were cemented to the Christian (more or less firmly, depending
critic) by means of allegory: the sea-hardened sailor became re-c
the suffering pilgrim (associated by some with the peregrini o
Vulgate),11 and the strange land, the goal of the final voyage, was r
the Kingdom of God. The exhortation to praise God therefore fo
an oblique but nonetheless powerful narrative that implicitly enjo
listener to set aside the transient hardships of this life for the imm
certainties of the next.

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 160 John Corbett

The Seafarer , in short, is

intersections. It is a written text that bears some of the hallmarks of oral
composition, particularly the traditional formulae of oral poetry; it is a
possibly uneasy blend of secular lament and Christian hope; and its shift
from personal narrative to religious exhortation is curiously enigmatic.
Though few, if any, now read the poem as a dialogue between an old sea-
dog and a young sailor, the wider question remains as to whom this
ancient mariner is addressing, and to what purpose. He can sing us 'a
true song' about himself and his travels, but whether this is ultimately to
inspire our sympathy, awe, or religious devotion, is unclear. However, if
The Seafarer itself is a complex cultural artefact, its complexity is only
magnified when it is perceived in relation to its translations.
At first glance, the rendering of an Old English Christian homily
would not be likely to appeal to the iconoclastic Ezra Pound, the socialist
Edwin Morgan, or the cultural nationalists Alexander Scott and Tom
Scott. And indeed, with the possible exception of Edwin Morgan, the
adaptations of the source-text are dramatic realizations of the translator's
power to appropriate his source, by creative interpretation and selection,
and to refashion both the source-culture and his own. According to
Venuti, the 'scandal' of translation is that while it appears to offer access
to texts from alien cultures, it invisibly transforms those texts into
something else entirely. Whatever that 'something else' is, it is an
impostor, a distortion of the source-text which serves the interests of the
translator and his or her culture. Translation, in Venuti's view, is a
metaphor for colonization. How, then, do the four translators of The
Seafarer seek to 'colonize' the source-text - and how, if at all, do they
seek to mitigate this inevitable colonization?
Pound's version of the elegy, first published in 191 1, has been much
discussed; my purpose here is largely to review that discussion in brief.
G. S. Fraser sums up the opposition's view thus: 'The case against
Pound as a translator is that he perpetually shows signs of not knowing
properly the languages he is translating from.'12 Scholarly indignation
has focused on Pound's 'howlers': for example, he translates 'byrig' as
'berries' rather than 'cities' (the Scots poets use 'burgh(s)', while Morgan
uses 'castles'); and he translates iifge mid englum' as 'shall ... remain
'mid the English' rather than the more accepted 'angels' (Morgan
translates this as 'with angels / will remain'). F. C. Robinson leads a
spirited defence of Pound's scholarship, however, in an article which
traces the poet's Anglo-Saxon studies at Hamilton College in New York,
and refers to Pound's own annotated copy of the seventh edition of
Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in Verse and Prose (1898), now in the
archive of the University of Texas.13 The annotations in this copy gloss

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 161

'byrig' as 'mulberry', clearly a direct reference to Anglo-

dictionaries which give two senses of 'byrig': 'town' and 'mulberr
As Robinson notes, in the context of spring returning to the lan
line 'Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries' is more
thematic unity than the literal 'the groves sprout blossoms, the
become beautiful'. Robinson's article argues that Pound's engage
with Old English was informed and thoughtful, and generally su
Pound's claim that his translation of The Seafarer is 'as nearly li
think, as any translation can be'.14
Even so, for the reasons already rehearsed, it is easy to see why
scholars have been horrified by this 'literal translation'. Its lite
does not lie in the conventional appeal to fluency but in a delib
construction of strangeness. The tortuous syntax and the delib
archaisms do not try to assimilate the poem into the modern can
to recreate it in a manner that is comprehensible (with effort) b
undeniably 'other'. A few more lines will illustrate the method fu

Nap nihtscua, nor})an sniwde

hrlm hrusan bond, haegl feol on eor})an
corna caldast.

Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then,
Corn of the coldest.

The archaic verb inflexions ('neareth', 'snoweth'), the occasional absence

of articles ('hail fell on earth'), the odd periphrasis ('corn of the coldest'),
and the compound words whose sense has to be worked at ('nightshade')
- all testify to the poem's deliberate lack of fluency. Yet it is at least
sometimes echoic of the original in morphology and sound ('nihtscua' is
a compound word meaning literally 'shade of night', and 'earth then' is
a clear echo of 'eor^an'). This is presumably what Ming Xie means by a
'heuristic' translation: one that makes the original accessible by
reconstructing it in its strangeness rather than assimilating it to the
norms of standard English.
As noted earlier, Pound's influence on later generations of Scottish
poets is considerable. In advice given in a poem to younger poets in
Scots, Alexander Scott insisted 'mak it new', himself echoing Pound's
call to the modernist poets of his generation.15 If, however, the 'newness'
of Pound's translation of The Seafarer depends on his having a standard
English to depart from, in order to create what Robert Crawford has
called the 'unidiomatic oddity' of his 'translatorese',16 what can be said of

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 1 62 John Corbett

the visibility of the translato

that has never assumed the fixed set of normative rules that characterize
literary English?
Alexander Scott and Tom Scott were two post-MacDiarmid makars
whose poetry in Scots was partly driven by a desire to refashion the
nation. Their literary Scots was consequently a fusion, or synthesis, of
Scots characteristics from different regions and periods, belonging to no
single locality because it sought to represent the disparate nation as a
unified whole. Alexander Scott, for example, though born, raised, and
educated in Aberdeen, does not write poetry in the local 'Doric' tradition
- his literary Scots follows MacDiarmid's in attempting to transcend
regional concerns and speak for the nation. This vision of a re-energized
national Scots also motivated his namesake, Tom Scott, yet their
translations of the Seafarer , though significantly similar in some respects,
are equally significantly different in others.
For both, the choice of an Old English elegy to adapt seems, at first
glance, odd. Both in fact published translations of several Old English
poems: Alexander Scott rendered The Wanderer as The Gangrel and
adapted part of The Battle ofMaldon as Sang for a Flodden; while Tom
Scott also translated The Wanderer, as well as The Dream of the Rood.
Why should two nationalist poets of the modern Scots renaissance
rework these remnants of Old English poetry? The answer is reasonably
obvious, and hinted at in the note following Alexander Scott's subtitle to
Seaman's Sang: 'Frae the West Saxon'. Rather than use the generalized
term 'Anglo-Saxon' (as Tom Scott does) to refer to the literary medium,
Alexander Scott stresses the fact that The Seafarer is the literary product
of an independent nation within early medieval England, one of the
Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Effectively, we cannot think of 'England' existing
as such at the time The Seafarer was set down. Consequently, the
language of The Seafarer can be said to relate as much to Scots as to
English (since both have similar roots), and the Scottish poets are - to
some extent - reclaiming part of Saxon literary heritage for the present-
day northern nation.
The literary archaeology extends to the structure of the translation.
Pound ended his version at line 99a (Robinson notes that in his copy of
Sweet's Reader Pound drew 'heavy vertical lines' in the middle of line
99, wrote 'End' in the margin, and underscored the word twice,
cancelling the remaining ten lines).17 Pound's preferred ending omits the
invocation to God, and sympathetic critics have explained the omission
as the result of Pound's following the scholarship of his day, by deleting
what was regarded as a corrupt Christian coda to a purer pagan original.
Pound's controversial translation of 'englum' as 'English' (line 78) accords

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 163

with the secularization of the poem. It is interesting, however, that

translates as much as he did. In her revised edition of Sweet's R
Dorothy Whitelock notes that the Christian addition to the poe
usually taken to be from line 64b onwards. This is in fact where bo
Scots poems end. Neither, therefore, has to make a choice b
'English' and 'angels'.
Both Scots poems avoid any hint of Christianizing, Alexander
in particular. This is clearly evident in lines 39-43:

for })on nis })aes modwlonc mon ofer eorj)an,

ne his gifena £>aes god, ne in geogu^e to })aes hwaet,
ne in his daedum to J)aes deor, ne him his dryhten to J)aes
})aet he a his saefore sorge naebbe,
to hwon hine Dryhten gedon wille.

One issue here is how to translate 'dryhten', which can mean 'lord' but
possibly might mean 'Lord' as in 'God'. Pound's rendition of this is a
good example of what might be called his 'sprung grammar':

For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,

Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.

Again, it is a struggle, but the meaning is more or less discernible -

which is roughly that there is no man so happy or content that he will
not yearn in his heart to be away on a sea voyage. 'Dryhten' is here
translated as 'king' and 'lord', and both translations suggest a worldly
relationship: the speaker is in service to a secular lord who might demand
that he make a voyage for him. In comparison with Pound's, Alexander
Scott's syntax and grammar are much more comprehensible (and his
emphasis equally secular):

There's nane sae heich 0 hert i the warld,

sae guid at the giein o gifts, sae swack in's youth,
in deeds sae dauntie, the laird's delyte,
but aye he yearns to stravaig the sea,
dreean whatever the weird o the fates micht be.

The translation here imposes much more order on the original than
Pound does, rendering 'dryhten' as 'laird' and 'the weird 0 the fates'.

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 164 John Corbett

The latter expression retai

a pagan context. Tom Scot

There's nae man sae no

Sae giftit wi grace, sae
In deed sae daur-deil,
That hesnae for seafari
Onwittan white ver his

'Dryhten' here is rendered

to the etymology of 'lord
denotations are secular, th
connotations in the use of
and in the possible biblical
term 'loaf-giver'. Like A
grammatical complexities o
Grammatically, at least,
Pound's. That said, Tom
more contorted and lexica
In the passage quoted ab
archaically, as a lexical ver
obscurity, Alexander Scott
possible. This is evident e
Pound's translation is give

May I for my own self

Journey's jargon, how
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares hav
Known on my keel m
And dire sea surge.

Tom Scott renders these lines:

A suthfast sang I can sing o my life,

Vaunt o vaigins, hou I vexious tyauvin
In days 0 sair darg hae dreeit aften.
Bitter the breist-pangs I hae abydit,
Kent abuin keels care-trauchlit wonnins,
Mangset o the mains waw.

Compared to these, Alexander Scott's reads almost like a gloss:

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 The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 165

Anent mysel I'll tell ye truly:

hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days,
aye tholan the dunts o time,
I've borne strang stounds in my briest,
kennan my ship the hame 0 monie cares.
Amang the coorse girn o the swaws

Alexander Scott's version is less prone to depart from the

syntactical order of everyday speech (compare 'I've borne stang s
in my briest' with Tom Scott's 'Bitter the breist-pangs I hae ab
which is much closer to Pound), its alliteration is less thumping
Tom Scott's, and in some ways it is less overtly 'poetical'. Both
and Tom Scott render the Anglo-Saxon 'ceol' as 'keel'. In Sw
Reader (fifteenth edition) this is glossed as 'ship', but Pound an
Scott favour the metonymic reference. Alexander Scott, however, r
the term as 'ship' and in doing so misses out on the chance
alliteration to the fifth line, i.e. 'Kennan my keel the hame o monie
To return to Venuti's framework, then, Alexander Scott's is the
fluent translation - as a translator, he is less visible than either
Pound or Tom Scott. The cloak that renders Alexander Scott less
visible, however, is not standard English, but the literary construction
of a forthright speaking voice. This is a literary construction, but it
nevertheless appeals to speech, for example in the insertion of occasional
'fillers' associated with spoken discourse (emphases added):

Och, thon's what he daesna ken,

him that bides happy at hame

Aye, thon's what they dinna ken,

them wi the siller

Again, consider the much more literary renditions of these lines by Tom
Scott:

Yon man kensna

Lucky on land, in his life fair crouse

The burgh man kensna

Steadie and seilfu, whit the sailor maun thole

Comparing Alexander Scott's and Tom Scott's versions, then, it is clear

that Scots as a literary medium does offer the potential for differing

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 1 66 John Corbett

degrees of 'visibility'. H
translator into Scots, it is n
rather than the norms of a
eschewing the explicit lite
domesticating some of the
the harp (hearpe) becomes
drinc) becomes 'the drinkin
the source-text: where the
of the gannet, swan, and c
gannet's sang', the 'sea-ma
considerations of sound (pa
the greater melancholy evo
say, Tom Scott's 'the whau
the changes are not jarring
would not find them unusu
the translation.
In Venuti's terms, then, T
Scots translations. It does
original seamlessly into a Sco
does not domesticate refere
lexical density and gramma
following Pound in convey
original text - though it r
convey this strangeness. L
Alexander Scott to follow O
invent compound words to
'seavaiger'.
To say that a translation is 'more ethical' implies a value judgement,
but this judgement is more moral than aesthetic. Alexander Scott's
translation is much more of a fluent translation than Tom Scott's, but
one can also argue that the fluent translation has attempted a greater act
of poetic identification with the original text. Margery Palmer McCulloch
argues that 'Seaman's Sang', written in 1945, alongside his other
adaptations of West Saxon verse, were Alexander Scott's means of
articulating something of his sense of alienation after serving in the
Second World War. Translation gave him a means of mediating and
distancing what at the time were clearly painful, immediate experiences.19
Translation that cannibalizes the source-text, reconstructing it for new
and different purposes, might not respect the 'otherness' of the original,
but it can still result in a powerful work of art. And perhaps, just as we
do not really expect claims to veracity from novels or films 'based on a
true story' (a claim that this poem also makes in its first line), so perhaps

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 167

we should not expect an acknowledgement of 'otherness' from

evidently 'literary' translation. It is, perhaps, disingenuous to de
this phenomenon as 'scandalous'.
It might appear as if Venuti's concept of the visible translator,
'ethical' translation respects the otherness of the source material,
from another perspective age-old arguments about 'faithful' as o
to 'free' translation. The 'faithful' translation would be 'ethical' and
'respectful', and the 'free' translation would rework the source-text for
the translator's own purposes. But a moment's thought should disabuse
us of this notion. The ethical translation is as much an interpretative
reworking of the source-text as the 'free' translation - but, through its
non-normative use of language, it self-reflexively acknowledges its status
as interpretation. This self-reflection is what is absent from Alexander
Scott's translation. Alexander Scott constructs a norm of the direct-
speaking Scot, and avoids the excessive literariness that marks Pound's
and Tom Scott's renditions.
The final translation considered here is Edwin Morgan's modern
English version of the poem. What strategy does he use - to what extent
does he colonize or 'estrange' the source materials? Morgan is equally at
ease in English or Scots. Of the latter he writes:

To a Scottish translator, the use of Scots may be a relevant option,

particularly if a lively speech basis is wanted, but also because the
'adventuring in dictionaries' which MacDiarmid spoke about can,
if judiciously used, induce the creative freshness of a re-minted
vocabulary.20

The two options here are effectively those adopted by Alexander and
Tom Scott in their respective translations of The Seafarer. Morgan in his
own rendition chooses present-day English, and what, at first sight, is a
much more 'fluent' translation:

This verse is my voice, it is no fable,

I tell of my travelling, how in hardship
I have often suffered laborious days,
endured in my breast the bitterest cares,
explored on shipboard sorrow's abodes,
the welter and terror of the waves.

There is some alliteration here, but it is not mechanical: in the first line
the /v/, /£/ correspondences give an early hint that the echoing of
Anglo-Saxon verse technique will not be slavish. The word order does

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 1 68 John Corbett

not follow the convolutions

and does not reflect the
incomprehensible passage i

There is no man on eart

so generous in his givin
that he will cease to kno
the voyages which the L

As will be evident from the

lord and the Lord God, Mo
elements in the poem, whe
three poets discussed here,
is given in editions of Swe
lines 106-8. He omits only
Sweet regard as 'very cor
Morgan seems more concer
considered a 'faithful' tran
'fluent' one. And indeed, M

it seems clear that the tran

the translator comes acro
and excites him, and he
translate that interest an
language.22

Morgan immediately notes that this simple motivation is quickly

complicated by a range of factors, including the cultural relationships
implied by source-text and translation. Even so, there is a general
paradox for the translator here, between Morgan's desire to convey the
excitement and interest of the source-text, and Venuti's desire to
acknowledge its otherness, through techniques of linguistic alienation. It
is difficult to be excited by a text that is expressly designed to alienate
you - you can be intrigued, yes, and intellectually satisfied, but visceral
excitement is different.
Morgan's translation is a careful, subtle rendition, designed to excite
and - just occasionally - intrigue. There is only one obviously jarring note
(lines 9-10):

waeron fet mine forste gebunden,

caldum clommum

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 169

There my feet were fettered by frost,

with chains of zero.

The expression 'with chains of zero' might be more literally rendered as

'with cold fetters', and, unlike Pound's creative misreadings, there seems
little justification etymologically for the translation. Yet, like Pound's
more controversial options, it can be read as a reminder that this is a
translation - that it represents an interaction between the Anglo-Saxon
source-text and the modern poet. Unlike Alexander Scott's transformation
of 'curlews' song' into 'soun o seals', 'chains of zero' sounds distinctly odd.
It is a particularly characteristic type of phrase for Morgan, provocatively
yoking together the tangible and the absent, and it arguably does enough
to signal fairly early in the poem that this is a creative recasting of the
original. Elsewhere the translation is careful: Pound's 'berries' and
Alexander Scott's and Tom Scott's 'burghs' become in Morgan 'castles':

When groves bloom and castles are bright

- but this reading follows modern editions of Sweet's Reader that gloss
'byrig' not as 'town' or 'city' but 'nobleman's house'.
Morgan, however, is not wholly concerned with exact equivalences.
He writes:

If you are in touch with a mysterious, hidden 'real' poem

underneath the surface foreign words, you will start your
translation on a deeper and less conscious level; things, solutions
will fly into your head suddenly and seem right without their being
plodding, word-for-word equivalents. And because of the variety
of motives in translation, the final result may or may not look like
a close equivalent to the actual verbal text.23

Morgan's search for the 'non-verbal' poem underneath the original does
occasionally lead to changes. The lines beginning 'Nap nihtscua, nor{)an
snlwde', discussed earlier with reference to Pound, are in Morgan's
version rendered:

Black squalls louring: snow from the north:

world-crust rime-sealed: hail descending,
coldest of harvests.

Here Morgan loses the reference to approaching night, but intensifies

the weather imagery: 'shade of night' becomes a 'black squall'. The

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 170 John Corbett

compounds in the followi

English word-formation, an
of the translator. At th
strategies used by Pound.
As Morgan points out, the
and this makes the discus
four translations under consideration here radiate out from the source-
text in quite different directions: their ideological assumptions overlap
and diverge, creating ever more intricate patterns, which are in turn
reflected in the linguistic choices made. Ultimately, the four translations
do not simply show us how we render Anglo-Saxon in a modern idiom:
they reveal something about how we read literature generally.
The reworking of an Anglo-Saxon text by different twentieth-century
writers naturally requires a variety of interpretative decisions: the poem
becomes more or less secular, more or less English, more or less personal,
more or less archaic, more or less universal, more or less romantic,
depending on who is doing the translating. How does the reader evaluate
the ethics of each work? As I hope I have shown, no clear-cut correlation
can be drawn between the visibility of the translator and the variety of
language used. Where English-language poets tend to use the standard
variety to achieve invisibility, a Scots language poet would tend to use
something that appeals to the spoken voice. Each option is problematic:
just as no Scots speaker would actually sound like Alexander Scott's
'seaman', any English rendition of this poem would no doubt be forced
out of the syntactic patterns and lexical choices of the present-day
standard variety - at least occasionally. The 'invisible' standard English
translation of The Seafarer probably has yet to be written. It is also
difficult to determine how ethical the option of visibility actually is. Tom
Scott's explicitly literary Scots perhaps captures some of the strangeness
of the source-text as well as Ezra Pound's convoluted grammar and
pastiche archaisms. However, Alexander Scott's more fluent Scots allows
a more direct access to the suffering of the speaker, a speaker who claims
that his sufferings are based on fact ('so5gied').
If one wants to communicate empathy and excitement, is a distancing
translation the most 'ethical' way to do it? The examples of Alexander
Scott and Edwin Morgan would suggest not, though both are subtle
enough to combine accessible language with unobtrusive poetic phrases;
compare Morgan's

the lone flier cries,

urges my desire to the whale's way
forward irresistibly on the breast of the sea

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 171

and Alexander Scott's

the lane stravaiger scraichs

and forces my hert to fare til the faem
ower the streitch 0 the sea.

Both are, I think, more immediately moving than Pound's

the crying lone-flyer

Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly
O'er the tracks of ocean

or Tom Scott's

The skirl 0 lane sea-maw, scouran and ravenous,

Gars my hert girn to be gane owre the whaleweys,
The swalm o the swaw.

If nothing else, a study of these translations reminds us that there are no

simple dichotomies in a field awash with candidates (faithful vs free,
visible vs invisible, ethical vs scandalous). These categories are themselves
unstable constructs (significantly, often couched in ethical terms), each
of which embodies a complex of ideological assumptions about the
purposes of translation, and about how individual texts are best read.
Perhaps they can be regarded as dim lights, there to guide us, as, like the
Seafarer, we put forth into what are still uncharted waters.
University of Glasgow

Notes

1. This article was first presented at a seminar on 'Ethics and Scottis

Literature' at the fifth ESSE Conference, Helsinki, September 2000. I am
grateful to my co-participants in that seminar for their helpful comments
The primary sources cited in this article are as follows: Ezra Pound, The
Seafarer in Selected Poems, edited by T. S. Eliot (London, 1933), pp. 51-3
Alexander Scott, Seaman's Sang in The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott,
edited by David S. Robb (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 13-15; Tom Scott, Th
Seavaiger in The Collected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott (London, 1993), pp.
83-4; Edwin Morgan, The Seafarer in Collected Translations (Manchester, 1996),
pp. 246-8. Old English quotations are from Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in
Prose and Verse, fifteenth edition, revised by Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford
1967), pp. 165-9. A hypertext edition of the poem, by Corey Owen, with
examples of different translations and an annotated bibliography, can b
accessed at http://is2.dal.ca/~ca0wen/annbibst.htm.

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 172 John Corbett

2. Lawrence Venuti, The Sc

3. Lawrence Venuti, The Tr
(London, 1995), pp. 234ff.
4. Ming Xie, 'Pound as Tra
Pound, edited by Ira B. N
original emphasis. Further
translations can be found
English with a Foreign Acce
5. See my Written in the Lang
Translation into Scots (Clev
Scots and the Global Cultur
6. Venuti, The Scandals of T
7. See Sons of Ezra: British P
and James McGonigal (Ams
'Pound and MacDiarmid', p
Young Poet', pp. 169-79.
8. Benjamin Thorpe, Codex
(London, 1842).
9. See, for example, Daniel
The Wanderer\ Neophilolo
Gordon, 'Traditional Them
(1954), 1-13; W. W. Lawren
(1902), 460-80; B. J. Timm
ES, 24 (1942), 33-44; Doro
Seafarer'' (1923), reprinted in
by Sir Cyril Fox and Bruce
Burton Raffel, 'Translating
New Essays in Criticism an
1983), PP. 31-45-
10. Max Rieger, Zeitschrift f
11. See Dorothy Whitelock's
Gordon's (both n. 9).
12. G. S. Fraser, Ezra Pound
13. F. C. Robinson, '"The Mi
and "The Seafarer'" Yale R
14. Quoted in Robinson, p.
15. See 'Mak it New' in The C
16. Robert Crawford, 'Poun
17. Robinson, p. 211.
18. For a detailed compariso
Lilo Moessner, 'A critical as
an exercise in translation', S
19. Margery Palmer McCu
Significance of Song in the
77-90. See also Kenneth D
Achievement of Alexande
comparison of Pound and Sc
Scott's poetry as a whole.

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The Seafarer: Visibility and Translation 173

20. Edwin Morgan, 'The Third Tiger: The Translator as Creative Commu
in Channels of Communication, edited by Philip Hobsbaum, Paddy
and Jim McGhee (Glasgow, 1992), pp. 43-59 (p. 55).
21. See, for example Sweet's Reader (n. 1), pp. 276-7.
22. Morgan, 'The Third Tiger', p. 43.
23. Morgan, 'The Third Tiger', p. 45.

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