Michael Anderson, Translator
Before I started writing novels, I began with poetry and had the good fortune to take a workshop with Canadian-American poet, Molly Peacock. One of the lasting influences upon my work was a book she recommended and which, albeit a wee tattered (original publication date was 1966, though my edition is much later.) Yes, it was Anderson’s translation and edition of The Earliest English Poems.
My strong recommendation is that it is a book for poetry and prose writers alike, as it is key to an understanding the music of our rhyme-poor, but alliterative, Anglo Saxon tongue.
Anderson’s introduction is, to put it kindly, a bit dated, though not without merit. (Interestingly, my edition is dedicated to Ezra Pound.) Anderson’s portrayal of what I would call orature, the oral tradition which encompasses, then as now, a large body of tales, epics, all recited or sung orally with the cynn—loosely, community— right there to listen and enjoy—a much more communal affair than grabbing a book and going off in a corner by oneself to read it. Mind, I do not advocate illiteracy, which is one reason why, if at all possible, readers should read this book in print.
My objection to so much of our contemporary writing is that it lacks music; and, no, I do not mean the prison of the classical world where the declamations of the Iliad and Odyssey reign supreme. While returning to Middle English, despite it certainlybeing influenced by Norman French, even then, Chaucer turned to Provençal and used iambic pentamenter (see my essays on the Wyve of Bath, Issues THREE and FOUR.) Wonderful as the Canterbury Tales are a mix, turning away from our odd Germanic language. However, today, too much contemporary work relies on semantics alone; the music, the rhythm and flow, for those of us for whom English is our mother tongue, is often flat, if not absent.
My favorite poem in the collection, though Beowulf and the like are very well done, is the following, about a woman who, Anderson surmises, had a cruel husband but a wonderful lover:
— Bronwyn Mills
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