The One Meter

Rebuilding a poetic language on accentual verse

Ordinarily, a traditional poetic language – such as that of the ancient Greeks or precommunist South Slavs – is handed down from the distant past without the aid of writing. Were such an edifice to be rebuilt in modern English, however, its starting-point could only be the literary relics that survived the mass destruction of oral-poetic traditions. It would in some ways be analogous to the Chinese idiom tradition, in which a mass of rhythmically-identical phrases distilled from ancient poetry and literature are held in popular memory and constantly reused in new contexts.

The problem is that the traditional treasures of Europe (and beyond) are scattered across a variety of different languages and meters, and have not hitherto been translated into a unified meter and poetic register in English. To re-translate them (or, less ambitiously, to recast existing translations) would be a work for many hands, and I cannot reasonably expect to inspire such a herculean cultural project. Yet I see no harm in laying down the theoretical groundwork anyway, in the manner of a strategist unfortunately bereft of an army.

Let us say of our ideal register only that it ought to be somewhat dignified and archaic, but not unintelligible or entirely closed to modern influences.¹ This would best follow the example of historical poetic languages, which may have been orally transmitted by the people, but had nothing to do with the modern democratist compulsion to reduce poetry to ordinary speech.

Let us, then, concentrate instead on the unification of meter.

Before English poetry was recast according to such foreign conventions as syllable-counting and end-rhyme, it had a common poetic meter that served as a vehicle for its (long-dead) poetic language. This was a kind of accentual meter, characterized by four stressed syllables per line, and strict rules for ornamentation by head-rhyme (otherwise known as chyme, or if you must, ‘alliteration’). The half-line, consisting of two stressed syllables, was the basic unit of poetic phrasing. Even today, this form is somewhat more natural to English than the imported conventions (especially when we loosen up the rules for chyme), and its inherent atavist prestige and associations with traditional poetry makes it an obvious choice.

One way to learn this meter is to translate the Old English poetry written in it. Take, for example, the famous opening lines of Beowulf (main stresses emphasized in bold):

Hwæt we Gar-Dena    in gear-dagum, Þeod-cyninga    þrym gefrunon...

These we can translate as follows, keeping not only the four stresses but also the chyme and (more or less) the phrasing intact:

O of spear-armed Danes    in the days of yore, Of the kings of tribes    what clamour we've heard...

I can say for certain that line in Beowulf can be translated into a modern English one with four stresses (see here, here and here for more examples). But not all can be made to chyme in modern English without violence to the original phrasing. And when we move on to translate the Serbo-Croatian oral poems recorded by Milman Parry (which need neither chyme nor rhyme in the original language), it becomes clear that we cannot insist on chyme without imposing an artificial variation that would break up the formulaic phrases.

However, we can render these verses quite faithfully by blank-versing the old meter – that is to say, by keeping the beat of four stresses while stripping out the chyme rules. Let’s take as an example the opening lines of The Wedding of Smailagić Meho, dictated to Parry by the illiterate singer Avdo Međedović:

Prva riječ,    “Bože nam pomozi!” Evo druga:    “Hoće, ako Bog da.” Samo da ga    pominjemo često, Pa će nama    dobro pomagati...

Which can be translated as follows (stressed syllables in bold for emphasis):

Our first word:    "God be thou our help!" And here's the second:    "It shall be as He wills it." As long as Him    we call upon constantly Then He to us    will grant good aid...

Although I have not yet probed deeply into this body of material, because I am not yet well enough versed in the language, every line that I have translated so far can be cast in this pattern.² And this means, of course, that Serbo-Croatian traditional phrases can be freely imported into English and reused interchangeably with others (even in chyming poems if they are broken up at the half-line level).

This blank-versing comes in handy elsewhere. It should go without saying that a New English poetic language could not spring up fully formed from Anglo-Saxon, but would also absorb many literary phrases that have passed into collective memory. These of course come from lines cast in syllabic meters, primarily iambic pentameter – the verse-style of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and countless others, all of whom were rhymers or blank-versers. To rewrite their lines to chyme would be silly; but most can be ‘reinterpreted’ as four-stressed lines with no or minimal rephrasing, and this often produces a more natural pattern of speech.

Take, for example, a memorable line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

My thoughts be bloody    or be nothing worth

I have bolded this according to the artificial, one-on-one-off cadence of syllable-counting verse. But let’s try treating it instead as an old-meter line, with four stresses surrounded by variable unstressed syllables. Here it is again:

My thoughts be bloody    or be nothing worth

It divides quite nicely into two self-sufficient phrases with two strong stresses each. Can the same be said for other, more randomly selected examples? Let’s sample some of the lines preceding this one, and you can be the judge:

And let all sleep?    While to my shame I see The imminent death    of twenty thousand men: That for a fantasy    and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds,    fight for a plot Whereon the numbers    cannot try the cause; Which is not tomb enough    and continent To hide the slain?    O from this time forth My thoughts be bloody    or be nothing worth!

Admittedly some difficulties arise (such as extra stresses), but not major ones, and there is always the option to rephrase or paraphrase.

Yet there is more. Old English poems occasionally employ a different line, called ‘hypermetrical’, that is longer than normal and contains six instead of four stresses. Here’s an excerpt from one of the few parts of Beowulf in which such lines appear:

Æghwylc oðrum trywe.    Swylce þaer [U]nferth þyle Æt fotum sæt frean Scyldinga.    Gehwylc hiora his ferhþe treowde, Þæt he hæfde mod micel,    þeah þe he his magum nære Ærfæst æt ecga gelacum.    Spraec ða ides Scyldinga...

The stress-patterns and chyme rules for these lines were worked out by Constance Hieatt (see here and here; links are free to read but require registration). They are an absolute pigdog to translate while retaining the chyme; here’s my attempt:

Each to the other was true.    And likewise Unferth the sage, At the feet of the first of the Scyldings.    All trusted his fighting spirit, And knew that his courage was keen,    though he to his kinsmen had not Been loyal at the locking of swords.    Then spoke the lady of Scyldings...

But let’s say we strip out the chyme rules again, leaving us with an accentual meter containing six strong stresses per line. The most obvious use for this would be to translate Greek hexameter poetry, that other great repository of oral tradition. I hasten to say that I have almost no knowledge of Ancient Greek; but the Perseus Project makes it relatively easy to look up words and grammar forms, and having worked through the first Homeric Hymn and part of the first book of the Iliad, I can say that it is quite possible to translate lines one-for-one using this meter.

Let’s test it on the first two lines of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε...

These can be translated into the following six-stressed lines in English (this time using slashes rather than spaces to indicate phrasal breaks):

O goddess sing of wrath, / of Achilles the son of Peleus; Rage accursed, / that brought the Achaians / to countless pains...

As you can see, I am really using two types of line here (although there are probably more possibilities): a ‘hypermetrical’ one containing two half-lines with three stresses each, and an ‘extended’ one containing three normal half-lines with two stresses each. In one, the phrases are nearly interchangeable with those used in the other line types, and in the other they are fully interchangeable.

I daresay that those with actual knowledge of linguistics have worked all this out before, and maybe put some of it into practice. But what I have never yet found in a translator is the golden combination of attention to meter, faithful representation of traditional phrasing and appropriate register (this last but not least, given the aforementioned modern hostility to poetic archaism and elevation). Traditionalist re-translations based on these principles could perhaps set a new standard. But would they accomplish the true goal – to weave the broken threads of old traditional poetries into a new one? ³

1. Perhaps the best example of this ideal is the ‘Nameless Isle’ by C.S. Lewis; but since this is a bit obscure, the reader might better imagine a less stilted version of the Tolkienian style.

2. The Serbo-Croatian epic line consists of four syllables and a break followed by six more syllables. The shortness of the initial half-line creates some difficulties in translation, sometimes forcing the inclusion of filler words or the promotion of normally unstressed words to stressed status (though this happens in Old English texts as well). Hence, while most lines in chyming verse are longer in the first half-line (which sometimes takes an extra stress) than in the second, here the usual pattern is reversed and the second half-line becomes longer in order to reflect the meter of the original language.

3. On reflection, this remark and others may imply that the creation of a poetic language would be a matter of collecting a vast stock of formulas, which could then be rearranged to create new poems. This, as oral theorists know, is not really how it works; rather, the meter and stock phrases serve to facilitate the creation of new ones, and it is this process that really constitutes the art of traditional poetry. When we translate old poems, we are not just collecting old phrases, but habituating ourselves to the state of mind that produced them.