Samantha Pious

on translating Anonymous

The Old English poem presented here is one of almost a hundred verse riddles preserved in a tenth-century manuscript known as the Exeter Book. Its modern-day editors, George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, titled it “Riddle 47” in the third volume of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (1936). In Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry (1976), Michael Allen and Daniel Calder trace its origins to a late–Classical Latin riddle by Symphosius (late fourth or early fifth century), which is available in Raymond Ohl’s edition and translation (1928).

The riddle’s answer (Latin tinea, Old English moððe, Modern English “book moth”) is obvious, but, as Patrick Murphy points out in Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (2005), it seems less important to get the solution right than to contemplate the paradox of an animal “devouring” words but not “ruminating” on them. Indeed, consuming without contemplating is more or less what the book moth does.

This translation began as a thought experiment for Old English Live, an annual celebration organized by Emily Steiner at the University of Pennsylvania where participants share creative reimaginings of Old English poetry. At Professor Steiner’s suggestion, I decided to translate an Old English riddle into Middle French, as though I were a fourteenth-century poet. I imagined myself as Eustache Deschamps or Oton de Granson stumbling on an undiscovered copy of the Exeter Book riddles in the royal library of King Charles V and wondering what language, let alone what form or genre, he was looking at. Perhaps he would have managed to locate a copy of the riddle in its original Latin and been able to decipher the Old English from there.

Of course, translation practices in the fourteenth century were very different from what they are today. Middle French narrative couplets tend to lend themselves to far more prolixity than Old English alliterative verse, and I’m afraid the poet may have allowed his feelings to run away with him. The French riddle is twenty lines — more than twice the length of its Old English source, to say nothing of the Latin original!

Finally, I’ve added a relatively faithful Modern English translation of the “Middle French” version — except that, for better or worse, I embellished the English verse with far more internal rhymes than there are in the source text. Am I as flighty as the book moth? Or did I contemplate too much?