After the success of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in 2010, Armitage published his translation of the alliterative Death of King Arthur, another fourteenth-century verse narrative that delights in the possibilities of the Middle English vernacular to tell a story about the legendary Round Table. However, the poem—also known as the Alliterative Morte Arthure—is more interested in the pyrotechnics of epic warfare than the inner torments of the soul and flirtation with a lady (and her husband) witnessed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Next came Armitage’s modern Englishing of Pearl (Liveright, 2016), the second-most famous work by the Gawain poet. Pearl is a heartbreaking, intricately structured dream vision in which the dreamer sees his daughter, dead at the age of two, as one of the brides of Christ in Heavenly Jerusalem.
Armitage’s newest translation from Middle English, The Owl and the Nightingale (Faber & Faber, 2021), takes us back a century or two earlier. There are some commonalities in the language of this poem and the later ones, to be sure, but, overall, the idioms are quite distinct. Seen from our vantage point, Early Middle English is the transitional point between the Old English of Beowulf and the Late Middle English of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. For example, the influx of French into English in the years after the Norman Conquest (1066) does not register dramatically in The Owl and the Nightingale, even though the syntax appears more fixed than in Old English verse. The text features only 3.1 percent of borrowings from French, according to the scholar Neil Cartlidge: words like acorde (accord), castel (castle), kukeweld (cuckold), merci (mercy), proud, and spouse (spouse). Rightly, Armitage does not limit himself to the vocabulary derived from Old English, but uses the full resources of Modern English, turning to terms like “misdemeanors” (for unwrenche, “evil deeds”) and “domiciled” (for wuneþ, “dwells” or “resides”) as well as “creepy-crawly bugs” (no direct equivalent in the original, which instead lists spiders, flies, and worms). Despite its preference for native vocabulary, The Owl and the Nightingale consistently uses rhyme, which was originally a feature of Romance languages rather than Germanic ones that do not typically stress the last syllable. Armitage manages to carry over the rhyme, making it oblique from time to time, and in a few cases even rhyming on the same words as his source: “strong / tongs” for “stronge / tonge.” (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight famously employs both rhyme and alliteration, the latter being more appropriate for Germanic languages which stress the first syllable.)
The Early Middle English period used to be rather neglected by modern scholars and poets since much of the surviving literature does not fit the categories we usually associate with the Middle Ages: the heroic epic, the chivalric romance, or the love lyric. There is in fact a longer menu, exemplified in the following extant texts: a hagiography with a protagonist who withstands extreme torture, bursting out of a dragon’s belly (St. Margaret of Antioch); a religious treatise encouraging aristocratic girls to become nuns rather than suffer the degradations of child-rearing and running a household (The Holy Maidenhood); a guide for anchoresses who still need to balance living in the world with their hermit-like form of spiritual devotion (The Ancrene Wisse); a bestiary, or a compilation that gives moralizing interpretations of both common and fantastic animals (The Middle English Physiologus); and even a gargantuan collection of sermons that proposes its own orthographic system (The Ormulum). The Owl and the Nightingale is a debate poem between two birds equally adept at scatological invective and flights of lyricism, that remains unresolved in the end. It playfully shows an awareness of the broader, varied literary tradition of its time. The poem abounds with wise sayings, miniature fables, ad avem attacks, appeals to religion, and references to the purported real-life behaviors of owls, nightingales, and other creatures.
However lexically conservative The Owl and the Nightingale tries to be, it comes from a time of multilingual textual production in the British Isles. For example, the Owl tells a story that recalls the twelfth-century author Marie de France’s lai (or short romance) Laüstic, in which a jealous husband traps and kills a nightingale whom his wife has used as an excuse to stay awake and flirt with her neighbor from her window. Marie was also a translator from Latin, and lived and wrote in England—hence her self-designated epithet “of France.” Marie gives the title of that lai in three languages, Breton, French, and English, or rather their medieval forms: laüstic, russignol, and nihtegale. While the Early Middle English Owl and the Nightingale reveals its debt to the textual tradition in multiple languages without creating an explicit polyglottal texture, Armitage gives an occasional nod to the multilingual situation in medieval England. He renders “‘Ich wot wel’ quaþ the niʒtingale” (literally, “‘I know well,’ said the nightingale”) as “‘That’s easy,’ said the rossignol.”
When the Owl and the Nightingale verbally attack one another, scatological references often come to the fore. This humorous effect reminds us that we share the lowest bodily experiences with people (and animals) across time, space, and cultural differences. Shit is the great leveler. The Nightingale accuses the owlets of excreting in their nest:
You are repellent & impure,
you & those filthy chicks of yours
( . . .)
They soil the den they’re living in
until their droppings reach their chins
then stand about as if they’re blind
which brings this truism to mind:
‘Accursed be the wretched beast
that makes its toilet where it feeds.’
Tropes about the Middle Ages include the notion that people and their language were not as clean as they are today. Yet, the Middle English poet, like Armitage, employs euphemisms: “Vel wostu þat hi doþ þarinne” (you know well what they do in there) and “hi fuleþ” (they befoul). The Owl retorts, not afraid to turn to euphemisms as well as a term that becomes taboo in later English. It does her no good, she says, if she should “speak / the kind of oaths & foul abuse / & filthy talk that shepherds use,” with “filthy talk” rendering “schit-worde.” Later on, the Owl presents a more direct response to the Nightingale’s claim. She says that the Nightingale likes to spend time “by that smelly house / (. . .) / at song behind the toilet seat. / (. . .) where people bend & bare their rear.” The “smelly house,” “the toilet seat” and “their rear” correspond closely to rum huse, þe setle, and hore bihinde. “Rear,” like “behind,” is a current euphemism for ass. “The toilet seat” seems like a startlingly modern expression except that setle means “a seat,” “a privy,” and “a posterior” according to the Middle English Dictionary (MED), a tremendous resource freely available online and much easier to search in the most recent iteration.
Neil Cartlidge in his edition of The Owl and the Nightingale gives several possible translations of rumhus based on different possible roots: “roomy building” if rum is from the Old English rūm (roomy); “cleaning-up room” or “easing or relieving” room if from rӯman (to clear up, open up, make space); or, finally, runhus (secret or private room,) so in the meaning like the French borrowing “privy.” The MED provides a further explanation: “If read as run- the likeliest derivation is from roun(e n., ‘secret, etc.’ the compound a near equivalent to privē chaumbre or F[rench] privé-hostel.” This is the same word as rune, which in today’s era of medievalist video games and movies refers to the mysterious script which predates the Roman alphabet in the lands of Germanic speakers. The rune house is just a euphemism here for the toilet, itself a euphemism in Modern English (ultimately from the French toillette, a diminutive of toile “cloth”). Behind compounds constructed of native materials there might still hide a French expression. More overt foreign borrowings work well for euphemisms, too. In another passage, Armitage translates rumhus as “loo.” Loo might be an Anglicization of the French euphemism for the toilet—lieux, literally “places”—to cite the etymology that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) considers most plausible. Many European languages, including French, have WC, short for water closet, an English expression no longer in use in its unabbreviated form. These insights occurred to me because of Armitage’s willingness to feature more casual language. His translation demonstrates that Modern English is far from a monolith; rather, it contains, like Middle English, multiple dialects and registers.
Being complex creatures, the protagonist birds can have lyrical flights. The Owl defends her singing against the Nightingale’s accusations of discord and terror:
I see the distant dawn draw near
& watch the morning star appear
then from my throat a note is shaped
that summons workers to their trade.
Or in Middle English:
wone ich iso arise vorre
oþer dai-rim oþer dai-sterre.
Ich do god mid mine þrote,
& warni men to hore note.
That is, overly literally, “ . . . when I saw arise afar either the day-rim (dawn) or the day-star. I do good with my throat and warn men for their benefit.” The poet presents us with another source of humor. The Owl’s idea of herself and her screeching seems at odds with the common human perception of them. You could say any number of things about the nocturnal predator bird, but would “she does good with her throat” be among them? Yet the Owl’s ability to appreciate and paint a beautiful early-morning scene transcends any ironic needling. Seen from her own strigiform point of view, she is the heroine of a lyrical poem. Like the Owl, we also tend to think of whatever traits we have as the most beautiful, however they might look to others. The Owl accuses the Nightingale of similarly centering her experience: “You twitter, so for you a song / that doesn’t cheep & chirp is wrong.”
Armitage follows closely some idiomatic expressions in the poem and adds other ones. Several turns of phrase that appear fairly modern actually echo the formulations in the medieval text. The Nightingale says to the Owl: “Þu schalt falle, þe wei is slider,” that is, “you shall fall, the way is slippery,” which becomes in Armitage's English, “ . . . it’s a slippy slope you tread.” The Owl urges the Nightingale to be quiet: “Now stop your chelping, chatterbox, / you’ve never been so tied in knots,” which corresponds to “Site nu stille, chaterestre! / nere þu neuer ibunde uastre” (which could more literally be rendered as “Now sit still, chatterer! / you have never been bound tighter.”) Armitage adds the vivid term “chelping” to create an alliteration with “chatterbox” since the Middle English text also features an alliterative sequence “site . . . stille.” The OED marks “chelp” as dialectal; Armitage once again expands on what translations of medieval poetry can sound like. Elsewhere, the contemporary English translator ingeniously renders red-purs—“a bag of wisdom” or “one’s store of good ideas,” as glossed by the MED—as a “bag of tricks.” The Owl uses two sayings toward the end of the poem that resemble each other in the two historical forms of English. She says to the Nightingale: “You & your kind aren’t worth a turd,” that is, “a tort ne ʒiue ich for ow alle!,” (literally, “I do not give a turd for you all!”). She threatens her thus: “You’ll sing a very different song” or “ʒe schule on oþer wise singe,” (literally, “you shall sing in another manner”). Singing another tune: the birds’ use of ornithocentric diction (along with the references to other birds and stories involving avian protagonists) is a consistent source of joy and laughter for the readers of The Owl and the Nightingale. Armitage could not resist adding another bird expression to the mix when he translates the Owl’s insulting address to the Nightingale, “wreche . . . / . . . nauestu none miʒte!” (literally, “wretch . . . / You have no power!”) as “you stunted little featherweight!”
The contemporary English poet-translator understands the nature of the game that The Owl and the Nightingale sets into motion. He contributes to it without hesitation, and even inscribes himself into the text. The Middle English author mentions a certain Master Nicholas of Guildford, supposedly living in Portesham, Dorset, who would judge the outcome of the debate between the birds. Armitage employs, as he says in his introduction, “the name of a poet who has a more reliable connection with the text”—himself. Instead of Portesham in Dorset, he has Huddersfield in Yorkshire, his birthplace. The translator’s flaunting of his signature, to use a phrase from the scholar Barbara Godard, challenges the readers, making it clear that what they are reading comes through the mediation of a particular person with their own set of interests and agendas. The audience can look over to the left-hand side of the page and read another name in the original text. They can investigate more about the poem, look up another translation, and even attempt some deciphering of their own with the help of resources such as the MED (the translator lists many resources in his Acknowledgments). In The Owl and the Nightingale, Armitage masterfully reveals the presence of multiple Englishes historically and in our time, of stylistic registers jostling and clashing, with two birds who praise themselves, attack each other, and reflect on their and our shifting, exhilarating, and dangerous place in the world.
