Wondrous this wall-stone, on fate’s wheel broken,
boundaries bursted, and blighted the giants’ work:
the roofs are all ruined, the towers ruinous—
of ring-gate bereft, and rime on the limestone.
Sharded the shelters are, sheared, all fallen,
undereaten by age. Earth’s clutches retain
the wielders, out-worn, fore-gone,
hard ground-grip. A hundred generations
of people withdrew. Oft this wall abade,
grey-gone and reddened, reign that reign followed,
upstanding through storms. Fell the steep spandrels:
the remains are yet heaped
clung
grim-ground
on it shone the bodies of heaven
artifical artefacts
tiles in a ring
The mind remembers, in mental abstraction,
the heedful in rings, the heart-proud festooned,
the wire-fastened wall, wondrously bound.
Brilliant the buildings were, and bath-halls manifold,
high arches in hordes, and the great hosts’ commotion
in meading-halls many, full of man’s gladness.
Until the great wheel annulled it.
Widely fell the war-dead, onward came plague-days,
silence plundered it all, the sword-steady men,
their war-bastions to waste-sites,
the boundaries blighted, and the builders all died,
hosts in an earth-house. So these houses decline,
and the red-arched shingles shed down.
The roof’s framed beams came down to rest,
fragmented in mounds where, long ago, battle-men,
gladdened and gold-glimmering, gleamingly fettered,
were solemn and wine-blushed; their war-deckings shone;
and looked on sapphires, on silver, on soil-wrought gems,
on fortune, on riches, on rarest stones,
on this whole bright burgh, its broad domain.
The stone houses did stand, gushing hot streams,
welling wide. The wall all engirdled
in its bright bosom, there where the baths were,
which heated the spirit. That was havenly.
Then they let flow
over the hard stone the hot streams,
and
until the hot ring-pool
there where the baths were,
then is
that is a kingly thing
how it burgh
The Ruin
Anonymous
translated from the Old English by Luke McMullan
Read the original in Old English
In the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731, many codices in the Cotton Library, including the Exeter Book (c. 960 C.E.) which contains the only copy of ‘The Ruin,’ were destroyed or damaged by the fire. The text of ‘The Ruin’ itself was partially obliterated and can never be recovered. So the poem’s conventional title is fitting with regard not only to the poem’s subject matter—a meditation on a (probably Roman) ruined city in which baths feature heavily—but also to its material-textual state. In the heat of conflagration, the poem’s material has melded with its matter.
Ruins are tourist attractions only for those countries and those people for whom comfortable shelter is not in question. This is not the situation of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Much Old English poetry revolves around access to shelter, the loss of it, the attendant danger of weather, and the perils of travel. The poem was written on an island still populated by wolves, which were a threat to travellers. The countryside was no pacified idyll and the towns belonged to frequently warring kingdoms. The ruined city, then, could not be the curiosity that Pompeii would be to eighteenth-century antiquarians. Instead, it was an admonition of frailty and precarity in a world not yet thought to always grow better. The poet knows himself a latecomer. I have tried to explicate the significance of this ideological delta in the carrying out of my translations, myself also a latecomer, and knowing it. This translation is one of approximately thirty translations of ‘The Ruin’ I have done according to different principles and through different historical mediators (dictionaries, articles, literary forms) in the manuscript for a forthcoming book. The original poem was in alliterative meter in which two or three words per line start with the same sound; this particular translation imitates that meter.
Ruins are tourist attractions only for those countries and those people for whom comfortable shelter is not in question. This is not the situation of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Much Old English poetry revolves around access to shelter, the loss of it, the attendant danger of weather, and the perils of travel. The poem was written on an island still populated by wolves, which were a threat to travellers. The countryside was no pacified idyll and the towns belonged to frequently warring kingdoms. The ruined city, then, could not be the curiosity that Pompeii would be to eighteenth-century antiquarians. Instead, it was an admonition of frailty and precarity in a world not yet thought to always grow better. The poet knows himself a latecomer. I have tried to explicate the significance of this ideological delta in the carrying out of my translations, myself also a latecomer, and knowing it. This translation is one of approximately thirty translations of ‘The Ruin’ I have done according to different principles and through different historical mediators (dictionaries, articles, literary forms) in the manuscript for a forthcoming book. The original poem was in alliterative meter in which two or three words per line start with the same sound; this particular translation imitates that meter.
Luke McMullan is a poet and translator from Northern Ireland who lives in New York. His previous poetry publications include n. (Wide Range, 2012) and Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours: A Love Song (BlazeVOX, 2015). He co-curated and co-edited the unAmerican Activities reading series and is a curator of the Segue reading series. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at New York University.
