When I first read “The Wife’s Lament,” an Old English elegiac poem from the 10th century, I did not think it would upend my thinking about our recent 2018 midterm elections. I glanced at the Old English words and saw nothing but a riddle. Some of the letters weren’t even the same. How could I begin to understand a poem steeped in the lore of the past, written in a language that bore little resemblance to that which I understood? What could I hope to gain from the exercise?
Well, as it turns out, thinking critically about translating “The Wife’s Lament” helped me also think critically about the nature of our political discourse leading into and after the midterms. Even though I knew what I wanted to see CNN project on November 6, I started to wonder about the limitations of my thinking as an unapologetic liberal and devout Democrat.
Of course I wanted a blue wave. A massive blue wave. A bigger torrent of blue than Bush’s referendum in 2008. Admittedly, with the Senate electoral map Democrats faced, this was never going to happen. The most I could hope for was the House, a way to cauterize the wound.
Then, the Sunday before the election arrived, on what I thought was a completely unrelated note, I set out to study the scholarship on “The Wife’s Lament.” I wanted to see how different translators rendered their editions of the poem. I hoped to understand the poem in its original dialect better through an engagement with other scholars’ work on it.
Although “The Wife’s Lament” resists any definitive resolution of its major plot points, we do know a few things with some degree of certainty. We know the poem tells the story of a female speaker, exiled in an earthen cave far away from anyone she knows or loves. However, the majority of the poem’s details are ambiguous. We, as readers, can’t tell exactly how many men there are in the poem or even why she is exiled. Yet when she speaks of walking under an oak tree at dawn, forever alone, it is impossible to ignore. The speaker has rendered the impalpable and often inexpressible woes of femaleness so wrenchingly immediate.
When I first encountered the poem, the speaker was obviously female. The poem is a gnomic expression of the inescapable condition of womanhood. It is a dissection of a woman’s response to the patriarchal hierarchy of her society. Granted, I am not a fluent speaker of Old English. My professor’s admittedly feminist translation of the poem mediated my initial reaction.
However, I was shocked to discover scholarly interpretations of the poem seeking to erase the gender of the speaker. One interpretation asserted that the speaker of the poem was a thane, an Anglo-Saxon lord, exploring the issue of fealty. In order to support this interpretation, this scholar, Rudolph Bambas, proposed a retroactive elimination of female inflections on words. Old English, similar to languages like French and Spanish, genders its words. For instance, in French, the word for “nice,” “gentil,” has multiple forms. If it is used to describe a female person, it switches to “gentille.”
Several words in “The Wife’s Lament” carry this female inflection, an inflection that a scholar has retroactively tried to replace in order to evince his own interpretation of the maleness of the speaker. This, to me, is pure scholarly idiocy. It is ridiculous to erase an irrevocable characteristic of the poem in favor of one’s own interpretation. In fact, it is flagrantly offensive.
But in thinking more about this problem, I am not sure what I expected of a literature scholar from the 1930s and 40s. Instead, I worry more about how this scholar used the act of translation to justify his own thoughts. Because no language is a direct analog of any other language, he can read his own bias into the words. Then, he can present these words to others who may not be able to engage with the original language. His bias becomes fossilized in the translation.
It is this danger inherent to the act of translation— that one’s own problematic biases will creep unrecognized into a particular text — that coincided so topically with the 2018 midterms. I began to think about how progressives and conservatives translate policy arguments into soundbites and then amplify these reductive simplifications without an acknowledgment that this may not be the original source material.
When a progressive says “We need universal healthcare because we want to protect people with preexisting conditions,” a conservative pundit might translate this statement as “Democrats think rich people should bail out lazy poor people.”
Likewise, when a conservative says “We need to invest more in our military because we need to keep Americans safe,” an MSNBC talking head might translate this statement as “Republicans prioritize shooting foreigners over helping their actual constituents.”
While my “translations” of these statements are clearly hyperbolic, I think they capture the kernel of truth present in the rhetoric our political system encourages. I know it is not revolutionary to say that politicians debase and twist each other’s words. I find more useful a realization of the similarity between this discourse and the scholarly conversation about “The Wife’s Lament.”
Ultimately, both instances became deeply dangerous in the obfuscation of their sources. An Anglo-Saxon scholar can get away with a deeply incorrect translation because few people can call him on his heresy. A disseminator of political information today can pull off a creative retelling because no one in her circle of listeners wants the truth anyway. We enjoy the comfort provided to us by brightline, binary translations. We like to hear yes or no, right or wrong, stupid or smart. We resist an engagement with the necessary complexity of actual political ideology. To actually think about healthcare or the military requires a submergence in uncomfortable moral questions. What is the value of a human life? What does an equitable society look like? To whom does our government have a responsibility?
We’d much rather imbibe the digestible sound-bite, the modern English translation, than research the issues ourselves, tackle the Old English in its complexity. But to do so is often to be complicit in egregious mistranslation.
I don’t expect our politicians on either side of the aisle to change their tactics anytime soon. Rather, I’m advocating an increased awareness of any form of speech as an act of translation, encoded with its own subterranean biases. I’m advocating that progressives and conservatives spend more time engaging with the actual arguments of the opposite side, rather than packaging up politically expedient phrases for their own self-aggrandizing purposes. Let’s engage with the source material as concerned citizens ourselves.
Contact Emily Elott at elotte ‘at’ stanford.edu.