translation of Gower

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

I’ve been tinkering with a somewhat free translation of Gower’s short Latin poem Ecce patet tensus. I have an article forthcoming about the date and style of this poem. I argue that it is late in Gower’s career, c. 1400. Among Gower’s poems Ecce patet tensus has a certain mystique because it exists in just one manuscript copy, which is possibly incomplete, but it is copied in Gower’s own hand according to Sobecki.

The stanza shape is one that I’ve been gravitating toward for my original poetry. It accommodates the syntax of Gower’s elegiac couplets pretty well. I found I didn’t need punctuation: the line-breaks give sufficient guidance. (There isn’t much punctuation in medieval poetic manuscripts, either, for the same reason.)

Whence the Arrow Flies
by John Gower

see here blind Cupid’s bow lies taut

            and the flying arrow becomes the flame of love

                        love conquers all but wanders blind

            and misses the straight path

he leads his servants / blind lovers

            no one in love can see what is fitting

                        the heart’s eye blinded by the darkness of the flesh

            sinks and reason is unreasoned

love feeds on will which blind lust

            nourishes and provides with every delight

                        the world lies in the shadow beneath his wings

            and all obey his law

crowned love makes the low and the mighty

            equal by law of equality

                        love conquers all that nature creates

            but remains unconquered by all

he shackles and frees / binds and unbinds

            wounds every people but suffers no wound

                        there is no one left to overpower love

            there is no one left to agree terms with him

Samson’s strength / David’s sword—in these

            what is there to praise? or Solomon’s wit

                        oh humanity! which none can abolish

            nor absolve its sins

oh humanity! which inexorably turns

            toward the impossible compulsion

                        oh humanity! composed of two opposite thoughts

            irreconcilable

oh humanity! which finds permanent war

            between soul and body for inner authority

                        Cupid burns through lovers’

            hearts and subjugates them

whoever would restrain the flesh’s flame

            look out for the bow whence the arrow flies

                        no one can escape this innate disease

            unless grace finds a cure

Further reading

Sobecki, Sebastian. “‘Ecce patet tensus’: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand.” Speculum 90 (2015): 925-59.

Gawain in 101 tweets

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

This month, I composed a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 101 tweets, corresponding to the 101 stanzas of the original Middle English alliterative poem. This project was inspired by Elaine Treharne’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf in 100 tweets and Alice-Catherine Jennings’s translation of the Old French poem Song of Roland in 291 tweets. To create my translation, I cross-referenced Neilson’s translation with the original Middle English text.

I was thinking about Gawain because I have been reading it with my undergraduate seminar, Literary Approaches to the Past. One of the themes of the course is the way that attitudes toward the distant past find expression not only in literature but also in the material conditions of its production, transmission, and reception. We began with William Caxton’s printed edition of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and we will end with Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. In late April, we will visit the Burns Library at Boston College to explore rare books and manuscripts relating to the course content.

Gawain occurs in only one manuscript copy, known today as British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. Unusually for a manuscript of medieval English poetry, Cotton Nero A.x has illustrations depicting scenes from the four poems it contains, including Gawain. I chose to include images of the manuscript text and manuscript illustrations at appropriate points in my translation, because I felt that this was an opportunity for medieval and modern text technologies to speak to one another. Ironically, in this my translation comes closer to reproducing a medieval experience of reading Gawain than modern critical editions, which tend not to include images of the manuscript text or the illustrations.

Translating Gawain in 101 tweets was an exercise in concision; it also taught me two things about the poem as a poem. First, I was reminded that this is a poem of lists: lists of clothing items, lists of food, lists of animal parts, lists of landscape features. Many of the tweets took the form of a list. Second, the third section of the poem is very long. The poet devotes more attention to Gawain’s stay at Hautdesert Castle, its three hunting scenes interlaced with three bedroom scenes, than to any other event in the poem. This imbalance teaches us something about the poet’s conception of the poem as a narrative; it also raises questions about the conventional modern title for the poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which refers only to the action of the first and fourth sections.

poem in burntdistrict

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

A poem of mine appears in burntdistrict. Written in couplets of roughly eight-syllable lines, this poem began as a parody of the absurdly specific submission guidelines issued by some poetry journals. I felt that some of these guidelines had rather strange implications for the act of composing verse. Here is the poem:

Submit Seasonal Poems Two Months in Advance

I am writing autumn poems
in June, Doctor, my liver hurts,

I have started thinking in words
I don’t recognize, please help me

catch up. I love the summer
and what the fall inherits,

trees, the clarity of nighttime,
it is fall during each season

separately, but especially
during summer, which sometimes begins

two months in advance, and sometimes
earlier, the chicks melt, sometimes

summer begins in other countries,
in advance, indiscernibly,

one day it is clear to people
through and through.

poems in Cricket Online Review

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

A sequence of four of my poems appears in Cricket Online Review. These poems are drawn from a book-length manuscript entitled The Short Century. They use lines of mostly six or nine syllables to explore textures, anticipation, and the juxtaposition of large and small. The poems are untitled. Here’s one of them:

it pummels the surf, it is not meant
so the phoenix wrangles its cracked skin
always the last time/ whether on
or in, it is a view you can’t get
possible response runs the table
(then actual response) like a gun
waits in the stocking like a catfish
brighter than life and incredibly
small

Update, 12/14: artist Marcy Erb has drawn a lovely illustration for one of my Cricket Online Review poems. Now I will always think of the illustration in connection with this poem:

weiskott_poem1

artwork by Marcy Erb