A Medieval Twitter Fight?
Simon Armitage’s The Owl and the Nightingale: A New Verse Translation
Reviewed by Bret van den Brink
Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, in addition to being an original poet, is among the foremost translators of Middle English poetry. To his eminently readable body of translations from Middle English, including The Death of King Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Armitage has added the anonymous twelfth- or thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale.
Some readers may be daunted by the scholarly appearance of Armitage’s volume—his translation faces the Middle English text (from the British Library’s MS Cotton) and is published by Princeton University Press—but they should not be. This translation is not a critical edition but a casual one, and its chief purpose is to delight. (Delightfully, delighting also happens to be the purpose of the medieval original.) Simon Armitage successfully translates (dare one say transmutes?) the poem’s 897 Middle English couplets of (roughly) iambic tetrameter into 897 Late Modern English couplets of (roughly) iambic tetrameter. This prosody, paired with the poem’s subject of querulously quarreling birds, results in easily accessible and rollicking good fun.
Indeed, this medieval poem’s subject invites a modern parallel. The poem’s titular Owl and Nightingale, like two trolls exchanging vitriolic abuse with one another on Twitter,
tak[e] turns to slate & curse
what in the other bird [i]s worst,
with insults being especially strong
when rubbishing the other’s song. (9-12)
One is struck by the exceptional immaturity of these birds. The Nightingale thus denigrates the Owl’s song: “As for your tuneless yodeling / it makes me want to spit, not sing” (39-40), and thus denigrates the Owl’s appearance: “[Y]our neck’s too thin, your trunk’s too small, / your head is bigger than. . . your all!” (73-4). At more serious moments, though still playfully handled, the poem considers such perennial topics as class conflict and religious hypocrisy.
Armitage’s playfulness matches the anonymous author’s own. One candidate whom scholars offer as the author of this work is Nicholas of Guildford, a man twice referenced in the poem whose character is so beyond question that both birds would acquiesce to his adjudication of their dispute. Armitage’s mischievous sense of humour comes through when he notes in his introduction, “In this translation, I have replaced Master Nicholas with the name of a poet who has a more reliable connection with the text” (viii). In the text itself, the Nightingale deliciously promises “to engage / that clever Simon Armitage” (1745-6). In the original, when asked where this wise man lives, the Nightingale answers at “Porteshom” [Portesham] in the county of “Dorsete” [Dorset] which is “bi þare see in ore utlete” [by the sea on an outlet] (1752-4). Armitage hilariously has his Nightingale reply,
He’s domiciled near Huddersfield,
in Yorkshire, nowhere near the sea
& nowhere near an estuary. (1752-4)
The town and county are, of course, the Poet Laureate’s own.
This translation is a happy remedy, akin to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, to those who forget the (alas-all-too-forgettable) playfulness of the Middle Ages. To those who would generalize the whole period as dark and grim, this poem answers, as its Nightingale quips, “You are deluded in your aims / to smear me with deceitful claims” (755-6). The period has as much learning and barbarity, as much delight and severity, as any other. Medieval works can still speak to the contemporary reader, and thanks to Armitage and his ilk, the contemporary reader need not learn other languages to listen. The vivacity of Armitage’s translation is attested by how it sticks in one’s memory, even if the reader cannot say, with Armitage’s Owl, “All that was said / I memorized from A to Z” (1785-6).
