Harry Potter and the Decline of Literary Civilization

Is Harry Potter Dreadful, and does his popularity signify the end of literary civilization?

Chris Clarke linked to this piece, by Matthew Yglesias, about someone who wrote that people who read Harry Potter never read any real novels, and which -- the Yglesias piece, I mean -- had a long tail of comments. I found it all very odd. You see, the problem, for me, is that I'm far more snobbish and old fashioned than the person who didn't like Harry Potter. I don't think novels are high literature at all. To me the people fretting about Harry displacing real novels are just as off-track as the people who think that Harry Potter is as good as literature ever gets.

I enjoy novels enormously. But the novel is simply not a very important part of literature. It's been hugely, hugely popular for about a century and a half, and for a rather shorter time it's been taken seriously in universities. Of course I like them. For the same reasons you do. Because we share this odd historical moment. But that doesn't make them important.

Some novels are good. Some of them are thoughtful. Some are enthralling. But storytelling, though a fine and venerable craft, is not, to my mind, an art. Poetry is an art. I'm sure people will still be reading poetry five hundred years from now. Will they still be reading novels? I doubt it. Novel-reading is a peculiar activity, taken in a wide historical context, and literary novel-reading is more peculiar still.

I admit that I find "literary" novels -- the ones written since the 1920's or so, in conscious hopes of achieving literary immortality -- ridiculous and unreadable. I haven't read one in years: to me they're a waste of time. Even when they're mercifully short, they're horribly long winded and pompous, portentous and solemn, nervously clutching at a high seriousness that they can't quite keep hold of. Some people enjoy reading them, or do read them anyway, and I wish them godspeed. I'm not going to join them though.

I like the Harry Potter books a lot. I think they're a good series of novels. I don't think they're the modern equivalent of Aeschylus. But then, I don't think Don DeLillo -- or whoever we're supposed to take seriously nowadays; as I've already admitted, I don't read the stuff -- is the modern equivalent of Aeschylus either. I much prefer reading Harry Potter, because Rowling is not under the delusion that she's Aeschylus. She's a storyteller, and she sits comfortably in the storyteller's chair. I think that's nice. I like it.

High literature has, to me, one unmistakeable marker. You would memorize it, if you had the time, and not find it tedious to do so. It has that intensity, that richness of meaning and beauty of sound, that you're willing to etch it into your synapses. Nobody, I hope, is going to memorize the Harry Potter novels. No one is going to memorize Don DeLillo either. They're simply not worth it. Read and reread them, sure. Go to them for comfort and instruction. (I'm sure people do that with DeLillo, even if my imagination can't quite make the leap to picturing it.)

Five hundred years from now, should our species get so far, people are still going to be memorizing Aeschylus, Li Po, and Shakespeare. They will not even be reading Rowling or DeLillo. Or Conrad or Dickens, for that matter, unless they're scholars or antiquarians. Novels are ephemeral.

That doesn't make them worthless. And of course in a larger sense, all literature -- and the one species we know of that produces it -- is ephemeral. That's worth remembering too. So let's not get too het up about it all. Even high literature is not that important.

---

Well. I don't believe all that. Oh, I believe that the novel is a minor form and that its current vogue will pass. But the "high literature" and "art" stuff? Nah. It's just fun to get up above someone who thinks they've taken the high ground and take a few potshots.

Real novels are, and always have been, popular, longwinded, repetitive, and meandering. It's the genius of the form. I am entirely with C.S. Lewis, who snorted, "who ever bothered about style in a novel, until all else was lost?" Sure, you can write a concise novel with style coming out its ears, and excite critics into using words like "lapidary," and keep pulling the reader up short by leaving out the usual repetitions and redundancy of storytelling. But you haven't written a novel, really -- you've pulled off a party trick.

---

I like the Harry Potter novels. The theme of them is that it's better to be kind than nasty. It's a perfectly good theme -- it's the theme of most of Dickens's best novels -- and I'm a little bewildered by the dislike they seem to inspire, even in some people that I know to be very kindly. They're not challenging novels, for the most part -- they don't put you through a moral or intellectual wringer, if you're well-read, anyway -- but Rowling has in spades what most modern novelists lack: invention. She's very like Dickens, who was also defiantly lowbrow, stole plots and characters anywhere he could find them, and pandered shamelessly to the crowd. Both of them, you have the feeling, could go on pulling rabbits out of their hats indefinitely. An infinite wealth of throwaway character and incident. It's the sheer abundance that delights. They are, in every best sense of a much-abused word, liberal.

The Disconsolate Chimaera

The handlebars on my bicycle came loose again. Politely -- they just shifted a bit, giving me plenty of warning. But by the time I got to Tosi's, though, they were moving pretty freely. It's interesting to ride without putting any weight on the handlebars -- the brakes and gearshift are on the bars, so I have to squeeze and turn them, while keeping the vector sum of all the force I apply to the bars at zero. It's entertaining, though it would be more entertaining if I didn't know that an abrupt emergency would certainly make me lose control of the bike. It's fine to ride no-hands; we did it all the time as kids. But dodging, swerving, evading...? No. I think I should take it into the shop and have them bolt the bars (and the seat) where I want them. I know where that is, now. They don't need to be adjustable any more.

I love this bicycle: it's the tangible sign of my freedom. My equivalent of the midlife-crisis crimson sports car.

Yesterday was the one of the first real resurrections of discontent. It should have been the perfect day: a practice session with Lana, trying to incorporate the rudiments of shiatsu and tui na, and then a lovely massage from Tele. But Lana talked the whole time I was working on her, friendly conversation; I wondered toward the end if I were really still working on her, or if it was just a pretense to open up the space for talking. And Tele seemed faintly uncomfortable, and ready to be gone at the end. I was left feeling a little mournful. Though I would have said, a year ago, that this was all I wanted in the world -- this kind of touch, this intimacy, this trust.

They're too young to be entirely easy friends: there's always a problem of translation. The world you inhabit at thirty is different from the world you inhabit at fifty. And coming of age in the nineties left different marks from the marks left by coming of age in the seventies. Vocabularies shift subtly. The dominant preoccupations, with which or against which we framed our identities, were different.

But that's just "the presenting problem," as I believe psychologists call it. The pretext for dissatisfaction. The real problem is that achieving this -- getting what is, supposedly, all I want -- didn't change anything drastically. I still ache, I still want. There's still an empty space that won't be filled. I'm old enough not to have expected that it would be -- consciously -- but unconsciously I did, and I found myself vaguely resentful and petulant. Spiritual longings are not to be satisfied by the pleasures of the world; not even by the pleasures of touch and friendship. But it's so easy to let myself be washed into the current of believing they will be. It runs strong. Lots of people want me to believe it, desperately, because it will help them believe in its possibility too.

Never enough. "Nothing touches the tired spot," as Lincoln said. It's palpable to me sometimes, the desire that you have for me to have achieved a life in which the world makes me content. In which the tired spot is rubbed away by magically good massage. And I know that from time to time I have pandered to that desire, teased it up, suggested or implied that it was so, could be so, was about to be so. I me me mine --

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimaera.

And

"That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was," Ron mumbled.

"Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was," said Harry. "I've been trying to tell you that for years."

Benediction

Every bone in my body is broken, and newly set: I feel that fragile. But whole.

Grief, like a benediction.

I can't even guess why I have been so blessed.

Seriously cute, yes. But the maniacal gleam in her eye is no trick of the light. First, last, and always a predator. This is our foster-kitty.

Posted on the Bathroom Mirror this Morning

"We think of it as a system," said Dr Terence Cloth, of the BMRC at the University of Minnesota. "It's a group dynamic, really. Often you'll have one family member -- you know, supposedly well -- who'll be picking a wet bathmat up of the floor three, four, five times a day. Enabling. It's sad, really -- they think they're helping, but of course they're just perpetuating the cycle."

There is hope, adds Dr Cloth. "At the Bathmat Rehabilitation Center we've had significant results from negative feedback training. What in layman's terms you might call 'whoppin 'em upside the head.'"

Researchers at the Dry Foot Clinic in New York City, however, which also treats the disease, take a different approach. According to Dr Tinea Pedis, "We're finding two lines of research promising. The fundamental theoretical problem of Bathmat Neglect is, why does it happen at all? After all, what could be easier than picking a bathmat off the floor and hanging it up? One line of research suggests that the underlying cause is a fear of completion. The patient doesn't want to admit that he's done getting ready for the day, so he puts off hanging up the mat, and puts it off, and puts it off, until he's late for work and rushes from the room -- leaving the bathmat on the floor, of course. We've developed some excellent mindfulness techniques that seem to help with this.

"The other line of research has to do with perception. Some people, we hypothesize, are so accustomed to having the mat on the floor that they quite literally don't see it. We ran an elegant little experiment in which people leaving the bathroom were interviewed about its contents: a surprising percentage showed no awareness of the bathmat at all." Her colleague, Dr Srinivas Fungal, is experimenting with helmets that force patients' heads forward, so that they look always at the floor. "So far," he admits, "patients don't seem to like to use them."

The Wanderer (complete)

Often a friendless man must wait it out for favor,
The Measurer's mercy, although, troubled in mind,
He must for a long while, over the water,
Stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
Wander in exile: Wyrd has all been spoken.

So said the earth-stepper, remembering hardships,
And the fall of his family
In savage slaughter.

Often I have told my trouble to the dawn;
There is no living creature now
That I can talk to freely. I know for a fact
It is a better habit to keep your heart's cage locked --
To keep your mind's wallet closed -- think what you will.
A worn out heart cannot withstand Wyrd
And a disordered mind mends nothing.
Someone who wants to be thought well of
Binds his unhappiness up tight in his breast.

So I have hidden my heart-spirit
Miserable with care, cut off from home,
Far from my family, bound in fetters;
Since I wrapped my gold-friend, years ago,
In the darkness of earth, and I, abject,
Went from there, winter-troubled,
Over the lacing waves, looking, hall-sick,
For where I might find, far or near,
A master in a mead hall
Who knew of me and mine,
Or who would comfort a man of no kindred,
Welcome him warmly. Wise men know
How cruel a companion sorrow is
For a man meager in patrons.
He is attended by exile, not golden armrings;
A frozen heart-cage, not the flowering earth.
He remembers hall-friends and receiving treasure;
How in his young days his gold-friend
Accustomed him to feasting: all joy fails.

A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.

Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.

I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.

A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.

All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.

So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:

Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast?
Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!

The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.

Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.

So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
for the grace of our Father in heaven.

The Wanderer (V)

Here is the end of the poem. Spears were made of ash-wood, and ash-trees are emblematic of fate in Germanic mythology; the poet is drawing liberally on both his cultural traditions, both of which emphasize the shortness and fragility of life in this world.

The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.

Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.

So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
For the grace of our Father in heaven.

Paris is worth a Mass

For class I'm supposed to write about my responses to learning the theory of Traditional Asian Medicine. They're all over the map.

First of all, I love it, just as a new system to learn -- lots of complicated interlocking parts, a new nomenclature. The same hunger for new intelligibilities that drives me always to be studying new languages and new computer systems eats this right up. And there's the fascination (which it has in common with languages) of feeling my way into a set of cultural assumptions, mental habits, and protocols. Trying to think my way into a mind that feels that concepts as disparate (to me) as wood, fire, and earth have the same taxonomic status. I love that sort of thing.

There's the frustration of having to rely on translators and interpretors, of unknown reliability, which always frustrates me. I spent a year or two studying Chinese, but it completely defeated me; now I remember only a handful of words, a character or two. I won't be learning Chinese in this lifetime. So everything that comes to me is already filtered and shifted by at least one or two -- probably more like a dozen -- Western intermediaries. The little shifts and transformations they've made will be invisible to me.

I find the symmetry and regularity of the system deeply satisfying, but deeply suspicious. Suspicious precisely because it's satisfying: I can't help thinking that some of these elaborate correspondences will have been filled in simply to make the sets complete. Human beings work that way. Our minds leap to perceive patterns, and often enough the patterns they seize upon aren't really there, or aren't as complete and regular as we perceive them to be.

(The meridians, the "energy channels," by the way, are reassuringly quirky and unexpected; nobody trying for an elegant system would invent all these queer jogs and backtracks, oddities like the bifurcation of the Bladder Meridian on the back or the Kidney meridian's little twirl below the ankle. These have the continually surprising shape of reality.)

As a long-time Buddhist I have some philosophical problems with the principles (which I'll sloppily call "Taoist") underlying much of Chinese medicine -- the conceptions of qi, yin, and yang. Taoism views Nature as aligned and balanced, and civilized man as out of whack and unbalanced, which is a dualism, to my mind, just as ill-considered and pernicious as the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. And the emotional equanimity championed by Taoists doesn't satisfy me. I'm after ecstasy, more than tranquility.

I have no problems with the fact that qi is not, for the most part, directly measurable. And my only problem with the conception of the self implicit in this system is the age-old dispute about whether the self, the individual atman, is a permutation of a greater atman (God's) or delusion pure and simple. (I tend to go with delusion.)

The scientific unverifiability of much of this theory (not of much of this practice, which has a good track record) bothers me only because systematic theories that aren't subject to some sort of rigorous verification tend to turn into ratifications of what people already think is true. I don't care whether the verification is scientific, or by way of a rigorous meditative or yogic discipline, but without disciplined verification, what you generally get is wish-fulfillment fantasies. So I view the enthusiasm of some of my fellow-students with some skepticism.

I guess the bottom line for me is experiential. I don't need to believe that the theory is correct. I don't, after all, believe that the scientific materialist theory of reality is correct either, but I use it and its insights all the time. What I know is that someone trained within this framework can give a massage much more powerful and effective than anything I can usually do, at present. I want that. As that Protestant contender for the French throne (Henri of Navarre?) said, on adopting Catholicism, "Paris is worth a mass."

The Wanderer (IV)

So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:

Here follows the passage that is, rightfully, the most famous ubi sunt in Old English poetry. Tolkien rewrote a version of it, a very good one, as a sample of the poetry of the Riders of Rohan, and thence, altered again, it actually appeared on the lips of Theoden in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movie -- the only bit of Old English poetry, that I know of, ever to have reached a mass audience.

Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast? Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!

Difficulties for the translator abound. First of all: hwaer com mearh? is not exactly "where is the horse?" It is not even "where has the horse gone?" Literally it's "where came horse?" Maybe I'm being too finicky, but it seems to me of great importance that the speaker actually locates himself in the same place as all these lost things -- they haven't gone away from him, they have come to the same place he has -- the place of ruin and loss. I was tempted to try "where has the horse come to?" or even "what has the horse come to?" and I might have gone with it, except that the question is repeated twice, with different subjects, and what is iffy once becomes emphatically ridiculous three times in a row. Tolkien's solution is the neatest and most economical, I think -- dropping the question of coming and going altogether, and saying simply "where is the horse?" (I don't know, by the way, that Tolkien invented this solution, only that he used it. I'm deliberately avoiding other translations till I'm done.)

The other thing that defeated me was the alliteration. All three subjects in the first two lines of the ubi sunt alliterate, in the Old English -- mearh, magu, mathum-giefa -- mare, man, and mathom-giver -- and it's important that they should do so. But I could not for the life of me come up with three plain but suitable words that would alliterate in Modern English, and here of all places the diction needed to be simple, clean, straightforward. So I surrendered, I hope gracefully. The first two lines alliterate, if you can call it that, on nothing but the repetition of "where?"

Then there's "ea-la!" (the "ea" is a diphthong, a long 'a' sliding into 'aw'.) Most people translate it as "alas!" but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It's accurate enough, and etymologically correct, but its associations are disastrous. Love-sick swains, Romeos, and Ophelias say "alas!" -- not hardbitten soldiers. Since it has no real semantic content, I decided it didn't need to be translated at all, that it wouldn't hurt anyone to have to learn the sound, in Old English, of inarticulate grief.

In the Oven

A cloud cover of remote silver scales, heavy with the impending heat of the day; already there's a dusky shadow in the air. A couple of fat raindrops struck my face as I rode my bike here, but that's all we'll get, I think. It will be another day in the sky's oven. It is not so much that I mind the heat, as that I mind seeing Oregon gasping this way. East Texas is supposed to be like this, not the Willamette Valley.

Dress rehearsal for clinic last night. Next week I'll have my first-ever paying clients. Last year at this time I was still working, or rather not working, in my cubicle in Beaverton. That seems a very very long time ago. Although it also seems like I just started massage school -- that I can't possibly be in my last quarter.

My last class, besides Clinic, is "Survey of Modalities" ("modalities" being the odd and highfalutin, though standard, name for different kinds of massage; I guess "Survey of Sorts" struck someone as falling short of the high dignity of our calling.) It has no prerequisites, so there are some beginning students in it, people who aren't used to whipping the sheets on and off a table and matter-of-factly shedding clothes, and who are still stumbling over "coracoid process," confusing it with "coronoid process," or even coming up with the enchanting "congoloid process," which really ought to be the name of something. I'm so used to feeling like a raw beginner in this that to feel like an old hand is somehow unpleasant -- distancing. I have loved this so deeply, being a student again. A student is what I am, always have been, always will be; I love learning new things. I'm so grateful to have had this chance to be what I am again, for a lovely luminous year.

The Wanderer (III)

A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.

All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.

Giants. What to do with the giants? Giants to us are irresistably fairy-tale and comic -- since we don't believe in them -- and their presence here can only mystify most modern readers, who can't be expected to know that any impressive stonework of forgotten origin was assumed by the Anglo-Saxons to be the work of giants -- a race struck down by God, ages ago, for their pride and presumption. It is not the first time, that is to say, that God has depopulated this place. At first I tried just leaving the giants out, and no doubt if I had been able to settle on a good line about ancient ruins standing empty I would have done so.

I have to confess that the warriors of this deserted place did not really fall proud by the door-posts. They fell proud by the wall -- wlanc be wealle, one of my favorite formulas of Old English verse. Though to tell the truth though I'm not quite sure what falling proud by the wall means -- possibly it connotes last-ditch struggle -- backs against the wall -- fighting to the last man. But anyway, Modern English has no initial 'wl' sound, more's the pity, and it has no word for pride that I could think of that begins even with plain 'w', and there are already too many "walls" in this section of the poem for my taste -- and more to come -- so I made them fall by the door, with posts to alliterate with proud. (Plus I've always loved the compound "door-post" -- I don't know why. If I were a scholar I couldn't do this, but I'm a massage therapist, and I can do whatever I like.)

The Wanderer (II)

A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.

Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.

The lacing waves is the best I can do for wathuma gebind, literally "the binding of the waves." The image is clear to me -- the way that, after staring at the sea for a long time, you see the waves start to form interweaving patterns, to tie knots in the water. But I didn't like "binding," which has for me its chief connotations with ski technology. I like the sound of "lacing," but it loses an important resonance with the overriding images of constriction and imprisonment. I've played with words for tangling and snaring and knitting and knotting and tying, but nothing has quite come together.

I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.

I cheat sometimes with the alliteration. Here are the rules of alliteration, in brief:

The first sounds of stressed syllables are the only candidates for it. In the first half-line one or both of the two most heavily stressed syllables must begin with the same sound; in the second half-line the first heavily stressed syllable must begin with that sound, and the second must not. My rules have been more lax: I have only required that at least one heavily stressed syllable in each half-line alliterate, and I often alliterate on the second stressed syllable of the second half-line.

What is "the same sound"? In old english, 'sp' and 'st' are their own sounds, and can only rhyme with themselves, not with any old initial 's'. Otherwise things are pretty much as you'd expect, except that any initial vowel rhymes with any other initial vowel -- the absence of a consonant, at the start of a stressed syllable, is perceived, you might say, as a particular sound. Hence my lines such as "He is attended by exile, not golden armrings," where the alliteration is on Exile and Armrings. I have extended this un-consonant to include 'h', since the Modern English 'h' has dwindled from its former throat-clearing rasp to a barely-there aspiration; hence "Of other men's hearts," where I mean Other to alliterate with Hearts. I've taken a few other liberties that an Old English poet would not have allowed himself -- in "He imagines he embraces his lord," for instance, I allowed iMagine to alliterate with emBrace, because to my ear the 'b' in embrace, smothered between its 'm' and 'r', is nearly the same sound as the strong 'm' of imagine. And for me 's' alliterates with 'sp' and 'st', if it has to. Cynewulf would shudder.

The Wanderer (I)

At the beach I got maybe halfway through translating The Wanderer, an Old English poem from the 10th Century or thereabouts. Since I reckon most people would prefer to get it in bite-size pieces, if at all, I'll post as I go along, with comments as I please. It's about five pages long. Below is first installment.

Translating Old English alliterative poetry into Modern English alliterative poetry is relatively easy. Sometimes the alliteration can be lifted wholesale from the original: vowels shift around a lot more than consonants, over the centuries, and usually one or more of the heavily-stressed, alliterating words that carry the heaviest charge of meaning in a line has a direct descendant to build a Modern English line around. Alliteration in any case is far easier than rhyme in any Germanic language.

The difficulty is in capturing the rhythm. Modern English, having lost most of its inflections, is afflicted with a swelling rash of articles and prepositions, little unstressed words that we can't do without -- and keep a remotely natural-sounding diction -- but which wreck the pattern of Old English sound. The usual rhythm of Old English goes BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom; the usual rhythm of Modern English is more like bom BOM bom bom BOM bom bom BOM bom. The brilliant effects of iambic pentameter are founded on the interplay between the theoretical five stressed syllables of a line and the actual two or three that Modern English supplies. I have found it difficult to break the pentameter habit, but it seems critical to me, to catch even a ghost of the Old English, to have two strong stresses in each half-line, with a strong caesura in between. The problem is that this bloats the line. I've switched back and forth several times between breaking my "long alliterative line" into two lines -- which feels a little juvenile and jerky -- and keeping lines that feel a little too long. (The solution that immediately occurred to me, of course, was to adopt William Blake's magnificent fourteeners; but this was a disaster. Its rhythm is even further away from that of Old English verse, very Miltonic, very latinate. No go.)

What I found myself doing was occasionally falling into a "hypometric" couplet or two -- lines with only two major stresses -- but keeping for the most part the basic form of "four stresses with a hole in the middle" that Seamus Heaney used for his translation of Beowulf. I have a feeble excuse for this variation: something like it occurs, if not very often, in Old English poetry -- isolated so-called "half-lines," with double alliteration. More common are "hypermetric" lines -- in which each half-line has three heavy stresses, rather than two -- when it wants to slow down and become graver: the last five lines of The Wanderer are in "hypermetric" verse. That's not really a valid precedent. Really I'm just following George Orwell's rhetorical dictum, that one should break any rule rather than say something downright barbarous.

The real rhythm of Old English verse is simply not reproducible in Modern English: it has to do with how two long, stressed syllables crowd each other or back away from each other within the half-line. Maybe I'll take Rachel's suggestion and try to produce an audio file of The Wanderer in the original, so you can hear it. I know of nothing like it in the modern poetry of romance or germanic languages.

Here is the beginning of The Wanderer:

Often a friendless man must wait it out for favor,
The Measurer's mercy, although, troubled in mind,
He must for a long while, over the water,
Stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
Wander in exile: Wyrd has all been spoken.

Metod, "the Measurer," is the old Pagan name for personified Fate (Old English "Wyrd"), adopted easily, here, into an epithet for the Christian God. Anglo-Saxon England was remarkable for the smoothness of its transition to Christianity -- it was fortunate in its missionaries, who were broadminded, tactful men, more inclined to assimilate Pagan thought and practice than to challenge it. Early scholars of Old English, who were eager to reconstruct a Pagan past, and who had a Protestant prejudice against the medieval Church, tended to see, in poems such as this one, Pagans pretending to be Christian. In the last generation or two a more sophisticated understanding has developed, which sees this Christianity as deep and sincere, though certainly colored by the Pagan understanding of fate.

So said the earth-stepper, remembering hardships,
And the fall of his family
In savage slaughter.

Often I have told my trouble to the dawn;
There is no living creature now
That I can talk to freely. I know for a fact
It is a better habit to keep your heart's cage locked --
To keep your mind's wallet closed -- think what you will.
A worn out heart cannot withstand Wyrd
And a disordered mind mends nothing.
Someone who wants to be thought well of
Binds his unhappiness up tight in his breast.

The shift from third person into first person is as unexpected in the original as it looks here. Translators sometimes deal with it by putting quotation marks at the beginning of the poem, but then you have to decide where they end, and where they begin again, and so on; the first person speaker seems to come in and out of focus throughout the poem. The effect to me is dreamlike and satisfying; I feel no particular need to sort out narrators and tidily assign speeches to them.

So I have hidden my heart-spirit
Miserable with care, cut off from home,
Far from my family, bound in fetters;
Since I wrapped my gold-friend, years ago,
In the darkness of earth, and I, abject,
Went from there, winter-troubled,
Over the lacing waves, looking, hall-sick,
For where I might find, far or near,
A master in a mead hall
Who knew of me and mine,
Or who would comfort a man of no kindred,
Welcome him warmly. Wise men know
How cruel a companion sorrow is
For a man meager in patrons.
He is attended by exile, not golden armrings;
A frozen heart-cage, not the flowering earth.
He remembers hall-friends and receiving treasure;
How in his young days his gold-friend
Accustomed him to feasting: all joy fails.

"Gold-friend" means king, liege-lord -- an Anglo-Saxon king traditionally rewarded his thanes according to their bravery in battle, typically with gold arm-rings (though it might be anything -- horses, land, anything valuable). The relationship between lord and thane was an intense one, even a passionate one. Becoming lordless is generally the worst calamity an Old English poet can imagine.

More anon...