sīþ, wræcsīþ : Literal or Figurative? Considerations on Genre and Gender Conventions in Translating from Old English

The Old English poem The Wife’s Lament is an extremely conventional and, at the same time, original text. It portrays a female character suffering for the absence of her loved one, through the framework of the so-called ‘elegiac’ style and a mainly heroic vocabulary. The traditional exile theme is, thus, interwoven with the uncommon motif of love sickness. While this appraisal of the poem is the most widely accepted one, disagreement still remains about the translation of some key- words, strictly related to the exile theme, such as sīþ or wræcsīþ . The aim of this paper is to examine diverging readings and glosses of the above mentioned ‘exilic/elegiac’ keywords, and to show that an accurate translation should not neglect a thorough appraisal of the text in its complexity and the association with related literary patterns and imagery in other poetic and prose texts. Summary 1 Introduction. – 2 Aim of this Paper. – 3 The Opening Lines of the WL and the Word sīð. – 4 Fashioning the sīð as Banishment. – 5 Sense of Movement and Digressions in the WL . – 6 Final Temarks.


Introduction
The Wife's Lament (WL), an Old English poem in 53 alliterating long lines, found in the Codex Exoniensis (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501 fols. 115 r-v ), 1 is about a woman who suffers because she has been separated from her husband, probably a chieftain or a man from the ruling class in his land. For unknown reasons, she is forced to become an outcast and to dwell in an earth-cave under an oak-tree, in an unfamiliar and deserted region. The WL shares many features with a group of poems conventionally labelled as Old English elegies, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer. 2 Despite the many similarities with other elegies, the WL is almost unique in the entire Old English poetic corpus. Its speaker is a woman, as is revealed by the feminine adjectival endings in the first lines; furthermore, the poem focuses on love sufferings and sexual desire, which are very unusual topics in Old English (Magennis 1995), with the exception of two other short poetic texts, Wulf and Eadwacer and The Husband's Message, included in the Exeter Book as well. As female voices are not so often heard in Old English poetry (with the exception of the above mentioned Wulf and Eadwacer) and despite the material proof, the first editors (Conybeare 1826;Thorpe 1842;Schücking 1906) of the poem simply ignored, or failed to recognise the female voice of the poem. In more recent times, a few scholars have again tried to dismiss the female identity of the speaker, on the basis of the cultural and social conditions of that time (Bambas 1963), or on purely literary evidence (Stevens 1968;Mandel 1987, 152-5). 3

Aim of this Paper
In the present paper I wish to address one problem associated with this poem: namely, how to read and translate some lexemes occurring in its opening lines. In dealing with the WL, I had the opportunity to compare many translations of the poem, mainly in modern English, and also consulted some common Old English readers, with appended glossaries; I realised, with some disappointment, that the majority of translators and glossators made some translational choices, which I was unable to understand or could not agree with. 4 Part of these unsatisfactory interpretations concern the opening lines of the text, and particularly the lexemes sīþ 'voyage', and wraecsīþ 'journey of exile', which, together with wineleas wraecca 'a friendless outcast', a phrase occurring a few lines later, contribute to creating a certain expectation about the poem itself, and recall a definite web of images, which may be found in other poetic texts. These words are relevant both to the 2 Common features of the 'elegies' are a first person speaker, a gloomy atmosphere, an unfriendly natural environment, a sense of loss and separation, feelings of loneliness and isolation. A 'working' definition of 'elegy' was first provided by Greenfield (1966, 143); and later by Klinck (1984, 130); however, the existence of such an Old English genre has been questioned several times (Mora 1995;Ashurst 2010, 136-9;Fulk, Cain 2013, 259).
3 For a survey of the main critical issues raised by the WL see Klinck (2001, 49-54;177-88); Niles (2003Niles ( , 1107; Kinch (2006, 121-6). 4 Translations and readers are listed, in chronological order, in the appendix to this paper, together with the passages and interpretamenta under examination. domain of 'voyage', 'travelling abroad' and, at the same time, and more meaningfully, to the imagery of 'exile', 'wandering in exile', a very common theme in the Old English poetic corpus, not only in secular poetry, but in religious poems as well.

The Opening Lines of the WL and the Word sīð
The opening lines of the WL introduce the topic of the poem: the first person speaker declares she will tell the audience about herself and her present and past sufferings. In this way the giedd, 'song, story, narration', takes the form of a lament on the speaker's own sorrows, and, according to her utterances, subject of this 'song' will also be her own sið (quoted from Leslie 1988 According to Bosworth, Toller (1898, 878) sīþ could be translated as 1) 'going, journeying, travel', but also 2) 'a journey, voyage, course, expedition'. In a more abstract meaning, without any reference to motion, it could also be glossed as 3) 'proceeding, course of action, way of doing, conduct', and still as 4) 'lot, condition, fate, experience' or 'course of events'.
Most scholars, commentators and translators do not read sīþ according to its basic meaning, as 'travel, voyage', probably in order to give the word a connotation more in agreement with the general tone of the opening lines, and the statements of sorrow uttered by the speaker. Thus I have found 'Schicksal' (Schücking 1919), 'my own experience' (Mackie 1934), 'the tale of my trouble' (Kennedy 1939), 'my own course' (Malone 1963), 'lot' or 'condition' (Curry 1966, 5 'lot, plight' (Cassidy, Ringler 1971), 'experience, trial' (Pope, Fulk 2001), 'my own distress' (Hamer 2006). The Italian scholars also chose to render the phrase in a more emotional way, so we find 'il mio destino' (Ricci 1921), 'la mia dolorosa esperienza' (Sanesi 1975). It is also interesting to evaluate how the first translators and editors of the WL interpreted sīþ in their anthologies. So in Conybeare's first translation and editio princeps of the Exeter Book (1826) mīnre sylfre sīð is translated as 'my own journeyings', while Thorpe (1842)  neither Conybeare nor Thorpe recognised, from the adjectival inflections in the opening lines, that the speaker was a woman. The opening lines of the WL have often been compared with the very first verses of the Old English elegy The Seafarer, which are similar in content and diction, sharing a few keywords and phrases and some identical lexemes, such as sīþ and -gied (quoted from Cucina 2008; Author's translation and emphases): Maeg ic be mē sylfum sōðgied wrecan sīþas secgan, hū ic in geswincdagum earfoðhwīle oft þrōwade; bitre brēostceare gebiden haebbe, gecunnad in cēole cearselda fela I will sing a true song about myself, tell of my travels, how in days of sorrows, I oft suffered times of hardships; bitter hearth cares I endured, I experienced on a ship many places of anxiety Among the modern anthologists, Hamer (2006) prefers to translate the wording sīþas secgan of The Seafarer as 'tell my travels', while, as we have seen, he understood the wording mīnre sylfre sīþ of the female speaker in the WL as 'my own distress'. Cassidy, Ringler (1971) list in their glossary different meanings for sīþ in both occurrences: given the general meaning 'journey', they record the gloss 'experience, trial' for the lexeme sīþas, occurring at the beginning of The Seafarer, and 'lot, plight' for the sīð, in the opening lines of the WL. Pope, Fulk (2001) attribute to sīþ the general meaning 'travel, journey, voyage', but they prefer to give to both occurrences, in the opening lines of the WL and The Seafarer, the meaning 'experience, trial'. Other scholars give the general meaning 'travel, journey' to the word sīþ, but then specify a distinctive rendering for the WL as 'my own experience' (Mitchell, Robinson 2007), or as 'plight' (Baker 2007). In this way, we can notice that most translators and glossators of the WL ascribe a meaning to the word sīþ that does not correspond to its basic or literal sense, as given in the first glosses by Bosworth, Toller (1898, 878) and, at the same time, some of them interpret the word in a different way, according to different poetic contexts.

Fashioning the sīð as Banishment
The lexeme wraecsīþa, '[of my] exile-journeys', occurs at line 5 of the WL, and, a few lines later, we find the alliterating formula winelēas wraecca 'friendless exile'. 6 Wraecsīþ appears a second time in the poem (at line 38), as the speaker portrays herself sitting in sorrow, inside an earth-cave, weeping for her despairing situation: Wraecsīþ is a compound of wraec 'punishment, misery, exile' and sīþ; its basic meaning is 'exile-journey' or 'journey into exile'; it is also etymologically linked to the word wraecca 'exile, outcast', which follows a few lines below. Bosworth, Toller (1898, 1269 list three different interpretations of this lexeme: I) 'travel in a foreign land, peregrination'; II) 'exile, banishment', III) 'misery, wretchedness'. While in the dictionary we find a large number of instances of the word in the first two mentioned meanings, 7 the third gloss occurs only three times. 8 Some of the translations I compared did not express wraecsiþ with 'exile', 'path of exile' or 'travel into exile', but had markedly different readings, as for example 'Unglück' (in both instances, Schücking 1919), 'sorrows', 'miseries' (Mackie 1934), 'miseries', 'hardships' (Malone 1963), 'durissime pene', 'miserie' (Sanesi 1975); in his edition Leslie (1988) glossed the word as 'misery' too. 9 Almost half of the translators and commentators decided to render the word in agreement with its etymology, as 'exile' or 'wandering (in exile)', in one or both occurrences, so too Thorpe (1842, 'wanderings', only the first instance), Ricci (1921, 'lo straziante mio esilio'), Kennedy (1939, 'exile', only  It is also remarkable to learn how some translators explain their readings of the word. Curry (1966, 198) rejects the first two meanings given by Bosworth, Toller (1898, 1269, 'travels in a foreign land' or 'exile, banishment', and prefers to read the word as 'wretchedness', since "neither of the first two meanings fit the extent or nature of all of the possible variations in interpretation of the speaker's situation"; according to this scholar, 'wretchedness', on the other hand, seems to echo the words of the female speaker at the beginning of her utterance (bī mē ful geōmorre), "and anticipates the feeling of the song itself". Even if the word is glossed by Cassidy and Ringler (1971, 344) according to the general meaning as 'exile-journey, exile', two alternative explanations of the sentence are proposed, in a footnote beneath the text itself: "I always got pain in return for my exile-journeys", or "always I suffered (the) torment of my miseries". Morrison (2000, 23) considered these discrepancies as the result of a gendered approach concerning the female speaker: in this way, the different readings of sīþ and wraecsīþ are explained as the effect of the application of the dominant, heroic model. Namely, according to Hennesey-Olsen (cit. in Morrison 2000, 23) "the concept of genre influences the way that we read particular works, but preconceptions about the genre of a work can prevent us from reading that work, except as it has been read traditionally […] many readers view Anglo-Saxon men as active and heroic and women as negatives […] in a heroic, brightly illuminated male world". In this way, while an identical word is rendered neutral for a male agent, it suggests passivity and suffering for a female agent (Morrison 2000, 23). 10 As a matter of fact, a gendered reading could also explain the different interpretation of words such as sīþ or wraecsīþ in different poetic contexts, as in the WL or the so called 'male' elegies. But such a suggestion could be disputed on the ground of Conybeare's and Thorpe's translations. Both thought of the speaker as a male agent, and nevertheless they did express the lexeme sīþ in different ways, respectively as 'journeyings' and 'fortune'. On the other hand, the great majority of the interpreters and translators somehow considers a non-literal or figurative reading of both lexemes as the most suitable. This is particularly true of the word sīþ, to which many abstract meanings have been given, such as 'fortune', 'Schicksal', 'destino', 'experience', 'lot', 'course', 'esperienza'. Some of them are also more or less deeply emotion-charged, such as'trouble', 'plight', 'trial', 'distress', 'sorrow'. In my own translation I chose 'my own path' as the most fitting way to render mīnre sylfre sīð, in order to give an interpretation, whose literal meaning does not preclude a less material or metaphoric reading. As mentioned above, as far as the 'technical', exilic term wraecsīþ is concerned, many translators and interpreters chose an abstract or metaphoric reading ('Unglück' 'sorrows', 'miseries', 'hardships' 'durissime pene','wretchedness'), in agreement with the speaker's own sorrows. This could moreover be a suitable interpretative choice, since an outcast 10 Some scholars define the behaviour of the female speaker of the WL in terms of a 'dignified passivity' (see e.g. Niles 2003Niles , 1116. On the gendered nature of the theme of exile in Old English poetry see, among others, Belanoff (1990), Bennett (1994) and, more recently, Klein (2006). has surely his/her own share of unhappiness and sorrows during his/her solitary journeys, far from homeland and friends.
In the following paragraph I will try to take a closer look at the text of the WL, and explain why I believe that those translations, ascribing to the word sīþ an abstract or metaphoric meaning (such as 'plight', 'lot', distress'), are somehow lacking of a thorough interpretation of the short poem as a whole.

Sense of Movement and Digressions in the WL
If we analyse the text, and examine more closely what the speaker declares, we perceive an idea of motion, especially in the first part of the poem. This consideration is also emphasized by Jensen (1990, 452-453), who states: "when we examine the poem as a whole, a pattern emerges: we see a progressively narrowing focus in the imagery, a movement that begins in the first lines of the poem and culminates in the earth-cave".
Concerning the idea of travelling abroad, conveyed by the word sīþ, by which at first the speaker describes her life, we can see that both the speaker and her husband are first seen in movement, he ofer yða gelac, 'over the tossing waves', and she as a winelēas wraecca, 'a friendless outcast', in search of a retinue. In this way the movement made by the wife parallels that of her husband, who went forth from his people, as the woman states a few lines before.
A second image connected with space and movement suggests a wider setting, involving indefinite spaces: the man and the speaker are separated 'as far apart as possible in the world', since the man's relatives conspired to separate them. This image is also evoked by the indirect questioning of the speaker about the present location of her husband: he must be somewhere, in a distant land, far from his country, and his people, in an unknown place. A third type of movement is represented in the poem by the progressive concentrating of the narrator on the place of her dwelling, and of her ultimate stasis. She is commanded to take her place in a desolate region, where she has no friends at all, and suffers loneliness. This place is first referred to as þissum londstede, 'this region', but a few lines later (27), she begins to describe her new dwelling in detail, first as a sorrowful forest grove; but, from the more generalised image of a wood, the narrator moves to a specific oak-tree, under which she is confined in an 'underground cave' (eorðscraefe, 28). After a short pause, the speaker gives us more details about this unfriendly place, which she now calls eorðsele (29, 'earth-hall'), describing its surroundings (dark valleys, high hills, sharp town-walls overgrown with briars). So we have followed the speaker in her shift from the journey, to the country of her exile, to the forest, and finally to the earth-cave, where she looks outward to that oppressive location. Only at this point does the woman depict herself, in spite of the closed environment of her dwelling, as walking alone at dawn through the earthcaves, while she suffers for her abandonment. The image apparently conveys an idea of acceptance of her sorrowful situation but, at the same time, she reveals the impossibility for her to rest under the weight of her passionate desire for the absent man. At the end of the poem, the woman imagines her husband sitting in a desolate environment, under a cliff over the sea, surrounded by water, in unfriendly climatic conditions. In this way, while at the beginning of the poem, both wife and husband are seen as travelling abroad, at the end her present stasis and impossibility to move correspond to the supposed, ultimate location of her husband.
Some other poetic analogues show striking similarities with the passages from the WL, containing the lexemes wraecsīþ, wraecca and sīþ. At this point I will briefly introduce the Old English poem known with the title of Resignation B. Also contained in the Exeter Book, this poem shares with both the WL and The Seafarer similarities in the use of phrases and words, even if they occur in the middle of the text and not at its beginning: 11 Here a first person speaker, like the female speaker of the WL, announces his intention to utter his 'sad song' (sārspel), and, like the woman, he will relate a sið 'voyage'. In this case the voyage has not been accomplished yet, and the speaker, a would-be traveller, wishes to undertake his seajourney, if he only had money and a boat. This envisaged voyage of exile has the feature both of a peregrinatio pro amore Dei as well as of a metaphoric journey to the heavenly homeland (Greenfield, Calder 1986, 289). The exile is fashioned as a kind of relief from the speaker's present sufferings. If we credit the speaker of Resignation with his imaginary journey, why should we not consider trustworthy the wife's utterance regarding her already accomplished wanderings? 12 Tradurre: un viaggio nel tempo, 93-112 e-ISSN 2610-9441 ISSN 2610-945X

Final Remarks
Each translator's choice is acceptable and debatable at the same time, and the difficulties in translating from Old English are known. Furthermore, the WL is not an easy task for each interpreter, due to its elusive language and its complex syntax. The translations I compared also have different features: line to line paraphrases, prose renditions, even blank verse and modern alliterating versions. 13 Obviously, metrical and prosodic requirements could, in some way, influence the lexical choices of the translators. As I have shown in a couple of examples, 14 such words as sīþ, wraecsīþ, wraecca construct a web of images that recalls other poems and texts and creates meaning, placing a story in a recognisable horizon. Exile and travel imagery permeate the Old English poetic corpus: the use of such terms in the WL, even by a female speaker, is clearly a conventional device, which allows the author, whether male or female, to shape a familiar pattern for his/her audience, who were assuredly well acquainted with the hardships of travelling abroad, and of living alone, far apart from friends and relatives. Even though most of glossators and translators seek for a non-literal or figurative rendering of the word sīþ in the WL, its basic meaning 'travel, journey' in the poem "makes good sense and goes well with the general exile theme" (Rissanen 1969, 93), and, I would add, is in perfect agreement with the speaker's words. Leaving out the basic ideas of 'journey' and 'exile' is a disservice to our understanding of the poem. Furthermore, translating sīþ as 'journey' or 'path', or wraecsīþ as 'exile-journey' or 'banishment', does not exclude the metaphoric and symbolic value of those terms, a value they have for us, even in our everyday speech, and as they probably also had for an Old English audience.  Krapp, Dobbie (1961) and Krapp (1961) [Author's translations]. The Old English De consolatione philosophiae (I,10) also has an interesting analogue to lines 38-9 of the WL, since it outlines the afflictions of Boethius in strikingly similar fashion, using both earfoðe 'sufferings' and wraecsīþ: Hē is swīðe sārig for dīnum earfoðum and for dīnum wraecsīþe (He is very sad for your troubles and your banishment); quotations from Irvine, Godden (2012) (Author's translations).

I added a summary description of each translation in the appendix.
14 Above all The Seafarer and Resignation B, but also the poems and texts quoted at notes Appendix: Keywords Translation -WL 1-5, 9-10, 38-9a Original text from: Leslie, R.F. [1961;] (1988 The author prefers to translate sīð as 'lot' or 'condition' because they "are more expressive of the speaker's concern. 'Fate' would also be acceptable, but in its finality contradicts the hope of reunion which may be read in the abīdan of l. 53b". Curry also proposes for mīnra wraecsīþa 'wretchedness' "as neither of the first meanings in Bosworth, Toller fit the extent or nature of all the possible variations in interpretation of the speaker's situation. 'Wretchedness', on the other hand, is an effective echo of ful geōmorre and anticipates the feeling of the song itself". 11 Leslie, R.F. [1961;] (1988 12 Alexander, M. [1966;1977 18 Mitchell, B. ;Robinson, F.C. [1964;1968;1982;1992;2001