Pearl

Reviews / Votes

'The language is marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original, gorgeous and natural this old poem can be.'

David Morley, Poetry Review 'Draycott's version is compellingly human.'

Lachlan Mackinnon, Times Literary Supplement 'A host of subtle and spellbinding effects, testament to Draycott's skill as a poet as well as her grasp of grief's psychological realities'

Theophilus Kwek, The North The four poems in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x. art. 3 are known to students of medieval literature with the modern titles Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the poet often referred to as the 'Pearl Poet' or the 'Gawain Poet'. Much has been written about the four poems and about the manuscript, about the fascinating set of images contained therein, with much of the attention directed at the remarkable Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The beautiful poem that opens the manuscript, however, has certainly been less studied. It has also been less translated: Marie Borroff published one in 1977, Vantuono in 1983 and Casey Finch produced one in 1993. These translations are for the most part by professional academics and medievalists, while one can point to translations of Gawain by contemporary poets, such as Armitage or Merwin. This situation has now happily changed with the wonderful translation by the English poet Jane Draycott. Introduced by the medievalist and poet Bernard O'Donoghue, the short poem is rendered with a great simplicity and power. It is a dream vision in which the narrator laments the loss of his pearl, often thought to be his little daughter. During his vision he sees her across a stream and begins a dialogue with her. She explains what he sees and comforts him, clarifying what he cannot understand. The poem's masterful control is most evident in having the narrator continue to not understand, and when he attempts to cross the stream to be with his pearl, he wakes up. Bereft. The poem is technically extraordinary: written in an alliterative meter, with 101 stanzas of 12-lines, divided into five-stanza sections. It turns on a series of what are called concatenating rhymes, where the rhyme-word ending one section will begin the next section, and where the word's sense is stretched and elongated with dazzling dexterity.

The first stanza (ll. 1-12; f. 39r in the manuscript) amply demonstrates Jane Draycott's skill:

Perle plesaunte, to prynces paye

To clanly clos in golde so clere:

Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,

Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.

So rounde, so reken in vche araye,

So smal, so smo?e her sydez were;

Queresoeuer I jugged gemmez gaye

I sette hyr sengeley in synglure.

Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;

?ur? gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.

I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere

Of ?at pryuy perle withouten spot.

One thing I know for certain: that she

was peerless, pearl who would have added

light to any prince's life

however bright with gold. None

could touch the way she shone

in any light, so smooth, so small -

she was a jewel above all others.

So pity me the day I lost her

in this garden where she fell

beneath the grass into the earth.

I stand bereft, struck to the heart

with love and loss. My spotless pearl.

Look at the boldness of that opening line, the sense of certainty and incomprehension, the way she captures the emphasis of this first stanza, its almost hypnotic beat of statement after statement. I love the way it seems to rise and fall. I think that that 'I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere' translated as 'I stand bereft, struck to the heartwith love and loss' is just magnificent, where the enjambment renders the line more powerful (as O'Donoghue rightly sees in his introduction, p. 8). Great poems can make for great translations, other great poems really. Read this great translation because it is also a great poem.

http://miglior-acque.blogspot.com/2011/04/jane-draycott-pearl-carcanet-2011.html The miracle of their music.

Pearl is a victim of sibling rivalry. Had the British Library manuscript Cotton Nero A x contained only Pearl, Patience and Cleanness, Pearl would have stood as the major nineteenth-century discovery in Middle English poetry. But it also contained Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The apparently greater accessibility of this last, and the reasonable assumption that they were all the work of one author, has given Sir Gawain a misleading pre-eminence.

Jane Draycott's version of Pearl is therefore very welcome. Her method is to render the original stanza by stanza, rather than line by line, which allows her to adjust the poem's syntax to modern expectations - she can avoid inversion, and so forth. She uses a normally four-beat line, as does the original, and alliterates only as it comes naturally, where the original does so throughout. At times, her version is remarkably beautiful. For instance, in the original,

Fowles ther flowen in fryth in fere,

Of flaumbande hewes, both smale and grete

Bot sytole-stryng and gyternere

Her reken myrthe moght not retrete;

Fir quen those bryddes her wynges bete,

Thay songen with a swete asent.

I particularly admired Draycott's version:

In the forest, birds with feathers the colour

of flame flew together. The woodland rang

with the rush and ring of their beating wings

and the harmony of their song.

No instrument could imitate

the miracle of their music.

The citole and its descendent cittern vanish, a sensible decision, and the slightly enamelled original is given a modern sensuousness. The much higher proportion of run-on lines in the new version helps give a forward movement to the tale the poem tells, needed perhaps for a readership less concerned with theology and less likely to enjoy debates about it. Adeptly throughout, Draycott gives us the story of the speaker's grief for his lost infant daughter, his lost pearl, his vision of her, his theological argument with her, his vision of the New Jerusalem and his subsequent waking. The awkward relation between living father and dead, enlightened daughter is conveyed, as is the father's inability wholly to accept what he must, either in this world or metaphysically. Draycott's version is compellingly human. But it remains only a story. Critics fruitfully argue about whether the pearl is allegorical or symbolic; now, it can only be symbolic, because we have lost the tradition of layered allegorical reading and there is no way to indicate it in the text. On this, as on a number of points, I wanted something much more substantial than Bernard O'Donoghue's brief introduction.

Inevitably there are other losses. The first is that Draycott does not reproduce the astonishing formal complexity of the original. 'Perle' is the original's first word; here, 'pearl' arrives in the second line. In the first of the poem's twenty sections, she ends the first four stanzas with 'spotless pearl', reproducing the original 'perle wythouten spot'. Her fifth stanza ends 'My girl', though, undoing the repetition and clarifying what the original does not. We know from this more about what has been lost than the original discloses, although the ambiguous sense in which 'My girl' might be a lover as well as a daughter intelligently picks up the speaker's use of occasionally amorous diction. In the original, 'Spot' is picked up, meaning 'place', at the start of the next section, another part of the binding together of the poem which vanishes here. Draycott has only 'place'.

Although it rhymes occasionally, this is essentially an unrhymed version. The four-beat line of the original often moves towards iambic tetrameter, an effect Draycott reproduces. Some editors have, mistakenly, tried to tidy the whole thing into iambics, missing an essential tension. The elaborate stanza form belongs to a newer poetic than the line's, as the speaker must look forward to a new life. His difficulty in shedding his past is mirrored by the Pearl-poet's nostalgic use of the older line and a declining north-west Midlands dialect, an effect which cannot perhaps be achieved in any modern version. And yet, this will deservedly become the form in which most people read Pearl. It is all the more regrettable that it has not been supplied with the editorial matter that would explain how a modern rendering can, at best, be only a shadow of the original, for the Pearl-poet, had he written nothing else, would stand among the greatest writers in the English language. Part of the same 14th century manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, also written in its dialect, Pearl is an intricately wrought 1200-line elegaic poem. A father grieves for his small daughter, dead before her second birthday. Anyone who has ever read this wrenchingly beautiful vision of love, and bereavement, and the consolation of faith, knows that historians lie when they say parents in times of high infant mortality didn't care very much for the little ones they lost. Jane Draycott's fresh version of this anonymous masterpiece is the best available. The glamour, even glitz, of its view of paradise across the river of death dazzles as never before in modern English. And the sadness of the father; 'exhiled from the country/ of eternity', just breaks the heart. The manuscript labelled Cotton Nero A.x in the British Library contains four narrative poems written in a West Midlands dialect in the latter part of the 14th century. We know the names of the poems - 'Pearl', 'Cleanness', 'Patience', and 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' - but not the name of the poet, which is a tad unfortunate, as 'Pearl' and 'Gawain' are two of the brightest jewels of Middle English literature.

Pearl is an elegy by a father for his dead daughter, in the form of a religious dream vision, made popular by the 'Roman de la Rose', in 1,212 alliterative lines of 12 line octosyllabic stanzas. 'From the point of view of its metrical form', argued AC Cawley and JJ Anderson in their edition of the poem published by Dent in 1977, '"Pearl" is probably the most complex poem written in English'. Kenneth Sisam, in Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, said: 'If 'Piers Plowman' gives a realistic picture of the drabness of Medieval life, "Pearl" shows a richness of imagery and a luxuriance in light and colour that seem scarcely English.'

Jane Draycott, whose collections include Prince Rupert's Drop, The Night Tree and Over, wanted 'to move away from the striuct regularity of the original towards a more fluid and echoing character'. Bernard O'Donoghue, in his introduction, praises her achievement as 'a rare model of how to modernise and be faithful at the same time'.

Her translation, while not as good an undergraduate crib as that of JRR Rolkien in 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', 'Pearl' and 'Sir Orfeo' (Allen & Unwin, 1975), is nontheless imaginatively and elegantly done, as was clear when the first two sections were published as a taster a couple of years ago in Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by David and Helen Constantine.

Here are two examples of the beauty, and the precision, of her poetry: 'Like the moment when the moon appears / before the dropping light of day'; 'And through this watching sears my heart / and wrings the wires of sadness tighter, / still the song this silence sings me / is the sweetest I have heard'. There's a lot of Medieval theology, too; trying, as Milton put it, 'to justify the ways of God to me': 'So we were damned / to die in midery, deprived of light / and dragged down to the fires of hell / to dwell there with no refuge or escape / until the end of our long agony / arrived as holy blood and water / running on a rough and cruel cross', but Draycott handles it with aplomb.

Her version of 'Pearl' should be set beside the Simon Armitage 'Gawain' and Seamus Heaney's translation of the Old English epic 'Beowulf' for making our native, Early English, alliterative tradition fresh for the 21st century.