Among the treasures of the British Museum is a manuscript which
contains four anonymous poems, apparently of common authorship: "The
Pearl," "Cleanness," "Patience," "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight."
From the language of the writer, it seems clear that he was a native
of some Northwestern district of England, and that he lived in the
second half of the Fourteenth Century. He is quite unknown, save as
his work reveals him, a man of aristocratic breeding, of religious and
secular education, of a deeply emotional and spiritual nature, gifted
with imagination and perception of beauty. He shows a liking for
technique that leads him to adopt elaborate devices of rhyme, while
retaining the alliteration characteristic of Northern Middle English
verse. He wrote as was the fashion of his time, allegory, homily,
lament, chivalric romance, but the distinction of his poetry is that
of a finely accentuated individuality.
The poems called "Cleanness" and "Patience," retell incidents of
biblical history for a definitely didactic purpose, but even these are
frequently lifted into the region of imaginative literature by the
author's power of graphic description. "Sir Gawayne and the Green
Knight" is a priceless contribution to Arthurian story. "The Pearl,"
though it takes the form of symbolic narrative, is essentially lyric
and elegiac, the lament, it would seem, of a father for a little,
long-lost daughter.
The present translation of "The Pearl" was begun with no larger design
than that of turning a few passages into modern English, by way of
illustrating to a group of students engaged in reading the original,
the possibility of preserving intricate stanzaic form, and something
of alliteration, without an entire sacrifice of poetic beauty. The
experiment was persisted in because its problems are such as baffle
and fascinate a translator, and the finished version is offered not
merely to students of Middle English but to college classes in the
history of English literature, and to non-academic readers.
If "The Pearl" presented no greater obstacle to a modern reader than
is offered by Chaucer's English, a translation might be a gratuitous
task, but the Northwest-Midland dialect of the poem is, in fact,
incomparably more difficult than the diction of Chaucer, more
difficult even than that of Langland. The meaning of many passages
remains obscure, and a translator is often forced to choose what seems
the least dubious among doubtful readings.
The poem in the original passes frequently from imaginative beauty to
conversational commonplace, from deep feeling to didactic aphorism or
theological dogma, and it has been my endeavor faithfully to interpret
these variations of matter and of style, sometimes substituting modern
colloquialisms for such as are obsolete, or in other ways paraphrasing
a stubborn passage, but striving never to polish the dullest lines nor
to strengthen the weakest.
A reader who will observe the difficult rhyming scheme, a scheme that
calls for six words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand
the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer
in even "The Faerie Queene." These padded lines are a serious blemish
to the poem, but the introduction of naïve and familiar expressions is
one of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in
Paradise[1] that among beatified spirits there can be no rivalry,
exclaims: "The more the merrier."[2]
The translation may, at many points, need apology, but the original
needs only explanation. Readers familiar with mediæval poetry expect
to encounter moral platitudes and theological subtlety. Dogma takes
large and vital place in the sublimest cantos of Dante's "Paradise,"
and the English poet is consciously following his noblest master when
he puts a sermon into the lips of his "little queen." To modern ears
such exposition is at harsh discord with the simple human grief and
longing of the poet, but to the mediaevalist symbolic theology was a
passion. Precisely in the moment when she begins a discourse
concerning the doctrine of redemption, Beatrice turns upon Dante "eyes
that might make a man happy in the fire," and at its close he looks
upon her and beholds her "grow more beautiful."[3] If even Beatrice
has been considered mere personification, it is natural that the Pearl
should be so regarded, but the plain reader finds in the symbolic
maiden of the English poem, as in the transfigured lady of the
Italian, some record of a human being whose loss was anguish, and
whose presence rapture, to a poet long ago.
The lover of things mediæval will find in this little book not only
the familiar garden of Guillaume de Lorris, of Boccaccio and of
Chaucer, but an unexpected and enchanting vision of great forest and
rushing water, of hillside and plain, of crystal cliffs and
flame-winged birds; of the Pearl among her white peers; of the
Apocalyptic Jerusalem, discovered to the poet, it may be, as a goodly
Gothic city, though its walls are built of precious stone, and its
towers rise from neither church nor minster.
If even a few readers turn from the modern to the original version,
the translation will have had fair fortune, for the author of "The
Pearl" is, though unknown and unnamed, a poet second only to Chaucer
in Chaucer's generation.
It is a pleasure to record my many debts of gratitude: to Professor
Frank H. Chase of Beloit, Professor John L. Lowes of Swarthmore, and
Dr. Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, for their careful reading of the
translation in manuscript, with invaluable assistance and suggestion;
to Professor Martha Hale Shackford, and Miss Laura A. Hibbard, for
constant aid while the work was in making, and, above all, to
Professor Katharine Lee Bates for a critical, line by line, comparison
of this version with the original.
[Footnote 1: Par. III.]
[Footnote 2: Pearl, stanza 71.]
[Footnote 3: Par. VII, II. 17-18; Par. VIII, I. 15.]
S.J.
WELLESLEY COLLEGE,
June, 1908.
EDITIONS: R. Morris, Early English text Sc. 1864; I. Gollancz, London,
1891; C.G. Osgood, Boston, 1906 (with admirable introduction, etc.).
TRANSLATIONS: Gollancz (above); S. Weir Mitchell, New York, 1906
(poetic, but incomplete); G.G. Coulton, London, 1906 (metre of the
original); C.G. Osgood, Princeton, 1907 (prose).