Four riddles from the Exeter Book, translated from Old English by Evan Klavon

Translator’s note:
Riddles confront us with unfamiliar perspectives, disguising what in testing wisdom of how. Objects themselves narrate strange attributes and behavior, then finally demand “What am I?” To have one’s sense of the familiar reoriented and enriched by thousand-year-old riddles is to be reminded of continuities in the powers of human imagination and insight.

My versions of these four Old English poems from the Exeter Book involve a range of approaches to translation, in an attempt to represent the variety of qualities of the source texts. With Riddle 7 I’ve closely approximated the meter, alliteration, and further musicality of the Old English verse. I’ve also tried to carry over the riddling ambiguity and double-meanings of the original, in some places inserting Modern English puns similar in suggestion and near in location to puns in the original. In particular, my version attempts to render a reading which I have not found in any critical literature or translations to date: adding the complication of quill-pen to the consensus solution of swan.

For Riddle 8 I’ve opted to make the old feel more contemporary through modernization of some of the colorful idioms and vocabulary, and by trying to capture the verve and theatricality of the nightingale in loose and rough pentameter. The lack of punctuation in a way reproduces the nature of the manuscript, where poetry is written as (mostly) unpunctuated prose, its verse and syntactical patterns to be supplied by the reader/performer.

Little consensus has been reached regarding the solution to Riddle 39. Proposed solutions include: cloud, comet, day, death, a (prophetic/auspicious) dream, fate, moon, revenant, speech, and time. Rather than translate with a particular solution in mind, I chose to use an open form, reproducing the original’s field of catalogued details while playing off its grammatical relationships, especially the pattern of negations which comprise much of its riddling description.

While many of the Old English riddles personify objects to the extent of giving them voice and/or generally anthropomorphic figuration and action, Riddle 50 is especially rich in presenting fire as a powerful and proud warrior. To capitalize on this persona, I decided to transform the riddle from Old English verse (the single form of which was also used for warrior poetry such as Beowulf) into the more modern popular form for tales of heroes, the ballad stanza.

—Evan Klavon