Michaela Kotziers

on translating Anonymous

“The Ruin” is rich in physically descriptive imagery of a ruined city. The exact location of the city alluded to, and whether it is in fact an actual city and not a spiritual metaphor constructed by the poet, is still debated by scholars. The belief that “The Ruin’s” author was inspired by Bath or another Roman scene guides us to imagine the author as someone in awe of the accomplishments of the master builders of ancient Rome; it is from this perspective that I wrote my own translation. Rather than viewing the city as a metaphor for the human body (which is not uncommon among medieval Christian texts) and exploring the poem as one with a moralizing, religious theme, I chose to wade through the emotions of reimagining a site that has been lost. The speaker of my poem asks what it means to yearn for a time that was never her own, to stand at the site of a sunken past.

With the liberties that I’ve taken in writing “Ruin,” although I have attempted to echo the speaker’s meditative mood, my poem is more aptly called an adaptation than a translation, in terms of both content and form. An individual line of Old English poetry consists of two half-lines, where each half-line has two accented syllables, and the two half lines are bound together by alliteration of the accented syllables. While I did not consistently employ half-lines, alliteration and its coincidence with accented syllables was important in crafting the sound of this poem. One thing that I find most wonderful about Old English is its creation of new words through kennings and compounds, and in response I created original compounds in my translation.