Louis Rodrigues Web Site

Many of those who have memories of coming off worse in classroom battles with Beowulf welcomed Seamus Heaney’s new translation published in 1999. Heaney’s book was an outstanding success and brought about renewed interest in Anglo-Saxon literature on a massive scale. In making Beowulf fully accessible to the general reader, he was – perhaps unknowingly – building on what Louis Rodrigues has been doing for years.

This is not to denigrate Seamus Heaney. The new translation is an outstanding work of scholarship over which he sweated long and hard. His Beowulf though, was published as a straight translation without further information other than family trees and a note on names. This is fine for the reader who simply wishes to know the story, but does not provide for those who wish to take it to a deeper level. One can know the epic, but not master it. Admittedly this was not Heaney’s purpose.

Where the works of Seamus Heaney and Louis Rodrigues complement each other is in the latter’s provision of full glossaries, notes and references. In Full pitiless is fate …!, Dr Rodrigues (whose PhD is in Anglo-Saxon) presents two poems from Beowulf and a selection from the Exeter Book, and explains how they work. One is presented with the joy of receiving the texts, a lecture and suggestions for further reading rolled into one. It is especially illuminating to read his academic translations from Beowulf in tandem with Heaney’s poetic treatments. Full pitliess is fate…! is the ideal starting point for anyone wishing to explore Anglo-Saxon literature in greater detail.

In Retrospect is a selection of poems in a variety of forms written by Rodrigues. Each is supplied with explanatory notes. He addresses numerous subjects, but all the poems have one thing in common: they are written in the Anglo-Saxon style (thankfully in translation!). The Stripper is a gloriously vivid example of how Anglo-Saxon poetry would describe a striptease act, the following stanza being a fine example:

Entranced by her especial tune, she turns,
half-pirouette, to grasp a transverse bar
aloft; her stern, voluptuous in the gloom;
and, hanging thus, her torso tense, rotates,
divinely lewd, each supple rump, to loud
handclap and gasp of wonder from the crowd.

A purist would criticise the term “half-pirouette”, but the fact that this is a contemporary poem in the Anglo-Saxon style serves to mitigate it.

Scriptural Cryptogram gives a similar treatment to the coupling of Adam and Eve. Chaucer-like, it is not blasphemous; the pair were after all only human, which is precisely what the poem demonstrates:

And, they remarked the gross delight
of juices swilled in wantonness:
that throbbing tool and battered quim
were naught compared to duping HIM!

Youth and Innocence is strongly evocative of Kipling’s Epitaph on a Dead Statesman and is worth re-printing in full:

Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean
have made it more than ever plain
that Prophets might be heaven-sent,
Apostles not – because they’re bent;
importuned Youth, for thirty pence,
would gladly sell its innocence,
enjoy a spell of dubious fame,
then go and hang itself in shame.

For those not fully acquainted with the Cambridge spy ring, Rodrigues helpfully explains that at Trinity Blunt and Burgess belonged to an elite club known as The Apostles. The biblical allusion of the traitors sacrificing their countrymen to the ‘prophets’ of the Soviet Union for thirty pieces of silver is clear.

Say What I Am Called is a real treat: a collection of 91 riddles. Although there is little direct evidence that the Anglo-Saxons were keen riddlers there is some, and it is thought highly probable that they were at least competent and used them in their folk culture.

As with his other works, Rodrigues is generous with his introductory explanations and his notes. Not content merely to list the solutions, he gives comprehensive information with appendices and bibliographies. These form around half of the book.

A number of the riddles fall into groups including storm, birds, runes and lewdness, and there are two examples of riddles forming a pair. Numerous poetic devices are employed ingeniously in order to serve the need both to disguise meaning and obey metre. An elementary knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is required, but not to the exclusion of the intelligent newcomer. The author’s lecture-style opening in combination with a reading of the first few solutions make the riddles mind-stretching but hugely enjoyable.

Out little spear…! is a serious academic paper of a little over 10,000 words (around the length of a British MA dissertation). In this work, Dr Rodrigues presents a detailed examination of Anglo-Saxon charms and their Christianisation. Such charms would have been incanted. In the author’s words,

as remedies against natural disorders, diseases, or hostile witchcraft, or as general protectives. The adaptation of pagan religious practices to Christian purposes (on the advice of St Gregory the Great to St Augustine of Canterbury) would account for the preservation in medical – especially herbal – recipes in religious houses, in tenth and eleventh century manuscripts, of some twelve metrical charms intercalated among prose ceremonial directions and related matter. The poetic quality of these charms is not of the first order – their irregular metres indicating oral traditions older than those of classical Anglo-Saxon poetry. Their interest, however, especially to cultural anthropologists, lies in their curious mixture of pagan traditional magic and Christian ritual. To the layman, it is their unexpected freshness and vitality that appeal. It is not always easy to distinguish between these verse-incantations and their prose accompaniment, but twelve charms are generally recognised.

The Anglo-Saxons regarded charms as harmless provided that they did not involve witchcraft or sorcery; even these, though, were considered legitimate if used against an enemy tribe. Illustrative of the primitive Christianisation of the pagan charms is For loss of cattle, which demonstrates the Christian origins of an anti-Semitism at the same time as showing a mis-representation of the gospels.

…3 Then worship three times towards the north and say three times: ‘Crux Christi ab aquilone reducath, crux abscondita est et inuenta.’4 The Jews hanged Christ, treated him most evilly, concealed what they could not keep hidden. So may this deed be concealed in no way, through Christ’s holy cross. Amen.

The likelihood, of course, is that the crucifixion was put in terms recognisable to pagans familiar with hanging but aware if at all of crucifixion only as a very distant folk memory.

The original manuscripts examined by the author exist in the British Library and are thus available to scholars. This reviewer’s interest has ceratinly been fired enough to seek them out.

Rodrigues concentrates on four manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Spirit must be braver …, three of which are held by the British Library and the fourth by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Further manuscripts are also drawn on. Spirit must be braver … is a detailed examination of the poems of The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon and is, like Out little spear …!, a solid piece of literary criticism.

Brunanburh itself is rightly cited by Rodrigues as “the only purely heroic Anglo-Saxon poem extant, since, neither Finnsburh nor Waldere are long enough to permit their general scope and quality to be gauged, and Beowulf, usually considered primarily heroic and epic, is in its ultimate aim elegiac.”

Maldon is a fragment whose original length is unknown. The likelihood, though, is that the poet could not have sustained the epic much further: “exactly how much of the poem is missing is difficult to tell, as we have no exact idea about its original scope. But, it seems likely that less has been lost at the end than at the beginning, perhaps one leaf (about 50 lines) at the end, and about two or three at the beginning. Artistically, the fragment as it now stands is complete, since it contains the kernel of the story, a decsription of the fall of Byrthnoth and the consequent defeat and flight of his men.”

The historiography associated with the two poems is ably handled and the author makes rich use of available documents. As with Out little spear …! there is a basic assumed knowledge but nothing which will put off an interested reader. This reviewer, being grounded in the discipline of history, found it an exhilarating read.

The Exeter Book provides the source material for Wulf, my Wulf in which Rodrigues considers a group of five short poems of varying date and character: The Finnsburh Fragment, Waldere, Widsith, Deor, and Wulf and Eadwacer. The Exeter Book is in itself a fascinating source, being “an anthology of short, mostly lyric, poems copied at the close of the tenth century. Yet there is considerable disparity in their probable dates of origin. Moreover, their heroes came originally from different Germanic peoples, and none of them are in fact Anglo-Saxon.”

The poems are included with a comparative examination of each, with full notes as always.

These six books from Louis Rodrigues are at once both scholarly and accessible. For a reader immersed primarily in history and modern English and American poetry, they represent a real eye-opener and have re-opened a genuine passion which inadequate teaching and resources at school had all but killed off.

Articles and reviews by Louis Rodrigues (PDFs)

RIITTA OITTINEN: Translating for Children
Published in 2000
Garland Publishing, Inc. (Taylor & Francis Group),
29 West 35 th Street, New York, NY 10001
xiv + 205 pp.
ISBN 0-8153-3335-8
Click for full text (pdf)

MEMORIES OF ALTAGRACIA.
A novel by Salvador Garmendia. Translated from the Spanish by Jeremy Munday, with an introduction by Fernando Ainsa
1998, 206 pp
ISBN 0 7206 1036 2 UNESCO Publishing;
ISBN 92 3 103475 8. Peter Owen Publishers,
73 Kenway Road, London SW5 0RE.
Click for full text (pdf)

José Martí: VERS LIBRES.
Edition bilingüe établie par Jean Lamore. Prologue de Cintio Vitier.
1937. 221pp.
Editions L’Harmattan, 5-7 rue de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 75005 PARIS, Éditions UNESCO, 1 rue Miollis, 75732 Paris cedex 15, © L’Harmattan, 1997. ISBN 2-7384-5127-6.
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Josep Marco: El fil d’Ariadna. Anàlisi estilística i traducció literària. 2002. 331pp.
EUMO Editorial, Pl. de Miquel de Clariana 3, 08500 Vic. España [Biblioteca de traducció i interpretació: 7].
ISBN 84-7602-427-4.
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