#eng1015

Old books on olds books on old books. I look for an old book of Old English poems, in the old basement of King's College Library: The Exeter Book. Collected with other big, old books. I'll just read my two assigned poems in here, in Krapp and Dobbie's collection of six old books:

Nope, they are written in Old English. Incomprehensible.

I find two other books, in English this time, in Killam Memorial Library & Halifax Public Libraries: The Earliest English Poems & Old English Poetry: An Anthology. Each have different translations of "The Wanderer" & "The Wife's Lament".

A few lines from The Wanderer

"Wyrd(1) is fully fixed." (Stanza 1, Line 5)

(1) Old English word for Fate, a powerful but not quite personified force. It is related to the verb weorthan, meaning roughly "to occur." Its meanings range from a neutral "event" to a prescribed "destiny" to a personified "Fate"; it is useful to think of wyrd as "what happens," usually in a negative sense. In a poem so preoccupied with puzzling over the nature and meaning or wyrd, it seemed appropriate to leave the word untranslated.

—Old English Poetry: An Anthology

"Wierd [sic] is set fast." (Stanza 1, Line 5)

—The Earliest English Poems

A few lines from The Wife's Lament

I make this song of myself, deeply sorrowing, my own life's journey. (Stanza 1, Lines 1-2)

—Old English Poetry: An Anthology

I have wrought these words together out of a wryed existence, the heart's tally... (Stanza 1, Lines 1-3)

—The Earliest English Poems

A definition from A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Volume X Part II, V to Z — one of 13 books, more than a metre thick

Weird:

(O[ld] E[nglish]) The principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny.

The Fates, the three goddesses supposed to determine the course of human life.

I walked off a Spring Garden bus and into the Central Library and into its elevator to the fourth floor, past the gamers first-person shooting and the oldsters packing up, to their shelf. Beside When My Brother Was An Aztec was Postcolonial Love Poem. I grabbed them both without thought, without knowing one had only four poems and the other had the fifth, secret one.

I checked them out up there and took the elevator down and exited the library as a new bus arrived and I hopped on. I read "When My Brother Was An Aztec" as the ferry hovered in the Halifax terminal. Four refreshing but violent poems and one insane, obtuse poem—the secret, fifth one—"My Brother, My Wound".

In my bag were Killam Memorial Library books Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, Poems of Rita Joe, French translations of Emily Dickinson's quatrains and I Place You Into the Fire by Rebecca Thomas. Also, A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I finished on the way to my first class. Usually I dog-ear the pages with good quotes but this slim, fragile copy—the first of this book I've ever seen—seemed to want to be read; not mined.