Jargoning Jackdaws
These days I daily read a page or two of Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology or of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, astonished at the intelligence and musicality of Waddell’s renderings, which sweep away the distance merely apparently created by the passing of centuries. Richard Ellis Roberts, translator of Peer Gynt, wrote of Waddell’s poetic versions: ‘Not a translation fails to be an original poem; and not a translation fails to give with an entrancing fidelity, the meaning and the spirit of the original.’ One can hardly imagine higher praise. And it is warranted. Consider this tenth-century poem passed on to us in MSS of Canterbury and Verona, a mariology in miniature, consummately constructed:
