My COVID19 reading has just included, after more years than
I care to remember, a re-reading of Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars.
My copy is a Pelican paperback from 1954, one of Penguin's postwar nonfiction series
with blue borders around a no-nonsense white front cover, price 2/6, two
shillings and sixpence. On the fly-leaf is my name in blue ink, in my father's
handwriting; I guess he gave it to me when I was at school. The pages are
yellowing now, and their edges sometimes flake off under my fingers; this pelican
wasn't built to last. The text is the sixth edition, from 1932. First edition
only five years earlier - the book was unexpectedly popular.
The Wandering Scholars is not about scholarship, it's
about poetry. Specifically, it's a history of the Latin-language, secular lyric
poetry of the European middle ages. Latin was then the international language
of the church, law, scholarship and diplomacy - and of a mostly forgotten bunch
of poets.
The book has all the charm of an enthusiast's despatch home
about her discoveries in far-flung, dusty archives. Helen was fired up so much
that she published a book of translations too, called
Mediaeval Latin Lyrics.
Not only that, she wrote a romantic novel about one of the poets,
Peter
Abelard, which became a best-seller in the 1930s. I've got those books too,
I was so warmed by her fire.
The Wandering Scholars is not just salvage scholarship,
it's a praise song, written in a shifting, allusive style that's sometimes
brisk, sometimes turgid, sometimes witty and sometimes lyrical itself. Helen scattered translations of the poems
(and sometimes fragments of originals) through the text, a large part of the
book's appeal. She made confident rankings:
who was a great man, who was a lesser, what was a great poem and what was not
(top two: Dum Diane vitrea and Dies irae). She even staged in the
text a competition for the best drinking song in the world (won by Mihi est
propositum). She was a hands-on researcher, but her book was a literary
composition more than a technical history. It presupposed a reader with a
little Latin, some Christianity, and quite a bit of European history - enough
to get scholarly jokes about the Trinity or passing allusions to Gregory the
Great. Evidently in 1920s England, there were enough readers like that.
Helen wasn't the first to trawl these archives. She was able
to rely on printed editions of important sources, especially the famous Carmina
Burana (a manuscript from the monastery of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria, with
an amazing collection of earthy and jovial poems in Latin and German,
apparently transcribed by three monks).
What Helen did, basically, was to weave them into a mighty
story, from the fall of the Roman empire to the thirteenth century, when
vernacular languages began to take over. Her tale has two great heroes: the
outrageous philosopher Abelard (whose lyrics have been lost, but whose story
survives), and the witty, cynical and technically brilliant Archpoet (whose
name has been lost, but whose lyrics survive). The tale has a collective hero
too, the subversive subculture of the vagantes, the wandering scholars
themselves: the Beat Generation of the middle ages, enthusiasts for sex, booze,
travel and laughter. Heavily disapproved by the church, to which they replied
with cutting satire.
I wondered at some absences. There was some lusty stuff
being written in Arabic at this time; did none of it waft across the water?
Mediaeval Europe had a patriarchal gender order, certainly, so the priests,
bishops and vagantes were all blokes; but were no women writing secular
verse? Hildegard von Bingen (or the nuns writing under their Abbess's name) wrote
religious poetry and music, heavy-duty spirituality and medical texts; no
recreational verse? Did the brilliant Héloise not have a try? Maybe they did,
but so many of the surviving poems are anonymous...
I can't say I'm an enthusiast for Helen Waddell's translations.
They are loaded with thee and thou, nay, unto and hither. Pseudo-archaic, like
other scholarly translators of her generation; yet written in the same decades
as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Still, translation is hard in any style, I
shouldn't complain. Not when I've been warmed again by this fire.
Try Dum Diane vitrea and Dies irae, if you
don't know them: both are wonderful poems. And try Mihi est propositum.
Who knows, it could be the best drinking song in the world.
