The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson translated by Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber, £12.99
As Seamus Heaney admits in his introduction to this splendid new translation, little is known about Robert Henryson other than that he was probably born sometime in the 1420s, he was “a schoolmaster of Dunfermline” and he was dead by 1505 when William Dunbar mourned his passing in Lament for the Makars. He was the author of three major narrative poems – The Testament of Cresseid, The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice – as well as a number of shorter lyric poems.
Heaney cites Denton Fox as saying, correctly, that “Henryson belongs firmly to the Middle Ages, not to the Renaissance” but adds: “He belongs also in the eternal present of the perfectly pitched, a poet whose knowledge of life is matched by the range of his art, whose constant awareness of the world’s hardness and injustice is mitigated by his irony, tender heartedness and ever ready sense of humour.”
Heaney says it was the sensation he got when reading Henryson “of intimacy with a speaker at once sober and playful that inspired me to begin putting the not very difficult Scots language of his originals into rhymed stanzas of more immediately accessible English.”
Henryson, in The Testament of Cresseid, promptly acknowledges his debt to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – “Who knows if all that Chaucer wrote was true?” – which tells of the love of the Trojan Prince Troilus for Cressida, as Shakespeare called her, and how she betrays him by dumping him for the Greek warrior Diomede. Henryson’s Cresseid, with the stress on the second syllable, is in turn abandoned by Diomede:
“When Diomede had sated his desire / And oversated it on this fair lady / He sought fresh satisfactions with another / And sent Cresseid a banishment decree / To bind and bar her from his company. / She went distracted then and would ramble / And be, as men will say, available. // O fair Cresseid, the flower and paragon / Of Troy and Greece, how could it be your fate / To let yourself be dragged down as a woman / And sullied so by lustful appetite / To go among the Greeks early and late / So obviously, like any common pickup? / When I recollect your fall, I want to weep.”
She contracts leprosy and, when Troilus later passes, he fails to recognise the beauty he once loved: “Upon him then she cast up both her eyes / And at a glance it came into his thought / That he some time before had seen her face. / But she was in such state he knew her not; / Yet still into his mind her look had brought / The features and the amorous sweet glancing / Of fair Cresseid, one time his own, his darling.”
Heaney’s new translation from the Lowland Scots in which Henryson wrote is a magnificent achievement and, like his translation nine years ago of Beowulf from the original Anglo-Saxon, not just an excellent translation but an extraordinary new poem in its own right. The publishers give us a parallel text – Henryson on the left, Heaney on the right – to compare and contrast. Heaney says: “I enjoyed the work because Henryson’s language led me back into what might be called ‘the hidden Scotland’ at the back of my own ear. The speech I grew up with in mid-Ulster carried more than a trace of Scottish vocabulary and, as a youngster, I was familiar with Ulster Scots idioms and pronunications across the River Bann in County Antrim. I was therefore entirely at home with Henryson’s ‘sound of sense’, so much in tune with his note and his pace and his pitch that I developed a strong inclination to hum along with him. Hence the decision to translate the poems with rhyme and metre, to match as far as possible the rhetoric and the roguery of the originals and, in general, keep the accent.”
Keith Richmond
