If you’d like to know a little more about some of the words I explore in my new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words (to be published by Virago in the United Kingdom on May 25th and by Viking Press worldwide on August 29th), you can listen to me chatting to Michael Rosen on BBC Radio Four’s Word of Mouth programme.
Continue reading BBC Radio 4 Word of MouthAll posts by Stylisticienne
Of Ane Blak Moir
Dr Nicola Clark of the University of Chichester and I hope that an Open Access Modern English translation of what Prof Karl Steel of Brooklyn College has called a “precociously racist” poem will prove useful for those studying and learning about black lives in Early Modern Britain. Prof Steel has written an excellent blogpost on teaching the poem, in part exploring its use of rhetorical convention as well as giving suggestions for further reading on the poem and its contexts. You can find the translation further down this page.
Continue reading Of Ane Blak MoirSpecial Advisors and Evil Counsel
On gibberish
With apologies for the long silence on this blog, here’s a link to a new essay of mine on the history of gibberish. It runs from Old English to the present day, featuring medieval lullaby carols, the Chester shepherds’ play, Tudor songs and more.
Continue reading On gibberishLost and Found
Sometimes I worry that I am too obsessed with getting things exactly right in my forthcoming Big Bumper Book of Middle English Poetics (TM). But making sure you understand something, which for this project often means painstakingly learning about forms in other languages and media, can ultimately pay off. For far too long I have been getting to grips with what defines a roundel, the English name for a French lyric called the rondeau (and the related form sometimes called the chanson). The form is rare in Middle English, except for the series of roundels which Charles of Orleans includes in Fortunes Stabilnes, many of which are translations of French originals.
Dangerous form
The early sixteenth-century poem presented and translated at the foot of this blog probably needs a trigger warning, at least for those of us who’ve had such dark moments in life that we’ve thought of ending it all. This ballade (if you use that term pretty loosely) describes a night-time vision of a murdered man who encourages the narrator, perhaps a despairing lover, to kill himself. The final stanza revamps the familiar ending of a dream vision in which an authority figure urges some action and/or some startling event occurs, the violence of which awakens the dreamer. Here it is the speaker’s suicide which ends the dream. The last line, flinging us into the present tense, gives a vivid picture of the speaker’s heart thumping as he wakes.
Lady Life
A short bit of translation, to celebrate #WhanThatAprilleDay18. At the foot of the page is a much modernized version of an extract from the alliterative poem Death and Liffe, a depiction of the arrival of Lady Life. This poem presents a debate between Lady Life and Dame Death, two figures whom the narrator sees in a dream vision at the heads of two opposing armies. The poem survives in a corrupted late copy, and so the translation below both relies on editorial reconstruction and has a fair bit of freedom in trying to arrive at something readable.
A New Year’s Gift
[First, of course, the apology for the lack of new posts on this blog. The good news is that this because I am hard at work on The Book. But I will try to do a little better in 2018. By way of a New Year’s gift, here is a late fifteenth-century New Year’s gift poem from MS Lambeth 306 with text and Modern English translation. The lover sends his heart, and this poem, as a New Year’s present. It is a lovely heartfelt poem about giving and receiving.]
Juellis pricious cane y non fynde to selle
To sende you, my soverein, this New Yeres morowe,
Wherfor lucke and good hansselle
My hert I sende you, and Seynt John to borowe,
That an hundred yeres withouton adverssite and sorowe
Ye mowe live: I pray to God that ye so mote,
And of all your dessires to sende you hastely bot.
[I can find no precious jewels to sell to send something to you, my lady, on this New Year’s morning, so therefore for good fortune and as as a New Year’s lucky charm I send you my heart, with St John as my guarantor, so that you might live a hundred years without adversity and sorrow: I pray to God that you might do so, and that God might send you quickly everything you desire.] Continue reading A New Year’s Gift
Verse and Line
Why do we call a line of poetry a line in English when it is a vers in French (though we do use verse and verses to mean ‘poetry’)? What did Middle English poets call their lines of poetry? In their (at least) trilingual world, they had plenty of words for the basic units of poetry. A metrical line is a versus in Latin (and by extension versus means a set of verses, i.e. a poem). Continental and Insular French usage follows this: a vers is a metrical line. Vers signifies the core unit of poetry, marked out by repeating segments of metre and rhyme. Poetry was in verses whether it was copied as prose (with its units marked by metrical punctuation) or lineated as verse.
Three Dead Kings
For #WhanThatAprilleDay17, a day celebrating old texts in old tongues, here is a translation of 'Three Dead Kings', the most fiendishly intricate of Middle English poems.