The Fourteenth Century poem, Pearl, is a lament for the poet’s daughter and also a presentation of Christian doctrine showing him to be a lay theologian of Catholic belief. Jane Draycott’s translation reveals the poem’s humanism. This is an outline;
The Lost Pearl
I-IV (stanzas 1- 20) The poet, a jeweller, agonised at the loss of a pearl, sleeps in a garden. He dreams his soul is translated to a magical landscape. As he follows a stream he discovers a paradise on the opposite bank. He wants to cross the stream, but, as he tries, he meets a beautiful woman. She greets him lovingly.
The Precious Pearl
V-VII (stanzas 21-35.) The soul asks in dialogue whether the woman is the pearl he has lost. The soul wants her, but the woman wants the soul to accept the mercy of God. He is curious about her. She tells him she has married the lamb.
The Human Pearl
VIII - XI (stanzas 36 - 60) He queries that the woman is a substitute for Our Lady. He sees that she is his daughter. He further queries whether she was worthy of being a queen. The woman answers that no one would question Mary’s role, as Queen of Courtoisie, but that she like many others is a member of the body of Christ.
The Pearl of the Kingdom
At this point the poem becomes a homiletic. The woman tells the man the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20.1-16.) He objects to the idea that God rewards every man equally, regardless of his apparent due. She answers that God gives salvation to those he chooses.
The Pearl of Christ
XII - XV (stanzas 61 - 81) The path of the Fall, grace, repentance, and salvation is explained to the man. The woman describes the New Jerusalem in the words of John and emphasises how Christ’s sacrifice has brought about her happiness. The woman wears the pearl of great price (Matthew; 14:45-46,) which is symbolic of salvation because of Christ, the lamb’s sacrifice.
The Pearl of Heaven
XVI- XIX (stanzas 82 - 96) The poet asks what the place, Jerusalem, is, to be told it is the city of God. He wants to go into the city but is told he cannot, except through a privilege. The man and the woman go upstream. The man contemplates the city which is outlined as the vision of the Apocalypse (Revelation 21.2).
The Pearl Reclaimed
XX (96-101)
Then he sees a procession of blessed women. In his compulsion to be part of the vision, he plunges into the river. As he does so, he wakes, finds himself back in the garden and resolves to follow the sacramental path to salvation.
Jane Draycott’s Pearl
You only have to open Pearl, translated by Jane Draycott and read the first few verses to realise what this TS Eliot and Forward Prize short-listed poet has done for this poem. Gone is the attempt to translate rhyme and refrain, gone the regular phonemic links from the fifth stanza to the next, gone the four-stress lines and gone the light caesuras. What has been gained, according to Bernard O’Donoghue is “unforced modern idiom.” As the anonymous original poem is one of the most elaborate in the English language much of this loss is a necessity, if the resultant translation is not to read as a private language.
Earlier Pearls
Of translations which are current, Brian Stone’s and Marie Borroff’s are certainly beginning to date. Brian Stone’s neglected, but inaccurate translation recasts the rhyme-scheme and comes across a little clumsily as in :
My soul then sank in suffering.
There on that flowery patch I fell:
Such flagrant balm to my brain then shot,
I slipped into a swooning spell
For that precious Pearl without a spot.
Yet the poet makes no mention of the soul in the opening section as it is the vision of the soul that is to take over in the next.
The original (1.5.57-60) reads:
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght
-Suche odour to my hernes schot
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot.
Borroff’s highly-wrought language, based on her theory that there is a stylistic resemblance between the combined four-beat alliterative line and Romance prosody and Gerald Manly Hopkins’ sprung rhythm reads too academically:
but wretched will would not forbear
I fell upon that flower-bed fair
such odour seized my brain distraught
I slipped into slumber unaware
on that precious Pearl without a spot
Borroff writes “would not forbear,” which is a subjunctive double negative. It is stilted and abstract.
J.R.R.Tolkien’s archetypal version reads like, well…Tolkien. According to Rao, It is Gollum’s lament! a popular private language, impeccably accurate.
On the flowery plot I fell, methought;
Such odour through my senses shot,
I slipped and to sudden sleep was brought,
O'er that precious pearl without a spot.
Jane Draycott has ;
Then the power and perfume of some flowers
filled up my head and felled me, slipped me
into sudden sleep in the place
where she lay beneath me. My girl.
The Mourned Pearl
The last words of this line typify Draycott’s handling of the poem’s Mediaeval rhetoric. She presents us with twenty vertical elegies in which a man mourns unambiguously for a dead daughter. The only concession to the horizontal, or linear flow of the poem is her fidelity to line number, with its theological symbolism of twelve and the five-fold stanza unit of all but one section and a semantic rather than a phonetic deployment of link words with a big emphasis on colloquial uptake.
The Metonymic Pearl
Yet the essence of Draycott’s style lies in its handling of the distinction between metaphor and simile. According to Travis, Mediaeval rhetoric, stemming from Aristotle and Aquinas, metaphor, or trope, took the attributes, or concepts of one discourse and applied them to another. Simile, on the other hand was an analogical comparison. As such, the truth conditions of comparison are those of correspondence, whereas those of metaphor appeal to the coherence of an imaginative falsity.
What gives Pearl its power is its subtle blending of metaphor and simile. As Sarah Stanbury puts it in her Introduction to Pearl ; “The pearl is a gem, is a two-year old child, is a beautiful young woman, is the immortal soul, is the heavenly city - as well as a collective of the properties that inhere to each term singly.” Each level of the poem’s argument consists of a profound quibble over definition, which depends on a specific series of revelations.
The Allegory of the Pearl
Surprise, tension and disclosure abound in the poem. A set of "calculated category mistakes" to follow Paul Ricoeur, triggers understanding. Each quibble is a metaphor. Yet the collective which Stanbury refers to is an allegory of how the soul stricken in its dependence on material things leaves the body and experiences a vision of beauty, which in turn becomes his dead daughter grown into grace, which in turn becomes the soul itself as part of an assembly of the saved which in turn becomes the heavenly city of God
The Metonymy of Bereavement
Jane Draycott concentrates the distinction into metonym. This is a carrying over only of attributes and not of concepts. It stems from structuralist preoccupations which feed Post-Modernism. According to Spearing, in the original poem the conceptual range of the image of the pearl spans the whole poem and has a different conceptual and ideological identity at each point. This is not carried over in Jane Draycott’s translation.
Allegory is simile and therefore takes its meaning from an image, or images, compared to reality. The reality, for the anonymous poet, is the path of salvation outside of time and space that the soul can receive from God. The reality for Jane Draycott is a sequence centred on the recovery of the self in mourning, in the tradition of De Quincy and Wordsworth. Closer to Davenport’s account, it begins in disbelief and moves to a dialogue of anger, then the anger becomes a bargaining. In turn the bargaining becomes depression “My mortal mind was carried to madness” and finally, acceptance, which is not yet a happiness.
Of course in the hands of Jane Draycott, the poem is still a unity, but it is a vertical one, rather than a flowing dream-narrative. A beautiful and moving set of elegies on the power of the imagination to comfort the self that it emerge stronger from bereavement.
Sources:
- Borrof, Marie, (1962) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A stylistic and Metrical Study New Haven, Yale University Press
- Cawley, A.C. and Anderson J.J., (1976) Pearl, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, London, New York, Dent, Dutton: 3-47
- Davenport, W. A. (1978)The Art of the Gawain-Poet. New Jersey, Humanities Press,
- Draycott, Jane (2011) Pearl, Manchester, Carcanet
- Kübler-Ross, E. (1969) On Death and Dying, London ,Routledge and Keegan Paul
- Ricoeur, Paul(1978),The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Czerny, R et al London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 197;
- Spearing, A. C. "Symbolic and Dramatic Development in Pearl." Modern Philology (1962), 60
- Stone, Brian (1964) Mediaeval English Verse, Harmondsworth, Penguin: 136-174
- Travis, Peter W. "Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor," Speculum 72 (1997), 399-427.
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
