Saint Aldhelm's Riddles

by Aldhelm, A.M. Juster (Translator)

The first and one of the finest Latin poets of Anglo-Saxon England, the seventh-century bishop Saint Aldhelm can justly be called Britain s first man of letters. Among his many influential poetic texts were the hundred riddles that made up his Aenigmata. In Saint Aldhelm s Riddles, A.M. Juster offers the first verse translation of this text in almost a century, capturing the wit, warmth, and wonder of the first English riddle collection.

One of today s finest formalist poets, A.M. Juster brings the same exquisite care to this volume as to his translations of Horace ( The best edition available of the Satires in English Choice), Tibullus ( An excellent new translation The Guardian), and Petrarch. Juster s translation is complemented by a newly edited version of the Latin text and by the first scholarly commentary on the Aenigmata, the result of exhaustive interdisciplinary research into the text s historical, literary, and philological context. Saint Aldhelm s Riddles will be essential for scholars and a treasure for lovers of Tolkien, Beowulf, and Harry Potter."

Genres: Poetry, Medieval

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 700

About the author

Aldhelm, born c.640 in Wessex, and becoming abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop of Sherborne, was the first English man of letters; up to 1100, his prose writings were the most widely read of any Latin literature produced in Anglo-Saxon England.

Reviews

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have put off reviewing this way too long after reading it, in the hopes that I would somehow carve out some zone of time, contemplation and will in which to pay the book its due.

Well that plan has fucking failed.

I really liked it. I doubt I could review it well. Primarially due to the layers of complexity, each of which demands a level of knowledge and expertise that I don't have.

First we have Aldhelms original poems, these are in latin and from (I think) about 7th century England (I thought it was 10thC, this is much deeper dark-age stuff than I thought - some also have a lot of specifically religious references, making understanding of them even more specialised.

Then we have A.M. Justers translations. Its very very rare to see a translation from medieval latin that doesn't feel archaic. They either come from the pre-20tch century age of scholarship, when people knew about poetry but who tend to make everything slightly ponderous and starch, like cheap Tennyson, or they come from modern scholarship, in which case they tend to be well-informed and certainly less judgemental than the previous age, but also effectively euphonically deaf.

These translations are light, they are clever, they try to be as clever, fine and beautiful as the originals must sound if you are someone who can easily and directly read heavily church-influenced 7th-Century (english) High Latin.

And if you are someone who gets all the fucking references to other deep-medieval (more Dark Aga) stuff, of which there is a LOT.

I can't do any of that. I think the translations generally succeed. At least they were beautiful and interesting _to me_. Whether Justers use of rhyme and metre is an artistiaclly valid or historically valid use translation of whatever Latin poetry does, I have no idea.

Finally, we have the notes. In true academic fashion, each poem has a load and, in true acadmeic fashion, they hide bunch of micro-stories, strange facts, off-kilter scholar-arguments and rambling. They are rather enjoyable on their own and at one point break out into a full translation of an entirely different poem.

Honestly, probably the most fun you can have with an English poet in the 7th century. Really this should be better known.