A Review of The Shaping Book 1: Satan's Saga, translated by Douglas VanBenthuysen (AKA Parch)

Satan's Saga is the first part of VanBenthuysen's rendering of the Old English poems conventionally called Genesis A and B. He calls them The Shaping, in accord with his preference for the vivider feel and image of the English root. The title puts God, angel, devil, men, and women (the shapers, manglers, and begetters of our reality in the poem) in a continuum with poets (Old English "scop," or “shaper”), translators, and other makers who strive to give a certain shape to the pure, impure, always dynamic, and often recalcitrant elements in which they work. This title, more native and near in feel than Genesis, yet also far more odd and rife with suggestive possibilities, sets the tone for his choices through the rest of this first installment of the old English epic. This first book he has deceptively designated “Satan's Saga.” This is because VanBenthuysen hopes that Satan sells books, and not because the Devil either owns the story or plays the role of protagonist.
Some translators of literary works seek a conventional idiom of their own time and attempt to recast the original's images, feelings, and meanings within patterns effortlessly accessible to its readers. VanBenthuysen has a different aim. Though he uses modern words, he makes them work and ring in ways that our language has forgotten. In the vital, formulaic baby-talk of his translation, the differences between common nouns and proper names, the one and the many, sign and signified, medium and message, seem always about to disappear—giving the reader a sense of being plunged into proximity with the origins of mind, meaning, and things themselves. He, moreover, insists on leaving core elements of Old English vocabulary essentially untranslated. "Mod," for instance, (a thick word which in Old English means “courage,” “heart,” “anger,” and “intent”) is consistently rendered "mood," where most translators would opt for a variety of renderings. The result of such choices is a kind of exploded modern English, immediately familiar yet obviously working in unfamiliar ways. In the poem, we love God “with our moods”; the devil's party fell “through over-mindfulness”; the devil himself is “overly moody,” he uses “hate-speech” and “pride words” and sets “a sick helmet” on his head; the Angels and Satan and Eve are “shiny”; heavenly bliss is a “dreaminess”; the fallen angels lament that their “reach” is not “roomier” and that God has taken “the heaven reach” from them; the tempter promises Adam that, if he eats the forbidden fruit, “your mood-safe would become more, and your body much more light, your shape much more shiny”; God is “the meter” that moves through the cosmos, through our nature and moods and poems, and with or against which we shape our “wyrds,” so that Adam and Eve “began, at God's behest, to beget children as the meter bid them”; immensities are, strangely, “the unmet,” e.g. “the unmet evening,” as if—when we lack meter, reject what or how God metes out to us—we will nor really “meet” anyone anymore, doomed to a life and death of “unmet evening”; the Creator possesses and shares a “genitive power”; to “deal” is often to divide one thing into two, so that part of Adam's curse is that “for you, body and soul have become dealt”; Adam is a “self-shaped man,” Eve “a free-willed woman”; the first couple are “the marriage-bound two”; to leave is “to lay tracks”; God decides to “nail those born of the curse” with a flood; the ark is a “temple” in which Noe (“Noah”) and his sons and their wives are “ghost's riders”; when Noah grows drunk, “his mind-safe goes away.” 
If this sounds forbidding, it shouldn't. Language is no fixed thing—as if God or man formed it only to be abandoned in frigid chains. It was made to play, and mingle, and produce new ways of saying. The mind and ear soon quicken and move to the meter of this poem's new-old idiom which keeps coming into being as it is read (preferably aloud!). We rejoice to remember that our words have “shaping” and “dealing” energies within them, genitive power, roomy reach; they are self-shaped, free-willed. 
Not only the immediate experience of the poem, but also the story it tells is surprisingly fresh—even to readers who may be familiar with the Biblical narrative or Milton's epic. The temptation of Adam and Eve, for instance, has many very distinctive and provocative features. Since in this poem Satan—more like Dante's Lucifer than Milton's—remains in the prison of Hell, chained in “great grids of hard, heat-forged irons,” not he but a “go-between youngling” tempts the first parents. This lesser fiend boldly claims to be a messenger of God who carries a divine command with the sanction of divine punishment. And, since Adam and Eve cannot really know whether he is telling the truth, their trial requires of them a special steadfastness and “self-shaped” courage. Indeed, the awful responsibility of every individual man and woman is one of the poem's most often sounded themes: “men's children might make a choice: good or evil; each person, wellness or woe.” “I don't know, though,” says Adam to the tempter, with startling authority, “if you fare with secret thought, or if you are the chief's go-between from heaven. Listen. I cannot know your pattern a whit, words or ways, treks or sayings. I know what he bid me himself, our savior, when I saw him last. He ordered me to hold worthy his words and hold them well, track his lore. You be not like any of his angels I have seen before. . . . For this, I cannot hear you, but you may go forth. I have fast belief up to the almighty God who wrought me here with his own arms and with his own hands. He may give me every which good from his high reach, though he need not send his youngling.”
Turning to Eve, the tempter tells her that Adam's proud refusal of his command has earned him God's wrath unless she will carry it out. She seems genuinely deceived by the fiend (as Adam is later by her), thinking that she is doing God's will. Even more interesting is the tempter's promise of angelic vision: “Eat of this fruit!” he tells her, “Then, your eyes will become so light that you may afterwards see so widely over the world, and your master's own seat, and have his favor henceforth.” And so complete is the tempter's deception that, on eating, she seems indeed endowed with angelic powers of vision: “Then, she could see widely through the loathesome one's loan, … so that she thought heaven and earth whiter, and all the world lighter, and God's work much and mighty, though she did not see it through human thought.” She tells Adam that she sees God himself, and so wins her husband over, “I may see from here where he himself sits . . . wound in goodness, he who shaped the world. I see his angels hovering around him with feather-cloaks, the foremost of all folks, the most joyful of riders. Who might give me such wits if God, heaven's wielder, did not send it directly? I may hear roomily and so wide, across the whole world over this broad creation! I may hear sky games in heaven! It became for me light in mind, outside and inside, since I bit of that fruit!” This angelic imagination, this mind that Eve is loaned for a time, seemingly flooded with unmediated light, seems to me a truly unique and provoking element of this telling.
After Adam succumbs and the bright vision darkens, showing itself to be “death's dream” indeed, the man cries out, “Whom shall we two now become?” and wishes God had never made Eve. Yet the poem sees Eve better than Adam does in his grief, and immediately corrects him. There is goodness, generosity, penitence, and courage in her, it tells us: “She was God's work, though she had become deluded by the devils craft. 'You may hurt me for it, my friend Adam, with your words, though it may not pain you worse than it does me at heart.'” Adam too is full of nobility. Not future punishments but the thought of being no longer under God's word, in his loving friendship and service no more—this is the blow that devastates him. He does not know if he will ever hear a word from God again. Even an angry word would be a balm: “Even if heaven's God, in hate, now orders us to fare, wading in a flood, it would not be as fearfully deep as this! No ocean-streams as this! For that, my mood has become forever betrothed to his. But I would go into the ground if I might work God's will.” There is tenderness, nobility, realism in these speeches of our first parents—and they give us man and woman in the heroic mold. 
In another inspired passage, the poem's vision opens after the first murder, when man first “slew his free-kinsman, his own brother, and spilt his blood, Cain of Abel.” From this act a tree of death sprouts and spreads and roots itself across time and space: “Middle-earth swallowed that one's death gore, man's blood, after the slaughter stroke. Woe, pain's progeny, was reared. Ever since, from that twig, horrible fruits have loathesomely grown, longer as more strongly. That crime's boughs have spread widely throughout men's homelands. The harmful branches, severely and sorely, have struck mankind's sons. They still do! From then, broad blades of evil began to sprout! We must lament that story, slaughter-grim wyrd, with weeping, not at all without cause.” 
Beautiful too is poem's sense of how good it is, even in a woe-wracked world, to “fill the earth and subdue it,” to possess the ground, look up at the stars, establish a household, a family, a line—to share in the genitive power of the shaper, by action and word and procreation initiating a free future whose ends are beyond our scope and control, but embraced in the divine meter of wisdom and love: “Malalehel held the land and goods for a swarm of seasons. The first-spear had five and sixty winters when he began begetting children by a wife. The bride brought him a son, a maiden into mankind. He was powerful in his tribe, they tell me, a warrior from youth called Iared. Afterwards, Malalehel lived here long and enjoyed bliss, mankind's dream, here among worldly-treasures. He had five and ninety winters, and eight hundred, when he went forth. He left heirs, land, and tribal guardianship. Long since, he brought guys gold gear. The earl was noble, an honor-fast hero, and the first-spear was beloved to his free-kinsmen.”
It is to be hoped that VanBenthuysen, or Parch, or whatever he calls himself in future, will complete and publish the rest of The Shaping. I would encourage him, even as he encourages me in his dedication, to “keep your line alive”!