Uncer Giedd / Our Song

By and | 15 May 2023
                                                                                      this time you be the prey

                                                                                      & I’ll be the predator




this time you’re stranded

on an island of violent men


& I defeat them all

with the battle-strong

branches of my bōgum


                            this time I devour you

                            like a wolf


                                                                                                     this time you find me

                                                                                                     crying in the middle of the forest


                                                                        & cover me with heavy branches

                                                                        until I can barely breathe




                                                                                                     this time I save you

                                                                                                     from a tyrant husband




                                           this time you be wyn

                                           & I’ll be lāð




this time you be the wolf

& I’ll be the whelp




                                                                                      this time you are an island

                                                                                      surrounded by blood

                                                                                                    & I have to drink it all

                                                                                                    to save you




                                                                                      this

                                                                                      wæs mē wyn tō þon




                                           this

                                           uncer giedd geaddor




          the weird

                            endlesss

                            aching song

                            we make together
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M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator, whose collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes is available now from Anhinga Press. Their poems appear in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Fiddlehead, Interim, Massachusetts Review, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Their work in translation aims to revise the critical interpretation and reception of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. Their translations appear in Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. An editor for Asymptote, with grants from Bread Loaf, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, they’re the founder the Translation Now! symposium.

https://www.m-l-martin.com/

More by M.L. Martin on Cordite Poetry Review →
What we know of the poet who composed the Anglo-Saxon text commonly referred to as Wulf ond Eadwacer is very limited. Though unnamed in the poem, we can discern from the feminine inflection on the words "rēotugu" and "sēoce" that the speaker is a woman. It is possible, though perhaps implausible, that the poet is male, but even so, because the poem describes and laments a forbidding set of circumstances foisted onto the female speaker by a patriarchal Anglo-Saxon culture, the poet – who may have been Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon and lived some time before the 10th – was undoubtedly a feminist, an outsider, and a radical poet, who mixed forms from both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, subverting the literary conventions of each language culture in sophisticated and surprising ways.

More by Anonymous pre-10th c. Anglo-Saxon Feminist on Cordite Poetry Review →

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