The first versification of the poem in English was produced in 1897 for circulation as a Christmas greeting to a small circle of friends of an attorney in Birmingham, England.
Although it was then printed privately with various works by the same amateur poet, this version gained little traction with the public. A decade later, another one in verse, composed by the Scottish-born Catholic, Reverend George Comack, drew broader notice. Among its selling points was that it was published by trade presses in both Britain and the United States. In addition, it came out as a book unto itself. Finally, it bore what became its customary English title: Our Lady’s Tumbler. In English, both the first prose translation and the first poetic one that won any currency happened to
be the contributions of clergymen. The clerical connection offers early confirmation, probably superfluous, that the medieval narrative’s origin as a religious exemplum did not escape remark or resonance. The story has an almost intrinsic potential to be redemptive reading. In addition, it was in keeping with the controversy over the place of Mary within Christianity that unfolded in Victorian Britain, and that echoed across the Atlantic. As a Catholic revival took hold in Britain, a sweeping avalanche of immigrants from this faith recast the religious landscape of the United States.
After centuries in which for religious reasons any special devotion to the Mother of God had been out of the question for the British, the Catholic revival advanced hand in hand with a Marian revival. The twinned renewals brought radical changes. The reworking of the atmosphere can be sensed most readily in four apparitions of Mary that came to Anglicans at a monastery of sorts in Wales in 1880 (see Fig. 3.20). The preacher who had charge of the abbey was a funny figure called Father Ignatius. The zany padre was intent on reinstituting monasticism in England, but in accord with a pastiche of customs and practices that he improvised. In his quirkiness Ignatius has been described as “not indeed the last end, but a term of the Gothic revival, of the Oxford Movement, or Romanticism, of Evangelicalism, of neo-Mediaevalism, or revivalism in a general sense taking on a new and particular sense.” On three occasions, four boys of the makeshift monastery saw a woman, encircled in light, glide across a meadow. On the Octave of the Nativity of the Virgin, Father Ignatius assembled the community to invoke the Virgin by singing the “Hail, Mary” in Latin. Thereupon they discerned circles upon circles of lights, with the Mother of God fleetingly in the middle, robed in flowing drapery. Reputedly, miraculous cures ensued. To commemorate the experience, pilgrims gathered annually for years afterward.
Fig. 3.20 Llanthony Monastery, Church, and Convent. Photograph, 1880. Photographer unknown.
Reverend Cormack did not belong to the acolytes of Father Ignatius, but he shared an attachment to the Virgin Mary. In the foreword to his translation of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he includes a paragraph drily dismissive of his predecessors. Crisply informative about his own objectives, he declares his aspiration to create “a versified translation that, while keeping close to the text, should gain warmth by reproducing it in its original octosyllabic metre with rhymed couplets.” Ultimately, he aims to present to English-speaking readers “the legend… attired… in its own costume.”
The paragraph in the preface that succeeds the one just discussed gives in its very mannered way fair warning of the preciosity that lies ahead. The writer claims to have been “so wrought upon in reading the poem” that he resolved “though nearing his grand climacteric, to try for the first time a metrical tumble in honour of Her whose thrall he glories to consider himself, and in whose service alone he would risk such an unwonted gyration.” The syntax and diction of Cormack’s verse that follows, as a glance at any few couplets will demonstrate, are distant from those of most poetry and of much English of any form today. The pastor’s major misstep in converting the medieval French was once routine in translations of medieval texts. With others, he inclines strongly toward archaizing words, on an assumption that a poem from the Middle Ages will ring truer when put into timeworn vocabulary. Such verbiage holds bracingly true to quotidian medieval English as mediated through the inch-thick distorting lens of Sir Walter Scott’s prose in his early nineteenth-century historical novels, but it would not have been common in nineteenth-century colloquial.
Cormack was followed by an independent scholar of medieval culture, a translator named Mrs. Alice Kemp-Welch (see Fig. 3.21). In her career she produced several volumes from Old French prose and verse. Her careful prose translation Of the Tumbler of Our Lady was first published in 1908. It was later reprinted and eventually
Fig. 3.21 Alice Kemp-Welch. Albumen cabinet card by Giuseppe and Luigi Vianelli, 1877.
London, National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. All rights reserved.
In production, the little volume is crafted adorably. A reviewer contemporary with the translator applauded it, along with two of her other translations, all of them in a series called the New Medieval Library, for both their production and content. In the case of Our Lady’s Tumbler, a reader who handles a copy notices in a heartbeat the attempt to conjure up the Middle Ages. The full leather cover, with brass book clasps at the top and bottom, has a stamped title, with an elaborate initial O and an illumination (see Fig. 3.22). Although almost all copies available today in libraries or private hands have lost the shoddy metal fittings, the effect of the rare specimens that retain them is enchantingly close to that of a heavily worn medieval manuscript, as was originally intended. The touches of showy elegance are meant to call to mind the jewel-encrusted boards that kept original manuscripts safe. Medieval-like lettering serves for the title, and an illuminated initial, depicting what may be a wedding being anthologized. Her style is generally clear, although not altogether without traces of the same deliberate out-of-datedness that marred Cormack’s English. The conclusion to the story gives an aftertaste, with constructions more reminiscent of English Bibles from the early seventeenth century than of the parlance used by everyday people in the early twentieth century. Two “unto’s” and one “endeth” are the most visible tokens of a now-familiar antiquarianism that cankered many translations of premodern texts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection makes apparent Kemp-Welch’s familiarity with an impressive range of stories relevant to Our Lady’s Tumbler.
Fig. 3.22 Leather front cover of Alice Kemp-Welch, trans., Of the Tumbler of Our Lady and Other
Miracles (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908).
Fig. 3.23 Cloth front cover of Alice Kemp-Welch, trans., Of the Tumbler of Our Lady and Other Miracles (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908).
Fig. 3.24 Frontispiece and title page of Eugene Mason, ed., Aucassin & Nicolette and other Mediaeval Romances and Legends (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910).
Mason’s version elicited a favorable reaction already from D. H. Lawrence (see Fig.
3.25) shortly after its publication. In his hurried shorthand, he scrawled with gusto to his dearest colleague, “Mac” McLeod, from the school where both taught. He told this chum that he would pass on to him his copy of the Everyman edition, if he had not read it. He concludes, “It is rich, it is a nonesuch. I read it to my mother in bed two months ago.” Lawrence keeps to himself any thoughts about the English style of the story as he read it. Presumably he would have been drawn by the content, since the narrative wafts the reader far from the industrialized modernity that the British writer enacted in a Gothic choir, is simulated (see Fig. 3.23). To close the first decade of the twentieth century came a fourth English prose version, by Eugene Mason (see Fig. 3.24). Already a published poet, the translator went on to put other medieval texts into English. A couple of his translations held the field for eight decades to come. Although not consistently better than Kemp-Welch’s translation, his Our Lady’s Tumbler has outdone it and other earlier English versions in its influence. Whatever the reasons, his translation earned enduring success. Beyond being reprinted time and again, it was also often anthologized in storybooks for popular audiences as well as in textbooks and sourcebooks for college students.
deplored. He bubbled over about medieval architecture, both Norman and Gothic, and he seems to have responded well to a work of literature that made a worthy match for the architectural style.
Fig. 3.25 D. H. Lawrence. Photograph by Nickolas Muray, 1920.
Reproduced on postcard (early twentieth century)