Venerable Indeed

Before the long haul north, the furthest I've been for twenty years, I spent some time with Bede and his History of the English Church and People. He lived up there, as did Aidan, Cuthbert and Alan Hull and as do Sean O'Brien and Rod Clements.

Of course it's up to us how we want to interpret reports of miracles, piety and other Christian propaganda but whether any of it is true or not it's beautiful in its way. Like Vasari's Lives of the Artists in which each biography expounds the rare talents of its subjects, all the bishops and holy men that Bede tells us about are paragons of devotion and one gets the impression that both Vasari and Bede are aching to say that each was uniquely so but are held back because the definition of 'unique' doesn't allow them. 

I know the feeling. I'd like to say, at one time or another, that maybe 50 pieces of music are the best I've ever heard but you can only say such a thing about one of them.

What impressed most, though, was Bede's 'poetics'. He was more than 1200 years ahead of Robert Frost with the idea that 'poetry is what gets lost in translation' when reflecting on some lines by Caedmon that,

This is the general sense, but not the actual words that Caedmon sang in his dream; for verses, however masterly, cannot be translated literally from one language to another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.

 

By all means it would be insular of us to only read poems, or anything else, written in our own language but unless we are fluent in any others, we put all our trust in a translator to know the work of those who wrote in all the others but the 'poetry', the sound of it, is altered and so we can get a sense of it but never the whole effect.

I can't help thinking the point has been made here before, Frost notwithstanding, but Bede knew as much and, for me, that more than anything else, makes him venerable indeed.