I picked up the letter and tucked it into my jacket pocket.
A flutter of old memories came back to me then. They hovered in the back of my mind, loitering around this meeting with Sophie, just like they always did, each one distilled down to a single movie frame from heavy use – The Open Leather Satchel Memory, The Water Dripping Down Gloss Paint Memory, The Shards Of Glass On The Doormat Memory – each one fluttering and batting at the edges of my thoughts, drawn to the light of our conversation.
I lifted my glass and took a long, deep drink, mentally shooing them away.
‘Would more have made a difference?’ I said, putting the glass down. ‘To what you think of him, I mean?’
‘More books? No,’ Sophie said. ‘But it would’ve paid off the mortgage. So, you know, it’s something.’
‘My father thought a lot of him.’
Sophie held my gaze.
‘Your father, who we’re not going to talk about, thought a lot of his talent.’
She took her purse from the table, unzipped it and slipped the newspaper clipping back inside. She was about to put it back in her bag when she noticed my nearly empty glass.
‘Another?’ she said.
o
‘Tom, have you ever heard of Frederick J. Klaeber?’
Sophie had returned from the bar with a round of drinks. I’d been staring out of the window, watching the river, lost in thought.
‘What? Sorry – who?’
‘Frederick J. Klaeber,’ she said, passing me a glass and sitting down. ‘Great academic. Early translator of Beowulf.’
‘Sorry. I don’t know much about Beowulf.’
This was true. For whatever reason, my parents had never owned a copy of Beowulf and I’d never felt the need to track one down.
Sophie looked surprised. ‘Really?’
‘I mean, I know the story, but nothing about the business end.’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Sure.’
‘All right then. So, the problems with Mr Klaeber’s translation of Beowulf,’ Sophie said, ‘begin with the Old English word aglæca’.
‘What does—’ My mouth lost its nerve, like a horse at Becher’s Brook.
‘Aglæca.’
‘Yeah, what does it mean?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. Nobody knows. The meaning of the word is lost, so we can only make an educated guess based on the way it’s used in the story. But Klaeber’s educated guess back in 1922 was a little . . . suspect.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, the word appears several times in Beowulf. For instance, it’s used to describe Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon at the end.’
‘Okay, so it means something like “monster”?’
‘Aha. This is what Mr Klaeber says too. In his book, which is considered the gold standard of Beowulf scholarship by the way, he translates aglæca as . . . hang on.’ Sophie dug her little black notebook out of her bag and thumbed through it until she found what she was looking for. ‘Monster, demon, fiend. In the case of Grendel’s mother, the word is modified to aglæc-wif.’
‘Female fiend?’
‘Klaeber charmingly opts for “wretch, or monster of a woman”, and where Klaeber’s translation goes, all the others follow.’ Sophie turned a page. ‘“Monstrous hag” is Kennedy’s definition, “ugly troll lady” from Trask, “monster-woman” from Chickering, “woman, monster-wife” from Donaldson. Even Seamus Heaney translated aglæc-wif as “monstrous hell bride”, can you believe it?’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘I mean, I can’t see why he wouldn’t. What’s the problem?’
‘The problem is that aglæca also appears in the poem to describe Beowulf himself.’ Sophie closed her book with a theatrical snap. ‘What do you make of that?’
I thought about it.
‘Beowulf wasn’t a monster, was he?’
‘No, and when the word appears in reference to Beowulf – the exact same word, remember – Mr Frederick J. Klaeber translates it as “warrior, hero”.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds like Mr Klaeber was making it up as he went along.’
‘Doesn’t it just? A professor by the name of . . .’ the notebook again ‘. . . Sherman Kuhn makes the very sensible suggestion that aglæca should be translated as “a fighter, valiant warrior, dangerous opponent, one who struggles fiercely”.’
‘You’re about to make a point.’
‘I am. You see, Grendel and the dragon are clearly written as monsters, but there’s nothing in Beowulf to suggest that Grendel’s mother is a “monstrous hell bride” or a “troll lady”, or anything of the sort; quite the opposite, in fact. She’s a female warrior, an accomplished, powerful woman who’s every bit the equal of Beowulf. Then our Mr Klaeber comes along – this one man sitting alone at his writing desk, and with a few flicks of his pen, a few scratches of ink, he changes her. Turns her from one thing into something else. He reduces her into “a wretch”. A wretch. He steals her from every schoolgirl, from every young woman growing up in this world trying to understand what they can and cannot be, for the best part of one hundred years. Maybe for ever, because words have power once they’re written down.’
‘The Mary Magdalene treatment.’
Sophie nodded. ‘The Mary Magdalene treatment.’
I stared into my drink, unsure of what else to say. A Paul Auster line floated into my mind – a word becomes another word, a thing becomes another thing – but I didn’t speak. The second hand ticked around the large clock over the bar, the Thames rolled on, and the entropy of the universe steadily increased.
‘Why do you have notes on Beowulf? Is there going to be a book?’
I didn’t say ‘is one of your clients writing about Beowulf?’ but it amounted to nothing more than a slightly obscured version of the same question, and when I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I knew Sophie wouldn’t answer.
‘Someone has to keep track of these things.’ She shrugged. ‘Frederick J. Klaeber wasn’t really Frederick either, he was a Friedrich.’
‘In 1922? Well, we can’t blame him for that.’
‘No, we can’t.’ Sophie fixed me with her steady blue eyes. ‘But we can observe that he was a man who was fully prepared to rewrite the narrative, when he deemed it necessary.’
I took a sip of beer then set the glass down on the table between us. The head had completely collapsed by now, leaving a ring of white bubbles and a few little islands of foam gently fizzing themselves out of existence.
‘Sophie?’
‘What?’
‘What are we talking about here?’
Sophie leaned forward on her elbows.
‘Take it home and burn it,’ she said, quietly.