Notes on translating with 'mood'

You might call this post a worked example of some of my semi-translating process.

Here's a passage from CWKB with some spoilers redacted:

[x/x/x/] Upon the wreck
then Spireback pressed with foot; the [/x] bright
that [/] had blissful worn, he upwards tore;
this prize to reach of sun he vaunting bore;
not knowing owner’s death, it gaily shone.
Now Spireback joyed in gain, in gainful deed.
O mortal mood, not witting fate to come,
allotted doom, or how to bound the self!
For Spireback, time would come when gold full great
he gladly would return for [/x]’s life,
when he the prize in battle reft would rue.

O mortal mood, not witting fate to come,
allotted doom, or how to bound the self!

is if not quite a translation, at least a close echo of Aeneid X.501–2:

nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae
et servare modum, rebus sublata secundis

Which David West renders as

The mind of man has no knowledge of what Fate holds in store, and observes no limit when Fortune raises him up.

And Fairclough's old Loeb translation gives as

O mind of man, knowing not fate or coming doom or how to keep bounds when uplifted with favouring fortune!

While Gavin Douglas, writing in sixteenth-century Scots, goes for

O manis mynd, so ignorant at all
Of thingis to cum and chancis quhilkis may fall!
Upheit sone in blynd prosperyté,
Can not be war, nor myssour hald with thee!

Now, the quiet archaism in 'O mortal mood, not witting fate to come, / allotted doom, or how to bound the self' comes in the word mood.

I mean this word primarily in its modern senses. Spireback's mood is mortal because it's deadly (for him and for others), and mortal because it's the kind of hubris that mortals experience.

However, I also chose 'mood' because its etymon, Old English mod, is a dense multi-meaning'd word: mind, spirit, heart, emotional state, zeal, rage. We don't use 'mood' to mean 'mind' today, not exactly, but(!) its lost older sense offers a workable equivalent to Virgil's use of 'mens'. So there's a secret faithfulness in translation offered here, if you read backwards in time.

This passage also intersects with at least two famous discussions of hubris.

One is the long debate over the meaning of the word ofermod in The Battle of Maldon, which Tolkien argued represented overweening pride. Another reason to keep mood in mind…

And the other is Simone Weil's reading of not the Aeneid, but the Iliad: 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force'. I imagine most or all critics of Homer today wouldn't sign up to all Weil's conclusions, but it remains a stirring piece of writing and a remarkable document of what reading Homer in the middle of Europe's nightmare mid-century was like:

Achilles rejoices over the sight of the Greeks fleeing in misery and confusion.

What could possibly suggest to him that this rout, which will last exactly as long as he wants it to and end when his mood indicates it, that this very rout will be the cause of his friend’s death, and, for that matter, of his own? Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.

But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears.

This essay is not wholly irrelevant to Kin-Bright's story.

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons: 'Brythnoth [sic] at Sunset' photograph of John Doubleday's modern statue of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, taken by Trevor Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0.