‘Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings,’ wrote Charlotte Brontë in Villette. In Old English literature, it is often a sign of sadness, the opposite of the happy mead hall where a lord and his loyal band of warriors feast together. In Beowulf, just such a hall – Hrothgar’s glittering Heorot – is filled with laughter, harp music, songs and stories. But when Beowulf describes the grief of Hrethel the king over the death of his eldest son, Herebeald, he pictures an old man contemplating a very different hall: his dead son’s, now abandoned and windswept. In the Old English elegy The Wanderer, the speaker remembers a hall in which his comrades did fealty to their lord and received gifts of gold. The contrast with the poem’s beginning, in which the speaker is pictured as alone and adrift on an icy sea, is all the crueller.

While editing Silence Please, an anthology of poems about silence, I knew I wanted to include these moments of utter desolation and isolation – both the passage from Beowulf about the grieving old man (lines 2,452–65) and The Wanderer in its entirety. But the anthology is aimed at a general readership, so there was no question of using the Old English originals. Translations would have to be found.

My copyright budget had already been spent on contemporary poems. The finest translations, including the magnificent versions of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney (1999) and Stephen Mitchell (2017), were beyond my reach. What about translations whose authors had died more than seventy years ago? The Victorians – John Mitchell Kemble, Benjamin