Michael Alexander, poet and broadcaster whose Anglo-Saxon translations were used in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation – obituary
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Michael Alexander, who has died aged 82, was a translator, poet, academic and broadcaster whose scholarship was both deep and varied; his interests ranged from Old English poetry to the modernism of Ezra Pound, and he was also the author of an epic history of English literature that ran to more than 400 pages.
While still a student at Oxford University, Alexander started translating Anglo-Saxon poetry into modern English verse, inspired by Ezra Pound’s translation of The Seafarer. In 1966 Penguin published his translations as The Earliest English Poems, and he was subsequently commissioned to translate the 3,182-line Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf into modern verse.
It was first published in 1973 and Alexander went on to produce a glossed text, also for Penguin, in 1995. “Alexander’s translation is marked by a conviction that it is possible to be both ambitious and faithful,” noted the medievalist Tom Shippey. “[He] communicates the poem with a care which goes beyond fidelity-to-meaning and reaches fidelity of implication.”
Several more books followed, including a History of Old English Literature (Macmillan, 1983) and The Canterbury Tales – The First Fragment (Penguin, 1996). Collectively, Alexander’s Old English books for Penguin sold more than a million copies. His translations were singled out by WH Auden, Seamus Heaney and Kenneth Clark, who used Alexander’s renderings of Anglo-Saxon poetry in Civilisation.
Academic success led to literary commissions for BBC radio, to which Alexander brought his customary erudition and good humour. For 17 years he represented Scotland on Radio 4’s Round Britain quiz, alongside the Sunday Herald journalist Alan Taylor, who cheerfully referred to the programme as “the mental equivalent of the mediaeval rack”. In later years, Alexander’s documentaries for Radio 4 included Past Perfect, a profile of Penelope Fitzgerald, and Macavity’s Not There, on TS Eliot.
Upon his retirement from the position of Berry Professor at the University of St Andrews in 2003, Professor Robert Crawford, Head of the School of English, paid him a warm tribute. “[Professor Alexander] writes deftly, with a fluency born of industry, yet which seems, for all its freight of learning, stylishly and easily airborne,” he observed. “Poetry seems written in his stars.”
The eldest of three children, Michael Joseph Alexander was born in Wigan on May 21 1941, to Joseph Alexander and his wife Winifred, née Gaul. The family lived in Liverpool but had transferred to Wigan after the city came under heavy bombardment from the Germans and the maternity hospital where Winifred had been due to give birth was hit.
When Michael was five the Alexanders moved from Liverpool to rural Worcestershire, where Joseph was the manager of Worcestershire Farmers, an agricultural cooperative that made and sold animal feed to farmers. Michael attended boarding school from the age of eight, at Worth Priory in Sussex and then Downside in Somerset. At Trinity College, Oxford, he read English from 1959-62.
After leaving Oxford, he spent a year learning French at Cahors and Italian at Perugia (where he met Ezra Pound several times), then took a job as a general trainee in publishing at William Collins. He left in 1965 for a PhD at Princeton, which he abandoned after a year, finding it oppressively Presbyterian and stiff after Oxford (it was a “dry” campus).
The publication of The Earliest English Poems in 1966 led to a job as a lecturer in English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Alexander lived in Montecito and was (for the only time in his life) very well paid, but found UCSB rather “vacant”. He went back to London and worked briefly for the publisher André Deutsch, under Diana Athill, at the same time taking on the commission to translate Beowulf for Penguin.
The work took him to the University of East Anglia, where he held a temporary teaching post, and then to Stirling in Scotland, where he rented a room in a castle, made lifelong friends and met his first wife, Eileen McCall. In 1985 he was appointed to the Berry Chair of English at St Andrews University, where he helped to revitalise the struggling English department.
Following his retirement from St Andrews he continued to write, publishing Medievalism: the Middle Ages in Modern England (2007), Geoffrey Chaucer (2012) and Reading Shakespeare (2013). A History of English Literature (2000) ran to two further editions in 2007 and 2013. In 2021 Shoestring Press published Alexander’s short book of poems Here at the Door (the title taken from a line by John Donne). It included a three-stanza reduction of Beowulf, which ended:
Much later a Dragon awoke,
Sent Beowulf’s hall up in smoke,
So his fifty not-out
Was all up the spout.
But he killed it, then died. What a bloke!
A gifted raconteur, Michael Alexander was capable of discoursing on an enormous range of subjects, often in places where the listener least expected it: supermarket car parks, say, or the queue for the bathroom. He took his Catholic faith very seriously but wore it lightly, and was never dogmatic.
He enjoyed games but didn’t play to win, preferring to explore the dead-end corridors of the Cluedo mansion rather than enter any rooms. He was physically active well into later life, demonstrating the playground zipwire to his granddaughters and playing real tennis at the Oxford University Tennis Club.
With his first wife Eileen, née McCall, Michael Alexander had a son and two daughters. She died of cancer in 1986 and he married, secondly, Mary Sheahan, who survives him, along with the children.
Michael Alexander, born May 21 1941, died November 5 2023
