W & E: a refracted translation of Wulf and Eadwacer
By M.L. Martin

ISBN: 978-0-900575-26-6 | 164 pages | Price: $18 | Release Date: 4/15/2025

“A thing easily falls to threads
that never was entwined—
the tale of us together.”

ML Martin’s groundbreaking book W & E begins with the mysterious Anglo-Saxon poem commonly known as “Wulf and Eadwacer.” The poem, found only in the Exeter Codex, appears to tell the story of love and imprisonment: the speaker is kept from her lover, Wulf, by Eadwacer, who could be her husband or captor. But the narrative is elliptical and strange, the grammar ambiguous, the formal features unorthodox. The poem may not even be a story – some scholars have suggested that it might be a riddle, a beast fable or charm. Rather than establishing a singular truth behind this enigmatic poem, Martin’s translations and iterations dwell in the potentialities of the text. Entranced by its mysteries, Martin returns again and again to hear new stories, new poems, and through these discoveries contemplates the dynamics of violence and romance, and “our queer love song.”

Praise for W&E

W & E is both a brilliantly provocative experiment in the possibilities of imitation, translation and recreation, and a memorable, highly original work of poetry in its own right.

– Emily Wilson

One poem on one island is devoured by a translator on another island. It is charm or riddle or ballad. Or, “slaughter-sick.” Elegy or injury. Anonymous Pre-10th-century Proto-Feminist poet, we welcome you. In W & E, ML Martin’s gloriously multiplicitous book-length translation of your poem, they speak your broken silences and hungry vowels, breaks and remakes them. The poem emerges not intact, but as defiant offerings. Case in sharp points. Some poems, like “Wulf and Eadwacer,” can only be rendered legible via an explosive-expansive translation as this, and as such should be read as embrace, as wolf, as joy, as battle.

– Sawako Nakayasu

About the Author

An anonymous pre-10th c. radical, feminist Anglo-Saxon poet. What we know of the poet who composed this ancient poem is very limited. Though unnamed in the poem, we can discern from the feminine inflection on the words “rēotugu” and “sēoce” that the speaker is a woman. It is possible, though perhaps implausible, that the poet is male, but even so, because the poem describes and laments a forbidding set of circumstances foisted onto the female speaker by a patriarchal Anglo-Saxon culture, the poet—who may have been Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon and lived some time before the 10th c.—was undoubtedly a feminist, an outsider, and a radical poet, who mixed forms from both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, subverting the literary conventions of each language culture in sophisticated and surprising ways.

About the Translator

M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet, translator, editor for Asymptote, the premier site of world literature in translation, and founder of the Translation Now! Symposium. Their language-based installation, Journey to Shoshone Falls, was shown at The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma from October 2019—March 2020. Their poetry and translations have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, The Fiddlehead, The Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Poetry, and elsewhere. They live in Canada.