Elegy
When translating any poem from one language to another, it is very difficult to preserve both meaning and form. This situation is not helped by the fact that the original language here is the insanely-dense, super-convoluted, guttural gobbledygook that is Old English.
In its original language, "The Wife's Lament," like many poems in the Old English tradition, is unrhymed, with irregular meter. Its most noteworthy metric element is the use of caesura, a heavy pause that divides each line in half. The caesura is denoted in the text with a large gap. Take a look at the first five lines below:
Ic þis giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre,
minre sylfre sið. Ic þæt secgan mæg,
hwæt ic yrmþa gebad, siþþan ic up weox,
niwes oþþe ealdes, no ma þonne nu.
A ic wite wonn minra wræcsiþa. (1-5)
As you can see, there is a natural pause breaking every line in two. Because each line is roughly the same length, about four to six syllables on either side of the caesura, there is a distinct rhythmic pacing to the poem. This irregular meter holds through the entirety of the poem.
Also contributing to the poem's steady, almost hypnotic pacing is the use of trochees. Come again? A trochee is a type of metrical foot made up of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Imagine you just finished a test, and you are going from stressed to unstressed. This is basically the same thing, and it sounds like "DA dum." Let's take two representative lines out of those first five:
minre sylfre sið. Ic þæt secgan mæg (2)
niwes oþþe ealdes, no ma þonne nu (4)
The first half of each line consists entirely of trochees. This heavy, chanting rhythm sets up the second half of the line, in which nearly every syllable is stressed. The caesuras and trochees combine for a slow, deliberate pacing, percussive rather than melodic.
As you've probably noticed, there are no stanzas in the poem. It's basically just a massive block of super-dense text. In some ways, the modern English translation is even denser, without the caesuras and heavy trochaic accents to establish some sort of rhythm. Most translations of "The Wife's Lament" focus on content, rather than poetic quality. Thus, this attention to rhythm and pacing, present in the Old English original, necessarily gets lost in translation to modern English.
The translation we are working with here is completely unrhymed, completely unmetered, and lacks much of the poetic quality of its Old English counterpart. What is impressive, though, is the translator's effort to make each line in the translation correspond with the original Old English line. The translation is exactly the same length as the original, 53 lines, and each line of the poem matches up with its equivalent in the original text. This is no small feat, and makes our lives quite a bit easier. So, yeah, we applaud him for that.