tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post116302570322224257..comments2023-11-02T09:18:44.063-04:00Comments on Old English in New York: Translating the FutureMary Kate Hurleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1163450823369543752006-11-13T15:47:00.000-05:002006-11-13T15:47:00.000-05:00That is a great quotation from LeGuin, and it hits...That is a great quotation from LeGuin, and it hits right on something I struggle with all the time [or want to say all the time] in my own work--that, regardless of the past-ness of the historical artifact, whether the "Beowulf" manuscript or Hadrian's Wall--it is primarily here with us right now, and is therefore also modern in some way [much like human beings, with their biological genealogy, are both historically-shaped and moving along in the present]. While it might be important to know how and for what reasons "Beowulf" was written down in the tenth or early eleventh century, a more urgent question for me is: why would anyone want to read it, or write it [again] now? Thanks for yet another of your really thoughtful posts.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1163080376128103702006-11-09T08:52:00.000-05:002006-11-09T08:52:00.000-05:00I hadn't read that LeGuin quote before and really ...I hadn't read that LeGuin quote before and really like it. The project of translating that which does not yet exist (and yet the existence of which is, it seems, indisputable) is a more difficult version of the the medievalist's plight: to translate the languages that did exist, but because they were alive and because they endured for a long time and because they exist now only in deceptive fragments, to be forced into translations that are always out of time, always stories about petrified remains and not living, changing things. Or even more frustrating, to attempt to translate languages and learn in that process that our knowledge is doomed to recede, not grow.<BR/><BR/>One of the amazing things about having a child who is musically inclined is to watch in wonder -- and listen in wonder -- as he masters a language that I have no grasp of at all. The music he makes as he bangs away at the piano and turns notes on a page into his own kind of art stir me emotionally, but they also make me sadly aware of the world whose principles of language he understands but I don't.<BR/><BR/>A few scattered thoughts. Good post.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com