A Digital Codex

by Mary Kate Hurley

[illustration from the Lindisfarne Gospels -- thank you, BBC!]

Within a few hours of it being posted on the Valve last night, as a result of Scott Eric Kaufman's reading of a blog called "Readin" -- a number of my friends were emailing me about this. I haven't had the time to fully explore the website, but it would seem that UCLA has put together a page that allows for the easy browsing of all MSs that are digitally available online. Granted you may have already noted its existence through a post at ITM all the way back in December, but given that I noted it only in passing at the time, I thought it worth a second look.

From this article on the website:

Highlights of the virtual holdings include:

• The largest surviving collection of the works of Christine de Pizan, one of the first women in Europe to earn a living as a writer. The manuscript was commissioned by Queen Isabeau of France in 1414 and is now held by the British Library.
• An Irish copy of the Gospel of John, bound in ivory and presented to Charlemagne sometime around 800, now in the library of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland.
• The Junius manuscript, one of only four major manuscripts preserving poetry in Old English. Dated to around 1000, the book is now among the holdings of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

As an Anglo-Saxonist, I got no further than the Junius Codex. Along with Exeter, Vercelli, and the Nowell Codex, it houses Old English poetry, including Genesis, Exodus and Daniel. It was also my first Anglo-Saxon codex, which I saw at In the Beginning at the Smithsonian back in 2006. I'd be curious: do other medievalists out there remember their first manuscript? I mean, I'd seen other MSs here at Columbia's RBML, and at various museums and such. But to see the Junius, in person, even if I didn't get to "read" it more closely than through the glass protecting it -- that was pretty amazing.

I also couldn't help but think about the materiality of the codex. Of course I've gone on about this before. After a full semester, however, of one class on paleography and another on medieval book culture (the latter with Chris Baswell, who is part of the team that worked on assembling the UCLA site), I can't help but think about the objects themselves. Perhaps it's the lingering questions raised by Jeffrey's Weight of the Past talk last week, but I do tend towards feeling rather strange about digitized manuscripts. As teaching resources, they make the kind of intense paleographical work I did with Professor Dutschke possible in a way that before it would not have been outside of a few select places ten years ago.

However it also raises the question that all digital technology raises: that is, access. In this case, it's a question of access to the past. I'm working on a cataloging project with Prof. Dutschke for a few hours a week (along with several colleagues) -- and what I've realized is that there is so much to a manuscript that perhaps no digital reproduction, however fine, can represent. For example, I've often felt too squeamish to be a medievalist -- the thought of reading books that are written on animal skin often makes me hesitate to touch a manuscript. This Monday, for example, I sat in the Rare Books reading room and looked through a Chronicle written on parchment. The material of the text was utterly beyond my comprehension -- in addition to being in what was one of the worst late medieval hands I'd ever seen, the text was in German, a language I am slow to read when it's legible. However, the materiality of the book, the object itself, was exceedingly clear. Vellum, like un-moisturized skin, wrinkles. Yes, wrinkles. Texts age, and do so visibly. It's oddly similar to human skin in that regard.

This all tied in quite nicely to my Intro to the Major class, which I also taught this past Monday. I was introducing some of the ways medieval poetry thought about language, and the authority of the speaking or writing voice. After I gave an "introduction to Old English culture" that made me cringe slightly with its brevity -- we worked with one of my favorite of the Old English Riddles, Number 47:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.


A moth ate words; a marvelous event
I thought it when I heard about that wonder,
a worm had swallowed some man’s lay, a thief
In darkness had consumed the mighty saying
With its foundation firm. The thief was not
One whit the wiser when he ate those words.

Trans. Richard Hamer

When a poet in the Middle Ages looked at a book s/he didn't see something pristine, like my copy of Klaeber's Beowulf, which is still too new to be dog-eared and worn. Rather, books had long histories already, even when new -- it was not, as it were, their first life. And books were not safe from the ravages of time or even of the worms that also rend human flesh after death. Perhaps its worth remembering that even digital materials have worms which feed on data. Transience, it would seem, was and is part and parcel of textual experience. Rightly so, given that humans create them.

In part, and as always, it seems I've come back around to where I began when I started my musings: materiality and the medieval. We're always dealing, in some fashion, with what's left -- never an established whole, never a static object-of-knowledge. The medieval, it would seem, is always contextual, and therefore always contingent on the kinds of contexts we can find for it. It seems obvious, I suppose -- but every time I open my web browser and look at my first Anglo-Saxon codex, I don't know that I'll always acutely feel the absence of the codex Junius (given that it's not at my beck and call -- or even on this side of the Atlantic). But I do sense another kind of absence -- albeit one that is paradoxically full of lives and ideas and cultures that are always just beyond our ability to recall fully. I'm sure someone else has already said this -- but maybe we're always missing the Middle Ages?

Thanks to Scott Kaufman of The Valve for bringing this back to my attention, and to all the friends who forwarded it to me.

Cross posted at ITM.

More on something Beowulfian -- the conference for which it is intended -- on the morrow.

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Beginnings

[figure 1: A view of Lake Erie, from Hamburg's public beach. I took this photo on a chilly day this past November.]

Despite the chill in the air and the snow on the ground here in New York, spring semester always puts me in mind to think about beginnings. Spring reminds me that when it comes to my medieval interests, it all started in the spring – in this case, spring 2002. My first Old English class started seven years ago this past Wednesday – and every year, I’ve grown more certain that if the course caught my interest, it was largely because of how difficult it was. I’d never learned a language before, truth be told – French had been part of my growing up, present both in and out of school thanks to my mother’s background as former French professor. And anyone who’s been through the American school system knows that it’s a rare thing to really learn English grammar. I joke about it, but I think I really did learn modern English grammar in my Old English class – I wonder if others have had that experience? I certainly didn’t know the difference between a nominative and a genitive (in terms of what the words meant, at any rate), and I don’t think I’d ever heard of the dative before. It was like a revelation, really: modern English just made so much more sense after taking Old English, from the past tense of verbs to the use of apostrophes to indicate possession. Grammar rules had reasons – who knew?

So awhile back, Jeffrey invited us to talk about what we're teaching this semester -- and now, finally, I can make my contribution to that discussion. This semester is pretty exciting for me, as I’m beginning my career in teaching literature, after five semesters teaching freshman composition. If you're familiar with my academic preoccupations, the way I plan to begin the semester won’t surprise you.

Columbia’s English department has recently instituted a new course for graduate students to teach. It functions as a kind of introduction the English major. Essentially, we cover various genres of literature (the triad of poetry, drama, prose), and critical methodologies for understanding and interpreting them. It’s a wide ranging class, in which a professor lectures for an hour once a week, and then graduate students teach a section of seminar that meets for two hours, also once a week, and covers more material than the lectures do. It’s a big course, and looks scary from the outside, but it’s not meant to be an in-depth study of any one period or method – it’s just introductions, making acquaintances, and learning to engage with texts in ways that are meaningful to current critical discourses.

All that aside, I wanted to start with something that would put everyone on the same level. I can’t teach literature without finding some way to put something medieval, or even better Old English, into it. I couldn’t even teach writing without using medieval references to illustrate writing points (like the idea of “auctoritee,” borrowed happily from Chaucer). My opening class? I think I’m going to start with something I know intimately, but am utterly unable to understand (yes, one honors thesis, one masters thesis, and countless translations later, I still don’t understand this poem – I doubt I ever really will). The idea here is to start from a place where there is no background information, to look closely at what can be understood without a sense of the context of a piece. So I’ll start with the manuscript: what can we tell just from looking at this text, as it appears on the page? Then, I hand out a modern edition of the poem (in old English, of course). I’m assuming no one will be able to read it. But if you know that it’s an edition of the MS we’ve been looking at, then what can you say about the text now? With a little luck, I’ll be treated to a rousing chorus of “It’s poetry!” The fun part will be discussing why we can say that now, if we couldn’t tell before. It allows discussion of editorial practice, and will hopefully allow us to talk a bit about assumptions concerning how poetry “looks.” Also: a great moment to point out alliteration, caesurae and the like.

From there, we move to a translation (I’m still deciding which to use, so any suggestions would be appreciated!), and what becomes an exercise in close reading of what the poem says, and how we arrive at conclusions about the techniques it is using to do so. Of course, I’ll close the class with a mini-lecture on the cultural and historical context of the poem, and hopefully that will spur a few more minutes of discussion and questions about how we can understand the poem in its literary and historical contexts. Ideally, it’ll be a fun exercise to think about how we approach poems, what we bring to the table in analysis, and how to think about a poem without immediate reference to the author’s biography or even any historical context. Most of all, I’m hoping it will get everyone talking early on in the class, as they will presumably all be coming in at the same level of knowledge concerning the poem in question.

In a class about introductions, you see, I’m planning to introduce them to the poem I’ve spent far too much time reading, thinking, writing and talking about, on ITM, OENY and elsewhere. My first real literature class? I’m teaching The Wanderer.

cross posted at ITM.

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Getting Anglo-Saxon, or, Anatomy of a First Chapter

[picture from the Vortigern Studies website. It's supposedly Orosius!]

by Mary Kate Hurley

Around the same time we finished out our group discussion of Getting Medieval, I reached a milestone of my own. I’ve recently completed work on my first dissertation chapter – and, though the chapter will no doubt be returned from my adviser with plenty of comments for my revision, I thought that I’d do a short series of posts on the process of getting this first chapter written, and what I’ve found now that I’m there. I’d wanted to do so as I was researching and writing – however, it would appear that learning to write a dissertation chapter makes it really hard to step back and write about writing that dissertation chapter. I’m hoping that, now I’ve “learned” how to write a chapter, I can share more of the second chapter as I go. The interactive part: I’d love comments and feedback, of course, but I’d also love to hear how other scholars approach the questions I’m raising here – grad students and more advanced scholars alike. Most specifically: How do you write a 45(ish)- page chapter on a text that you could easily write a book about? How did you narrow down your focus on your source(s)?



Correct me if I’m wrong: everyone who does a field in Old English literature, including prose, for their exams comes away with one translation out of the Alfredian corpus that qualifies as their favorite. And there are plenty to choose from, too: the Boethius, the Psalms, the Pastoral Care, the Dialogues, the Soliloquies -- and the subject of my first chapter, the Orosius. Although I certainly have a soft spot for the Pastoral Care and the Boethius (after all, who doesn’t love getting consoled by philosophy? And in Anglo-Saxon no less!), I suppose the Orosius is my “favorite.” I’m not quite sure what it was that attracted me to the Orosius, but I do know that unlike the majority of work done on Old English translation, it wasn’t the preface.

Why does that matter? To back up for those who haven’t slogged through the great works of Anglo-Saxon prose: The Old English Orosius is a translation (some, following the work’s editor Janet Bately, would call it a “paraphrase,” contending that it’s too close to the original to even qualify as translation!) of the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos. Written by the fifth century Spanish priest Paulus Orosius, the Latin text was meant to be a companion-piece to Saint Augustine’s City of God Against the Pagans. In the Historiarum Orosius intends to show how history may be read in light of Christianity – and moreover, that such a reading will show that the past was, in a sense, destitute: understanding and insight into historical happenings could not exist without the acknowledgement of Christ. He avers that these “pagans” do not know how to read history, that “they do not inquire into the future, and either forget or do not know the past,” and so they attribute the calamity of the sack of Rome to the “increasingly less worship of idols.”(1) In short: they assume their punishment for converting to Christianity is the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. Orosius sets out to show them how in the grand scheme of things, life is much better post-Christ than before his coming. In so doing, he interprets pretty much everything through a lens of how much worse it used to be, and how we can see God’s work explicitly bringing Rome to Christianity, after which, things were comparatively less bad.

Orosius, then, clearly saw himself in the same tradition as Augustine in terms of his
understanding of the relation of human history to Divine Providence – he’d undertaken the project at the behest of Augustine, though the results were not really what Augustine wanted. Orosius’ conception of historia differs significantly from his mentor’s, which makes it clear why Augustine was so disdainful of his work. (2) Orosius’ difference from Augustine in his historical reasoning is a function of the way in which history itself is structured. Confronted with “a universal sweep, a universal explanation of men’s basic motives, a certainty of the existence, in every age, of a single, fundamental tension,” Orosius over-generalizes, and produces what Peter Brown describes as “a neatly-patterned Christian ‘Universal History’”. (3) In Augustine, the work of God in the world is always implicit, but can rarely be seen – “we can only be confident in general that all history is in God’s hands, but we cannot watch his hand at work.” (4) Orosius, on the other hand, seems to be certain that the work of the Almighty is easily intelligible to those who know the signs by which it can be identified. Moreover, history is easily sorted, categorized and judged: Orosius’ “catalogue of worldly woe” shows explicitly how the world waxes more evil earlier before Christ one looks. Thus it is only the person who cannot see with the clearer light of the Christian faith who would aver that the present, with its knowledge of both Christ and His redemption, is worse than the ignorant – and therefore all the more wicked – past.

The translation into Anglo-Saxon of the Latin Historiarum is highly abridged – it cuts the original seven books down to six, and leaves out large sections of the text (Bately, in her introduction to the text, gives a more complete summary of the textual differences, both the abridgements and additions) . However, the OE Orosius is most often noted for its additions. First, there are additions of mythological and historical information Orosius did not include in the Latin -- these would have been familiar to 5th century Rome but not to Anglo-Saxon England. More tellingly however, critics have been overly enamored of the so-called “geographical preface.” The Latin Historiarum features a discussion of the landmasses of the world, and the various populations therein. Seeking, apparently, to do them one better, the Old English Orosius includes a much remarked on insertion, usually referred to as the “Ohthere and Wulfstan” part of the text. In it, two “norðmenn” tell King Alfred about their travels in Scandinavia and other parts of the far north, and about the people who live there (including various “magical” things they can do!). A quick survey of the critical literature reveals a huge emphasis on the preface, and these two travelers – and so, my first goal was to avoid talking about the “original” parts of the text, or at least to avoid the preface!

This didn’t really narrow things down all that much. It did, however, give me a chance to use a hard-won realization from my translation studies courses and workshops: translations, if they are true translations, must not be treated as “derivative.” That lesson, repeated to me over and over again by Michael Scammell (my workshop professor, who finally convinced me that if I am ever to translate Anglo-Saxon poetry, I must learn to love Modern English as much as Old English. That project is deferred indefinitely.) allowed me to formulate a different way of understanding the text: if I’m not concerned with what’s “original” in the translation, how do I locate Anglo-Saxon England in a text so close to the Latin from which it is translated?

Next time: What Orosius Said, or, The Trial by Appendix

1. “qui cum futura non quaerant, praeterita autem aut obliuiscantur aut nesciant praesenti a tamen tempora ueluti malis extra solitum infestatissima ob hoc solum quod creditur Christus et colitur Deus, idola autem minus coluntur, infamant.” Trans. Deferrari, 4.

2.Cf. Rohrbacker, David. The Historians of Late Antiquity, 148. Rohrbacker cites a number of scholars who identify the tone of Augustine’s second book of the City of God as arguing against Orosius’ less philosophically sophisticated version of a world history.

3. Brown, Augustine of Hippo 321

4. Bittner 355


Works Cited
Bittner, Rudiger. "Augustine's Philosophy of History" in Gareth B. Matthews (ed), The Augustinian Tradition. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999. pp. 345-360.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Deferrari, Roy (trans). Orosius: Seven Books Against the Pagans. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1964.

Rohrbacker, David. The Historians of Late Antiquity. Routledge, 2002.

Cross posted at ITM.

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Dreaming Language: Lytton Smith's Monster Theory

(I've been wanting to write about LJS's chapbook for about a month now -- a moment's rest in the rush of the end-of-semester madness made this finally possible. As some of you know, LJS is frequent commenter at In the Middle -- and I can't recommend his work highly enough. He's also a colleague of mine in the Columbia English department's Medieval contingent, and a fellow Anglo-Saxonist. That might be why it was a bit strange writing about him in the third person! I have to confess, I don't know how to write a poetry review...thoughts and comments welcome! The image is from national geographic, and illustrates another Loch Ness Monster theory. Seemed a good match.)

Reading Lytton Smith’s chapbook Monster Theory is a bit like stepping into a memory you’d forgotten. At first the reason seems obvious: in a book where so many poems take cues and even characters from the world long past, of course you’ll find something in it that is eerily familiar, whether a “Book of Encouragement and Consolation,” a “Charm Against the Loss of Crops,” or even a “Monster Theory.” However, on second approach, this strange familiarity becomes just that -- strange, but in the sense of the French étranger: foreign. If there is a memory here, it isn’t something entirely of the reader’s making. It’s at that moment, in the recognition of that which isn’t precisely recognizable, that the poet’s spell begins.The sense is that this book requires – demands – our complete attention, and moreover, demands to be re-read, even in absence. This little book of poems haunts the reader who lets its language speak to her.


Throughout the book, the poet asks for an gesture of imagination from his reader, and from the first a point of entry is established: “Bury your eyes in late barley,” opens the first poem, called “Scarecrow Work.” With this opening it becomes clear that there is a relationship forming, a world the poet constructs of language which, while it seems to be reveling more than revealing, will show the reader something that exists beyond the glittering surface of its words. Repetitions, particularly of verbs, seem important here, as in the last stanza of “Scarecrow Work”:

“…Your lesson: what will not scatter is safe, /
Is dove, is olive return.”

The existential status of that “which is” safe, isn’t merely safe, and the repetition of “is” – is dove, is olive return – suggests that, while each thing that does not scatter is safe, each thing that does not scatter will still scatter, if only in a proliferation of references.



The centrality of the poem “Monster Theory” to the chapbook which bears its name is well placed. A poem not unlike the patchwork [monster] it speaks, the work performed by each section of the piece stands in for a larger analysis of what the [monster] patterns, promises, reveals and conceals. Though the first section reminds us that “It is always at an outset a displacement—”, the bracketed [monster] moves quickly through that displacement and into a stunning soliloquy that closes the work. The poet writes of a village, a cartographer, a lost daughter, a gathering search for a monster which refuses restraint or removal (the almost playful lines of the fifth section enumerate the ways the [monster] thwarts any attempt to prevent his escape: “Cauldron of boiling water: stench, but not of burning flesh. /Buried alive: Why expect so much of wood and soil?”), and the rendering of the [monster] as myth (“two anxious and too young sentries posted at the cave entrance…” mark a particularly lovely line in the third section), until finally in the seventh section we see the [monster] speak. Though in dialogue with what we presume is the daughter he snatched away, the [monster’s] words are the only voice we are allowed to hear. We are confronted with a [monster] who seems to know his place, and this is where the poem’s provenance becomes strikingly clear. Inspired by the essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (the introduction to a volume of collected essays called Monster Theory), Smith has retained some key phrases from Cohen’s article, and this lends the [monster] an eerie prescience, a theoretical take on lives human and monstrous which approaches a kind of philosophy of monstrous purpose: “The monster exists as harbinger to crisis, / devil’s advocate to the identity.” It becomes clear, however, that when this [monster] is allowed to speak, another aspect of human identity is at stake, and with language, this focus lends light to other work being done by these poems:

‘You of all should know fear of the monster
is a kind of desire, a way of loving without
the difficulty of touch.’ ‘............
.......................................
………………………’ ‘If your hands grant
a life I could not have imagined, the amber
of electric through the body, I have seen
also your weeping after.'

This sense of the body -- human or not – which simultaneously gives voice to and is voiced by language, is what Smith seems most interested by in so much of his poetry. The intersection of language and body, his poetry tells us, can be painful and profound.

“Annuls the Space/Time Experience” is one of the moments where the intense pain that language can cause is brought out most beautifully in the text. “Is this the dream of language,” the poet asks, and then confronts the reader with the possibilities: “a trap with rusted hasp (suggests escape / but offers teeth)” The musical beauty of language is not forgotten either, and in another moment of the same poem, we are offered these lines:

…and Ben has left
a written note as if to say the lair

is love of lair, the lyre a stringed bereft
of am, the lure just that, another dream
of language much as fluid as adrift…

The progression from lair to lyre to lure is particularly musical, and its setting in a poetic meditation on language is particularly appropriate. And yet, in spite of (and perhaps because of) the beauty of such lyric lines, the poem concludes on this haunting note:

“…we’ve fallen for our absents
and this is then the dream of language,
of those who’ve left, and left us with their absence.”

Those who’ve left, and left us with their absence – returning to this line, repeatedly, the haunting beauty of that which isn’t present (and so must be represented in language) is what it seems Smith is most adept at rendering. And of course, it is where bodily presence is least possible that it becomes all the more pronounced.

In a particularly bold poetic move, the poet writes in the voice of Eva of Wilton, the intended recipient of Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius. In “The Book of Encouragement and Consolation,” this young anchoress, who is only known through a letter she may have never received, and the voice of a man, Goscelin, whose love for her may have been implicated in her removal from St Bertin to Wilton, is given her own chance to respond. The embodiedness of her language – “(tongue / composed, the restrained throat forgotten / as threshold)” – as represented in the text is striking, and we remember that silence is an absence which implies a presence, and so lasts “only until its next breaking.”

Despite the deep ambivalence that becomes clear in terms of what “dream of language” we might ultimately embrace, the poet implies that this isn’t the end. If, as in “A Manual for Weather,” we are reminded that “All that is left of weather / Is how it is written…” and if we might (as with a bracketed [monster]) exchange the word “weather” for other words, Smith’s poetry envisions this status as one of hope, not desperation. If language cannot be fixed, or static, therein lies its beauty, its hope – its ability to live beyond us. Lytton Smith creates a world in which words are more than simply memory, and he invites us to leave our preconceptions about language and its myriad uses at the door. At the end of “A Manual for Weather,” positioned as it is at the end of Monster Theory, we are granted the grace of an unexpected arrival:

Welcome, friend. Leave your instruments
at the entrance. We live between weather
and earthlight: there is no use for them

here, no music without weather. Pitch
nor oscillation, string nor wind nor voice.

The poem ends where we do – at the limit of what language can represent. The final line goes out almost like a prayer – and a remarkable chapbook ends with what peace a world of language might finally give:

Silence, and words folding into it, enough.


________

Lytton Smith's Monster Theory was the winner of the PSA chapbook award in 2008. His book of poems, The All Purpose Magical Tent will be published by Nightboat Books in 2009. Lytton blogs at: The All Purpose Magical Tent.

Cross posted at ITM.

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Thinking About: Translation

I'm still working on that post entitled "Growing Pains" -- all about the last two months of my academic life, and the weird transition into dissertating that has been by turns difficult and exhilarating, but mostly just plain scary. I'm hoping that eventually I'll have a bit more mental space to sort out all of the fragmented "notes" that are populating the "Blogging" section of my Spring 2008 OneNote Notebook (yes, I have sold my soul to Bill Gates -- but OneNote is really fantastic) -- more specifically, I'm hoping that after this weekend, I'll have a little more mental space to think through all of that.


However, part of my brain power has been caught up in a conference I've been helping to organize, and so I'm excited to mention that, this weekend, there's a New York Happening you won't want to miss: Columbia's Center for Literary Translation is putting on the third biannual National Graduate Student Translation Conference! The Keynote is a discussion, featuring our own Michael Scammell with Poet Laureate Charles Simic! Among the many roundtables during the two days, frequent commenter and fellow Anglo-Saxonist LJS will be moderating a roundtable discussion on Multilingualism and Translation, and I will be moderating a session on Translation and the Academy. The other -- and equally important and fun -- part of the conference is a series of workshops: graduate students from around the country are participating in workshops on translations from various languages (everything from Persian to French to Greek to Korean), and I'm going to be workshopping my translations of the Old English Advent Lyrics, and the Old English Wanderer, in one of them! It's a bit overwhelming: it's the first time I've let my translations be viewed by peers who weren't in a translation workshop with me at Columbia, but I'm also very excited to be taking part.

Anyone who has been at an event where the future of Old English studies has come up and I have been in the room will know that one of my major questions about the future of the field is what role new translations and editions will have to play in it. Of course, all you really have to do is read a bit of what I've written on ITM and OENY to notice that. One of the major ambivalences I've had about Old English and translation is the disservice it seems to do to the language, or more aptly, the disservice I do to the language when I try to translate it. And yet translations -- myriad translations -- are necessary in literature. And in life.

However, what is difficult to realize until you set yourself down to do it is that translation is a creative endeavor. As I've been writing about the Old English Orosius this week, I've realized how apparent the lack of concern for translation as creation in and of itself can be. For much of the history of scholarship on the Orosius, the concern has been for the "original" parts, the parts that weren't found in the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos: the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, which interrupt the geographical preface and bring the work of historical inquiry to the court of Alfred the Great, have been subject to intense scrutiny. When the Old English translator embellishes on the story of Babylon, composing an impromptu poem not unlike the Ruin, critics rush to praise the innovation of the translator.

I think that this betrays a fundamental misconception about translation, one that can be phrased two ways. First, it assumes that the real difficulty is innovation: if you can translate from Latin into Old English, what is interesting is composition that is only present in the vernacular. These moments in the text can be BOTH creative AND intellectually apt -- after all, modification to the original must still fit in with the text as a whole. This conception of translation marks it as inherently derivative, and privileges the original text's superior position not in terms of authority, but in terms of originality.

What this conception of translation misses is the difficulty of true translation: the difficulty in being able to pose someone else's words in words that are not their own, but somehow mean in the same way. The difficulty of inhabiting another person's point of view, of sharing a part of their understanding of the world -- and of doing so imperfectly, but respectfully.

Disjointed musings that all go to say firstly that my silence in the blogosphere is reaching an end point (I sincerely hope), and that I will undoubtedly have more to say about translation after my panel on translation in the academy. You may expect a full report. In the mean time, I leave you with an excerpt from the translation of the Wanderer I've submitted for workshop this weekend. It's the part where the voyager falls asleep, and imagines that the birds are his old friends -- only to wake up alone:

He who knows exile will lack lordly learning
and the wisdom of warriors. His sleep will be wretched,
shackeled by dreams. He imagines his lord
embracing him—and lays hands and head
in the lap of his king, as once long ago
he took comfort from joy in the mead-hall.

He awakens alone. Sea-birds bathe, and ruffle their feathers,
skim light over the dark waves in snow and sleet.
Seeing shapes and shades of friends of old,
comrades of the past—he greets them with joy,
hails them aloud, fleeting spirits!
They swim away. Sorrow returns.
Old words are useless to him, who
must send his tired mind far over the waters.

I do not know why my mind is not saddened,
when deep in earth’s darkness, I ponder how brief
are the lives of men, how quickly they leave
the mead hall, so bold and so young.

Happy weekend to all, especially to JJC and family, whom I will see in NYC soon!

cross posted to ITM.

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Fragments Shattered by History

So on Saturday, as I've mentioned here, I will be responding to this paper by Aaron Hostetter , a colleague of mine from Princeton. This will all take place as a part of the fourth annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference.

So here, for your Valentine's Day evening perusal, is my remark/question for our discussion. Any critiques or questions would be quite helpful -- this was the first time I've read Andreas. Though I find it quite fascinating, it's also insanely complex. One day that characteristic of Old English poetry will stop surprising me. With a little luck though, I'll never lose that complexity's delight.

So: Go read Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". Then, refresh your memory of the story with any one of these posts on Heather Blurton's Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature from the ITMBC4DSoMA event this summer. I should note that in my haste I've not had the time to read through all of the entries, though I certainly hope to do so by Saturday's session. Then, return here to read my entry in this ongoing discussion of Anthropophagy. My bibliographical notes are not terribly precise, as I'm mostly going on what I've read from Aaron's paper: however, I'll have to add it in tomorrow morning, when I have time to figure out what I was drawing on! My title could also use a lift -- any ideas would be appreciated!

Fragments Shattered by History


Aaron argues that as a poem, the Andreas makes a comment on the relationship between the past and the present: most specifically, that fragments of a past identity inhabit the present construction of self – more importantly, they inhabit the text’s present construction of cultural identity. Using the poetic borrowings of Andreas, and making clear their poetic effect, the argument culminates in the assertion that, in the case of the “sad anthropophagites” of the Anglo-Saxon corpus:

the act of devoration leaves the eater with a raw sense of the self in time, of ones utter dependence on the presence of the past with which to construct a present, and a lingering sense of absolute difference from the apparent integrity of those pasts.

In some senses, his argument squares with the recent work on the poem done by Heather Blurton: in her dissertation, and its rendering in book form, Blurton argues that we might productively read the poem not merely for its conversion narrative, but for its “cannibal narrative” – a narrative that tells a story of invasion and conquest and the subsequent, postcolonial hybridity that results. Andreas, she argues, deliberately depicts the Mermedonians in ways which echo the descriptions of Anglo-Saxon warriors in other poems. Clearly, Blurton picks up on the same tendency which Aaron highlights: the citation of other Anglo-Saxon poems is used to an effect in Andreas, and to read the poem in any other light flattens a nuanced reading – performed by the poem – of those texts, and the culture which produced them.

As an opening provocation to discussion, I would like to reframe the question which Aaron is asking us to consider. In doing so, I want to engage with the idea of this solitary “self-in-time” – to ask, directly, the question of what the Mermedonians are doing in Anglo-Saxon England. If the self is related to the other in Andreas through a metaphoric act of consumption, devoration, or put in the slightly more post-colonial term favored by Blurton, incorporation – the question raised becomes more than simply one of “self” and “other” per se. The intermingling performed by the act of anthropophagy, and the intersection of the past and present that occurs in the building of cultural identity, suggests that the time of this “meal” is, to borrow a phrase, “out of joint.”

The question this raises about Andreas is the way in which the pasts upon which the present feasts are only apparently integral: the ways in which their narrative wholeness is shattered by the onset of a different kind of history. In Augustine’s conception of history, the human interpretation of history’s narrative is fundamentally altered by the intersection of the divine with the human: Christ’s advent necessarily rewrites the linear narrative of human history, and the truly integral events (his birth, death, resurrection and final judgment) shape the interpretation of any other narrative (though, and importantly, it doesn't annihilate the presence of all other narratives, which could be said to haunt it). My question then, is this: if we were to let the conversion narrative shape the cannibal narrative of the text, might we understand this story of sylfætan as an interpretation of the non-Christian digestion of history. Fundamentally incomplete, the past can only disappoint those who wish to use its narrative to shape the future from its fragments: those stories need interpretation, direction, a space to develop into that does not return to the same, human story. Rather, human history needs a divine supplement – otherwise, how could anyone seeking to feed on its remnants find adequate nourishment?


cross posted at ITM

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Old English, New Media: or, Friday Night Meta-Blogging

As everyone knows, blogging isn't really academic blogging unless somewhere along the line, you start "meta-blogging": indulging in that art of writing blog posts which theorize about blogging. Recently, I was asked to write an essay for the Old English Newsletter about blogging and Old English -- more specifically, perhaps, about what is to be gained through academic blogging. Although the essay itself has not yet been published, I wanted to post a bit of it on ITM and Old English in New York -- both to get some reactions, as well as to share what has kept me away from blogging so often in the past few weeks.

Of course, we all know that this particular issue has been done -- some might argue to near-death -- on the blogs. However, I do think I managed to get somewhere when it came to defining my blog-work in terms non-bloggers or those new to the blogosphere might understand. Of course, the usual suspects were among my early inspirations -- Scott Eric Kaufmann, Adam Kotsko, and Joseph Kugelmass are all cited in the portion I'm copying here...however, I also am indebted to posts by Doctor Virago, Bitch, PhD, and of course, the usual suspects here at ITM (Eileen, Jeffrey and Karl). I may still have time for revisions -- but even if I don't, I look forward to hearing from you, dear readers, on things I could nuance, clarify, change or get rid of entirely. Also: my apologies to DTK, who had not yet begun his series of guest posts here at ITM when I wrote this (and so doesn't yet appear in the litany of guest and co-bloggers on ITM that I list in footnote 8).

Excerpt from Old English, New Media: Blogging Beowulf
[The essay from which this excerpt comes begins with a consideration of my own beginnings in the blog world, along with questions of pseudo- and anonymity, before segueing into the conversation that took place, both at Inside Higher Ed and The Valve, between Kotsko, Kaufmann, and Kugelmass. I begin here with the consideration of Kaufmann's article on academic blogging.]

Scott Eric Kaufmann, on the other hand, sees a brighter future for the prospect of blogging in the academy. Maintaining a fairly high readership with his blog Acephalous has given Kaufmann a certain visibility within the scholarly community, but the real pay-off is in the experience he has had not only as an academic but as an academic author, because blogging has given him the experience of learning “what it’s like to write in a way most academics never have: namely, for an audience.” [1] Furthermore, he poses a particularly challenging question to specialists: “Why not write for people who don’t already [know] how you think about everything? Why not force yourself to articulate your points in such a way that strangers could come to know your thought as intimately as your friends from grad school do?” [2]

Kaufmann’s questions here are ones I routinely pose to my first year writing students, encouraging them away from what the Rhetoric and Composition specialists call “writer-based prose” and toward the far easier to engage “reader-based prose.” It is a fine line to walk; what academic blogs can do, however, is allow all of us an opportunity to write for the non-specialist, to attempt to make complex arguments without being obscure. In responding to both of these authors, Joseph Kugelmass makes the point (one I hope will be well taken) that blogs allow an interface between the academy and the “public” in a way more traditional scholarly outlets such as journals, edited collections and books seldom do. Moreover, he claims that “[h]umanistic blogs are one way of restoring the connection between scholarly tradition and the new plenitude of culture.” [3] In short, they allow the humanities to be accessed by their subject – humans.

Kugelmass concludes his meditation on the use of blogging in the formation of academic communities with a possibility many might be familiar with: the idea (though not explicitly stated) of the workshop. Conversations on a blog, he suggests, might function as “stepping-stones to mainstream work: ironing the kinks out of a journal article, gathering sources for a dissertation, drafting a keynote address or the chapter of a book.” [4] Blogging, then, allows a lower-stakes audience for a work-in-progress, and thus allows for the author to take risks he or she might not otherwise take, and benefit from readers’ comments and responses. In line with Kaufmann, he highlights the development of the author in the writing of a blog, arguing that “the opportunity exists to turn blogging into something more than an interstitial occupation, for the lonely times, and the idle times. It can be the practice, as vital in scholarship as in friendship among equals, of discovering a voice.” [5] The idea of a practice inherent in blogging – a practice which should be highlighted as a process rather than a product – is key, for Kugelmass and for many academic bloggers (myself included), in the formation of “voice.” [6]

I would argue that the idea of developing academic “voice” is what makes academic blogging so valuable in general. In May of 2007, after numerous conversations with colleagues at Kalamazoo about the possible ramifications (positive and negative) of letting go of my pseudonym, Old English in New York’s “Anhaga” was relieved of her duties of authorship, and I “claimed my voice.” [7] In the time since, I have used the blog as a forum for promoting the activities of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, as well as posting interesting calls for papers and descriptions of conferences in the New York area. After having been a frequent commenter on the medieval group blog In the Middle (founded by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in 2006), I was asked in August 2007 to join the collaborative project there as the resident graduate student blogger. [8] In the Middle, and the community that has formed around it, is a forum in which I share my own ideas and projects, to be certain. However, and perhaps more importantly to the development of my academic voice, it has allowed me to be an active commenter and interlocutor for the work of other academics.

Through Old English in New York and now In the Middle, I have found a community of scholars with similar interests, who want to provoke and participate in discussions about the work we do. I would suggest that a part of what is gained in the blogging community is not simply a chance to think aloud on one’s own topics, but to be affected by each others’ work. Even when topics range outside our own areas of expertise, we can still comment usefully and intelligently on each others’ ideas. Moreover, I have found that the ideas and questions raised on the blogs linger with me, and hold a purchase on my imagination which can only enlarge my breadth as a scholar. This kind of interaction often encourages imaginative juxtapositions in what I call a “Forsterian” scholarship, drawing on the epigraph to the E.M. Forster novel Howards End. Our work is to “only connect”: to connect ideas, people, cultures and texts in a network that might, in the end, be best described not only as human but also as humane:

[W]ithout conversation, especially among those who seek, not to tear down your ideas, but to help you make them better and more theoretically rigorous, I really don't believe there is much traction for really good work to develop its highest potential, or else whatever ‘victory’ you do achieve with your work is, again, kind of lonely, maybe even empty. [9]

Here, Eileen Joy picks up on my Forsterian theme, suggesting that scholarly work at its very best is always a process of collaboration. Blogs are becoming a fruitful way for us, as scholars seeking to create a community of thinkers, to reach out across the distances that separate us to form a kind of “global classroom” in which we can all benefit from each others’ expertise early on in projects that can be made more astute through the interaction.

In reaching out in a format that is readily accessible to a culture that is increasingly engaging the texts we study, we have a chance to let intellectuals and enthusiasts who are not “academics” see inside the “ivory tower” a bit more. Perhaps in the process, that tower might be dismantled, allowing the study of medieval cultures and texts a place in a society that often finds it inaccessibly remote. All we need do is connect.

Footnotes:

[1] Scott Eric Kaufman. “An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging.” Inside Higher Ed. 1 November 2007.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Joseph Kugelmass. “Academic Blogging Revisited.” The Valve. 1 November 2007.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Here I would like to thank the director and assistant directors of the University Writing Program at Columbia – Joseph Bizup and Nicole Wallack – for introducing me to the theoretical aspects of writing, and in particular this focus on process, which is one of the key components of the course.
[7] “Claiming my Voice” Old English in New York. 16 May 2007.
[8] Although In the Middle began as a single-author blog, Cohen has hosted a number of guest bloggers during the two years of its existence, including Jon K. Williams and Michael O’Rourke. The first In the Middle “book club” event featured contributions from Susan Kim, Heather Blurton and Asa Mittman. Karl Steel and Eileen Joy, who are now co-bloggers with Cohen, also began their work on the blog as guest bloggers.
[9]Eileen Joy. Comment on “Scholarship and Blogs part 54656” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. In the Middle. 21 December 2007.

cross posted at ITM.

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I think this is why I read the BBC...

Perusing the New York Times this morning, I found this lovely little tidbit from Christopher Hitches on Harry Potter. My favorite bit:

Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as muggle and Wizengamot, and such names as Godric, Wulfric and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of “Beowulf” could be revived. The many Latin incantations and imprecations could also help rekindle interest in the study of a “dead” language.

Few? Surviving? I realize Hitchens is trying to make a point here, but it's kind of lost in the implication that anyone who wants to teach Anglo-Saxon must be slightly nuts and hopelessly lost in the fantasy that Beowulf has something to do with popular culture.

I'm being touchy, clearly, but still: that unfortunate collocation of adjectives suggests that Anglo-Saxonists are a dying breed. Hitchens continues to convey the false impression that all Anglo-Saxonists are both old and throwbacks to another era, irrelevant to modernity (though, apparently not without hope, impressively drawn through philological use of names rather than actual ideas or storylines) -- and given that Hitchens seems incapable of mentioning a female author who can match his beloved Orwell, Conan Doyle, and Pullman (whose entire oeuvre ends up a tedious attack on CS Lewis), that they're all men too.

Yes, I'm being unfair. But as a female Anglo-Saxonist who turned 25 last Monday and loves such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin and Agatha Christie -- I couldn't just let it slide.

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