What entered my head? A bit of history

A radical feminist nun, Jane-Marie Luecke taught me Old English decades ago, and I must admit that I was hooked from the beginning. It gives me a warm feeling if I can refract some part of her passion and dedication. Loved the paradigms, glossaries, and most of all the poetry. After I got my ASPR through the Book of the Month Club (tm)--yes, I am that old--I remember thinking that it would be fantastic to read through the entire six volumes. Checking out vol. 1, I see that my scribbled glosses end at around line 80 of Genesis in volume 1: The Junius Manuscript.  I was probably brought up short by my primitive and glacially slow ability to read OE. Now that I'm older, I've come to think of slow reading as a huge pleasure, so it doesn't bother me as much--and  after all these years of teaching OE (thanks, students for letting me!) I hope I've become a much better reader.

Anyway, the quest to read everything probably would have remained a harmless fantasy if it weren't for a seminar set up by Hal Momma and Heide Estes at NYU last spring under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium (ASSC).

April 27 Friday

Workshop "How Best to Study Old English Language and Literature (and Why)" at New York University 13-19 University Place Workshop from 12:45-2:45 pm in Room 222 Reception to follow in Room 229 Panelists: Fred C. Robinson (Yale University; A Guide to Old English), Peter S. Baker (University of Virginia, Introduction to Old English), Robert Hasenfratz(University of Connecticut, Reading Old English), Michael Matto (Adelphi University, The Word Exchange) Discussants: Martin L. Chase (Fordham, faculty), Heide Estes (Monmouth, faculty), Stacy Klein (Rutgers, faculty), Mo Pareles (NYU, Ph.D. candidate), Christine Venderbosch (Yale, Ph.D. candidate), Audrey Walton (Columbia, Ph.D. candidate), Erica Weaver (Columbia, undergraduate), Eric Weiskott (Yale, Ph.D. candidate), E. Gordon Whatley (Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, Faculty), Evan Wilson (NYU, undergraduate)

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/assc/

There was some crazy energy in the room--and that still shocks me a bit given the pragmatic and pedagogical nature of the topic. I wish I could remember who asked it, but one of the discussants or perhaps an audience member asked the panel if any of us were willing to bring out a "new Bradley" (referring to S. A. J. Bradley's Anglo-Saxon Poetry, the only translation that comes close to representing the entire corpus--though there are significant gaps). She talked about Bradley's wooden and Latinate prose renderings. If I'm remembering this right, all of the panellists recoiled in something like fascinated horror. I certainly did. God, how glorious to read through and translate the corpus afresh but then again how impossibly huge a thing it seemed. I think we all said something like "Lord, no."

On the Metro North train back to Connecticut I googled the size of the corpus on my phone: 30,500 + lines it turns out. Hrm. I guess the idea was sticking in the back of my head somewhere, floating around in the general mush, when my buddy and mind-boggling good poet Penelope Pelizzon, put her mind to work on this by asking me lots of great questions. How much can you translate in a day? How many days a week? How many weeks a year? She got me to crunch the numbers in a calculator. At hundred lines a day for every weekday, imagining I could keep this up for, let's say forty weeks out of the year, I could read/translate, it turned out, around 20,000 lines in a "year," making me think that I could conquer the corpus (or let it conquer me) in two years. It may take longer. 

At Kalamazoo, while I should have been drinking too much and embarrassing myself with my friends, I started translating "Christ and Satan" just to see how much I could do in a day, practically.   The coolness of OE poetry, one that makes my back leg go up and down, took over, and though my translation may need work, I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down daily to translate over the next week. I kept going, starting on the Junius MS., Genesis which I'm within a hundred lines of finishing.

Who knows if my translations will be fit for human consumption. With your help maybe I can figure that out. But for now, it's about the thrill of grappling with the poetry. I'll put some of my translations up in the blog--I'd be very grateful to get feedback from the OE community and any poets lurking out there.

For tomorrow's post, I want to think about this question: what are the main challenges of translating OE poetry?