The Painful Nowning Process

Three posts in one day may seem like spam, but when I realized that the replica Viking ship the Sea Stallion from Glendalough actually set sail yesterday on its return voyage from Dublin to Denmark, I had to post the link to the Smithsonian video . Last year, the ship sailed from Denmark to Dublin, reproducing typical Viking voyages of the 8th-11th centuries.

According to the accompanying Smithsonian.com article

[R]ecent research has suggested that the Vikings pouring out of Denmark, Sweden and Norway 1,200 years ago had more on their minds than raiding, though they were not above using their martial reputation to their advantage in areas where they were vastly outnumbered. These adventurers also wove a network of trade and exploration that stretched from Russia to Turkey to Canada, buying and selling goods from places as distant as China and Afghanistan. “They were people without boundaries,” says Wladyslaw Duczko, an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

This information will make fans of Michael Crichton’s The 13th Warrior happy, undoubtedly. A Viking voyage was swift, considering, but no romantic cruise, however:

Nighttime temperatures plunged into the 30s. . . . “It kept on raining and raining and raining,” says crew member Henrik Kastoft, a spokesman for a Danish political party in his day job. “There were so many nights I just sat there shivering for hours.” Each member of the crew had only about eight square feet of space to himself. “I really suffered from being so close to people for so long. I got edgy, cranky,” says Erik Nielsen. “Maybe the modern analogue would be a submarine.”

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and literary/history scholars learn a lot from projects such as these.

Thanks to my in-laws for the subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, without which I might have missed this story!

English is a fabulous language. Its enormous vocabulary, gathered from any number of other languages, makes it the most flexible medium of communication on earth. Poetry famously uses onomatopoeia–words that sound like the sounds they represent, e.g. “buzz,” or “murmur.” Joseph Bottum has been meditating on the way some words sound like what they mean, even abstract meanings:

They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness.

More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe. Pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon–sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning. They’re perfect, in their way. They’re what all language wants to be when it grows up.

In the absence of any formal linguistic term for such words, he decides to call them “agenbites.” Why?:

That’s a word Michael of Northgate cobbled up for his 1340 Remorse of Conscience–or Agenbite of Inwit, as he actually titled the book. English would later settle on the French-born word “remorse” to carry the sense of the Latin re-mordere, “to bite again.” But Michael didn’t know that at the time, and so he simply translated the word’s parts: again-bite or (in the muddle of early English spelling) agenbite.

Anyway, these words that sound true need some kind of name. And since they do bite back on themselves, like a snake swallowing its tail, Michael’s term will do as well as any other. Ethereal is an agenbite, isn’t it? All ethereal and airy. Rapier, swashbuckler, erstwhile, obfuscate, spume–agenbites, every one.

The conversation about “agenbites” continues on the First Things blog:

Another writer observes that some, though not all, of this phenomenon is created by what linguists call a “phonestheme.” Coined back in the 1930s by J.R. Firth, the term names the fact that, for unknown reasons, certain sounds are associated with a particular genus of objects or actions. So, for instance, the phonestheme “gl-” appears in a surprising number of words about light: glitter, glisten, glow, gleam, glare, glint, etc.

And then things get really serious and, of course, not so much fun. But I felt that I must include the link in the interest of fairness and scholarly completeness.

“Translation is interpretation.” I’m pretty sure someone else said that first, but I can’t recall who. In any case, I say it to my students in almost every class, especially “world literature” and medieval lit, in which they often read (or want to read) translations from Old or Middle English.

A few months ago I posted about the controversy over the translation of the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” This week the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews and updates the whole story, and the four scholars most involved with translating and publicizing the ancient text: Bart Ehrman, Marvin Meyer, Elaine Pagels, who contracted with the owner of the manuscript fragments, National Geographic, to translate it and participate in a highly publicized documentary about the text, and April D. DeConick, who questioned the results:

These discoveries filled her with dread. “I was like, this is bad, and these are my friends,” she says. It’s worth noting that it didn’t take DeConick months of painstaking research to reach her conclusions. Within minutes, she thought something was wrong. Within a day, she was convinced that significant mistakes had been made. Why, if it was so obvious to her, had these other scholars missed it? Why had they seen a good Judas where, according to DeConick, none exists?

Maybe because they were looking for him. The first reference to the Gospel of Judas was made by St. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in Against Heresies, written around 180. Irenaeus was not a fan of the Gospel of Judas, which he deemed a heretical text (though it’s not known whether he actually read the gospel or had only heard rumors about it). Until the Coptic manuscript surfaced in the 1970s, Irenaeus’ mention of the gospel was the only known reference. Irenaeus wrote that the gospel portrayed Judas as “knowing the truth as no others did.” It was an intriguing statement and suggestive of a more positive Judas.

DeConick thinks the translators were overly influenced by Irenaeus and read the gospel with his interpretation in mind. If you come to the gospel free of preconceptions, she argues, then it’s clear that Judas is evil and cursed, not holy and chosen.

Last week, the Chronicle reviewed a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the first by a woman (a second will be published later this year), and also discussed the interpretive slants of other popular translations:

Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil’s tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.

“Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned,” says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. “This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?”

He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors “who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet.” That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on [Stanley] Lombardo’s 2005 version is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone.

. . .

Richard Thomas . . . points to a phrase in Lombardo’s edition . . . “Without very much justification on the level of Virgil’s Latin but a great deal of justification from what’s going on in the poem,” he says, “Lombardo writes ’shock and awe,’ which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?”

Seamus Heaney’s popular translation of Beowulf is now embedded in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and although I and many other critics have praised its readability and poetic style, they’ve also noted that it’s not always very accurate. Heaney’s introduction to the translation discusses the many parallels he found to ancient Irish culture, which some think lead to a somewhat odd result. Tom Shippey critiques the pros and cons very even-handedly.

In the south, it’s “lhude singe mockingbird,” even though we have “cuccu”s, they aren’t nearly as remarkable as the English ones. So, exams and final papers are done, grades are filed, graduation and its celebrations have passed. We said farewell to several of our finest English majors, as we do every year. Some have plans, some–are still planning, but we expect they’ll do well whatever they do.

I’ll be cleaning up my office (or at least organizing the clutter a bit), preparing the courses I’ll be teaching this coming fall, and writing a paper for a conference in June. Not necessarily in that order.

What are you doing this summer?

April is National Poetry Month. I have many favorite poets, but among those who immortalized April, we must acknowledge Geoffrey Chaucer, who reminds us (via the mysterious ChaucerBlogger) that

Bifor Aprille was the cruellest moneth (whatever that meneth!), it was a moneth of coloures and cries, and pilgrymages.

Hear! Hear! Or as Chaucer would have said (perhaps), “Oyez, oyez!”

One of my favorite poems by Chaucer, read aloud in Middle English:

“Truth” or the “Ballad of Good Counsel”

During April, the Academy of American Poets will e-mail you a Poem a Day. I make no representations to the value or appropriateness of said poems, but you can check out those that have been sent so far this month.

My colleague Ken Morefield has boldly ventured into the lair of the 2007 Beowulf movie. I warned him, but he went anyway. Read his comments.

Film critics are heroes—they willingly dare all manner of dreadful culture-dreck, thus saving the rest of us from wasting our money. If we read their reviews. If we don’t, we have only ourselves to blame.

Students have been asking me if I’ve seen the new Beowulf movie. Generally, I am willing to see a movie for myself before passing judgment on it, and I did just that with the 2005 Beowulf and Grendel movie (filmed in Iceland, with real live Gerard Butler as Beowulf). It had its moments, mostly involving scenic Iceland; its attempt to provide Grendel with a touching backstory was unsuccessful, as was the pointless insertion of a witch into the plot. Why doesn’t someone just go all the way and film John Gardner’s Grendel? It would make more sense.

However, one glimpse of Angelina Jolie in the trailer for the Zemeckis/Gaiman/Avary Beowulf, and I knew it would be a travesty. No one who had actually read the poem could take her seriously as Grendel’s mother, especially not with six-inch stilettos apparently growing from her heels. Clearly this movie was going to set up some kind of seduction…where that would lead would certainly not be pretty. Posters proclaimed “Pride is the Curse!” Well…one of the possible curses, at any rate. Talk about a vast oversimplification. So all right, I haven’t seen it. I hear the 3D effects are thrilling…and occasionally comical. But a movie that’s only worth seeing for 3D visuals doesn’t seem like much, especially when it’s based on one of the world’s classic tales of adventure, courage, combat, and sacrifice.

If I do see it, I’ll report. But I’ve already seen at least one reviewer write that he now “understands” Beowulf after seeing this movie. I think that’s extremely unlikely

Recently I somehow managed to compare medieval studies definitions of literary sources and analogues, specifically Chaucerian sources and analogues, with some ways contemporary TV shows function as sources and analogues. So perhaps I was still thinking along those lines when I came across Joss Whedon’s take on a rhetorical scheme Chaucer uses frequently (which he learned from any number of other authors), the inexpressibility topos (among several stylistic devices). Here, with Whedon’s peculiar combination of poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, he shows us how NOT to describe the saddest song in the world. Genius is where you find it, I say. Or else, possibly, poetry is poetry.

A few years ago I wrote a paper comparing the indie film Anchoress with what medieval scholars and theologians really think about real anchoresses and female mystics, based on medieval texts. Anchoress is a visually-striking film, and rather useful for illustrating the enclosure and giving some indication of an anchoress’s daily life. But in the end, it goes off with a stereotypical 20th-century, new-age agenda.

Now First Things‘ Matthew Millner notes that “more sophisticated readings” of medieval mystics are turning up all over—and about time, too, say I. After pointing to several recent essays by top scholars, Millner writes:

Historians who understand that sex is not everything have set themselves a more complicated task than the “psychoanalysis of visions.” Their appointments at leading institutions testify that the results have been more satisfying. Good historiography, however, is no end in itself; its purpose is to facilitate encounter with medieval mystics, one that we moderns would do well to pursue.

Having just discovered that the 8th edition of the Norton Anthology cut large chunks of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in order to shoehorn these two mystical yet very different 14th century women into a unit on “Christ’s Humanity,” AND has yet to make those materials available online, I was feeling cranky about the perception and interpretation of medieval mysticism, but after reading Millner’s column, I feel slightly better.

Even though we didn’t actually have Labor Day off (long story—don’t ask) this week has felt “off” somehow with missed connections and best-laid plans ganging agley (thank you, Robert Burns).

To improve the time, let’s consider the new Hollander translation of Dante’s Paradiso, which the New Yorker likes very, very much:

It is more idiomatic than any other English version I know. At the same time, it is lofty, the more so for being plain.

Acocella’s review does make it sound good, and she makes a strong case for reading Paradiso, in some form—of course it goes without saying that it’s worth reading Inferno and Purgatorio, or you’d think so, but I was unhappy to discover that my new World Lit. anthology (which shall remain nameless, because I liked it pretty well otherwise) includes only Inferno! What the who with the what now?!

Call me old-fashioned, but I remain fixated on Dorothy L. Sayers’s lyrical Dante translations (Penguin paperbacks), which even manage to imitate terza rima. I suppose they’re not trendy, but her introductions and notes are also extremely helpful in explaining Dante’s spiritual symbolism and allegories.

A fellow I knew in grad. school, Tony Esolen, has also translated the Divine Comedy. I keep meaning to try his translation. According to this review:

Thanks to Esolen’s superb rendition, one can finally delve into the Divine Comedy in English and catch the rigor of Dante’s style and the polyphonic range of his voice….

Esolen has produced an incomparably good work, which is likely to become the standard poetic translation of the Divine Comedy for years to come. He correctly views the poem as the paradigmatically Christian vision and the very voice of Western spirituality.

Note to self: put this version on your wish list.