A marvelous review of Thomas Meyers BEOWULF by Anthony Bale in Speculum: Thomas Meyer, trans., Beowulf. Preface by David Hadbawnik and introduction by Daniel C. Remein. Brooklyn: punctum books, 2012. Paper. Pp. 312. $15. ISBN: 9780615612652. The modernist inheritance of medieval English poetry is well known. From W. H. Auden’s reading of Anglo-Saxon poetry to Seamus Heaney’s best-selling translation of Beowulf, twentieth-century English poetry reflected an immersion in the medieval canon by poets who had received traditional literary educations in which Anglo-Saxon and medieval poetry was the very basis of composition. Less well charted has been the debt to early literature of avant-garde or postmodern poetics, largely English and American poetry from the 1950s onwards. Such poetry appears to reject the “closed forms” of formal composition in favor of an “open field” composition, the hallmarks of which are improvisation, emphasis on individual words and lines rather than heuristic form, and the use of nontraditional registers (such as slang, slogans, abbreviations, and nonverbal sounds). As David Hadbawnik and Daniel C. Remein say in their superbly succinct and scholarly introductory comments to this translation of Beowulf, the poet and translator Thomas Meyer was part of a group of experimental poets concerned with “old forms” and “translation” (2). Meyer was connected to the Black Mountain group, a loose affiliation of experimental poets affiliated with Black Mountain College in North Carolina, from the early 1950s. Some of those in this group, or those published by its Jargon Books imprint, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov, went on to achieve very significant success. Meyer’s Beowulf, however, has never previously been published, and it is only by chance that it was brought to the attention of Hadbawnik (who has recently published an edition of another avant-garde version of Beowulf, by Jack Spicer). The publication of Meyer’s Beowulf provides an exciting and vital resource for students both of medieval and modern poetry. This rendering of Beowulf should not be seen as a curiosity but rather as a vital and sophisticated attempt at working with the poetics of Beowulf in order to produce a poem that is at once haunting, strange, and elegant. The dominant mode of translation from Old and Middle English into “modern English” has been to translate into a self-consciously “correct,” academic, BBC-style language; such a formal and precise English is often quite at odds with the source text. Modern translators are cautious about using contractions, slang, nonce words, hapax legomena, kennings, technical vocabulary, ambiguous diction, neologisms: those elements that instill in medieval English poetry such richness, expressivity, and, as in the case of Beowulf, strangeness. We are often disorientated by medieval texts, but translations too frequently try to turn such disorientation into order. Meyer’s version, while far from faithful to the original poem, captures much of the hauntingly dreamlike and abstract quality of Beowulf while remaining faithful to the poem’s narrative. . . . This handsome edition (its cover based on the poster for Hitchcock’s Vertigo) also includes a fascinating interview with Thomas Meyer, a selective bibliography, and an interesting glossary, with Meyer’s stimulating notes on characters and background. Meyer’s poem could thus very fruitfully be used with a student audience to explore the emotional landscape of the poem and the difficulties of interpreting its attitudes. But much more than this, Meyer’s poem can be read in order to shake up scholarly consensus: Meyer steers the poem from concerns of “historical reality” and the accuracy of translation towards questions of meaning, reading, and poetic feeling. Throughout, Meyer foregrounds the poem’s jumbled nature and its sudden jumps and leaps, aspects that other readers have critiqued as errors of transmission or failures of art rather than expressive moments in their own right. Finally, Meyer’s poem invigorates medieval translation with risk: he takes liberties with the poem and celebrates his role as reviser and rewriter to produce something distinctive and beautiful. Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 16:34:43 +0000
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