(half-course, 3000-level)
The poem Beowulf, the first extended appearance in any literature of a dragon, has inspired many modern translations, graphic novels, operas, interpretive approaches, and films, making it a surprising leader among medieval texts adapted for modern use. Some of this newfound popularity for Anglo-Saxon texts in the modern day owes itself to J.R.R. Tolkien, but many others have also engaged with Old English texts. In this course we will look briefly at the historical approaches to Old English, including William Morris, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Jorge Luis Borges, but we will focus on modern versions including novels by Michael Crichton, John Gardner, Paul Kingsnorth, and Susan Signe Morrison, but especially considering poetic engagements with Old English by modern poets: Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Basil Bunting, Earle Birney, Bernard O'Donoghue, and others. In order to engage with this material from the point of view of language, we will use translation studies as our approach, studying the essential features for assessing completed translations and embarking on translation.
Required Texts:
Seamus Heaney, trans. Beowulf: Bilingual Edition. (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).
Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2016).
Susan Signe Morrison, Grendel's Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife (Alresford, Hants: Top Hat Books, 2015).
Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead (New York: Knopf, 1976).
John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage, 1971).
Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (New York: Norton, 2012).
A further package of material on OWL.
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