tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7568975876666606486..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Ruins and Poetry: Beowulf and Bethlehem SteelCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-45193359426750495882007-12-02T10:37:00.000-05:002007-12-02T10:37:00.000-05:00MKH, these are (as everyone has said) great though...MKH, these are (as everyone has said) great thoughts. This post resonates with me as the kinds of ideas I was grasping toward in my "Prevailing Poetry" presentation several weeks ago--reflections on several adaptations of <I>Beowulf</I> and their implications for the poem's life. You've said things I never approached saying but seemed at the heart of my thoughts. And you said them beautifully.<BR/><BR/>Eileen, your thoughts are also great reflections, and I wish now that I would have had <I>The Postmodern Beowulf</I> on hand when I was writing my presentation.<BR/><BR/>I've posted the following at my blog, but it belongs here as a response to what's been said:<BR/>I was was having a conversation with one of my friends in the English MA here at UConn about the Beowulf movie, which then moved into a discussion about translations. Toward the end of the conversation, he mentioned how fascinating it is to realize that we always go back to the Old English poem. Although we keep translating, over and over, those translations still need reworked after a time, the old renderings set aside, the new ones reworked for a new audience. He said that he thinks this was the goal of Seamus Heaney with his translation--to provide a new rendering that spoke to the audience of everyone, not only English majors who would read the poem but also anyone who wanted to pick up the poem and enjoy it. Then he hinted that, someday, even Heaney's translation will be set aside for a new one. But we will always return to the original text, the Anglo-Saxon words that still speak to us and fascinate us from over one thousand years ago. And I think that this life--the life of a poem that keeps speaking to us--is the one that you're alluding to in your post.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for the powerful, thoghtful reflections.bwhawkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17909010609907741198noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59877133329820183112007-12-02T08:33:00.000-05:002007-12-02T08:33:00.000-05:00Seconding what others have said. What a rich comme...Seconding what others have said. What a rich comment, Eileen, and I love that Sebald quote. <I>Austerlitz</I> is on ALK's shelf, and I'll make a point of reading it once the semester ends.<BR/><BR/>MKH, I don't know why I've been so caught up in working class sensibility lately--okay, I do, and I think it has to do with my sadness over the high attrition rates among my BC students compared to my Ivy students, and my certainty that this has everything to do with poverty and its attendant burdens (early childbirth, chronic illness, an insufficient sense of entitlement to education)--but: no but, actually. This is praise. There's a strong temptation to mere aestheticization in talking about ruins (<A HREF="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=hubert+robert&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi" REL="nofollow">perhaps most notoriously</A>), a temptation to make affective connections with fragments of buildings as monuments to the heterogeneity of time, &c., all w/out recalling Benjamin's dictum on records of civilization and barbarism (and all w/out revising Benjamin appropriately to efface the pre-Critical Theory, Enlightenment deployment of the abjected, unthought category of barbarism, the deplorable temptation to make the strong contrast). <BR/><BR/>You don't do that. You speak of the love for this poem, and the love for Buffalo's blasted landscape, and of hope for each, and of knowing also the suffering and exploitation that brought us each. You don't go so far into materialism that you forget affective connection (the danger of Marxist calculation), nor do you go so far into affective connection that you forget the systemic suffering that created the conditions and artifacts that allow for your feeling, and hope.<BR/><BR/>Good work.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-80341282004814616452007-11-27T00:55:00.000-05:002007-11-27T00:55:00.000-05:00MHK:this is fantastic. I want to spend some time ...MHK:<BR/><BR/>this is fantastic. I want to spend some time reading rather than skimming it, between attempts at reading Old French. But, I want to say for the moment that I love love love the connection to the shells and husks of tulks and trammes that hang on the edges of the great lakes. I spent my holiday in Cleveland, (from where I harked at one time) where Erie runs into big shale cliffs , (and my father is from Rochester, in fact, I used to go to hockey tournaments when i played as a youngster: in Lackawanna). there is a texture of these two landscapes I have always wanted to juxtapose (great lakes fallout and various of Beowulf). <BR/><BR/>That is to say, in addition to bricolage and critical method, there is something productive to be thought about the butt-ends of the steal industry, and the monster and ruins of Old English. In all of their difference.dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75081911563848674842007-11-26T23:40:00.000-05:002007-11-26T23:40:00.000-05:00This is a great post, MKH [as always], and thanks ...This is a great post, MKH [as always], and thanks so much for writing it. I haven't seen the "Beowulf" movie yet, but plan to do so this weekend, and I also plan to probably think it's horrible in parts but to try to enjoy it anyway [however possible]. Our interpretation of "Beowulf" is, of course, more like bricolage than we often want to admit. I couldn't agree more. It is something, further, that we are always "translating" from one abandoned shore to another soon to be abandoned, and so on. And to signify my agreement and deep sympathy with your thinking here, allow me to quote myself, Mary Ramsey, and W.G. Sebald from the conclusion of our Introduction to "The Postmodern Beowulf":<BR/><BR/>"Perhaps the poem relates to our present moment, finally, not because it either is or is not a comforting grand narrative, is or is not a story about things that might have really happened, is or is not a type of window, however opaque, upon a past related to us through genealogy and a 'desire for origins,' but because it expresses some of the wish fulfillment, and also the anxieties, of a human memory troubled by history--in the same way that *we* continue to be troubled by history and our relation to its silences and blank spots, its dark fissures and violent effacements, its holocausts and other zones of devastation.<BR/><BR/>At the opening of the House of Literature in Stuttgart in 2001, the late writer W.G. Sebald, who grew up in the aftermath of Germany's destruction during World War II, gave a speech in which he ruminated how, as an author of fiction, he had devoted his life to 'adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still-life.' He recalled that, as he was riding the S-Bahn train into Stuttgart in 2001 on a winter night, he could not help himself from thinking, when he reached Feuersee Station, "that the fires are still blazing above us, and that since the terrors of the last war years, even though we have rebuilt our surroundings so wonderfully well, we have been living in a kind of underground zone.' Likewise, he found himself imagining how 'the network of lights glittering in the darkness' of Daimler Corporation's new administrative complex 'was like a constellation of stars spreading all over the world, so that these Stuttgart stars are visible not only in the cities of Europe and on the boulevards of Beverly Hills and Buenos Aires but wherever columns of trucks with their cargoes of refugees move along the dusty roads, obviously never stopping, in the zones of devastation that are always spreading somewhere--in Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea, or Afghanistan.'<BR/><BR/>What, Sebald finally asked, in such underground zones and (paraphrasing Holderin) in 'the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light,' is literature good for? Sebald's answer was that 'there are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship.'<BR/><BR/>We would like to argue that, similar to the poetry of 'Beowulf' or a work like Sebald's novel of post-Holocaust experience 'Austerlitz', scholarship can also be a 'restitution,' as well as an artistic (even poetic) intervention into history that engraves and links things together in the manner of a still-life in order to [in Gerhard Richter's words] 'grasp the ways in which [history's] images flash up only in the fleeting moment that illuminates . . . a field of endless relations that cannot be reduced to any realist or literalist concern.'<BR/><BR/>. . . . We do not see the work of criticism as belatedly secondary to the poem . . . or to any work of art (literary or otherwise), for as [Edward] Said writes, 'rather than being defined by the silent past, commanded by it to speak in the present, criticism, no less than any text, is the present in the course of its articulation, its struggles for definition.' Ultimately, the job of the critic is similar to the job of the poet who, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is always confronted, not with *things as they are*, but with *things seeming*, and both scholar and poet are 'the artificers of subjects still half night.'"<BR/><BR/>And so, MKH, much, maybe everything, in history, is perpetually in need of new, or different [or always transmogrifying, always renewable] endings, as well as beginnings and middles, and from what I have read of your own writing thus far, I think you practice a highly artistic and affective scholarship that is as much literature, in the highest sense of that term as an art of "restitution," as it is literary criticism. "Beowulf" is a kind of heap of fragments collected, not so much from actual pasts as imagined ones, and from which past some remnants may have been visible to a poet who sought to lend some kind of meaning to those ruins but also to something that may have been happening, right then, in his own time, some business still ongoing, unfinished, and threatening. Art must always be for the present, for some urgent need of it by someone, if even only one person, in a particular moment that is palpably alive and felt. And so, too, I can only hope, for scholarship.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-88307657633934608672007-11-26T14:11:00.000-05:002007-11-26T14:11:00.000-05:00Wonderful piece, MKH, especially in its bringing t...Wonderful piece, MKH, especially in its bringing together of short and long temporal spans. So much intriguing writing has been done recently on urban palimpsests (cities as architectural/material condensations of histories forced into simultaneity). The term has wide currency among architectural theorists and literary scholars alike, and has been applied to Mexico, Toronto, London, Tokyo ... what I like about your own musings is that you apply a similar kind of methodology to a city that is not so intoxicated by its own ever-expanding future, and yet find reason for hope there.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-26447619447309513212007-11-25T10:41:00.000-05:002007-11-25T10:41:00.000-05:00Have you seen the video Nokes posted here? Althoug...Have you seen the video Nokes posted <A HREF="http://unlocked-wordhoard.blogspot.com/search?q=the+ruin" REL="nofollow">here</A>? Although I don't think Beowulf has any "enta weorc" in it (or have I forgotten? does it?), this film adaptation of "The Ruin" speaks to the kinds of connections you're making (and the ones the Beowulf film so dismally failed to make).Dr. Viragohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03960384082670286328noreply@blogger.com