Greetings! Last week, I posted a little bit
about the “Middle Ages in the Modern World” (MAMO) conference at St Andrews—a posting
about Canadian heraldry. I would now like to provide a belated, more general overview of the conference as I saw it.
My key words for this posting are TRANSLATION and ECOLOGY (two concerns that
are perhaps not too surprising given my most recent posting about endangered languages).
The Middle
Ages Today
My desk
in Blackadder Hall (left); flyer for the Terry Jones plenary (right).
The inaugural MAMO conference was a highly publicized
event, years in the making: it marked the 600th anniversary of the founding of
St Andrews, a university which is quite literally a medieval institution in the contemporary world. The
conference venue testified in many ways to how the medieval past infuses
popular culture in the present, and in addition to many presentations
encouraging creative modes of thinking across time, a significant concern in
many threads concerned the blurring of boundaries between “professional” and
“amateur” medievalisms. The opening plenary, for instance, was delivered by
none other than Monty Python member, Chaucerian, and public historian Terry
Jones. Many of the conference participants (myself included) lodged at the implausibly
named Blackadder Hall—a site named (alas!) not for the multiply reincarnated protagonist portrayed by Rowan Atkinson but a real-life person, Agnes
Blackadder (1875-1964), the first female graduate of St Andrews.
Translating
the Middle Ages
This wide-ranging interdisciplinary conference encompassed a
variety of ways the medieval past (or a consciously constructed neo- or
pseudo-medieval one) informs many types of cultural production: literature,
visual arts, cable television, and other media. I found myself most intrigued
by how translation—cultural, linguistic, and artistic—served as a key concept
throughout disparate threads.
Oliver
Traxel's presentation on reverse translation; slide referring to Geoffrey Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC).
Some of the most compelling sessions tackled
translation in its manifold linguistic forms. For instance, one session on
“Translating the Middle Ages” yielded a striking variety of approaches to medieval
languages moving across time and space. Helen Brookman provided a glimpse into
the fascinating reception history of Anna Gurney, who was the first modern English
translator of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(her translation was published in 1819). Living a life that might now register
as queer (she resided with longtime female partner) as well as disabled (she was
wheelchair user), Gurney forged her own literary authority and reputation as a medievalist scholar by
working around many social and institutional barriers. Katherine Miller examined the
rather squeamish range of approaches to Old Norse terms denoting slavery in
modern English translations and dictionaries (modern translations and
dictionaries tend to evade or obscure references to slavery—due to a level of
discomfort with its acknowledging its presence, or a lack of full understanding
of the nuances of the language, or both). Oliver Traxel offered an engaging
overview of “reverse translation” (i.e., translating modern English works into
older languages like Middle English and Anglo-Saxon) throughout modern Germany
and Anglophone North America (including Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and the related twitter feed). What emerged from Traxel’s talk was a clear notion of translation as a means of
academic play, parody, and enjoyment—activities pursued not out of any profit
motive or use value.
Opening
slide of our Global Chaucers presentation.
In a session on “Global Medievalisms,” Candace Barrington
and I drew from our work on the Global Chaucers project to discuss how
Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is translated
across three very different contexts: Flemish comic book by Lük Bey (preview the Flemish and English iPad apps online!), a Chinese prose translation by Fang
Chong (which I’ve blogged about HERE), and song-and-dance performance in
Nigerian Pidgin English (view snippet HERE). Each work draws (broadly speaking) from a common source-narrative, yet each work adapts its own idiosyncratic strategies for conveying local nuances of linguistic register and discursive style. The other panelist, Dongill Lee,
compared his own Korean translation of Beowulf
to those of Heaney and others. Among other things, he considered how
Anglo-Saxon heroic values might be reoriented by a cross-cultural comparison
with feudal structures in ancient Korea and Japan (and he also mentioned he had
previously published a Korean translation of The Canterbury Tales).
Seamus
Heaney reads from his translations of Middle Scots poets.
In my mind the culmination of this thread—and
perhaps the conference as a whole—was a plenary lecture by Seamus Heaney; the poet read from (and spoke about) his translations from works by 15th-century Middle Scots poets (so-called “Scottish
Chaucerians” including Henryson, Dunbar, and others). Heaney began by suggesting three motives for
translation: translation as a mode of advocacy for a source text, translation
as a means of contact with another alien culture, and translation as “writing
by proxy”—with his own work interweaving these three motives simultaneously. I found his reading
showcased an intricate layering of voices across time—the contemporary Irish
poet uses modern English to ventriloquize the voice of medieval Scots poets—and the performance broke down any clear binary between an act of (derivative) translation and
(originary) creation. In this venue, I was invited to listen and attend to poetry as craft, and this experience provided me—a historicist literary scholar—with a refreshingly medieval sense of translation as a process of invention (in the medieval sense of inventio or perpetual re-creation),
an ever-provisional reworking of material that arises from intimate encounters
between present and past(s).
Ecologies,
Medieval and Modern
Carolyn
Dinshaw delivers her plenary on the Green Man. Title: “I’ve Got You Under My
Skin.”
The MAMO conference featured a surprising
amount of plenaries, including a morning and evening one on each day of the
conference. A somewhat unexpected theme that emerged throughout some of the plenaries was ecology—or rather, a series of discussions each putting into conversation a few modes of ecological
thought. Carolyn Dinshaw’s newest work on queer temporality and
amateur/professional medievalism was much invoked (see JEFFREY’s draft review
of her book, How Soon Is Now? for more on this work) and I’ve
seen various iterations of Dinshaw’s talk on the Green Man before. But with each recursive
discussion, I discover Dinshaw enfolds this material with new resonance. What I found most
intriguing in this particular version of her talk was a clear postcolonial
perspective. Toward the end of her talk, Dinshaw discussed Randolph Stow’s astoundingly complex novel The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980), which features an Australian who returns to the home of his ancestors in East Anglia;
in the novel's complex network of intertwining and embedded narratives, the
Green Man serves not only as figure, device, or “emblem” of the porous nature/culture
divide but also an animating force that radically transforms and unsettles
static conceptions of race, ethnic belonging, sexuality, and existence in time.
I felt fortunate that the organizers had asked me to chair a session on “The Natural World and
Medievalism,” as I was so curious to see how each of the presenters would engage with this topic. Elizabeth Robertson demonstrated how devotion for the daisy in
Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women
provided some means of inspiration for Wordsworth’s poetry, and she suggested some
ways to approach nature writing and locodescriptive poetry via Timothy Morton's ambient poetics. Arwen Taylor (a medievalist name if I ever heard one!) gave a paper on
birds in the works of Chaucer and Tolkien; in this paper, she attended to birds
as creatures who can act concurrently
as signs and as avian agents that (who?) resist figuration. Helen Price—most
closely engaged with Morton and recent ecocritical work by EILEEN and JEFFREY—widened the
discussion to the localized poetry of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) [read selections HERE and HERE], featuring
hoarders of disparate objects, as well as evocative site-specific poetry/art
projects like The Stanza Stones Walk
(2010) of Simon Armitage. By the end of this session, I had become most interested in how the so-called “natural”
world—flowers, birds, stones, other assemblages—veer away, withdraw from, or
are utterly indifferent to human modes of signification and (linguistic)
representation.
Bruce
Holsinger delivers his plenary on “The Worlding of Medievalism: Past and Present
in the Early Anthropocene.”
Bruce Holsinger’s plenary examined how a
narrative episode from the 13th-century Landnámabok—Thorkel Farserk swims across the Hvalseyjarfjord while carrying a sheep—gets
appropriated in the work of paleo-climatologists as well as global warming
skeptics. Working under the assumption that this body of water must have been warmer than it is today
(or else Thorkel Farserk would have died of cold), some (amateur) climatologists invoke this story as a piece of evidence for a pre-industrial Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Climate Optimum), a time when the North Sea was warmer that it is now (and also a time when Vikings were able to settle different
lands and achieve all sorts of nifty things as a result). Holsinger revealed
some of the ways the medieval past can serve any number of (pseudo)scientific and
political agendas—including the use of this story to cast trends in warming as “natural”
(not manmade) phenomena. Returning the overall discussion to the “professional
vs. amateur” distinction, Holsinger suggested not so much the playful side of
amateur medievalism but its potential for abuse. This sort of brute re-appropriation
of a highly imaginative medieval text
as “evidence” against (human generated)
global warming might strike literary scholars as rather unsophisticated
selective reading (and mischaracterization!) of a complex text. Holsinger ended
by suggesting how more fully engaged interdisciplinary endeavors might operate:
his ongoing research on medieval parchment, for instance, can bring literature,
paleography, and art history into contact with historical genetics and paleo-climatology.
Parchment—created from the skins of animals—carries the organic, material, and
cultural traces of another time.
MAMO was a well-organized and stimulating conference. I am pleased to see how academic medievalism
studies is gaining more prominence, and this burgeoning field
continues to encourage new ways to examine the enduring presence of medieval culture in our contemporary lives. From politics and policy to popular
culture, we find the past that is not safely partitioned in a realm beyond our
own; it potentially plays an intimate part of our everyday existence and modern ways of
life.
