Posts filed under 'legend'

From Epic Hero to Modern Bro: On Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf

December 9, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Kwan Ann Tan

Modern translations of medieval writings are not only a link to the past, but also a reflection of what our current culture finds important.

Throughout the year and across the world, people have reluctantly adopted and updated a medieval custom: quarantine in times of plague. Other remnants of the era, however, have been much more readily embraced. The Middle Ages continue to capture our fancy (sometimes even frenzy), and the latest version of a classic tale is a perfect case in point. By keenly zooming in on some of the boldest, most innovative aspects of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s recent translation of Beowulf, our very own Kwan Ann Tan (editor-at-large for Malaysia and medievalist-in-training) reflects on the value of bringing the past into the present.

The modern fascination with medieval language and culture is not particularly new—from the pre-Raphaelites to Hollywood blockbuster depictions of the medieval era, it’s clear that something about the Middle Ages still captivates us. In January 2020, for instance, the Facebook group ‘We Pretend It’s 1453 Internet’ was created, and it has since amassed close to 200,000 members; it’s filled with humorous posts imitating medieval speech and pretending to ask for advice on ‘medieval’ subjects (they’re not always period-accurate, but it’s the spirit that counts). Likewise, a subgenre of ‘medieval TikTok’ is gaining speed, with some genuinely funny skits reimagining what it would be like if knights were Twitch streamers—again, reformulating medieval staples to suit the modern imagination. On a more academic note, the Global Medieval Sourcebook project at Stanford University collects rare, previously untranslated medieval texts in modern English for the adventurous reader. In fact, new translations of medieval writings are being released every day, be they for academic or creative purposes.

As a child, I had vaguely heard of the story of Beowulf, but I always assumed that Beowulf himself was the monster, the antagonist—not the hero. After I memorised huge swathes of the text in the original Old English, the line between monster and hero only became more blurred; in fact, the poem’s elusive complexity has fuelled debate on this dichotomy for decades, if not centuries. There is something about Beowulf that keeps us coming back, and this lasting interest is reflected in the number of translations of the epic published over the past few decades.

When news of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) first broke on Twitter earlier this year, my timeline was quickly filled with messages from disgruntled medievalists complaining that yet another Beowulf translation had been unleashed upon the world. I myself approached it skeptically, but was quite literally hooked from the first word. For those who haven’t had the agonising pleasure of trying to decipher Old English for a year, it’ll teach you one word for sure: ‘Hwæt,’ the famous opening of Beowulf. It has been historically translated to varying degrees of formality, but Headley knocks conservatism aside to give us the earth-shattering ‘Bro.’ This brilliantly sets the tone for the rest of the text, and one thing is clear: it definitely isn’t your grandma’s Beowulf. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Du Ya

September 24, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Anni Liu

He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years / It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

This week’s Translation Tuesday features two labour-centric poems by Du Ya. “The Coal Miner” could be construed as a multivalent metaphor aligning the work of a coal miner with an unbearable lack of clarity regarding one’s position in the world. On another register, however, “The Coal Miner” shows how one’s occupation and environment can be written on and in the body, as well as the mind. “Copper” looks at the quality of the sub-strata itself. It is an homage to the hidden beauties and forms that underpin all that happens upon a surface. Copper’s stability, its cycles, and their accumulations might be related to translation itself, a conceptual attitude that recalls the archaeological cultural exercises of Walter Benjamin and the re-working of source materials to gain new insight or expression. Time can be read in the changes in striation and the different iterations of copper, constantly moving beneath the surface and in the hands of artisans, as a poem or thought too changes—and stays the same—as it moves.

The Coal Miner

He means to tell people about the light
but each part of his body revolts
disobeys the center, speaks only of darkness

Having gnawed so long on that mighty seam, he has no idea
that his lungs, liver, and intestines are now made of coal
The textbooks teach this: “change in quantity leads to change in quality”

His body is such a fitting exhibit, it needs no explanation
It wears pitch black shadowless silk
like a government official donning a tailored uniform

Yet he still speaks of light—and for light
he daily lowers himself underground (and time flows unchanging)
Not even the nightfish has seen such darkness

Sometimes, in the subterranean depths, he is frightened
He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years
It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

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Meet The Publisher: Antares Press’s Margarita Feliciano on Publishing from Spanish, French, and Indigenous Languages

October 11, 2017  |  in Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

I’m interested in bringing to the attention of readers in the world the fact that there are other languages—not known languages.

ANTARES Publishing House of Spanish Culture is a trilingual press located at York University’s Glendon Campus in Toronto, Canada. ANTARES aims to bring literary and scholarly works from the Spanish-speaking world to North American readers. With this in mind, the press publishes non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and theater either written in or translated from Spanish, English, and French. In recent years, ANTARES’s interests have expanded to include the literature of indigenous languages such as Quechua and Ojibwe. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with director Margarita Feliciano to chat about ANTARES’s catalog and their commitment to publishing translations of works written in Spanish and indigenous languages.

Sarah Moses: How did ANTARES get started?

Margarita Feliciano: The press started in the year 2005, but officially we started to publish in the year 2006. I’ve been a professor at York University since 1969 and I’ve always taught literature. In 1989, I started to publish a magazine called Indigo—before Indigo the store; I didn’t have a chance to register it. The subtitle of the magazine was The Spanish/Canadian Presence in the Arts. Things were not done in translation but published in their original language—it could be Spanish, English, or French.

I was forced to retire in 2005 because at the time we had lost a strike and one of the requirements was mandatory retirement for people aged sixty-five. The law is now gone but I unfortunately fell in that category. So in view of that, I decided to create ANTARES—to continue to do what I was doing and at the same time keep me at university because in my life all I’ve done is either be a student or a teacher. So I wanted to continue my work.

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