False Friends: "Translation," "Adaptation," or "Creative Interpretation" of the Medieval Text?
Sponsoring Organization(s)
eth press
Organizer Name
Chris Piuma, David Hadbawnik
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto, Univ. at Buffalo
Presider Name
David Hadbawnik
Paper Title 1
The Nonce Taxonomies of Translation and Mary Jo Bang's Inferno
Presenter 1 Name
Lisa Ampleman
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Cincinnati
Paper Title 2
The Well of Anachronism: Experimental Translation, Medievalism, and Gender in Contemporary Poetics
Presenter 2 Name
Shannon Maguire
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Wilfrid Laurier Univ.
Paper Title 3
Return to Sender: Re-Flemishing Chaucer's Flemish Tales in Verhalen voor Canterbury
Presenter 3 Name
Jonathan Hsy
Presenter 3 Affiliation
George Washington Univ.
Paper Title 4
"The harlot is talkative and wandering": Conduct Literature, Medbh McGuckian, and the Postcolonial Subject
Presenter 4 Name
Katharine W. Jager
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Houston-Downtown
Start Date
15-5-2015 10:00 AM
Session Location
Schneider 2355
Description
Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (2012, but written in the 1970s) has garnered praise from academic circles, including a positive review in the October 2013 issue of Speculum, and from poetry circles, with comments on and excerpts from the text appearing in Jacket2. Yet one review calls it an “adaptation” and another takes issue with Meyer’s “capricious and arbitrary” poetic license. More recently, as Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington relate in a forthcoming article, Patience Agbabi’s The Canterbury Copy (2014) “troubles standard distinctions between appropriation, translation, and interpretation.” Nevertheless, they also argue that, by reworking The Canterbury Tales with immigrant-pilgrims drawn from her own experience in London, Agbabi’s approach forces the reader to confront anew some of the language and translation problems of the original poem. This suggests that an overemphasis on the categories of translation vs. adaptation, academic vs. creative, might provide barriers to interacting with and thinking about medieval poems. This panel will ask critical questions around these barriers: What makes something a translation, something else not? Why do we care, and what does that caring mean? How can we think beyond such categories to arrive at deeper truths that medievalist reworkings might disclose?
Chris Piuma and David Hadbawnik
False Friends: "Translation," "Adaptation," or "Creative Interpretation" of the Medieval Text?
Schneider 2355
Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (2012, but written in the 1970s) has garnered praise from academic circles, including a positive review in the October 2013 issue of Speculum, and from poetry circles, with comments on and excerpts from the text appearing in Jacket2. Yet one review calls it an “adaptation” and another takes issue with Meyer’s “capricious and arbitrary” poetic license. More recently, as Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington relate in a forthcoming article, Patience Agbabi’s The Canterbury Copy (2014) “troubles standard distinctions between appropriation, translation, and interpretation.” Nevertheless, they also argue that, by reworking The Canterbury Tales with immigrant-pilgrims drawn from her own experience in London, Agbabi’s approach forces the reader to confront anew some of the language and translation problems of the original poem. This suggests that an overemphasis on the categories of translation vs. adaptation, academic vs. creative, might provide barriers to interacting with and thinking about medieval poems. This panel will ask critical questions around these barriers: What makes something a translation, something else not? Why do we care, and what does that caring mean? How can we think beyond such categories to arrive at deeper truths that medievalist reworkings might disclose?
Chris Piuma and David Hadbawnik