National poetry day

[liv]

It's National Poetry Day, apparently. And this one is actually based in my own nation, rather than just one of those vague nation-of-internet special days.

As it happens, yesterday the internet was full of people being cross about a project to produce contemporary English translations of Shakespeare. Now my opinion is that contemporary English translations are just one part of the myriad ways that modern audiences respond to literary classics. Certainly it's possible for them to be awful, but the idea of reworking Shakespeare's words isn't inherently awful.

papersky wrote a sonnet expressing the general sentiment that changing Shakespeare is horrible. I commented that I really shouldn't try to write a response sonnet to express my alternative view, and certain people talked me into it instead of out of it. I'm rather charmed with the idea of an internet argument about Shakespeare in sonnet form, I must say.

So anyway, have a rather bad, dashed off hypertext sonnet about why I'm in favour of translating and reinterpreting Shakespeare:

True poetry is what survives translation,
An exiled Magyar poet told me once.
We're all time's exiles. Each one longs
To touch the past through each imagination,

But time excludes us from each treasured word –
No verse, no rhyme, no play remains pristine,
We'll never watch unchanged a perfect scene,
Nor ever hear what past play-goers heard.

Limelight's electric now and women act,
Some plays are filmed instead of staged,
The words, the sounds, the very rhymes have changed.
No fossil, this, to be preserved intact,

But living art in loving minds reborn,
Poetic truth translation can transform.

I do rather like writing poetry that responds to existing works. Pastiches and filks and metrical translations of poetry in other languages, too, but especially when someone writes a poem and I reply to it in similar style and metre.

Comments

[siderea]

Funny you should mention "The 13th Warrior". I think it's one of the greatest cases-in-point for what our estimable host contends in her poem.

I am prepared[*] to argue that "The 13th Warrior" is actually brilliant from a Historically Informed Performance perspective. It's not merely a watchable action flick; it's actually making a really interesting argument about the interpretation of the source text – in short, that we've largely misunderstood "Beowulf" because we've taken it to be a heroic narrative, when really it's a ghost story/horror narrative, or rather it is at least as plausible that is the narrative work it was doing for its original audience – and it's a very compellingly presented argument. In putting forth that argument, it raises larger meta question about the concept of literary genre and how we do or don't apply those ideas to historical works: if the Beowulf-as-horror contention holds up, why is it that we projected onto Beowulf a heroic narrative for so long? Are we not allowing historical texts the full breadth of narrative expression – such as genres – that we expect to find in our own cultures? (Siderea's answer: Yes, actually; that is exactly the problem we've been having in interpreting other medieval text, q.v. troubadour and trouvere lyrics.)

Well, the first half or so of the flick. Second half just seemed like an action flick to me; it might bear a re-watch. But the first half rocked my little world and filled me with daring thinky-thoughts about my own HIP work.

[* Actually it may become one of my Patreon-funded posts.]

[davidgillon]

I'd agree with most of this, though, like you, I felt the second half didn't entirely hold up to the promise of the first. WRT Beowulf as ghost/horror story, rather than hero tale, can't it be both? We need to read it as an English take on the Sagas, IMO, and they're definitely rooted in the heroic tradition.