translatio

This isn't a reading post, really. On that front, I did make a pact with the one other medievalist in my cohort to meet on Fridays and discuss some texts. We're both so enmeshed in English department culture that we can't have read a book if we haven't discussed it with someone. So, this Friday we'll talk about the Old English poem Deor and, yes, Piers Plowman. I made a pilgrimage to Moes's (all three blocks from campus) and picked up, among a few other things, Derek Pearsall's edition of the C-text of Piers. It's more scholarly (read: has more footnotes) than the edition I had been using (which, furthermore, was of the B-text -- maybe I'll go into this when I get around to reading it, like after next Friday), and I'm hoping it will propel me -- along with the knowledge that I'll have to talk to a colleague about it on Friday -- to give the thing a more serious read.

In the meantime, we took the kids to see Where the Wild Things Are. In IMAX, no less. (Get it? I-Max?) It was fantastic. A complete work of art in ways that not so many films really are these days.

The question you may ask (or I would ask, if I were you, gentle imaginary reader) is: what the hell do you mean by "a complete work of art," Michael? (Have I mentioned my name before? I don't think I have. It's Michael.)

After all, how complete can it be in its work-of-art-ness, being an adaptation of a children's book? And it's not even that good at being that! As one commenter at the NY Times site put it,

This movie should have been called "My favorite childhood book was 'Where the Wild Things Are' so I wrote a movie based on it". It did not represent the book at all. ...I like Spike Jonze, but it was a disappointment to see another Hollywood personality touch an old classic, due to lack of creativity. No one should touch old favorite stories. Dr. Seuss stories included. Remakes are "Money in the Pocket" because Americans will buy anything, no matter how lame the product.

 Any movie based on a book, of course, is going to draw this kind of fire. One might ask the complainer how a book of a couple hundred words could be faithfully adapted into a 90 minute movie, but this complaint could be leveled (has been leveled) at many an adaptation of a multi-hundred page novel. I always wonder. when I hear these complaints, why we should bother going to the movie at all? We already had a movie in our head, apparently, and the director's movie, not being ours, couldn't help but fail to live up to the one we had already made.

A movie "based on" a book, I submit, is a translation. The problem is that we have funny notions, nowadays, about what a translation is supposed to do. What it is supposed to do, we assume, is make something accessible to someone who didn't have access to it in its original form. I can't read Greek. But I'm interested in Homer. So some translator can do me the service of rendering The Iliad in modern English, and I can read Homer. Of course, I haven't, because I can't. I have read Fitzgerald, or Lattimore, or Fagles, all doing their best to provide me with access to what I cannot access myself. This is not a translation, but a crib. A translation is a work of art in its own right, not a means to access an already existing work of art.

My class (the one I teach, I mean, or rather TA, i.e. lead the discussion section of) was recently asked (by me) to compare Petrarch's sonnets 140 and 190 to the various translation produced in Elizabethan England. They did a fine job with the exercise, but I was left thinking about Chaucer's use of Petrarch's 132 in Troilus and Criseyde (as compared here): he translates the poem rather faithfully, in the sense of it, but ignores Petrarch's sonnet form in favor of the seven-line stanza he has used throughout the poem. In fact, his version takes up three stanzas, turning Petrarch's fourteen lines into twenty-one; Chaucer clearly has very little interest in producing any one-to-one correspondence at all. What he is doing is taking a compelling bit of art and incorporating it into his own art production. Art begets art. Translation is the "carrying over" of a bit of art into another production, not the means of access into something left untouched by that access. 

So this is not to say that we cannot measure a filmmaker's closeness to his or her source material. Of course we can. But this is not a measure, in any way at all, of the piece of art that has been produced. It would have been very, very easy to make a film that was a faithful translation, in the abased sense of the word, of the book called Where the Wild Things Are. Film the beautiful original drawings (maybe animate them lightly), have someone narrate the text (preferably someone good, like James Earl Jones or Judi Dench), and you would produce a very nice three-minute film. That isn't, significantly, what Maurice Sendak wanted. He wanted a real piece of art, and he found some real artists to make it.

We have a weird double standard about these things. My fellow NY Times reader bemoans the general "lack of creativity" in the same breath in which he or she complains about too many liberties being taken with Sendak's book. Yet if a critic were to compare Chaucer's Clerk's Tale with Petrarch's version of the story, he or she would undoubtedly be disappointed to find too few liberties being taken in the "translation." The idea of translator as faithful-copyist-in-another-language does not comport well with our idea of Chaucer the ur-author. Why, then, is Spike Jonze not allowed the same respect? Do you want a director or a copyist?

As someone who has sat through the miserable early Harry Potter movies and looked in vain for a decent modernization of Chaucer, I know how insipid faithful "translation" invariably must be. I understand, therefore, that I will not have read Homer until I have gotten around to learning ancient Greek, which I may well never do. But I have also seen the rather good later Harry Potter movies, and I have read the great translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney (which gives the scholars fits, of course), so I know that things can be translated, and have a life of their own, if they are allowed. And then there is a translation like Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, which is a creation on another level. It is not "better" than the original, nor does it in any way fail to live up to the original. It is as much an original work of art as is the original, and there could be no better tribute.

Not convinced? Not ready to shell out for the IMAX experience? While you're waiting for the dvd, go ahead and watch this Czech version of Alice In Wonderland. If Tim Burton translates the thing half as well, I'll be impressed.

Dreaming of Wild Things

It isn't remotely medieval, but this article got me thinking about my Piers problem. It concerns the critic's changed relationship to Where the Wild Things Are (the book) on the occasion of the new movie adaption. The upshot is that he had greeted the book with an uncaring shrug as a child (and his children now do the same), but "after a decade of talk therapy" he could appreciate how Sendak expressed a complex psychological process in a concise and artistically satisfying fashion.

I have always been suspicious, as I have said, of the imputation of any importance to dreams, but this is really only a subset of my legion antipathies towards "talk therapy." I like some aspects of psychoanalytic theory as philosophy -- it makes good reading -- but the actual therapeutic practice has always seemed a bit of a sham to me. OK, more than a bit. But making this connection really should help me get over my dream-vision allergy, since there's nothing psychological at all about medieval dream-visions; they are contacts with the divine, not with the unconscious.

Dante doesn't (thank God) cheapen his journey by calling it a dream, but there shouldn't be a qualitative difference. A dream or a vision is a revelation as surely as Dante's very physical journey through the architecture of the afterlife. Yet how much immediacy is gained by that physicality! And this is what makes Where the Wild Things Are so fantastic, in both senses of the word: Max doesn't dream that his room is the world: his room becomes the world. This, I submit, is the exact trick that Dante plays. I wish Langland had done the same, but for now I'll just read him pretending he has.

mea culpa, maxima, etc.

So, part of the problem of the year of reading for orals is that no one is checking up on you. I'm useless without that guilt-motivator. (culpa primum movens est?). I figured this blog could be that guilter. And it has been! I've been guilty! But I haven't been blogging.

I have been reading, just not Piers Plowman. More on that later, maybe.

Since I've been teaching the Canterbury Tales, I've been rereading some of that. I doesn't hurt to know it really well, I suppose, but I've already written one thesis on it, and it seems to me there are other ways I could be productively spending my reading time. Then again, this weekend I'll be grading their first papers, and be ardently wishing I was rereading Chaucer. Besides, it is more or less pure joy to read, except for the Knight's Tale, which is half joy and half chore, or at least 70/30. I see that the Norton Anthology of Medieval Literature gives a plot summary of KT, the quicker to get to the Miller's Tale pay-off. I endorse this maneuver.

I've also been spotting up my Angevin history, reading Madicott's Simon de Montfort and Howell's Eleanor of Provence concurrently. I don't want to collapse "history" with "royal and aristocratic history," but I'm finding this reading to be illuminating of my general sense of thirteenth century English literature for a few reasons: Montfort, as a principal in the Baronial revolt, is a regular figure in the political poetry that appears right alongside the religious and amatory, and I figured I should have some somewhat objective background for that; Montfort's ascension (earthly ascension - I'm not making claims for anyone's sainthood) gives an interesting view into how force of personality can trump many other factors, even in the royal circle, which gives a useful corrective to a simplistically deterministic view of ideology that I need to remember to avoid; both Eleanor and Simon are reminders of how the English aristocracy is of the continent not only culturally but literally, and the literary culture they fostered is not even a full step removed from that of their southern siblings.

On the primary text front, I've been working my way through Hudson's Selections from English Wycliffite Writings. I had a general sense of what the Lollards were about, of course, from secondary reading around Chaucer, but the texts themselves are both more compelling, more sensible, and more radical than I had imagined. It's a little shocking how systematically and completely they prefigure Luther and the Reformation in general (and my vague understanding is that, through Hus, there is a definite and traceable line of teaching, but I'll have to look into that before I start making claims too grand, I suppose). And they make good reading - the rhetorical richness and vigor is quite refreshing after my brief encounter with the mushiness of Piers.

Speaking of, I really have to get back to Piers, because I have also been reading Steve Justice's Writing and Rebellion, and I'm up to chapter three: "Piers Plowman in the Rising." Chapter two, "Wycliff in the Rising," was masterful on its own, but enriched by being read alongside the actual Wycliffite texts. I suppose I should do Langland the same favor. I just wish he were as rigorous a writer as Justice.

I did identify my biggest stumbling block in getting along with Langland, though. I've never been able to remember my dreams. I know I have them, because occasionally I'll wake up able to identify some bits of one, but those bits slip away quickly, and all the more quickly if I try to grasp them consciously. For this reason (although until now I hadn't identified it as such) I've always been resentful and suspicious of any system that gave much credence to dreams. I would get along better with Freud, for instance, if he would have just admitted that dreams were meaningless rubbish and unworthy of analysis. Any plot that hinges on a dream instantly vitiates whatever appeal it could have otherwise had for me. Any plot that could but doesn't necessarily involve a dream (say, Alice in Wonderland) can only be worthwhile if the dream-aspect is dismissed as a red herring. Chaucer, so brilliant when he frames his work with realism (CT) or textuality (Troilus and Criseyde), becomes infuriating when he frames it with a dream narrative. Obviously I'm just going to have to get over this to some extent, or ignore about half of the poetry from my period. Maybe now that I've identified my problem, I can do that. The first step: explaining away the dreaminess.

You might note what else I haven't been reading: Old English. Need to get on that before I forget it completely. I have been fitfully working on my French and Latin by translating bits of Foucault and John of Salisbury. I'm surprised how well I can get along with the French and dismayed by how horribly I get along with the Latin. One of the joys of Justice's book has been the footnotes, which give generous swaths of his sources in both Latin and Anglo-Norman. There, too, I find the French more transparent, but I'm particularly intrigued by how much English crops up in it. I'm used to thinking of the influence of French on Middle English, but it clearly works both ways. Perhaps we should abandon the narrative that says that Old English absorbed some aspects of French and emerged as Middle English, which eventually supplanted French as the literary, legal and courtly language, in favor of a model in which English and Anglo-Norman exist alongside each other until they become indistinguishable. What we speak now is a creole. I've known this about English for some time, of course, but I always imagined the French spoken in England as remaining distinct.

At any rate, dear blog, I have to get to class, but I wanted to be sure you knew I really was reading. Really.

Nothing to report yet, really

The inspiration for this blog comes from what I understand the beginnings of another blog (the great Cahiers de Corey) to have been. Josh Corey, like myself but a few years before me, received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Josh, as I wish sometimes that I had done, accepted an offer to pursue the PhD at Cornell, and, while reading for his exams, started a blog to record his experience of the readings. Josh is now an Assistant Professor at Lake Forest College, and I am myself reading for exams in the currently cash-strapped confines of the University of California, Berkeley. Josh's example being an encouraging one, and his blog (continuing to be) a fine one, I am electing to render my own notes on this year's reading in blog form, starting tomorrow.

But where to begin?

I will be reading for four distinct fields, each with a reading list determined, in the final instance, by my own judgement, and each to be examined by a different professor in a half-hour, format-free oral exam sometime next Spring. The parameters of first two fields are decided, the second two up in the air.

Fields one and two are historically-bound sections of English-language literary history. In my case these are to be (1) Old English and (2) Middle English (were I working in later periods these fields would be defined by neat century demarcations, a luxury medievalists are not afforded). It is up to me to make up the actual list of texts to be covered, but certain expectations of canonicity and professional/pedagogical preparation will apply; I cannot realisitically skip, say, Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.

The other two fields get a bit squishier.

The first of these is the departmentally-mandated "third field," defined however my weaselly little heart should choose. As a measure of the range of possibilities for this field, I will mention briefly my two current leading contenders, one narrow and concise, the other immeasurably broad: (1) British Library MS Harley 2253 and (2) Critical Theory for the Medievalist.

The first of these would encompass only what is contained in, what is known about, and what has been written regarding ONE spectacularly important 14th century manuscript. This is, in and of itself, a vast-ish sort of literature, but one that could be more or less contained in the nine months of reading time I have at hand. One could, in that time, become pretty well informed on this one subject.

The second would encompass a great number of 19th and especially 20th century writers, few of whom were specifically interested in medieval literature, with no real limit on the amount of things to be read but my own time limitations, and a great deal of intellectual work to be done in determining how these readings related to my actual subject, i.e., medieval English literature. Even were all of my time in these nine months devoted to only this pursuit, there is no way I could feel actually versed in all the issues at stake. This, of course, makes it perversely attractive.

The fourth field is not a departmental requirement at all -- most schlubs in my cohort will stop at three -- but Berkeley offers a joint PhD in Medieval Studies, the fulfillment of which requires a "medieval studies" component in the qualifying exam, and thus, for me, a fourth field. The terms of this, again, are open to my definition, dependent on my ability to cajole an out-of-my-own-department faculty member into examining me in them. I have already asked a member of the History dept. to act in this capacity, but we have yet to hash out (or even discuss in the broadest terms) what the parameters of this field might be. So there is that, too. I am imagining that the reading list will concentrate on monastic history in England circa 1150-1300, but, again, the faculty member in question, hereafter named KZ, has not had the opportunity to weigh in on this matter.

Much else is up in the air, including the identities of all of the examiners except KZ, although the number of people to be there almost matches the number in the pool of potentials. The committee is made up of one advisor and three examiners, plus, in my case, the fourth examiner, already determined. Since my ridiculously rich department still has only five medievalist faculty, all but one will undoubtedly be invited to the party. Maybe we should find a way to include the last one, eh? They are all brilliant, and all incredibly intimidating as examiners.

But I still haven't mentioned where I'm starting my actual reading, although I have decided. I posed this question on facebook the other day and, amid the flurries of iterations of the expected response (at the beginning!) and the indespensible wisdom of my spouse (with coffee!) I received two pieces of usable advice. The dear Ashby Kinch, my advisor and friend from UM, says, "in media res! always in media res!" advice which I can entirely endorse. The dear Karen Williams, a fellow traveler here at Berkeley, advises starting with that which must be read but is least exciting. I'm afraid I'm going to go with Karen on this one, Ashby, and read first something from almost the end of my period, something I've long known to be unavoidable and yet thus far avoided, something that, 300 lines in, has not yet elicited any response but groaning: Piers Plowman.

I'm sure I'll come to love it. Eventually.

Since reading medieval lit as a 9-5 job leaves one not really in the mood for medieval lit as bedtime reading, I also started an almost-modern novel tonight, one which I may have reason to comment on as I go along here, since that novel is Ivanhoe. I last read it in the 8th grade, and loved it. What I actually understood then I'm not sure I could evaluate from this distance, but I am enthusiastically rereading it now from a much better informed but no less romantic perspective.