Category: literature

“Your face, your race, the way that you talk…”

Recently, the “Charlemagne” column in The Economist declared Playmobil Man its “European of the Year,” noting persuasively that Homo playmobilis offers “a striking snapshot of European aspirations, anxieties and foibles.” That approach to toys, I’d hasten to add, also says something about how they see history:

There are Playmobil knights and barbarians, pirates and Roman legionaries, all wielding lethal weapons. Europeans can even live with American military toys, if they are old enough: there are Playmobil cowboys from the Wild West, and soldiers from both sides in the American civil war.

The difference is philosophical, says Mrs Schauer. There are no more knights and pirates, so their combat is a “resolved story.” Modern war is “really horror.” That is echoed by Gabi Neubauer, a librarian buying toys in Nuremberg. She suggests that “it is more honourable to fight with a sword, somehow.” Not all explanations are as high-faluting. Asked why Playmobil makes any tiny toy guns at all, Mrs Schauer admits “otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be accepted by boys.”

To the modern toy-shopper, a medieval battle may seem more honorable when viewed through the thick lens of history. But when 14th-century conflicts continue to perplex, and frustrate, and threaten to come between allies, it’s iffy to claim that the knights of old Europe belong to a story that’s somehow “resolved.”

If you’re just catching up on the news of the weekend—Kosovo’s declaration of independence and the reaction it’s causing in Serbia—you’ll see that most articles skimp on historical background. They summarize briefly the wars of the ’90s, but doing the subject justice is nigh on impossible. Even for many foreigners with Balkan connections, disentangling the skein of religion and culture and old ideology is the work of at least half a lifetime. Besides, seeing Kosovo with no more than two decades of context, or panning back only a century, is like opening a book more than three-quarters in. To begin understanding what happened this weekend, you have to go back more than 600 years.

The Battle of Kosovo is murky indeed, but shadowy memories of this turning point in Serbian history did survive the centuries, first in oral tradition and then, in the 19th century, in the written records of a patriotic Serbian philologist. (You can order a hard copy from Ohio University Press or read all the poems online.) Commanded by a noble named Lazarus, the Serbs clashed in June 1389 with the invading Turkish forces of Sultan Murad at Kosovo polje, the Field of Blackbirds. The epic tradition is wonderfully vivid: Lazarus doesn’t want war, but he refuses to pay tribute to the sultan. Elijah appears to Lazarus as a falcon and forces him to choose the destiny of Serbia: glory on earth, or glory in Heaven? Lazarus thinks—then he makes his choice fast:

O Dearest God, what shall I do, and how?
Shall I choose the earth? Shall I choose
The skies? And if I choose the kingdom,
If I choose an earthy kingdom now,
Earthly kingdoms are such passing things—
A heavenly kingdom, raging in the dark, endures eternally.

Before the battle, Lazarus celebrates his slava—the feast-day for his patron saint—with a last supper and grim prophecies of betrayal. The Serb leaders know that the Turks vastly outnumber them; Ivan Kosančić declares that “[i]f all the Serbs were changed to grains of salt, / We could not even salt their wretched dinners!” Nonetheless, they agree to tell Lazarus that the Turkish army consists of children, old men, and cripples, but Lazarus seems to know otherwise. The Turks easily slaughter the Serbs, but much of the epic tradition dwells on the poignant stories of individuals, such as the Maiden of Kosovo, who wanders the carnage looking for the man she was supposed to marry; the nine Jugović brothers and their father, whose deaths cause their mother to die of heartbreak; the redemptive bravery of a falsely accused hero; and the treachery of his accuser. Much of the Kosovo epic is unverifiable, even ahistorical, but the fragment we have is a powerful read. Its legacy, though, is both tragic and sad.

Unless you understand the Serb defeat at Kosovo polje, you won’t see the symbolism in Gavrilo Princip assassinating Archduke Ferdinand on the 525th anniversary of the battle, the act that ignited World War I; you won’t know why charmless nationalist Slobodan Milosevic scored a propaganda victory by speaking at the battlefield on the 600th anniversary of the defeat (shortly before his own helicopter-assisted apotheosis); and you won’t appreciate why many Serbs still regard Kosovo not only as their ethnic and religious homeland but also as the site of their national martyrdom. At this point, history fades into vapors; as John Matthias writes, “while the final and conclusive battle was not fought until 1459…it is Kosovo which has lived in the popular imagination and in epic poetry as the moment of annihilation and enslavement.”

Today, we prefer our medievalism sweet: Renaissance festivals, fantasy novels, CGI movies, and Playmobil toys. But the Kosovo conflict is medievalism, too, the sort we would often prefer to forget. In the Balkans, where the scholarly study of Bosnian guslars later shed new light on Beowulf, medievalism also kindled World War I. During the 19th century, as medievalism adapted to the vagaries of national character, the English gave us Tennyson and the Gothic revival; the Scots had their Ivanhoe and the Eglinton Tournament; the Finns found themselves in the charming Kalevala; the Germans gave the world Wagner (not only his music but also, alas, the man) as well as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; and the French, bless their hearts, gave us Migne. The Balkans bequeathed us their own Middle Ages. The world they created, though grim it may be, springs right from the same source as Tolkien.

Sometimes, medievalism should give us pause, especially us Americans, for whom the phrase “that’s history” is more likely to be dismissive rather than admonitory. The battle of Kosovo resonates still; its legends and lore have profound implications. Playmobil knows this; just look at their toys. They sell Norsemen and Romans and wee Gaulish leaders, but no Lazarus or Sultan Murad. The thought is unnerving, outlandish, and weird. Let’s hope that their story is someday resolved.

“Looking in shades of green through shades of blue…”

When the Zemeckis Beowulf movie came out last year, several commentators insisted that a “fresh reading” often gives new life to an ancient work. Blogging medievalists weren’t necessarily hostile to that notion, accustomed as they are to studying stories that change over time, but most didn’t think the reworking of the epic succeeded on its own merits. Recently I wondered: Which film adaptations of medieval stories, if any, have succeeded without being true to their sources?

Expecting the answer to be “none of them,” I revisited what may be the most famously awful “medieval” movie: the 1984 film Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I hadn’t seen this turkey in 20 years, but I expected to find a wonderful piece of evidence against the “fresh reading” argument. In fact, I envisioned a world in which simply declaring “Sword of the Valiant! Sword of the Valiant!” would shut down any response from reckless modernizers who can’t be bothered to contend with a work of medieval literature on its own terms. Instead, what I found in Sword of the Valiant surprised me: a laughably bad movie, to be sure, but a most intriguing mess. The film fails not because its creators gave the story a “fresh read”; it fails because they loved its medieval sources just a bit too much.

If you’ve seen Sword of the Valiant, you know that the first ten minutes are somewhat faithful to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and there’s a five-minute section near the end that reminds you what this movie purported to be. The rest is a disaster. (Bafflingly, Sword of the Valiant is a remake of a film made more than a decade earlier by the same writer and director; that long-lost original is being reissued on DVD next month, I suppose to capitalize on the success of the Armitage translation.) The faces of familiar actors pass in and out of the frame—Trevor Howard, John Rhys-Davies, David Rappaport, even a weary Peter Cushing—but their presence fails to comfort, because Miles O’Keeffe, playing Gawain, is omnipresent.

How much Keeffe is in this movie? Miles O’Keeffe. Star of way too many awful, awful 1980s sword-and-sorcery flicks, O’Keeffe dons a Prince Valiant/Peter Frampton wig and takes up the challenge of the Green Knight, played by Sean Connery, whose pranceworthy outfit, spray-on tan, facial glitter, and exposed fuzzy midriff go a long way toward explaining why his wife from the original poem is nowhere to be seen.

En route to the Green Chapel, Gawain inexplicably wanders out of his original story and into another romance: the Yvain of Chretien de Troyes. Like Yvain, he’s trapped between two gates and then rescued by a maiden named Lunette, who brings him an invisibility ring. Three or four plot twists later, he falls into another lousy movie entirely and gets caught in a war between two barons, Bertilak and Fortinbras. Along the way, Gawain slays Morgan le Fay, whom the Green Knight turns into a talking orange toad. He acquires a squire, befriends a friar, interrogates a dwarf, and often earns praise and love for no apparent reason. We even see our hero chasing a unicorn through the woods with a crossbow because he hopes to kill and eat it. At that point, I don’t know why the filmmakers didn’t just show Miles O’Keeffe enjoying a Bavarian hang-gliding adventure over Neuschwanstein. That’s what he did as Ator in the equally terrible fantasy movie Cave Dwellers, and it couldn’t have made this movie worse.

Actually, I know why Sword of the Valiant never gets quite that random. Sure, the movie chokes on its own haphazard storytelling, but its randomness is of a particular type, resembling the immature but effusive novelty of the Squire’s story in The Canterbury Tales. When a pavilion full of food appears out of nowhere or a rainbow gleams in the sky after Gawain blows a horn by the seashore, the movie still stinks, but these strange moments at least make Sword of the Valiant a unique curiosity, ensuring that the film harks directly back to medieval literature in ways that most bad fantasy movies do not.

Consider the medieval storytelling motifs that don’t need to be in Sword of the Valiant but somehow get thrown in anyway. The unnamed, Arthur-like king declares that none shall partake of the Yule-feast until someone in the court proves he’s worthy of his spurs. The king is mouthing a cliche, of course, but the knight literally earning his spurs is a common folklore motif. (In fact, it pops up in the final reel, so to speak, of Ralph the Collier.) Unlike the hero of the original romance, who needs only to fulfill his promise after a year, our big, stupid O’Keeffe is also charged with solving a murky riddle, not unlike certain knights in Gower, Chaucer, and at least one other medieval Gawain romance. There’s even a stock encounter between our hero and an irascible porter, a scene with roots in countless medieval romances, even though it serves no purpose here. The inclusion of these and similar details suggests an interesting ambition on the part of the filmmakers: that they’re playing not to popular expectations regarding medieval adventure stories, but to the specific expectations of people who’ve actually read medieval literature.

Sword of the Valiant is random, episodic, unsatisfying, and incoherent. But when its actors deliver such interesting lines as “A sword is three feet of tempered steel, with death dancing on every inch and hanging like a dark star on the very point” or “The old year limps to its grave, ashamed,” they try to sound like they mean it, because it’s clear that the filmmakers want them to mean it. The movie bristles with this sort of unfocused ambition, much of it hinting that its creators resisted cinematic competence for the greater glory of half-assed medievalism.

Maybe that’s why I find Sword of the Valiant worthy of affection, if not an ounce of respect. Despite their desperate visual references to Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian and The Empire Strikes Back, the filmmakers aspire to rise above the usual fantasy cliches, even when they so obviously don’t know how. You can almost imagine them puzzling over dim memories of undergraduate lectures, as fascinated by Middle English as the haze of a hangover will allow, trying to rework the material not out of a need to freshen up their sources for modern audiences but because they loved the sheer medieval strangeness of it all. That’s why it’s fascinating, and a little sad, to see their apparent affection for medieval literature mated with sheer pretentiousness to spawn what is, in effect, a terrible work of medieval-lit fan-fiction.

Sword of the Valiant closely approximates a student’s first reading of the strangest medieval romances: you’re confused by an alien mindset, you’re served up a dog’s breakfast of medieval motifs, and you start to suspect that the storyteller has inherited an ancient pile of symbols that he doesn’t fully understand. It took centuries for medieval romances about grail-seekers and courtly love to seem outlandish and weird, and no actual romance is as blatantly strange as this movie, so let’s give Sword of the Valiant some credit: to accomplish that in less than 25 years—heck, to accomplish that just by releasing the film—sure must be some kind of art.

“She began to wail, jealousies scream…”

Everyone is done talking about the recent Beowulf movie. I thought I was done with it, too, until I saw this comment from Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times blog “Paper Cuts”:

One of my favorite tropes in “Cloverfield,” the new J.J. Abrams-produced monster-destroys-Manhattan movie that made one zillion dollars (give or take) at the box-office last weekend, is that the camera rarely lingers on the giant beastie long enough for audiences to get a clear look at it. What makes the monster so frightening is whatever we viewers project onto it – it’s whatever we think it might be.

If I were teaching this semester, I might ask my students: How come the guy behind television shows like “Alias” and “Lost” knows that this timeworn approach to the monster is guaranteed to work, but nearly every ambitious artiste who tries to adapt Beowulf feels the need to flesh out Grendel, make him visible and sympathetic, and turn him into a fathomable, manageable creature rather than an inexplicable evil half-spawned from the viewer’s own psyche?

The modern-day maker of mass entertainment understands implicitly what some too-clever adapters, with “fresh readings” and pretentious meta-narratives about storytelling, do not: that our scop had it right all along.

“Do you nervously await the blows of cruel fate?”

Over Christmas, while taking a break from alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse, I started reading Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain the Green Knight. The introduction led me to anticipate a bold, original poem. “This is not an exercise in linguistic forensics or medieval history,” Armitage warns his reader, insisting that “the intention has always been to produce a living, inclusive, and readable piece of work in its own right.” The poet spends four pages explaining his decision to imitate the alliteration of the Middle English original, as if it’s to be the sole conservative impulse in a translation that will otherwise astonish the reader with its rampant modernity.

At least one reviewer likewise suggested that Armitage was up to something wild. “His vernacular translation isn’t literal,” wrote Edward Hirsch in The New York Times. “[S]ometimes he alliterates different letters, sometimes he foreshortens the number of alliterations in a line, sometimes he changes lines altogether and so forth—but his imitation is rich and various and recreates the gnarled verbal texture of the Middle English original, which is presented in a parallel text.”

Not all reviews have been so positive. The Independent declared that “[t]here are some excellent hunting scenes towards the end, which Armitage rises to with great verve and agility. But there are also many moments of slackness, when the translation seems to have gone off the boil; when it feels dutiful, even throwaway.” Writing in The Guardian, Kevin Crossley-Holland remarked that in Armitage’s Gawain, “one has the sense of a wonderfully talented and versatile poet trying rather too hard.” And a Kansas City Star reviewer conceded the need for a new colloquial translation but ruefully concluded that Armitage “indulges in slanginess at the expense of decorum.”

Strangely, reviewers have neglected to mention Armitage’s most inexplicable choice. The 101 stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight vary in length, but alliteration on stressed syllables consistently unites the first and second halves of each line. Calling alliteration “the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threads,” Armitage reproduces this basic structural device, a difficult trick in modern English. But no one, not even Armitage, mentions that this new translation only partially preserves the form of the original.

Each stanza of the Middle English poem ends with a five-line “bob and wheel.” Unlike the bulk of each stanza, the bob and wheel rhymes: a short line (the “bob”) is followed by four longer lines (the “wheel”) in accordance with the rhyme scheme A-B-A-B-A. Armitage admits that “[i]n the ‘bob and wheel’ sections where meter and rhyme also enter the equation, further deviations are inevitable”—but take a look at what Armitage considers mere “deviation.”

Here’s the original “bob and wheel” from lines 102-106:

in halle.
Therfore of face so fere
He stightles stif in stalle;
Ful yep in that Nw Yere
Much mirte he mas with alle.

Here’s Armitage’s rendering:

would meet.
With features proud and fine
he stood there tall and straight,
a king at Christmastime
amid great merriment.

Here are lines 198-202 in the original:

with yye.
He loked as layt so lyght,
So sayd al that hym syye;
Hit semed as no mon myght
Under his dynttes dryye.

Again, here’s Armitage:

and bone.
A look of lightning flashed
from somewhere in his soul.
The force of that man’s fist
would be a thunderbolt.

In Armitage’s translation, the bob and wheel sometimes rhymes perfectly, in keeping with the original. But occasionally, only two of the lines actually rhyme. And frequently, randomly—and to me, inexplicably—Armitage gives us a bob and wheel like the examples above, translated verses that completely ignore the tightly packed rhyme of the original.

I’m not sure why Armitage would faithfully reproduce the alliteration of his source text, reworking entire passages to coax his own rum, ram, ruf reluctantly into place, but choose to ignore one of the poem’s most memorable formal devices. Translating a Middle English original that both rhymes and alliterates is enormously frustrating, but even for the greenest of poets, it’s hardly impossible. Perhaps these omissions comprise the “moments of slackness” cited by The Independent, but what a peculiar translation we get as a result: one that’s beholden to form almost all the time, except when it isn’t. Armitage’s troubles can teach a new poet one difficult truth: if you’re going to translate a medieval work, you’d better commit to a form.

By contrast, consider a project by Adam Golaski. Yesterday, thanks to Brandon at Point of Know Return, I discovered Golaski’s Green, an oddball translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s now being serialized by the Web journal Open Letters. (The first selection is published here; the second is here.)

Reminiscent of Tom Lehrer’s reworking of “Clementine” by “one of our modern ‘cool school’ of composers,” Green will baffle anyone who doesn’t know the original—but its first stanza reveals a translator who’s made a firm choice about form:

Since ceased th’siege + assault upon Troye,
bones brok’nd brittled t’bronz’nd ashes,
that soldier who trod treason o’er th’plots’v
his enemies was tried f’r treachery tho
agile Ennias, of th’truest on Earth, of high kind,
haunted by shade Dido, was worth th’wonder
wealth’v all th’west isles——
From rich milk’v wolf-mother Romulus
rose Rome’nd’n its captured riches Romulus was
swath’d. W/ arrogance he built his name
upon a hill + took Palatine t’Romulus t’Rome——
Tirius traveled t’Tuscany he built beginnings,
Langaberde’n Lombardy left us houses,
+ far o’er th’French floods Felix Brutus
on many full banks built Bretayn + sits
w/ one
where war’nd wreck’nd wonder
by surprise has went therein,
+ oft both bliss’nd blunder
fool hope shifted t’sin.

Although I can’t quite tell if Golaski is serious, or if his style is sustainable, Green is a pleasure to read aloud, a weird, silly, gimmicky jumble that makes Christopher Logue’s retelling of Homer seem timid by comparison. Golaski toys with the notion of literal pronunciation; he acknowledges that he’s dabbling, at more than one level, in abbreviation; and he engages with the sound of the original poem, often regardless of anything else, riding recklessly into the open field even as Armitage lingers politely alone at the tree line.

Golaski’s rendering will never make it into the Norton Anthology, and I’d only use Green in the classroom if I wanted my students to hate me, but its weirdness demands that a reader react. With a medieval romance as rich as Gawain, “the work of a sly, sensuous, genial writer…who loved his fellow humans for their strengths, their weaknesses, their sheer complexity,” getting a rise out of readers is certainly someplace to start. Having focused on diction while skimping on form, Armitage failed to engage me. More true to a poem both strange and humane, Golaski at least made me laugh.

“Vituð ér enn, eða hvat?”

In December, the death of Icelandic translator Bernard Scudder had been little noted by the literary world. A month later—and nearly three months after Scudder’s death—I’m glad to see (via Sarah Weinman) that The Guardian has finally published an obituary. It’s the most complete listing yet of Scudder’s many accomplishments. I was saddened to learn that he was just 53.

If you’re so inclined, remember Bernard Scudder by reading his translations of some recent Reykjavik-based crime thrillers, literary fiction such as Angels of the Universe, or medieval Icelandic classics such as Grettir’s Saga and Egil’s Saga. Scudder’s obituary doesn’t fully explain his passion for Iceland, but I suspect that the answer is found on each page.

“Ertu þá farin, ertu þá farin frá mér?”

If you’ve visited the Mál og Menning bookstore in Reykjavik, you’ve seen them: rows and rows of original works, many of them tantalizing, most of them inaccessible to outsiders. Unfortunately, we recently lost one of the rare souls who helped to share Icelandic literature with the English-speaking world: translator Bernard Scudder, whose death in October went virtually unnoticed.

Scudder wasn’t the only translator of Icelandic writing, but he was, arguably, the most versatile. He contributed to The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, the massive, five-volume set published in 1997; he translated hip works of literary fiction such as Angels of the Universe and Epilogue of the Raindrops; he introduced readers in North America and the U.K. to Icelandic crime novels, including Silence of the Grave and Jar City; and, God bless him, he helped pay the bills with such gimmicky fare as The Vikings’ Guide to Good Business.

Sadly, no English-language newspaper or magazine has published an obituary for Bernard Scudder. The Iceland Review Web site hasn’t noted his death, and Guardian book-blogger Sarah Weinman only learned of his passing because someone at MediaBistro happened to be visiting Reykjavik.

Even now, the prolific translator remains something of an enigma. Weinman writes:

All we know is that Scudder died suddenly on October 15, that he was married, and that Harvill Secker, Indridason’s UK publisher, commented in a statement that they held Scudder’s work “in high regard and that he was a pleasure to work with.”

Perhaps, in its own way, the obscurity of Bernard Scudder is suitably Icelandic. Consider this notion from the 1955 award speech of Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness:

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives’ work, have not been preserved for posterity. They live in their immortal creations and are as much a part of Iceland as her landscape.

Bernard Scudder will never be famous; he won no renown in life, and the literary world will likely forget him in death. Fortunately, his efforts will endure, and for some of us, he will always be an integral part of our Iceland, that stark and beguiling and weirdly secretive country we first beheld with our own startled eyes—but which we only really saw in translation.

UPDATE – January 10, 2007: A UK newspaper has finally published an obituary of Scudder.

“A winter’s light and a distant choir…”

In our era of sneeze-it-onto-the-page poetry, one doesn’t often spot a true commitment to formalism. Rarer still is the modern poet who attempts to craft a poem that’s as traditional in its form as it is in its theme.

So here’s to Frank Wilson at the Philly Inquirer, who has written, it so happens, a villanelle about Advent. You can read up on the formal requirements of a villanelle here to appreciate what Wilson has done—although I can’t help but imagine that newspapers might be more pleasant to read if people outside the book-review section attempted an exercise like this one every once in a while.

The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier.

[UPDATE: As of December 2012, information on purchasing The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier as either a paperback or an e-book can be found here.]

Do students better appreciate the artistry of great medieval poets if they also read some of the less studied works of the Middle Ages? After teaching a survey course for several years, I wondered about that—but I also knew that time constraints prevented me from assigning lengthy Middle English poems that would take students weeks to read. Instead, I decided to make my own classroom translations of several medieval romances, lively narrative poems that put more frequently studied works in context but which themselves rarely appear on an undergraduate syllabus.

“The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier” is my third modern English translation of a Middle English work. It’s an entertaining 972-line romance packed with folktale motifs, elements of French chansons, burlesque humor, post-Crusades Christianity, and an examination of the rules of courtesy that may be more thoughtful than it first appears. (If you’d like to read “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear” in its original language, you can check it out at the TEAMS Web site.)

You don’t need a background in medieval literature to enjoy this translation. If you’re new to the storytelling of this period, you’ll notice a typically medieval mixture of the familiar and the strange. The lengthy alliterative stanzas and many of the plot twists may frustrate modern sensibilities, but I hope readers can benefit from greater access to a story that once delighted late medieval people.

This translation—a no-frills, low-resolution, 19-page PDF—is free to download. However, if you find it useful, edifying, or entertaining, please support my efforts by purchasing a copy of my book Becoming Charlemagne in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle edition.

If you’d like to refer someone to this translation, please don’t link directly to the PDF or distribute it through other Web sites. Instead, please link to this page.

I hope you enjoy this other Christmas story about an unlikely hero named Ralph.

“I’m looking for cracks in the pavement…”

Back in July, while visiting family, I discovered that downtown New Orleans had been deprived of a prominent literary landmark.

Today, an email missive brings good news: Ignatius has returned. All hail the restoration of theology and geometry to Canal Street!

Behold the grandeur of his physique! The complexity of his worldview! The decency and taste implicit in his carriage! The grace with which he functions in the mire of today’s world!

(Photo courtesy of the blogger’s very cool mom.)