Professor Bob Hasenfratz (Department of English, University of Connecticut)
"The Old English Poetry Project"
Friday February 6, 2015
7.30 p.m.
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)
English Studies Conference Room (4406)
"The Old English Poetry Project"
Friday February 6, 2015
7.30 p.m.
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)
English Studies Conference Room (4406)
Bob will lay out the history, aims, and future of the Old English Poetry
Project (http://www.oepoetryproject.org), a growing
digital archive of translations from Anglo-Saxon poetry, founded in 2014 with
Miller Oberman, a poet and Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut. This
archive will eventually contain base translations of the entire corpus of Old
English poetry and will invite competing translations in a variety of styles
and languages from students, scholars, and poets. The talk focuses on the
challenges of translating Maxims I and II and explores the advantages of
embracing a “foreignizing” effect proposed by translation theorists Antoine
Berman and Lawrence Venuti. Representing the radical compression of Maxims I
and II in a contemporary translation can produce some remarkably alienating
effects that run counter to the desire to explain this difficult, but rewarding
poetry.