W & E
Author
Original Work
Translator
Language
Year
2025
Publisher
Country
United States
Pages
163
ISBN
9780900575266
"As the act of translation cannot be divorced from interpretation, the highly enigmatic nature of 'Wulf ond Eadwacer' would seem to begird the translator, to restrict the approaches, the strategies, and the outcomes available to her. Indeed, it seems sensible to decide what a thing is and what kind of effect it should have on the reader before translating it. But the reader should not have to pay for the translator's convenience, and perhaps the least faithful translation of this enigmatic, polyvalent anomaly of an Old English poem that might have been born Scandinavian in the first place would be to present it in the absence of its complexity, to pin the poem down to a singular, definitive interpretation, to lock it into a linear narrative that it never loved. The translation at hand aims to release the poem back into its radical complexity -- to restore the lacunae, the indeterminacy, and the strangeness that makes the Anglo Saxon version of 'Wulf ond Eadwacer' so haunting. Wulf & Eadwacer uses fragments of the original Old English both to re-acquaint the reader with her etymological roots and to make her a bit of a stranger in her own language. Code-switching between Old English and Modern English, Wulf & Eadwacer embraces the proto-feminist, disjunctive voice of the original poem, so that its enigmatic nature and plurality can fully be explored for the first time" --— Google Books
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