Candice:
> How about posting a couple from the Collected to supplement the two in
> _Brit Po Since 1945_ ("Hvalsey" and "Vadstena"), Matthew? Berry is new to
me
> also and quite interesting, meadevil-wise.
I'll see what I can do (without busting copyright). The way in might be to
start with "Punitive Expedition", go back to _Morant Bay_ [taking in
Melville's "Benitto Cereno" on the way], then on to _Ghosts of Greenland_.
Ignore anything pre-"Morant Bay", and avoid the novel-version (When _Illness
and Ghosts in the West Settlement_ became (the novel) _Ghosts of
Greenland_).
Or just buy _From the Red Fort_.
> Just to clarify a number of languages, poetics, and poems that seem to
have
> been conflated relative to alliteration,
Who's conflating? I'm [I +hope+] unconflating.
[When did you last read Sermono Lupes de Anglos?]
> we need to keep in mind that
> Beowulf is a textual artifact of an oral-poetics tradition in which the
> alliteration served to bind pairs of hemistiches, which weren't even
_half_
> lines prior to the introduction of writing
Um ... _Beowulf_ is written (continuous) [no line endings] as is Aelfric and
Wulfstan ...
> Both Langland and the Gawain/Pearl poet were _writers_ who used the old
> oral-alliterative device (as did the author of the alliterative Morte
> D'Artur, btw)
[Constant Reader Throws Up]
(And let's +not+ segue into fifteenth century Scots -- Where would you put
The Twa Merrit Wemen? Douglas's alliterative bits? Henryson was too
sensible, except when he was about to die -- remember the "shit a hard turd"
joke?])
> to make a sociopolitical/aesthetic point about the existence
> of poetry elsewhere in England besides the Court
[picky] "courts". The Gawain poet was "court" -- just West Midlands deeply
upper class provincial, rather than London metropolitan court. Same
difference.
> --Langland making his point
> in plain style (comparatively), while the Gawain/Pearl poet heightened the
> artifice so artfully in order (I suspect) both to tweak the Court poets
and
> to show that he could!
Hm ... Still think Langland is (metrically, and otherwise) batting in a
different ball-park from the Gawain poet.
[And Gawain = Pearl begs just a +tiny+ little question ...]
> The other thing to keep in mind relative to Modern English translations of
> Old English versus Middle English alliterative poems is how different the
> actual languages are: Middle English is so close to Modern that I've never
> seen the point of translating it at all, whereas Old English is so much
more
> like German as to be a foreign language to us speakers of Modern.
Perfectly fair -- none of the Big Three (the Gawain Poet [OK, well, just
maybe], Chaucer, or Langland need +translating+. The crunch is
transliterating. Carry it forward -- Wyatt makes perfect (well, mostly
perfect) sense in Modern English [rhythmically and semantically] -- Skelton
90%. The crunch comes when you hit the 1380s.
> P.S. Why isn't Christopher Walker or some other listee who knows all this
> taking up these threads? (Don't I have enough to do around here?!)
Concur.
Robin
