My stack of Beowulfs - Meghan Purvis Preface annotation

I have a problem.

What that problem is depends on the angle you look at it from, though. Some might look at this problem and say "You have too many translations of Beowulf." Others might argue the opposite. I'm leaning toward that one. But one thing is certain: I have a lot of Beowulf and they take up a good amount of space.

That's five films, one tv series, one Klaeber, one comic, 15 English translations, 3 Spanish translations, one Galician translation, and two novels inspired by Beowulf. I recently returned the copy of the Icelandic translation I had out from the library, but I did make a scan for my own use. And this doesn't count any other editions I only have electronically. And I have Meghan Purvis's translation in the other room, not in this picture, because I just realized it was missing.

Speaking of Meghan Purvis's translation, I've been reading it with my spouse lately. My spouse has never read any version of Beowulf, so this has been fun to experience the poem through new eyes and field questions from someone who is not a student, but also has enough contact with the field through me and my colleagues that the questions are generally very good and incisive.

I'm digging the translation. There's a good flow to the verse, the sectioning of the text makes sense, and I like the additional asides and shifts in narrator that lend the poem a polyvocality that feels very welcome. It's a breath of fresh air to have multiple narrative voices behind the poem, to have voices breaking in to say their piece, compared to the almost stodgy feeling some other translations have. There's a sense here that this story is communal, that it belongs to no one person or group, and that's definitely what Purvis is trying to carve out, going by her introduction to the text. She talks briefly but candidly about what it meant to hear Old English spoken by a woman for the first time, and how that was part of her drive to build her own spin on the poem. Anyway, since I'm already talking about it, I might as well get my first annotation on here. So here it is, an annotation for Meghan Purvis's introduction to her translation of Beowulf. Any students who may stumble upon this, you'll find that the annotations I write may be useful either as models or in terms of directing you toward useful sources.

Purvis, Meghan. “Preface,” Beowulf. Penned in the Margins, 2013. 7-8.

Key to Purvis’s feeling of at-homeness with the poem is a sense of conscious rebellion against the stodgy old white maleness of the poem’s reception history and its reputation (as well as the field of early medieval English studies broadly). She cites Edwin Morgan (Scottish) and Seamus Heaney (Irish) as examples of translators who led the way for her with their translations working against the traditional nationalist reading, while Kevin Crossley-Holland (an Oxford dropout) proves you don’t need the “right” academic background. These translators, in Purvis’s estimation, “do not have their papers in order,” and neither does she as a woman (7). She speaks of her first time hearing Old English spoken by a woman, and it is this perspective she brings to bear on the text. She owns her deviations from the source and tradition as opening up the voices in the poem that are just under the surface, employing a polyvocalic approach that allows multiple narrative points of view. For Purvis, translation happens “in the space between, in what is passed over and what is held up to the light” (8). On that count, she holds up many voices to the light who have been snuffed out even within the Old English.

So for me and the purposes of my project, it's not likely I'll cite much from the preface to Purvis's translation. It's fairly short and doesn't offer too much directly relevant to my project. She doesn't say anything about Grendel's Mother, after all. And yet, the preface is still worth considering and may earn one or two citations in the final project, both of which I've quoted within the annotation. First is Purvis's assessment of prior translations that deviate from the tradition of English nationalism through the poem. This will most likely not be relevant to discussion of the translation itself, but may be useful in helping situate these translations as part of the trend they follow. More interesting is the focus on polyvocal narration and what she sees herself recovering from the poem that other translations are not finding, which I will be able to pair with some analysis of her treatment of Grendel's Mother. The best point to do so will be with her translation of the manuscript's Grendles magan (line 1391), where she has Beowulf simply refer to Grendel's Mother as "He" and a narrator butts in "she, strong enough to kill / your best man, and a woman" (page 62). There's work to be done there, no doubt about it.

And that turned out to be a bit more than just an annotation, but I think it's a good start. I wish the text editing tools here allowed me to double indent the annotation, but setting it in single space is about all I can really do. Please bear with me as I figure out the tricks with this blog's software.

Until next time.