Papers by Mikaela Renshaw
Essays in Medieval Studies
On the surface, the Old English Beowulf seems neither modern nor modernist, given that Beowulf is... more On the surface, the Old English Beowulf seems neither modern nor modernist, given that Beowulf is one of the oldest works in the English language. Yet, the connection is far less paradoxical than it seems, not only because of the fascination that high modernists, such as Ezra Pound, had for the medieval era engaging with it frequently through their own translations, but also because medievalism is itself modernist. 1 Medievalism is born out of the desire to remake or recreate the medieval, both in how it truly was, as well as how we like to imagine it. 2 However, due to the impossibility of true recovery, medievalism is not centered solely in the past, but is instead created by the collision and combination of the medieval and the modern, the exact sort of amalgamation that stands at the heart of the modernist genre. As such, engaging with a medieval texts and its translations through a kind of modernist medievalism helps us to understand how the text also lies on this collision point, existing across multiple modernities as its own kind of amalgamation. To expand on that, I will be examining the translations of Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley to consider and define modernist medievalism. 3 While both works exemplify the translation of a medieval work into a modernist piece, they do so in rather different ways. Heaney translates Beowulf through a focused form of spatial modernity, in which his use of regionalisms and dialect allows him to ground the work in his native land of Northern Ireland. Whereas, Headley works within a more strictly temporal modernity with her use of diffuse contemporary dialect that calls upon not only poetic turns of phrase but slang terms as well. Finally, I will use these works to construct a kind of Beowulfian palimpsest, in order to examine how Beowulf is not just Beowulf, the original text, standing alone a singular static object anchored in the past. Beowulf, as an object of study, is also a Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a
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Papers by Mikaela Renshaw