Saturday 18th March 11:15—12:45, Session 2
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Translation in Progress |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 2 |
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Moderator: |
Julianna Képes |
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Paper 1: |
Translating Hanseatic Texts: Remarks from a Recent Experience |
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Paper 2: |
Adaptation as Translation: Beowulf in the Modern Era |
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Paper 3: |
Translating Hanseatic Texts: Remarks from a Recent Experience
Valentina Daniele
Two are the most relevant issues the translator of a medieval text has to face: firstly, a thorough analysis of the linguistic elements of the source-text; secondly, the reconstruction of its whole context.
This paper offers a survey of some problems involved in translating both the co-text and the con-text of Hanseatic documents (XIV – XVII) from Low German and Middle Swedish into Italian.
The paper also discusses the strategies I have adopted to make the medieval texts into the most authentic 20th century Italian translations.
Adaptation as Translation: Beowulf in the Modern Era
Alison Killilea
Since the early 19th century, Beowulf has received sustained critical attention, in the forms of both translation and scholarship. In the last seventy to eighty years, however, shortly after J.R.R Tolkien’s The Monsters and the Critics, which argued for the integrity of the poem in and of itself (as opposed to just an interesting linguistic and historical document), adaptations of Beowulf, including narrative, filmic and comic reworkings, have proliferated and, it may be said, have somewhat defined the poem, at least for a non-academic audience.
This paper aims to discuss these adaptations’ reception of and engagement with the original Anglo-Saxon piece, exploring how these modern reimaginings use the poem as a means to express contemporary societal issues and anxieties. While these adaptations often appear at odds with the Anglo-Saxon poem, many show a complex discourse with both the poem itself and also with the scholarly landscape. In particular, I wish to focus on the two characters of Grendel and Grendel’s mother, as it is often through the antagonistic forces of a work (as can explicitly be seen in the horror genre) that contemporary fears are articulated.
Through a consideration of a number of works, such as John Gardner’s Grendel, Graham Baker’s and Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulfs, and a number of episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, I will discuss how how the two ambiguous figures of Grendel and his mother can be understood as complex cultural signs that reveal as much about the climate of reception as the original characters to which they refer.