{"id":87,"date":"2007-11-28T09:45:56","date_gmt":"2007-11-28T13:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geneveith.com\/?p=87"},"modified":"2007-11-28T09:45:56","modified_gmt":"2007-11-28T13:45:56","slug":"the-literature-of-otherness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2007\/11\/the-literature-of-otherness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Literature of Otherness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Thanks to those of you who reviewed the Beowulf movie on this blog. You saved at least one middle school teacher from taking her 7th graders, which would have been highly embarrassing, to say the least.<\/p>\n

One writer, Blake Gopnik<\/a>, also found the movie falling short of the original, but he gave some different reasons. Mr. Gopnik said that when he read the poem as a young man, it was so compelling to him that he studied Anglo-Saxon in college so that he could read it in the original language. What he loved about it was precisely how different its imaginative world is from our own. The movie makers, though, thought they had to make it up-to-date and thereby eliminated its alienness, which is its biggest appeal.<\/p>\n

reading \u201cBeowulf\u201d takes us to a new place, where people think about the world and its stories in terms that don\u2019t make sense to us. That\u2019s why it takes a year and more to come to terms with it (at least in Anglo-Saxon) and why the effort\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n

\nI don\u2019t buy the tired old cliche that \u201cBeowulf\u201d is great because it touches universal themes. What\u2019s great is that it isn\u2019t universal; that it\u2019s its own thing; that its bards managed to build a world for us that\u2019s so complete a package, in its verse and tale and coloring, that we can still get lost in it all these centuries later. Whereas watching the movie leaves us absolutely in the place and present where we started out. It\u2019s just \u201cDie Hard\u201d in chain mail.\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. I\u2019m a big fan of \u201cDie Hard\u201d and \u201cSpider-Man\u201d and even trashier fare. (Did someone just say \u201cX-Men III\u201d?) It\u2019s just that I\u2019m also a fan of \u201cBeowulf\u201d as something very different from all that \u2014 as a work that truly makes you put yourself into the skin of an ancient Germanic marauder. What could be more thrilling than that?<\/p>\n

In all their many interviews, it\u2019s clear that the creators of the film could barely stomach the strange \u201cBeowulf\u201d they started out with. They didn\u2019t dare imagine that, even with a little cinematic help, their audience might ever come to terms with its foreignness. Instead, they had to bring the poem fully \u201cup to date\u201d and make it easily digestible.<\/p>\n

This is a brilliant point, applicable to much ancient and other-cultural literature and to the way they are translated. Consider, for example, many modern Bible translations. The up-to-date language tries to make Abraham and Isaac into one of our contemporaries. They are not! They are from an ancient world very different from our own. A good Bible translation, to be fully accurate, should faithfully render the strangeness and the obscurities, instead of trying to make everything familiar and clear when the original is not so. A good Bible translation should, like the Beowulf poem, take us into its world. That\u2019s why the King James version\u2013whose translators purposefully used language that was already archaic in their own time\u2013is still so evocative and powerful.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to those of you who reviewed the Beowulf movie on this blog. You saved at least one middle school teacher from taking her 7th graders, which would have been highly embarrassing, to say the least. One writer, Blake Gopnik, also found the movie falling short of the original, but he gave some different reasons. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-literature","category-movies"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Literature of Otherness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thanks to those of you who reviewed the Beowulf movie on this blog. 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