Saturday, June 28, 2008
Not dead yet
Just perpetually behind. :-) The last days of school overlapped with my own master's classes, which made for another really interesting end of the year. Graduation was enjoyable. A much-missed former colleague returned for the event. I'm deep in the thick of Anglo-Saxon poetry (yes, Beowulf) and a study of the history of rhetoric. Both classes are fabulous, and it's been wonderful to see my classmates of last year and meet some new ones. It's also been really nice having four-day weekends and getting to sleep in to my heart's content for this first week officially out of school. It's also been quite the babyfest around here, as we've been getting to meet or catch up with babies and children of friends and family. These will be reflected in my photo posts for the week(s) that I owe. :-) Fun stuff, maynard! Netflix continues to be a boon. We got to watch the Tin Man miniseries from the Sci-Fi channel -- a delightful and fairly well-done take (excepting a few predictable cheeseball moments) on the Wizard of Oz. I continue to reread Madeleine's books; it was interesting to reread Certain Women on this side of her death. Ah, many random thoughts, and perhaps I'll put some together that actually connect for a longer post. For now, I'll play catch-up with the many photos I owe.
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3 comments:
Beowulf, eh? What translation are you reading? Or are you going for the Real Thing and learning Anglo-Saxon?
we're reading the seamus heaney translation, and our prof references others as we read. i wish we were reading the 'real thing,' but that's hard to do in five weeks' time, compressed as these classes are. we do have the 'bilingual' version -- oe on one side, translation on the other -- and she's pretty good about taking us to the original to point things out. she's taught us about pronunciation and some linguistic things. wish it were more. we got our feet wet with "the wandered," "the sea-farer," and "the battle of maldon" -- reading multiple translations of each, which i thought was a good strategy.
we just read THE tolkien article, which was fun and fabulous, and we're presenting on various critical articles for exposure to a breadth of different critical trends and lenses.
what do you think about the heaney? i'm enjoying it, though he admittedly took some liberties.
i'm finding i'm a nut for things ancient, much to my surprise -- beowulf joins the odyssey and shakespeare as my favorites.
I like Tom Shippey's review of Heaney's translation:
http://www.english.uga.edu/~jdmevans/public/heanulf.html
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