Professor Bob Hasenfratz (Department of English, University of Connecticut) speaking on “The Old English Poetry Project”

Bob will lay out the history, aims, and future of the Old English Poetry Project, a growing digital archive of translations from Anglo-Saxon poetry, founded in 2014 with Miller Oberman, a poet and Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut. This archive will eventually contain base translations of the entire corpus of Old English poetry and will invite competing translations in a variety of styles and languages from students, scholars, and poets. The talk focuses on the challenges of translating Maxims I and II and explores the advantages of embracing a “foreignizing” effect proposed by translation theorists Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti. Representing the radical compression of Maxims I and II in a contemporary translation can produce some remarkably alienating effects that run counter to the desire to explain this difficult, but rewarding poetry.