In Praise of Old English Aerobics.

Not some weird fitness program...erase image of guys in smocks doing step ups to a four line beat...but the website:

http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/OEA/

which accompanies Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English.

Which leads to the observation that since it's got harder to find a course in Old English the possibility of teaching yourself has improved. I did three years at university and learnt very little; the methodology was to throw Sweet's Primer and Reader at us, give us chunks of grammar to memorise and wads of text to translate and to expect something magical to happen. It didn't. Not only was the "teaching" primitive, but I don't remember anyone suggesting the poetry was actually worth reading as poetry. Which is one of the reasons why I'd gone there in the first place.

I suspect I learnt more from Stephen Pollington's First Steps in Old English, which for a small fee (no joke, a small fee) can be converted into a correspondence course. In fact I suspect if you were determined enough you could start knowing nothing, and work through Stephen's book and end up being a competent reader of OE. You'd also be fairly comfortable going the other way, from Modern English to OE.

The Old English Aerobics site is also excellent. An interactive course based on Baker's book. Sadly it's never been finished, but even so, the exercises allow you to review and revise and they never have that look your teacher has when you get the same thing wrong three times in a row. The Anthology, with its point and click dictionary and grammar functions, allow the acquisition of vocabulary without endless page turning in a print dictionary.

In fact, reading the chronicle entry on the Death of William was actually enjoyable.

Saturday's S.U.R.G

This photo of the hospital at the top of Eccles street in Dublin.

In the offices of S.U.R.G. we follow Bloom as he sets out on his longest day. Weird juxtaposition, vivid memories of Dublin, of walking along Eccles street, of the deeply creepy front door preserved in the Joyce Centre and the clouds moving across Surfers in the distance, the high rise buildings disappearing as the rain moved in from the Pacific.

To which Joyce’s syntax could probably do justice.

Each reading differs. This time I pick up the lost key, the left open door, the ten years of marital abstinence echoing Ulysses’ ten years wandering from Troy. The fact that he keeps his card in his hat. We speculate about the Blooms’ relationship, about how the book doesn’t judge it, although Critics have. Most of all, we enjoy Bloom and the language. The humour.

And of course the skill.

Mrs. Marion Bloom.

It’s neat.

Dan Gerous and E. Mergency seek the Mad Ness Monster

I grew up with Dan Gerous, that well known French Canadian outlaw and his friend E. Mergency. There was also Fatty Gew and Cal Iber. The Mahogany Gas Pipes I never understood (Until I read Last Night’s Fun), and the Stew Barbed Wire and Rhubarb was confusing.

A love of verbal play:

If you mean to insinuate that I will tolerate such diabolical insolence from a such a miserable specimen of anatomy as yourself, you are wrongly governed by a misapprehension of false ideas;

and a delight in nonsense:

One Fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight
Three blind men to seek their way
Four dumb men to shout hoorary!
A legless Donkey walking by
Kicked the blind man in the eye
Knocked him through a nine inch wall
Into a dry pond and drowned them all.

(although to be honest, the last four lines of the above have always seemed sinister).

It’s tempting to ascribe the word play to the Anglo-Irish tradition, point an accusing finger at Joyce, and god knows they were all great talkers when they got going, fine story tellers, masters of the digression, but you can also trace the pleasure in verbal nonsense through English culture too; think Shakespeare, Lewis Carol, the Two Ronnies:

Lady Olivia swept down the grand staircase in her ball gown and then she dusted the china.

and those wonderful, awful music hall puns:

I say I say I say. My Wife’s gone on holiday to the West Indies
Jamaica
No, she went of her own accord.

Or the Goons:

How do I get out of here. The door is locked.
Turn the nob on your side
I haven’t got a nob on my side!

But I think that it’s partly the migrant’s revenge. Unable to escape the normalizing effects of English, with all its class and racial assumptions built into syntax and diction and accent, you could at least shrug it loose occasionally by turning it back on itself and underlining its own absurdities.
Nonsense in children is play; nonsense in adults is subversion or madness. But it’s a Dan Gerous game. If you can imagine the legless donkey walking by, you're not far from Mad Ness(That little known scotish loch):
“If I should return during my absence keep me here until I come back”. (Quoted in David Cooper: ”The Language of Madness”.)

Syntax and style#2

Do you very want to be engaged in love, but does not can? Purchase itself magic pills!

(I didn't make this up, it was a spam header.)

I like "very want".


I also like the way that my reading makes sense of the syntax. On first Reading I didn't even notice where very was. I read, automatically adjusting my expectations, until I arrive at the apparent impossibility of "purchase itself". It's like trying to keep your balance and keep moving on one of those shuddering plank walks they used to have in "Haunted Houses" at the fair ground. You wobble along to the end. As Lecercle would point out, although this string of words destroys the normal logic of syntax and semantics, it still "makes sense". Someone wants to sell pills that will help me "engage in love".

To say that I all I do is engage in a form of translation, shifting this back towards a "formal" grammar which would allow me to rephrase the sentences as "meaningful", perhaps against a store of remembered sentences which allow me to rapidly compare and proceed, misses the point that I would have to "translate" or interpret "engage in love" anyway.

It also avoids confronting the deeply disturbing idea that I know what it means even though it doesn't say what it means?

Where's the dooferlacky thingy?
I think. I think I Put it on the whatjamallit
NO, you didn't it's on the microwave.....

Syntax and style

Proust:
Le style, pour L'ecrivain, aussi bein que la colour pour le peinture, est une question non de technique mais de vision.

Joyce
"I'd like a language that is above all languages, a language to which all will do service; I cannot express myself in Englsih without enclosing myself in a tradition.(cited Thompson, 'The language or Finnegans Wake" sewanee review(1964) no 72 pp72-79)

Anno 2009. Her Bligh rice onfeng

So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(And without the weird Hilary Clinton I'm a woman, you're a woman, why aren't you voting for me ploy.)
But that phrase from the Chronicle, in this year x came to power/acquired the Kingdom/come into the ruler ship...reveals the problem not so much of translation but of understanding.
Imagine Godwin or Leofric, Harold or William the Bastard, resurrected to watch the election campaign. They were astute men used to the getting of power. But would they have had a chance of understanding or appreciating what was happening? The juxtaposition, the image of them sitting in the commentary box sending dispatches home as the election unfolds, reveals the problem.
Those nouns and verbs in Old English which describe power can be easily translated into modern English. And t'other way round. You could explain things like Parliaments in terms of Witan or Moot, and the idea of election wouldn't have been too alien (certainly not to Harold). But the translations mask the realities. To rule, to govern, a kingdom, a nation, a state, a King, even "to be elected" don't mean the same thing now as then, can't mean the same thing now as then.
SO our encounter with the past, which is irremediably other, is domesticated and familiarised simply though the effect of language. Not just the vocabulary but the syntax too, of which much more later.
Hardly an original thought, but enough for a Sunday morning...
So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(I like that, said Offa, sing it again!)

Lady G gets to ride and play with the Big Boys

Jane Holland's article "Drinking Beowulf’s Blood: The Influence of Old English on Contemporary Poetry" has very nice things to say about Lady G. It's almost at the end of the article, but the article itself is too good to skip through...

I like her conclusion about the possible uses of OE poetry in modern verse and hope she won't mind if I quote it:


"If we look to Anglo-Saxon remnants for some kind of primitive tribal identity, we will be disappointed, for whatever is reflected back appears to be, rather mundanely, ourselves. Yet we may find inspiration there, and possibly some comfort too: self-aware, heroic epics like Beowulf may earn a place in a war-torn twenty-first century, but so too should the Anglo-Saxon elegies — elegies for the lost, the fallen, the innumerable dead — and their enduring love poems, steeped in the numinous. Embracing the themes and alliterative force of Anglo-Saxon poetry need not entail a dissolution into the ‘ur-bark’ of Paterson’s cautionary tale; instead, it has the potential to empower us in creative terms, bringing contemporary poetry into contact with its own dynamic past and reconnecting it with those fragments of Old English still very much alive at the core of the language."