Date of Completion
5-5-2017
Embargo Period
5-2-2027
Keywords
Poetry, Translation, Lyric Theory, Old English, Queer Theory
Major Advisor
V. Penelope Pelizzon
Associate Advisor
Robert Hasenfratz
Associate Advisor
Margaret Breen
Field of Study
English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Open Access
Campus Access
Abstract
The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations
Miller Oberman, Ph.D.
University of Connecticut, 2017
This dissertation uses critical and creative means to explore connections between queer temporality theory and the act of translating and reading Old English lyric poetry. By considering translation as an act of intimacy located in the sense of movement and boundary crossing inherent in the prefix “trans,” this project recognizes the possibility for poets, scholars, and translators to create surprising and intimate relationships that work across and through improbable distances in space and time. The Unstill Ones combines an exploration of my own new poems and Old English lyrics, and outlines a framework for further application by translators and scholars.
The critical preface links the subfields of queer theory, medieval studies, translation theory, and lyric theory, and offers a series of examples exploring their utility for translating and thinking about the Old English lyric poem. I use queer temporality theory to examine translations and critical scholarship of “The Ruin” and “Wulf and Eadwacer,” resulting in new ways and means of understanding these early English poems.
In the creative portion of this project, this engagement represents itself in poems and translations that make connections between space, temporality, originality, identity, and artistic failure in ways that are crucial to my understanding of damaged, anonymous medieval texts. These poems waver between the status of original and translation, displace temporally in narrative and grammar; and make space for absences. They take up Walter Benjamin’s challenge in “The Task of the Translator” to navigate literalness rather than fidelity, and to allow contemporary English to be changed by this encounter with Old English.
The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations
Miller Oberman
B.A. Sarah Lawrence College, 2001
M.F.A. Georgia College, 2006
M.A. University of Connecticut, 2013
A Dissertation
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the
University of Connecticut
2017
APPROVAL PAGE
Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations
Presented by
Miller Oberman, B.A., M.F.A, M.A.
Major Advisor ________________________________________________________
V. Penelope Pelizzon
Associate Advisor _____________________________________________________
Robert Hasenfratz
Associate Advisor _____________________________________________________
Margaret S. Breen
University of Connecticut
2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems and translations have appeared, sometimes in variant forms: 14 Hills, Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois, Boston Review, Gramma, Harvard Omniglots, Harvard Review, London Review of Books, the minnesota review, The Nation, Poetry, Southeast Review, and Tin House.
Many thanks for support from: the Poetry Foundation, the 92nd Street Y, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, and the English Department at the University of Connecticut.
Special thanks to major dissertation advisor V. Penelope Pelizzon, who believed in my work enough to bring me here, tirelessly helped me keep the thread of my prose, and read these poems more times than I can count.
Enormous thanks go to Margaret Sönser Breen and Robert Hasenfratz for serving as my dissertation advisers. Bob: thank you for so patiently teaching me to read Old English. Margaret: I am enormously grateful for your help weaving my interest in queer theory into this project, and for your keen editorial eye.
To all my friends in Medieval Studies at UConn: thank you for the key to your library, both literally and figuratively.
I am grateful to Elizabeth Freeman and Darcie Dennigan for their editorial help and for serving on my defense committee, and to all of my teachers and mentors, especially: Maria Bell, John Watkins, Thomas Lux, Marie Howe, Victoria Redel, Joan Larkin, Suzanne Gardinier, Martin Lammon, Alice Friman, Laura Newbern, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Fred Biggs, Charles Mahoney and Ellen Litman. Special thanks to Mary Udal, without whom almost nothing happens.
This has been years in the making, and I’m incredibly grateful for my family, by blood and by choice, who have offered me support, love, readership, kind critique, and worldly sustenance: Jonas Moody, Gísli Rúnar Harðarson, Sean Frederick Forbes, Conrad Lumm, Sara Jane Stoner, Ana Božičević, Bekah Dickstein, Ari Banias, Erick Piller, Julia Tillinghast, Matthew Dickman, Nathan Levitt, Marcy Coburn, Emily Millay Haddad, Sheyam Ghieth, Jarred Wiehe, Leah Schwebel, Micah Goodrich, and the Oberman, Solomon, Rogers, Bloch and Rosen-Pyros families. To Eli and Susan Oberman, who are elemental, and in memory of so many, but especially Mark Oberman, Mary Rosen-Pyros, and Myron Rogers, who was rootin’ for me.
For Louisa Solomon, beshert and wyrd, and Rosa Sher, who is new.
The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations
Miller Oberman
Table of Contents
Part One: Notes Toward a Queer Medieval Translation Politic
Critical Preface......................................................................................... 1
Works Cited............................................................................................. 41
Part Two: The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations
e
Night Watch............................................................................................. 45
Cædmon’s Hymn......................................................................................... 47
On Trans.................................................................................................. 48
Wulf and Eadwacer.................................................................................. 49
Aloud, Out of Nothing............................................................................. 51
The City.................................................................................................... 52
The Ruin.................................................................................................... 53
The Smokewood Tree.............................................................................. 55
Tabula Rasa.............................................................................................. 56
Good Sleep............................................................................................... 57
Lies After the War.................................................................................... 58
The Sky Stone.......................................................................................... 59
The Woman Who Cannot............................................................................. 60
E
My Brother Was Missing........................................................................... 62
The Vespertines........................................................................................ 63
Brothers.................................................................................................... 64
Wolf Brother............................................................................................ 65
Silentium.................................................................................................. 66
The Ruin.................................................................................................. 67
Riddle 82................................................................................................... 69
The Old English Rune Poem......................................................................... 70
The Unmaking.......................................................................................... 74
Rocks....................................................................................................... 75
The Grave.................................................................................................. 76
On Fishing................................................................................................ 77
Against a Sudden Stitch............................................................................... 79
D
Natural History........................................................................................ 81
The Word Again....................................................................................... 83
Against a Dwarf....................................................................................... 84
The Grave................................................................................................ 85
Who People Are....................................................................................... 87
P.M.......................................................................................................... 88
Riddle 63................................................................................................... 89
Riddle 97.................................................................................................. 90
Wulf and Eadwacer..................................................................................... 91
Dear Lengthening Day.............................................................................. 92
What is Night........................................................................................... 93
Words Were Changing.............................................................................. 94
The Unstill Ones...................................................................................... 95
Body Walking Through Snow................................................................... 96
Riddle 94................................................................................................... 97
Voyages.................................................................................................... 98
Riddle 78................................................................................................... 100
Breakwater............................................................................................... 101
Notes........................................................................................................ 102
*Italicized poem titles indicate translations from Old English. I use brackets to indicate places where manuscripts have been damaged beyond readability.
Recommended Citation
Oberman, Miller W., "The Unstill Ones: Poems and Translations" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 1484.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1484