This chapter takes a look at the poet Thomas Meyer’s translations, providing a concise history of his early work in the field, the influence of Ezra Pound’s idea of personae, and certain hauntological components that surface in his tracing and myth-making projects. Meyer’s unorthodox approach to translation is presented as a collaboration with ghost authors, texts, and mythologies. A selection of his “translations” from the Old English, Ancient Greek, and German reveals his practice altered from one initially centered on an ostensibly “real” form of translation—that is, one rooted in the normative pretense that any language can be clearly transmitted into another—to a process of engaging with deceased poets to access “imprints” of poems, ideas, and mythologies, otherwise excised from human temporality. The latter portion of the chapter discusses Meyer’s Beowulf: A Translation (punctum books, 2012). Meyer’s employ of a visual approach emerges in response to Basil Bunting’s (à la Pound) complaints about the inadequacy of contemporary languages as vehicles for epic poetry. Consequently, he uses design to flesh out ideas latent in the Old English, that is, by way of typographic fragmentation, discontinuity, and blank space, which presents a deteriorated and entropic Beowulf.

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Translation’s Masks

  • Andy Martrich

摘要

This chapter takes a look at the poet Thomas Meyer’s translations, providing a concise history of his early work in the field, the influence of Ezra Pound’s idea of personae, and certain hauntological components that surface in his tracing and myth-making projects. Meyer’s unorthodox approach to translation is presented as a collaboration with ghost authors, texts, and mythologies. A selection of his “translations” from the Old English, Ancient Greek, and German reveals his practice altered from one initially centered on an ostensibly “real” form of translation—that is, one rooted in the normative pretense that any language can be clearly transmitted into another—to a process of engaging with deceased poets to access “imprints” of poems, ideas, and mythologies, otherwise excised from human temporality. The latter portion of the chapter discusses Meyer’s Beowulf: A Translation (punctum books, 2012). Meyer’s employ of a visual approach emerges in response to Basil Bunting’s (à la Pound) complaints about the inadequacy of contemporary languages as vehicles for epic poetry. Consequently, he uses design to flesh out ideas latent in the Old English, that is, by way of typographic fragmentation, discontinuity, and blank space, which presents a deteriorated and entropic Beowulf.