This essay addresses the state of the translation of poetry from Anglo‐Saxon and Old English in Anglo‐Saxon and Old English studies. As an alternative to a conservative tendency in the state of translation from Old English the essay points to the usefulness of thinking about Old English poetry and its translation from the position of the more radical moments of 20th and 21st century poetics. Translation from Old English poetry tends to result in or follow the direction of dominant and conservative poetics. The essay first examines this conservative tendency as it can be made legible by relatively recent theoretical languages from translation theory with reference to deconstruction. The essay then turns to a philologically minded reading of W. H. Auden’s poem sometimes titled ‘The Secret Agent’ in its relation to the Old English poem called Wulf and Eadwacer as an example of a way to conceive of translating the medieval more broadly and radically. In the case of Auden’s poem, to employ or even to think a more radical poetics of translating Old English would demand a willingness to queerly compromise the bounds of the proper, to learn from and follow not only dominant and conservative poetics but also modern and contemporary avant‐garde and experimental poetics. The essay outlines the possibility of translating the medieval as a betrayal of globally hegemonic modern English, allowing the medieval to infiltrate the present.
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