About the Project

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I'm a senior. That means that the question that I get most often is, "What are you going to do with yourself after college?" It's a scary question. I have many answers. I can tell you each of them with equal conviction, and I know that none of them is true.

The most useful advice that anyone has given me is this: You don't have to know. There's no way to predict where your qualifications will lead you. Already I can see that's very true.

I'm a Linguistics major. I have a minor in Studio Art. Somewhere between ages 5 and 7 it occurred to me that I might want to be a teacher. So I've pursued all of these things to various degrees. Two summers ago (2009) I was a summer school teacher with Breakthrough Collaborative. Breakthrough is an awesome organization that recruits high-school- and college-aged students to teach middle school students over the summer. I taught 8th grade English 4 periods a day, 4 to 6 students per class. Our curriculum for the summer included two books: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Macbeth. We started with Macbeth.

I taught in Santa Fe, New Mexico, my hometown, where most of my students were bilingual, English- and Spanish speakers. Many spoke only Spanish at home. And some didn't learn English until they were well into childhood. Macbeth was hard. I spent about a week trying in vain to engage the students with the book. The archaic language and play-style writing was not what the students wanted to be reading. Eventually, I had my "breakthrough" moment.

One of my middle school teachers, Brother Alan, leant me a copy of Macbeth: the Graphic Novel. I wasn't really into the idea. I thought it was rather juvenile.

The students loved it.

Overnight their experience of the book completely changed. Having a physical location, a setting, and a concrete cast of characters which all interact in the story gave the students a new way of looking at the text. They were able to work around the archaic language, to understand many of the more obscure words through context. And they were able to attach personalities, character attributes, personal histories to the unusual names.

Really, Macbeth is a wonderful story for eighth graders: the witches, the royalty, the mischief, the conniving, the manipulating, the treachery. I was forced to completely reassess my understanding of the graphic novel and its usefulness in literature.

Shortly into the next semester at Smith, I had an experience that reminded me of my 8th graders. We translated a segment of The Dream of the Rood in my English class. The 150-line Old English poem is the story of the crucifixion of Christ, told from the point of view of the cross onto which he was nailed. The cross tells his story to a man in his dreams. The poem is the man's retelling of what he saw.

It's an interesting poem in many respects. From a hermeneutic perspective, I, the modern-day translator, am concerned not only with the story's translation from Old English to modern English, but also from Latin to Old English – a translation that was not literal, but rather cultural. The poem tells a very traditional Christian story through the eyes of one inanimate object, who is not usually given character, which brings a unique perspective to the tale. The cross is telling us about the suffering of Christ, but also about his own suffering. He tells us how he was violently hewn from his roots, crafted into a weapon of torture, made to hold up a heavy weight, and, eventually, forgotten. But the real charm of them poem lies in the imagery of the cross.

I owe it to my first translation teacher, Charles Cutler, that I know that the first question a translator must ask him- or herself is, "Why?" Why am I doing this translation? Especially when there is already a large volume of literature about this piece, including multiple other translations, what is it that I can add to that literature that is worth adding?

A few weeks into my second semester of Old English, I was following along nicely, understanding most of what was being said and enjoying Mr. Davis' narratives about Anglo-Saxon life and philology. But I was struggling to find a way of mentally representing the character of the cross that was consistent with its role in the story. So I asked Mr. Davis in what way the dreamer's story would have been understood by the Anglo-Saxon people? Would they understand the cross to be a figment of the dreamer's imagination, a mental conception of an entity that is, of course, inanimate in life? Would they imagine the actual cross, seven feet of hard wood, standing before the dreamer and speaking? Would they even worry about what 'form' the cross would take?

His answer was simple: it would be a relic.

The poem is estimated to have been written around 800 AD. At that time, there were thousands of splinters of wood in circulation, all claiming to be from the true Cross of Christ. The religious relics were well-known to people of the Christian faith, who understood them to be part of a saintly whole, a tangible fragment of something sacred that never compares to what it once was, but allows those who touch it to glimpse something holy. They are immensely powerful objects. They span the bridge between the physical and the other-worldly. The dreamer in possession of a relic from the cross would have a direct link to the cross itself, and it would be a glorious miracle for it to speak to him in a dream.

And so it all clicked. I suddenly had a real-world object with which to depict the ghostly cross, an object that could transform into any manifestation of itself. A character with a 'face,' a history, a memory spanning hundreds of years. The story took on another dimension. It became the life story of a treasured splinter, from its tree form through its slow demise and decay, and to its 'rebirth' as an object of worship. It tracked one character's growth through hardship and suffering, and its triumph as it fulfilled its most important duty.

So that's how this project took form. I found the answer to my "Why?" Many scholars have called The Dream of the Rood an accessible poem. And it's true; the story is fairly simple. But it's also very deep. The poem has many, many layers to explore. Many people have done so, and here in the world of academia, that's not so difficult. But accessibility shouldn't end at the edges of campus. Thinking of my eighth graders, I decided that I could create a Dream of the Rood experience that would locate the story in time, space, and humanity. By constructing the context not only for the story but also for the characters, I could write a translation that would make that 'breakthrough' moment happen.

Though many modern versions of this poem exist, mine is the first (that I know of) that attempts to draw out the hidden layers, and make them accessible outside of academia. I have done my best to target this project to a large audience. It includes a scholarly discussion of the translation process and of the illuminations that emerged from working closely with the text. It includes a brief history lesson for those who are not familiar with the field. Most importantly, it includes a visual framework for those who are trying to access the poem from a vastly different time and place. With this cross-disciplinary approach, I hope that The Dream of the Rood will prove itself to be a story that has a little something to offer to everyone.