Sorting through boxes and boxes and boxes....
Boy, do I love going through old papers. To those who don’t know, I meant that sarcastically. I end up going sloooowly, because I have to stop and read everything. And then I get into great epistemological questions, like what did I mean when I wrote at the top of a list, “Drunken graveyard Tag!!"?
I found a brilliant translation of the Old English verse “The Wife’s Lament,” by me, back when I was taking Old English in 1990-something. Here is an excerpt:
“I this word utter about me, very sad of my self fate.
I that say, tell am able, what I of hardships experienced.
I up grew, recently or long ago, no more than now.
Forever I punishment suffered of my miseries.”
Hmmm…something poetic was lost in translation there, I think.
Oh good, my “Dream of the Rood” translation:
“Hwaet! I best of dreams will relate
Which me dreamed at midnight
When speech-bearers dwelled at rest.
It seemed to me that I saw a wondrous tree
In air as in light enveloped,
Of crosses the brightest.”
See, this is where I get into trouble. I say to myself, “Do I really want to throw this out? Well, what if one day I really need to know how I translated these Old English poems? I might be VERY sorry I got rid of this notebook, and feel bereft.” So I end up saving it.
And that is how I came to possess 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 useless piles and boxes of papers and notebooks, all of which I have to move every single bloody time we move.
I found a brilliant translation of the Old English verse “The Wife’s Lament,” by me, back when I was taking Old English in 1990-something. Here is an excerpt:
“I this word utter about me, very sad of my self fate.
I that say, tell am able, what I of hardships experienced.
I up grew, recently or long ago, no more than now.
Forever I punishment suffered of my miseries.”
Hmmm…something poetic was lost in translation there, I think.
Oh good, my “Dream of the Rood” translation:
“Hwaet! I best of dreams will relate
Which me dreamed at midnight
When speech-bearers dwelled at rest.
It seemed to me that I saw a wondrous tree
In air as in light enveloped,
Of crosses the brightest.”
See, this is where I get into trouble. I say to myself, “Do I really want to throw this out? Well, what if one day I really need to know how I translated these Old English poems? I might be VERY sorry I got rid of this notebook, and feel bereft.” So I end up saving it.
And that is how I came to possess 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 useless piles and boxes of papers and notebooks, all of which I have to move every single bloody time we move.
posted by Sarah Goss at 6:26 PM
9 Comments:
I'll second Albert's sentiment: inquiring minds want to know.
I thought translating Old English was fun, even if it does kink your brain into knots. At Akron I took it even further back into Old Norse. I was somewhat surprised on one assignment to find out that I had indeed correctly translated a sentence as "At the age of three, Nyal was a mean drunk."
I tend to be of the opinion that, "If I haven't looked at this in the last ten years, and I haven't felt I've been missing anything, I probably won't feel the aching need to look at this ten years from now."
Occasionally I've been wrong about that, though.
Or instead of scanning, set your camera to a low resolution and take pictures of the choice pages. So what if it's a big picture; hard drive storage is cheap. You can get those 2GB dongles for like ten cents now. Okay, maybe $40.
See, that's what kills me, Matt: when I LOOK at the papers, I am often delighted that I still have them. On the other hand, if I never looked at them again, the odds are good that I'd never think about what I was missing. Hmmmm.
Ahhhh... well, I don't have a scanner, but I could try the camera idea! But...do you ever really feel like you possess something securely when it only exists virtually? I am having a hard time becoming a full citizen of the 21st century in that way. Case in point: I just got my old Royal electric typewriter reparied so I can use it again!
When I went through my parents' attic recently, there was the old Smith-Corona I inherited from my brothers. The one I typed up all my essays on at CTY. :)
You did that, Matt (typed your CTY essays on a typewriter)? I didn't remember! That is so cool! I guess I must have handwritten mine... it's hard to recall not having a computer, but we didn't, did we?
CTY? Center for Talented Youth back in middle school? Skidmore College? Anyone?
YES! That's where I met Matt, at a Skidmore College Center for Talented Youth summer session when I was fourteen...might you have been there at the same time, Deb? I took expository writing that summer, and another summer I took creative writing, not at Skidmore but at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania...but my Skidmore experience was by FAR my best. Do you think we crossed paths and didn't know it?
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