Entries Tagged 'Art' ↓

Thanks to those of you who reviewed the Beowulf movie on this blog. You saved at least one middle school teacher from taking her 7th graders, which would have been highly embarrassing, to say the least.

One writer, Blake Gopnik, also found the movie falling short of the original, but he gave some different reasons. Mr. Gopnik said that when he read the poem as a young man, it was so compelling to him that he studied Anglo-Saxon in college so that he could read it in the original language. What he loved about it was precisely how different its imaginative world is from our own. The movie makers, though, thought they had to make it up-to-date and thereby eliminated its alienness, which is its biggest appeal.

reading “Beowulf” takes us to a new place, where people think about the world and its stories in terms that don’t make sense to us. That’s why it takes a year and more to come to terms with it (at least in Anglo-Saxon) and why the effort’s worth it.

I don’t buy the tired old cliche that “Beowulf” is great because it touches universal themes. What’s great is that it isn’t universal; that it’s its own thing; that its bards managed to build a world for us that’s so complete a package, in its verse and tale and coloring, that we can still get lost in it all these centuries later. Whereas watching the movie leaves us absolutely in the place and present where we started out. It’s just “Die Hard” in chain mail.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of “Die Hard” and “Spider-Man” and even trashier fare. (Did someone just say “X-Men III”?) It’s just that I’m also a fan of “Beowulf” as something very different from all that — as a work that truly makes you put yourself into the skin of an ancient Germanic marauder. What could be more thrilling than that?

In all their many interviews, it’s clear that the creators of the film could barely stomach the strange “Beowulf” they started out with. They didn’t dare imagine that, even with a little cinematic help, their audience might ever come to terms with its foreignness. Instead, they had to bring the poem fully “up to date” and make it easily digestible.

This is a brilliant point, applicable to much ancient and other-cultural literature and to the way they are translated. Consider, for example, many modern Bible translations. The up-to-date language tries to make Abraham and Isaac into one of our contemporaries. They are not! They are from an ancient world very different from our own. A good Bible translation, to be fully accurate, should faithfully render the strangeness and the obscurities, instead of trying to make everything familiar and clear when the original is not so. A good Bible translation should, like the Beowulf poem, take us into its world. That’s why the King James version–whose translators purposefully used language that was already archaic in their own time–is still so evocative and powerful.

Some great composers create music so aesthetically complex that hardly anyone can play them.  For example, hardly any pianist has hands big enough to reach some of Rachmaninoff’s chords. But where there is a will, there is a way. 

HT:  C. R. Biggs

For those of you who consider yourself too cool for polka, I offer here a battle rap smackdown between Martin Luther and Pope Leo X. Yo.

(This is by students from Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. Caution: some bad language and irreverence in church.)

Thanks to Bob Waters at Watersblogged! for putting me on to this. I’d like to learn more about the creators of this little work of art:

Thanks for your comments and suggestions about this blog’s new look. What do the rest of you think about this Cranach self-portrait I found on the web? A little forboding? Or as tODD said, creating a sense that he is looking upon your comment with disapproval? Or as frank sonnek said, an example of “cool realism”?

To me, this self-portrait has a kind of postmodern self-referential feel: The image is of the artist looking into the mirror as he tries to paint his own face. I like how his head is tilted and how he is biting his lips in concentration, peering out with that intent artist look that tries to see everything.

tODD misses the dragon, that scribble of Cranach’s seal that the artist used to sign his works, which is the logo of the Cranach Institute. I have seen versions of that winged dragon bearing the ring that are less abstract and that require less explanation. I’ve been looking for the image on the web but to no avail so far. If anyone knows where I could find it, please let me know.