Meet a Medievalist Maker: James Paz
An illustration of a phoenix from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Ashmole 1511 ( f. 68r)
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Project
Hello! My name is James Paz, the Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester and author of Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture. My first book was a fairly traditional academic monograph but my current project is a cycle of creative-critical responses to Old English eco-poetry, combining what I am calling ‘ecocreative’ translations of early medieval poems with critical commentaries on those poems. I recently published my first creative-critical response in Postmedieval, which explains my concept of ecocreative translation in more depth: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41280-024-00359-6
Whereas this first piece focused on storms and ice, the second piece I am composing concentrates on heat and fire. The first piece creatively translated The Wanderer, Wife’s Lament and Exeter Book Riddles but my second piece turns to The Phoenix. The latter is an Old English rendering – or recreation – of Lactantius’s Latin De ave phoenice. The Phoenix describes, in the third person, the mythical bird’s paradisical dwelling place, its flight to the desert where it dies amid flames and its rebirth from the ashes. The Old English transforms as much as it translates its Latin source, cutting some allusions to pagan gods and adding a Christian allegory on the Resurrection at the end of time.
This shift in source texts – from riddles and elegies to the allegorical Phoenix – has prompted a shift in my own creative and critical process. While my first ecocreative translations on storms and ice creatively ‘mingled’ the voices, minds and bodies of human speakers and more-than-human elements and weather events, I am now thinking with fire.
Process
At first, it might be hard to see how fire as an element could possibly inspire an ‘ecocreative’ practice. Fire does not suggest creative acts like growing or healing or building. The most well-known fire-breather in Old English literature, the dragon in Beowulf, is a creature of destruction who burns both bodies and buildings. Yet the less well-known Phoenix asks us to reconsider the more creative, or recreative, qualities of the flames.
So how can we think creatively with fire? What can destructive recreation do? How can we remake old poems by burning and breaking them down? My first idea was to work with the destructive nature of fire and practice a kind of blackout translation of The Phoenix. I started by rendering lines 361-74 into an alliterative prose poem. Then I erased words and phrases from that prose poem but, whereas most modern blackout poems leave those erasures black or blank, I filled them with fictional ‘editorial’ insertions in square brackets, creating the effect of a ruined yet reconstructed modern translation of the poem:
We have heard words about a blessed bird that glories in green groves and sparkling springs until a thousand years come and go, come and go, and it rises again to greet the blaze and be reborn, awakening from the ashes of fearsome flames; that bird burns bright but does not dread death. Undaunted by doom, it cannot give in to gloom: bold-hearted is the bird and hard-minded, strong inside its soul, for the fire-born phoenix is fierce and fearless; the noble one knows full well that it will rise from its relics, its ruined remnants redeemed from dust.
[The following folios were saved from searing flames] a blessed bird [burnt] glories in green groves [leaves lost] [these leaves are lost] years come and go [missing] come and go [missing] [something more is missing] fearsome flames [fragment] that bird burns [hole] hearted [scorched] inside its soul [a hole] one [whole word lost] [lots of words lost] [lost] [lost] its relics [ruined] its ruined remnants [unreadable] [riddled with fire] redeemed from dust [destroyed] [destroyed by fire] [these verses fell victim to the flames] [and these verses fell victim to the flames].
The resulting prose poem burns away the third-person description of my source text and replaces it with an editorial voice, lamenting loss. My early medieval source text already depicts the phoenix’s own experience of its life, death and rebirth but emphasizes the creature’s bold and brave inner spirit. My blackout translation subtly shifts this emphasis, amplifying the more harrowing aspects of self-immolation. The fiery phoenix is not only burnt in its body but is hot in its heart and scorched in its soul.
Peek
Of course, The Phoenix as a poem is not only about destruction. It is about a recurring cycle of destruction and recreation. Whereas my Old English source describes the fiery fate of the bird in the third person, I wanted to revive and revoice the phoenix in the first person – rebirthing the bird from the ashes of this burnt, blackout translation. This ecocreative practice can provoke fresh, ecocritical questions. Where is the animal within this allegorical poem? How does a burning allegory think and feel about its own death and rebirth amid flames? Is there a sentient, conscious creature in the hot heart of this fiery work of art?
This heavenly home that I call my own
will last and last until finally the Lord who first
crafted this world wishes to wreck his own work.
Until that time, I live alone in this land,
lamenting among these lovely leaves,
grieving again and again in this golden grove
for the father who will shortly forsake me,
for the newborn son I must soon become,
for an end that is an endless beginning.
These excerpts from my translation stay with, and within, the perspective of the phoenix in the hours before its death:
I perch there proudly for a peaceful moment,
peering at the sun and speaking a prayer.
This is the last light I will witness in this world.
That star is more stunning than anything I’ve seen,
those leaves lovelier than I believed them to be.
Tomorrow, I turn to ruin – but must rest until mourning.
My ecocreative translation thus allows the reader to glimpse not only the thoughts but the feelings that course through the hot heart of this speaking bird:
For a thousand years, I last.
But then I must leave my lonely land
and wander for a while into your world –
a greying ghost seeking shade
in a grove where no one goes
and not a soul can see my secret sex.
Desire swiftly sets my spirit alight;
my mood surges inside my mind,
heating and heaving high in my heart,
my bright breast boiling and burning
with a love and a longing for life,
inflaming my will for the way forth.
Prompts
I have found this process of destroying and then recreating a medieval text to be both creatively and critically illuminating. These ancient poems are rightly revered, but the more traditional critical, editorial and translation practices that have accrued around them can at times be restricting. By starting with an act of destruction, new pathways for (eco)critical thinking and (eco)creative writing open up. With this in mind, these are my prompts for your own creative-critical practice:
Render a medieval text (or short passage from that text) into a modern language. I use the term ‘render’ here because, as Seamus Heaney notes, it allows for a truce between the free versus faithful schools of translation. To render something is to ‘say over’ or ‘give back’ or ‘restore’ or to ‘extract by melting’ (Heaney 2011, xii). This suggests that rendering an old text into a modern language or form is always already an act of creative destruction.
Ruin your own rendering of that text. I have drawn on the techniques deployed by blackout poetry, but you may find other ways of ruining the medieval source you have rewritten. You can take the material ruination of medieval manuscripts as an inspiration. Famously, another poem from the Exeter Book – The Ruin – has itself been ruined by fire-damage, probably from a red-hot poker left on its pages.
Revive the medieval text you have rendered and ruined. How might you bring the thing you have destroyed back to life in new ways? Perhaps try some of the techniques I have deployed in my own practice: I revoice my source text by rewriting it in the first person from an other-than-human perspective and regrow those moments in the source text where nonhuman consciousness is glimpsed or suggested.
Reflect critically on what this creative process has revealed about your medieval source and the ways in which that source has traditionally been presented to scholars, students and the public. What does this creative yet very careful engagement with words, sounds, materials, forms and fragments reveal that a close reading cannot? Old English poetry is usually presented in very formulaic ways in modern editions (for example, with titles, with modern spacing and punctuation, with the a- and b-verses separated by a visible caesura). What do these traditional forms obscure about the text and how have you broken this apart? What new ways of looking at, or listening to, medieval texts has this process made possible?
References
Heaney, Seamus, ‘Foreword’, in The Word Exchange, ed. by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (Norton, 2011), pp. xi-xiii.
