Connection Central – Max Gray – Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture

Max Gray – New Member of the Digital Mappa Team
In this blog series, we introduce people working for or associated with the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture.

My graduate work focuses on poetry and its better half, translation. I am especially interested in “nontraditional” marriages of poetry and translation: translation of fragmentary poetry (Sappho, the Old English Ruin), translation of poetry written in a language the translator cannot read (Ezra Pound’s Cathay, popular translations of Rumi), and translation of poetry written in one’s own language (Ezra Pound’s Seafarer, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf).

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

This year I am working for Martin Foys on two of his edition and translation projects in the Digital Mappa environment. One of the projects, the Anglo-Saxon Belltokens project, features editions, translations and linked glossaries of an Anglo-Latin text on the significance of church bells together with an Old English translation of the Anglo-Latin text. Embracing the specificity and connectivity of the DM environment, the project opens dynamic pathways of approach to a pair of texts through the lenses of two languages, Old English and Anglo-Latin.

I am also working on my own edition of an unpublished essay of Ezra Pound, “The Music of Beowulf,” together with related archival material in the DM environment. The essay itself is a blend of poetics and medievalism, and with its related material offers an opportunity to explore the enmeshment of the “medieval” within “modernity.”

As I become more involved with DM and DH on campus, I am interested in how digital tools and environments can reenvision our experience of translation between languages, and of translation as a mode of language, and how they can represent the translations and mediations of our own and others’ engagements with medieval language, literature and culture.

For twenty-five years, the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture has been fostering the interdisciplinary study of print and digital culture, through lectures and colloquia, biennial conferences, short-term research and long-term postdoctoral fellowships, a book series, and as a home for campus research groups. We encourage scholarly work on the authorship, reading, publication and distribution of print–and now digital–materials, produced by those not only at the center, but also the periphery of power.