Here’s a few lines that I retranslated from the great Old English elegy, “The Seafarer.” They are part of my paper for a conference I’ve not been to before, the New Chaucer Society, in Portland next week. Yes, I do also talk about Chaucer…
And now my heart turns
Out of my spirit-locker,
My mind goes
Out onto the sea-flood.
Over the whale’s road
It flies widely
Across the surfaces of the globe.
Then it returns to me
Ravenous and greedy (58-62a).
I also used this poem for the first line of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.
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