melannen | Wulf and Eadwacer

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Wulf and Eadwacer

So, a long, long time ago, before I had an online journal or interacted with fandom in any way, back before Wikipedia ruled the internets, I used to post on Everything2, which is a wikipedia competitor with a very different structure, ethos, and culture. (As much as I do like the Wiki system, I wish more sites used an E2 framework instead - I think it would've worked really well for fanlore, for ex., with its emphasis on multiple voices and automatic flow.)

Anyway, one of the things I posted there, over eight years ago (!!!), was an attempted translation of the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer into poetic Modern English. I'm no Anglo-Saxon scholar, but I go through phases of reading lots of early English poetry and poking at the language, so it may be a bad translation, but I like the poem, and I like my version better than any of the other translations I've found, and I have nothing at all staked on it being a good translation, so critique it all you want. (I am, oddly, very fragile when it comes to criticism of my fiction - I can get scared into writing nothing for months even by *effusively good* feedback - but have a very thick skin about my poetry - say whatever you want about it, it won't change what the poem means to me.)

So there's this translation, that's been sitting pretty much ignored on a website that's been slowly dwindling in readership, until

shanaqui with her riddles on

poetry inspired me to look it up again and repost my Wulf and Eadwacer there.

And what should I discover but that someone has quoted my translation in an academic paper, as far as I can tell from Google pretty much in full, and published it in the journal "Language and Literature" only this month.

I am trying to articulate why this pisses me off so much. Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.

But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.

That pisses me the hell off (pardon my Anglo-Saxon. And Old French.)

I wrote a translation, using only freely available online resources to help me, and posted it for free on the internet out of fun and love and a desire to spread knowledge about this poem I cared about as widely as a could. And now, I am expected to pay $25 if I want to find out somebody else's public opinion of my unpaid labor.

I am not, I want to note here, upset at the author of the paper, or its existence, or the fact that he chose to publish in the venue he did. I am *deeply* upset at the system in which venues of choice for academic work lock away professionals' discussions while amateurs can actually have the free and unfettered forum for sharing thought that academics of a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of, and academics of the modern world are expected to choose not to participate in.

And I do, also, acknowledge that there are expenses involved in producing a journal, even an only-online journal, and I don't oppose the people who choose to work within the professional communities getting recompense for their work. I like the idea that people can make their living doing what I do for free: I wish more people could, and did, and if that means having a professional community that is behind some kind of subscription wall, I support people being allowed to choose to join that locked community.

What bothers me, I guess, is when that locked professional world doesn't stay immured behind its walls. Someone who has probably spent his entire adult life in an academic world, where everybody has institutional support that lets them access things like ridiculously expensive subscription journals, is coming in to *my* world, where everybody works for nothing and publishes for the joy of sharing freely, and dragging our work back behind the wall with him, where we can't touch it anymore.

And he probably hasn't even thought about that, because he's so used to operating inside the community (and grew up in a period when outsider communities were at least as difficult to access as professional ones) that the existence of interested people who can't get in doesn't even occur to him, and may think even less about the large amount of money and institutional support (much of it probably governmental) that has allowed him to get inside, which not everybody can access.

Especially in a world where expenses are going up so much that a lot of professional academics are having to fight to keep their own access, much less worry about everyone else's.

Short version: if Transformative Works and Cultures was pay-only, I would be a lot less supportive of it, that's for darn sure.

(I tend to think that fanacademia, even beyond TWC, tends to be fairly good about freely sharing info - even when papers are published behind pay-only, it's been fairly easy for me to get copies for free - but that might be because accumulated fanmeta rep has gotten *me* inside several locked walls of access that I don't even see any more.)

(Also, said fan network has already gotten me a copy of the paper about Wulf and Eadwacer that discusses me. I am now officially recorded in the ongoing conversation of Western Thought as "Melannen, a kind of 'groupie' for wit and wisdom" --- I'll take it! Could be worse. Also, my e2 post is "not exactly post-structural exegesis," but rather "a crude recommendation" to "make the empty room exciting with your own furnishings". Hmm, you know, I don't have any titles on my DW journal pages yet... :D But seriously folks, it's a reasonably good paper which is doing pretty much the same thing I tried to do in my e2 post but better - the quotes are actually a compliment, because I'm the only one of six translators - including Burton Raffel - he actually discusses at any length whatsoever. Even if he is baffled by the internets and the way learnings happen there. And he got the date of publication of the E2 entry wrong by five years somehow. And altered my translation in a fairly significant way without, apparently, noticing.)

...er. Speaking of the value of a public domain, last weekend I was at Farpoint - my first ever sci-fi con! - and spent most of the time trying to pretend it was con.txt, which meant hanging around the do-it-yourself panel rooms and figuring out how to talk about fanfic in them without outright admitting I'm a fanfic writer. (Panels I either gave or attended: Writing SF Erotica, DIY Social, SF Worldbuilding, Webcomics 101, Sex and SciFi, Not Everyone's a Pro, Copyright/Copywrong, Convention Sales for Creative Types, and Sherlock Holmes. I want to talk more about the con later, but this post is going to be long enough already.)

One of the coolest ones I attended was the "Copyright, Copywrong" panel, discussing copyright and its limits and controversies as they apply to fan activities. It was recorded for the Command Line podcast and can be downloaded at archive.org as an mp3. It features as panelists Thomas Gideon of Command Line, which is a great blog/podcast/site about copyright issues; Steve Wilson, of Farpoint and Prometheus Radio Theatre, and Marc Okrand, of the Klingon language. (I have just outed myself as the sort of person who translates Old English for fun, so perhaps you will not be shocked if I take a second to go *omg, I have met and talked to Marc Okrand and he is awesome and amazing and cute and smart and, and, real, and I am fairly sure I humiliated myself in front of him but I don't care, because Marc Okrand.* (I almost didn't go to the panel because I was too shy to be in the same room with him - seriously! The creator of the world's most widely spoken conlang! There is only one of them! And he talked to *me*!))

(I haven't listened to it yet because I am hideously embarrassed just in anticipation, without even having to endure the way my voice sounds in recordings. But you should listen! There's good info in there! Thomas Gideon really knows his stuff! And came by to say hi to me later and was really gracious when I apologized for not shutting up in his panel.)

...anyway it also features me as "person in audience who wouldn't stop talking". Hear! Me attempt to talk to Marc Okrand without getting squee all over him! Hear! Me slip slash discussion in under the radar by casually mentioning the OTW without explaining what it is! Hear! Me get scolded for talking too much and not letting other people participate! Hear! Me completely fail to mention Interrobang Studios, which is ostensibly why I was at the con!

(and for the record, if I was not so lazy I would officially put all of my work under a creative commons share-alike license, the share-alike being most important and the attribution being least.)

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Have you gotten the essay yet? if not i'll send it to you!!!

Also, y'know, really looking fwd to listening to the podcast!

And it'd help to read through the entire post :)

Anyway, I can't agree with you more. as a matter of fact, the thing is that noone but the publisher makes any money. Not the author, not the peer reviewers, not the editors. So there's really NO GOOD REASON that Sage charges that much (they're on my personal s-list anyway...for the longest time they were so expensive that my uni couldn't afford it!)

Yeah, the old fangirls network can be pretty awesome at some things. :D (I was going to ask in this post too but the people at

poetry got there too fast. Though I still haven't got my hands on "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) p. 639 , so I guess it doesn't work for *everything*. :D )

...I didn't realize that not even the editors got money. What. (There is an argument to be made that having the gatekeepers there - to determine what is & isn't rigorous work - is worth the extra expense even if the people actually doing the work are doing it for whuffie, because the whuffie does, supposedly, translate into paid research positions for them - but, seriously, the publisher gets it *all*?? They should be able to charge a *lot less* in that case.)

But see, it's still extra work that doesn't really translate. You can totally have a tenure track position and refuse peer reviews. Now, I don't know the exact process of tenure review, but I doubt anyone asks how many reviews and how useful and long you've written.

As for editors, some schools may give course reductions. But afaik, there's no income there. so yes, Sage's greedy!!!

[And don't get me started on trying to access YOUR OWN publications and being unable to do so. Or violating copyright when you share YOUR OWN WORDS, since most places habitually ask you to sign away your copyright!]

Okay, now I'm wondering why anyone ever offers to do peer reviews (I understand talking people into it is becoming a problem anyway...) And they're at least partly anonymous, right, so you don't even necessarily get much networking value out of it?

(And what do you mean, unable to access your own publications?? Even the most badly-run fanzines pay in contributor copies! ...the signing away copyright thing is its very own wonderful mess; that actually got touched on in the podcast, I think, when some audience members who weren't me who had experience in academic publishing actually managed to speak up.)

It was a mixup more or less, but it still holds...

Peer reviewing is one of those things one does and is expected to do. Like overseeing theses and other things that don't directly count toward either your research or your teaching. And it's important and most people do it willingly. I just want to point out that it tends to be free labor ON ALL SIDES--except for the publisher...

Often you receive a few offprint copies of your own article or review essay, but in an ongoing sense, there's no access (or not necessarily so). Libraries are pissed off by having to buy hugely expensive copies of what their institutions' faculty have published, too.

Things like http://escholarship.org are trying to shift that a bit (i.e., when you publish, retain repro rights so that you can lodge a copy in an institutional repository as well), but for eScholarship's case in particular, I have to say that most participants begin from a position of relative privilege already.

(here via metafandom, a bit late)

Edited 2010-02-26 18:23 (UTC)

[And don't get me started on trying to access YOUR OWN publications and being unable to do so. Or violating copyright when you share YOUR OWN WORDS, since most places habitually ask you to sign away your copyright!]

This is why I haven't submitted anything to the OTW affiliated on-line journal TWC. I don't want to be in the position of having to ask for my own stuff back because TWC requires the copyright to be signed over to them.

I don't care about the creative commons license to use my stuff for non-profit purposes. (Who knows? Maybe someone else will offer me payment to use it.) I've seen other journals specify the submitting author to agree to granting the journal a non-exclusive permanent license so there is a reasonable alternative.

- countess_baltar on LiveJournal

http://khellekson.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/transformative-works-and-cultures-copyright-clarification/

I read the essay (well, your parts :)

And, dude, the copyeditor should be ashamed! It says 2002 in the bib!!! *headdesk*

I guess you get what you pay for ?

...and that is the other reason I'm a bit dubious of the value of academic journals as gatekeepers of quality. Sadly.

you get what you pay for ? Well, I'm not sure that actually follows...it's not like we don't find mistakes in paid publications all the time!

OT, but I've never seen an academic journal without at least one hilarious, glaring, obvious typo. Usually many.

Similarly (but less cynically), I had occasion to read an academic book on fantasy novels shortly after meeting the author, and she was happy to be emailed a series of notes toward reprint corrections. In her copyeditor's defense, the typoes I caught were misspellings of characters' names, which, considering all the apostrophes and Welshisms and random nonsense in fantasy names, are much harder to spell properly than ordinary names.

I am *deeply* upset at the system in which venues of choice for academic work lock away professionals' discussions while amateurs can actually have the free and unfettered forum for sharing thought that academics of a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of, and academics of the modern world are expected to choose not to participate in.

THERE IS NOT ENOUGH "WORD" IN THE WORLD FOR THIS STATEMENT. I am constantly thinking, I am so glad I've been watching metafandom for so many years, because it has prepared me well for the brain-twistiness of reading academic theory papers. It is =ABSURD= that academics and random-smart-people-online are doing =THE EXACT SAME THING= but are completely =BARRED FROM SHARING WITH EACH OTHER=.

... furthermore, my school does not have access to that article except perhaps through interlibrary loan. FAIL FAIL FAIL

SECONDED.

And, like, I don't know, the reason I hang out doing fanmeta instead of going back to school is that it isn't *really* the same thing, and the fan way is more fun - I can sit around the living room for a few hours spewing a rant and have it count as perfectly good internet meta, which I hope wouldn't pass as an academic theory paper (though some of the theory papers I've read make me WONDER) and I think we need both ways of doing it - and having the professionals mine the amateurs for ideas to develop more fully and things to comment on from a trained perspective may actually be a good way of combining it - but the sad thing is that the amateurs appear to actually have a better infrastructure for having these conversations than the pros do, and are, well, better at using it effectively, and the pros are doing almost nothing to catch up, and that's just deeply, deeply sad. (This goes right back to kristina busse's recent post about why, at conference *on digital media*, the only people who were actually using digital media to communicate as opposed to just talking about it... were people used to fannish methods of social networking.)

(And in the meantime, of course, the amateurs & part-timers are kept out from the things they could be learning from the professionals, and vice versa, which is slowing all the conversation down.)

Yes, exactly, it needs to be clear two-way conversation - or better yet, *the same conversation* with everyone following it everywhere. But instead, academia gets internet-meta/fanmeta through a glass darkly if at all, while The Outside World gets academic work either poorly mediated through journalists or through a teeny, tiny leak in a giant dam.

John Hawks, by the way, is one of my heroes of internet academia.

This, this, a thousand times this. Academia is so... counter-intuitive, in its structures and rules and ownerships, and I'm glad that I'm out (for now).

I just got the PDF and was about to upload it for you, but I see you've already got it!

Have you tried contacting the author ;) ?

There are so many, many reasons why I am such a fan of open access journals and happy that my discipline, Biology, is slowly, slowly getting there with things like PLOS and the BMC journals, after Phyics is already there with arXiv.org . Most research is done with external funding, a lot even with public funding from government organizations - including the fee of open access journals in the grant is much, much better than having people who just want to read one article spend insane amounts of money for a few pages that don't even come in printed form. Publication fees for PLoS Computational Biology, for example, are US $2250, peanuts compared to what their funding usually is, and also compared to what universities spend each year just to get their researchers access to journals.

The humanities, from what I have seen, seem to have a lot of problems with open access journals. (If you can read German, the Heidelberger Appell seems to summarize the central points there: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberger_Appell They are actually using the word "Enteignung" - dispossession in context of Open Access journals. There is some English information here: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/571-guid.html and http://www.goethe.de/wis/bib/dos/oac/en4812973.htm )

*stops incoherent thoughts*

Edited 2010-02-25 14:23 (UTC)

No, don't, 'cos I was going to cosign, as a biologist not currently in academia, and therefore all the papers I've read the last year or so have been open access, mostly from PLoS. You're publishing with Elsevier or Springer? Sorry, I don't think your research is Real.

AS it happens, I work as caregiver/research assistant/amanuensis for a 97 year old man who is professor emeritus in Anthropology. And that is why I was able to access the paper, because I have his access privileges.

And he does not get the internet. He has learned to respect the worldwide access it can give him-- but he doesn't understand that it gives the same access to everyone else, or why that might be important. I mmaintain a blog for him, and of course we get a wide range of comments-- it totally irritates him when unlearned people show up.

In deference to his age... I just don't read those comments to him any longer.

Surfing in from metafandom.

I am *deeply* upset at the system in which venues of choice for academic work lock away professionals' discussions while amateurs can actually have the free and unfettered forum for sharing thought that academics of a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of, and academics of the modern world are expected to choose not to participate in. Yeah. This. You've made me think about academia and access in a way I haven't needed to in a long time, as I am currently safely behind that wall and spoiled with all the resources of a large research library. Will need to ponder this some more, I think, so thanks for that!

And as I do have all this access, are you still looking for the "Pocket Telephone" article you mentioned upstream? I'm heading to the library later today to make a few requests of my own, and according to the catalogue we have that particular edition of Literary Digest housed in our repository. I can see if I can snag a copy for you.

I would love to get a copy of that article! Not if it's too very much trouble, though - I'm not even entirely certain it'll be what I'm looking for (which is of course something for Holmes fanfic. (: )

(Google books appears to have Literary Digest online starting from the next year, so it was deeply frustrating to find that reference and *almost* be able to get the article.)

The Literary Digest collection was mysteriously not where it was supposed to be, so sadly I do not have it yet! But the library is still poking around for it and I'll let you know if they locate it. :P

Thanks for posting this. I'm a fan with a strong interest in copyright, and you've clarly laid out the problems here.

Please consider putting all your work under said CC license, as you have a legal right to demand attribution by the authors (or their publisher). You can threaten to sue!

It'll stop it ever happening again in the future.

Your summary of the copyright situation was very fluent, and knowledgable, and I'm glad I'm seeding the articles I downloaded with Mum's uni access on Bitorrent. As well as a few textbooks.

Here via metafilter. I just wanted to say that I have also translated Wulf and Eadwacer at one point in the past (for a class), and I really like your translation. I think it's both artful and provides a helpful reading of the poem.

I know that's not really germane to this particular post, but-- really well done, and thank you for sharing it freely!

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