Entry tags:
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shanaqui with her riddles on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.)
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.)