how we are to read them together, and, more important, through which
literary tradition we are to read the other. This book, then, will be as much a
study of the developing criticism of the material as it is of the material itself. It
questions what it means to respond to likeness or otherness in texts that are
removed from us linguistically, culturally and temporally, and which bear the
aegis of obscurity. It examines the perilous quality of translation, the "carrying
across" of cultural meaning, on several levels: not only across two contempora-
neous cultures (the Anglo-Saxons and the Early Welsh in their handling of
certain common themes), but also across a millennium where time puts us out
of touch with old contexts and encourages a kind of literary ethnocentrism in
the form of English scholarly discourse; thus its title, Between Languages,
which is meant to imply yet a third form of mediation, that of finding a middle
ground wherein conservative and innovative theoretical approaches can com-
bine to bring this sequestered poetry into a new light. I take as my starting point
the connection of natural image and emotion, "the natural analogy" as I term
it, a worldwide poetic phenomenon whereby external nature is connected to
internal mood, and one which is employed differently by these two traditions. I
show how the Old English elegies, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic,
are actually invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the compara-
ble Welsh poems are not; and how the Welsh "omissions" might be better
understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics,
imagery, obscurantist traditions) serve to link ideas and to fulfill or frustrate our
expectations. My argument revolves around the plight of lonely people de-
picted in these poems in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the
world and the different registers they employ to describe their placelessness; it
will move on to a discussion of imagery and intentional difficulty in the
maxims and gnomes, and in certain poems thought to be hopelessly obscure. I
offer texts and translations in the Appendix.

The cold war between medievalists and the contemporary academy (in
America and Europe) has been keenly felt by many recent scholars who
expose the "constructions of meaning" in the allegedly objective approaches
to medieval texts. Allen Frantzenand Charles Venegonichallenged the
"disinterested claims of scholarship" in their ground-breaking 1986 article; ¹

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