Sigurd's Lament

Book excerpt: In literature, the advice often given is to show and not tell. In academia, it is the opposite: tell and do not show. Sigurd’s Lament is a text that asks the question, can scholarship show rather than tell? On the surface, it is the collected work of a mid-twentieth-century scholar, Hawthorne Basil Peters, who has curated the life’s work of his father—the translation of a Welsh epic into the alliterative meter of the English Revival. The poem is produced in full, but so too is the historic introduction, commentary, and academic apparatus. Peters, for the first time, shares with the world his father’s wonderful translation and his previously unpublished academic ideas. In a text rife with distention, however, Peters draws the reader’s attention to the unexpected flexibility of language and asks only one thing in return: drink deeply. For Sigurd’s Lament is a text of the most serious play. It is ambiguous and obfuscating and riddled with footnotes that have lurking within them—like goblins in the weeds—future tales of past narratives.