Should we expect a panoply of loquacious objects to chatter on about their experiences exactly as we would? This collection of creative (re)translations, The Queer Life of Riddles, explores the ways these thousand-year-old lyrics lay athwart our expectations, veering in their own directions and refusing to conform to our canons of respectability. How they may be both þweorh (bent, twisted, deviating, queer) and wrǣtlīce (elaborate, intricate, fascinating, also queer). How they always exceed our design, singing on regardless of our solutions.
Ophelia Eryn Hostetter presents a renewed experience of these weird little critters, with an approach grounded in queer and translation theories, as well as the poetics of energetic performance. These fresh revisionings question traditional interpretations of this collection in order to redeem what has always been there yet too often ignored or spoken over. The Queer Life of Riddles cultivates multiplicity where only hegemony has been harbored, dialogism where only univocality has been heard, and a diversity of experiences and identities where only the monolithic has been harvested. Plus there are at least six bad swears in here, probably more — we didn’t count.
About the Editor
Ophelia Eryn Hostetter (she/they) teaches at Rutgers University-Camden and specializes in Old and Middle English literature, critical theory, translation, and food studies. She is the author of Political Appetites: Food and Cooking in Medieval English Romance (The Ohio State University Press), 2017, and the co-editor of Teaching “Beowulf” (Medieval Institute Publications/De Gruyter, 2024, with Larry Swain). She is also the hostess and translateuse of the Old English Poetry Project (2007–present). She is currently writing a monograph on the uses of radical translation theory and Old English poetry.