Medial Caesura

My word-hoard grows. I spent the entire night reading Anglo-Saxon, a nap at dawn, then a huge breakfast, and right back to the books. Using a pronunciation guide I read them out loud in A-S, then read the translation (70 different translators for 123 pieces), then check phrases, then look up some words. Mid-day I find myself thinking in alliterative half-sentences and thought about the oral tradition, the mnemonic devices that aid memory. A stick with some carved runes would be the score. I'd taken advantage of an early morning fire to cook some rice, with some refried beans and salsa this makes a fine meal, and every once in a while, I'd have a bowl (a treen in A-S, a wooden implement) using a spoon Kim had carved here, a couple of years ago, when I'd asked him to show me how he put a full twist in the handle. The pause between the half lines (the caesura) is a large pause, more than a comma, more than even a period; a wee dram of whiskey pause. The first word of the second half-sentence would/will alliterate with the stressed syllables in the first half-sentence. This is quite common in transcriptions of oral text. Just pre-literate. These poems I'm reading right now are 550 to 1150 AD, and they actually seem fairly current: a guy going off to sea, a wife left behind, some old apple trees that needed to be pruned, seem absolutely current. Like that strange feeling you get reading Emily Dickinson. The alliteration gets to be rather heavy-handed in the original and most of the translators tone it down a notch. I enjoy the gnomic pieces, as I always have. I've read Hesiod most of my life and collected gnomic works. Something about the plain-speak. And that's the thing about A-S, it's plain-speak. I love the doubled words, adjectives and nouns both, and that thunder-clap caesura. Realized I had a slight headache because I hadn't eaten so I carved a plate of finger food, salami, cheese, grape tomatoes, pickles, kim-chee, and some pecan halves that I'd misted with soy sauce and sprinkled with a tad of sugar. This proved to be a fun interlude, and I even opened the tin of Korean eel that Barnhart had brought out a year ago. I have a bad history with eel. The year I lived at Lucy's Crotch, in Orleans, I gigged eel with Winslow. We filled a freezer. They were inedible, tasted like mud, I fed them to a seal. Usually I eat anything Barnhart brings right away, Polish smoked sausage, stinky cheese, a canned fruit I've never heard of, it's always a treat; but I had this history with eels. Nonetheless I opened the tin, and they were wonderful. Fillet of eel in a wonderful brine. Eels figure into the A-S, as do onions and garlic; a couple of grains, they talk about bread. I look at runes for a while. A couple of the earliest poems incorporate runes, a perfect provenance. The runes reminded me of the Easter Island script, so I looked at that for a while, and thought about making marks. I've been reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which I strongly recommend, his language is so strong.