Review of Lena Liepe, A Case for the Middle Ages: The Public Display of Medieval Church Art in Sweden (original) (raw)

2020, Lena Liepe, A Case for the Middle Ages: The Public Display of Medieval Church Art in Sweden, 1847–1943, Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2018, in Speculum 95-3 (2020), pp. 858-860

Lieber describes her approach to translation as attempting "to capture not only the literary elegance of the JPA poems but also their playfulness, evocativeness, and dynamism," and "at the minimum. .. to be readable, clear, and modestly 'faithful' renderings of the original" (13). She has chosen to emphasize "features that would have been conspicuous in the performance of these poems-part of their lived reality beyond the words on the page" (14). This approach is certainly not a challenge that every translator would take on, and some readers might even have preferred a different, more philologically exact, translation style, but Lieber's has the not insignificant advantage of furnishing a translation that is easily readable. The absence of Aramaic texts facing the English version (à la Loeb Classical Library) is easily remedied by resorting to the indispensable Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (cal.huc.edu), under the rubric Palestinian Aramaic 53420 Piyyutim (SYAP). Scholars of Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages will certainly appreciate Lieber's effort in offering all of this textual material to them in conveniently accessible form. Almost every student of Judaism in those eras, regardless of academic specialty, is likely to find something of interest and value in the poems that she has translated. The wedding and funeral poetry, reflections of "real life," will certainly attract social and cultural historians; others will be unable to resist the parodic Purim poetry, some of which is characterized by a decidedly anti-Christian bias; historians of biblical interpretation will study the poems that retell biblical stories in an unusual fashion. And from a broader perspective, this first translation may also serve to stimulate further study of this corpus, as well as other Aramaic and Hebrew poetry from late antiquity, as a wider academic audience becomes aware of its existence and contents.