What’s a good side by side original/translation edition?
Beowulf: A New Translation
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Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#12What’s a good side by side original/translation edition?
There is a bilingual edition of the (excellent) Seamus Heaney translation.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#13I figure this is a good place for some discussion of the topic of translations. I always read an old translation and reference it with a new translation. People in all eras like to insert their own biases into their translation. This video sums up a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KqkyNnm7Bc
I can see why you used a throw-away, considering the comments of the video you linked and the very first other one I looked at both have people talking about eugenics in a positive fashion.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#14Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#15Poetry is not a medium that lends itself well to translation and no one can claim to have the Sprachgefühl for 900s English to appreciate the original, and most likely if one did it wouldn't be spectacular.
I remember reading some of it and I found it incredibly boring and gave up.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#16This New Yorker feature got me interested in this book, provides a few colorful excerpts. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/a-beowulf-for-... Although contemporary styling is often comical and overwrought, maybe drawing a little too much attention to itself, keep in mind that the original authors and audiences were not dusty elbow-patched-tweed college professors. This was raucous and rowdy stuff, more ak…
Eh no. It is generally agreed the language of Beowulf was already archaic when it was written down. Tolkien argues this point strongly in On Translating Beowulf.
Remember that it was most likely (if we are to go with professor Tolkien) created 200-300 years before the manuscript that survives was created.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#17My favorite is Tim Romano's alliterative translation: http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm
I like that a lot! I obviously didn't read the whole thing, but the couple of pages I did read sound incredibly faithful to the original.
For those who may not know, Anglo Saxon poetry didn't rhyme in the same way modern English poetry tends to. It used alliteration, as well as initial, and, frequently, approximate rhymes, and relied heavily on meter. Initial rhyme is essentially a combination of alliteration with a rhyming initial vowel.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#18What do you call a pack / group / murder of Beowulfs?
A cluster.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#19Bought it on Kindle based on the strength of the passages she quotes in the article. It is not as strong as I hoped, but it’s definitely entertaining. She verbizes nouns more than I would like, and doesn’t really use guy slang the way guys do. I feel a little condescended to in the translation, but it’s still good strong reading. Easily worth $10, that’s for sure.
Everyone knows the proper conjunction is verbify and verbifies anyway.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#20Poetry is not a medium that lends itself well to translation and no one can claim to have the Sprachgefühl for 900s English to appreciate the original, and most likely if one did it wouldn't be spectacular. I remember reading some of it and I found it incredibly boring and gave up.
In the case of Beowulf, that is very not true. We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. Anglo Saxon and Old Norse were mutually intelligible. Conveniently, Iceland was settled by the Norsemen in the 9th century. Its geographic isolation contributed heavily to the Icelandic language's slow rate of change -- to the extent that if you can read modern Icelandic, you can read the Norse Sagas from the 12th century in their original! This property of languages whose speakers are physically isolated being extremely conservative is well known to linguists via study of many, many languages. We also have other works written in the Anglo Saxon language, most notably translations of the Bible. This reasonably large textual corpus, combined with a very close, and very conservative, living linguistic relative allows us to have a very good idea of the phonetics of Anglo Saxon.
Saxon poetry does not rhyme in the sense that modern English poetry does. It relies primarily on alliteration and meter, along with initial and approximate rhyme. Were you to listen to it, a recitation of Beowulf would sound more like a chant than a poem.
Saxon poetry also relies heavily on a form of metaphor called a "kenning," in which usually two words, but, sometimes 3 or more, are combined in a non-literal way to replace another word. An example would be to describe a ship as "sæwudu," or "sea wood." Note the phonetic resemblance to modern English, after you take into account the vowel shifts that happened during the middle English period.
If you want to hear it, you can listen to the first few lines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI
While I don't doubt that Saxon poetry could be incredibly boring if you didn't have the proper introduction, I might suggest that, if you didn't, you go back and study its structure before beginning to read the works themselves.