An NPR review of hte book was discussed earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300467
Beowulf: A New Translation
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone knows the proper conjunction is verbify and verbifies anyway.
"She verbs nouns" would be a more appropriate complaint, although English has always welcomed the practice. Nouning verbs, likewise. Latin grammar makes a poor fit, but we shoehorn our English into it as best we can because if Latin isn't always exactly right, what could ever be? Vedic grammarians were always more rigorous than Latinists, but it is doubtful that a Sanskrit grammar would fit English better.
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Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#33Bought 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.
"Verbing weirds language."
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#34My 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…
For kicks you should get your hands on a copy of W.H. Auden's "Age of Anxiety"; an entire long poem in the modernist style, with 20th century modernist themes, but written mostly in the alliterative verse form of old Germanic poetry.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
A charitable interpretation is that OP is using that as an example of how a white supremecist inserts his own biases when reading various translations of Nicomachean Ethics. Sort of a meta-example, since the guy in the video makes mountains out of moleholes wrt to how public domain translations use more antiquated language than the modern translation his college professor made him buy.
I don't think there's any particular reason to be charitable with someone hiding behind anonymity.
Particularly when you go look for "eugenics" statements and don't find any. Who died and made you internet cop, anon?
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#36Poetry 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…
Further... Beowulf was meant to be performed. In addition to the challenge of language change, there is also the challenge of crafting a performance. It's hard to get a feel for a movie just from the script. A good performance will be much more entertaining than just reading it, though it may inspire some to learn to read it as well.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For kicks you should get your hands on a copy of W.H. Auden's "Age of Anxiety"; an entire long poem in the modernist style, with 20th century modernist themes, but written mostly in the alliterative verse form of old Germanic poetry.
That reminds me of Uncleftish Beholding: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#38Poetry 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…
The seemingly archaic quality of modern Icelandic is largely a myth. Over the centuries Icelandic absorbed a huge amount of Danish loanwords. That modern Icelandic has similar vocabulary to the sagas, is because the 19th-century language reformers called for restoring old words. It wasn't because Icelandic had kept them the whole time.
Modern Icelandic pronunciation, too, is vastly different from Old Norse, in spite of the similar orthography.
The one place where Icelandic has a legitimate claim to being archaic, is in the morphology.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#39Bought 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.
Damn should've known I was doing it wrong.
All I know is dang noticed and now I can die happy
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#40I remembered this twitter thread a few months ago on this: https://twitter.com/kendrictonn/status/1299355615257559042 I still don't disagree with any of it and offer it here without much comment. A short summary is that perhaps it's not a good idea to make this your first and only translation, and it's worth reflecting why you would want to read a version of the book that comes to you, instead of a (more faithful) version that requires you to go to it.