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Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

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Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#51

Post by acqq »

goto11 wrote: post #40
acqq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is jarring to me are always the anachronisms. E.g. while I can imagine that some form of short "bro" could have existed earlier, when I read the line using "sushi" I can't help but remembering that "sushi" didn't exist until recently. Then I feel cheated, knowing that the original form said something with the different meaning, and I'm aware that I can't know what it is reading the "modern" "retelling". Another…

Translations of ancient texts are anachronisms per definition. The English language did not exist at the time.

Ever watched some film about ancient Rome from around middle of 20th century? I am of course aware that the Romans didn't use shampoos and hairspray 2000 years ago, but that's the level of "incorrectness" that I'm used to accept in order to watch any such movie. Still, imagine that the protagonists in the same movie have Seiko watches -- that would be to me much more distracting.

I'm of course aware that in both cases for somebody from that time much more would seem "wrong."

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#52

Post by smhost »

acqq wrote: post #48
smhost wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then I feel cheated, knowing that the original form said something with the different meaning ironically, "meaning" as a thing that belongs to a technical dissection of single words/phrases is a fairly modern notion.

> is a fairly modern notion I believe it is ancient, the way I remember the texts, the false etymologies of words and names are present even in the Bible. People always loved the stories about how why something is named something, even when the story is false, if it's good, it will be repeated. We are all storytellers. Exactly because I know "the story of sashimi" that word is for me jarring in Beowulf. It's not only…

That's exactly what I mean. Pre-modern etymology was different than it is now. For example, the ancient greeks weren't interested in tracing a word back to some geographic-historical commodity. They were interested in tracing a word back to the source of its own meaning (which they often traced back to the gods), whereas for you, the meaning of a word is just the geographic-historical roots of its signified or whatever.

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#53

Post by morelisp »

martopix wrote: post #29
morelisp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey is similar in goal (flowing English, modern imagery, "scrap[ing] away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup") though not quite the same tone - Greek theater isn't the Saxon tavern, after all. https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey

"Greek theater": the Iliad was never theatre.

I am not an expert in this area, but my understanding was that while the Iliad is not "Greek drama" per se, the job of the Greek rhapsode was considerably ritualized - i.e. theatrical - while Beowulf's origins are a little more mysterious, but comparable e.g. Icelandic sagas were definitely not so.

The opening invocations - to the muses vs. compatriots - point at very different contexts the stories pretend to be told in, even if that too was part of the fiction, now or then.

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#54

Post by goto11 »

acqq wrote: post #50
goto11 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also consider "monsters" anachronistic?

> Do you also consider "monsters" anachronistic? No, but I'll enjoy reading your argument why you are asking that.

Monster is from Latin and only entered English after the Norman conquest. Anachronistic and from the wrong part of the world!

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#55

Post by goto11 »

acqq wrote: post #51
goto11 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translations of ancient texts are anachronisms per definition. The English language did not exist at the time.

Ever watched some film about ancient Rome from around middle of 20th century? I am of course aware that the Romans didn't use shampoos and hairspray 2000 years ago, but that's the level of "incorrectness" that I'm used to accept in order to watch any such movie. Still, imagine that the protagonists in the same movie have Seiko watches -- that would be to me much more distracting. I'm of course aware that in both case…

Yeah, it is funny which kinds of anachronisms we accept and which we don't. In movies it is common to have people in authentic-looking historical costumes using modern language and having modern values and thinking. In theater it is often the other way around - historical texts acted in modern or anachronistic costumes.

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#56

Post by morelisp »

cousin_it wrote: post #18

A page comparing many many many translations of Beowulf: http://www.paddletrips.net/beowulf/html/journey.html One particular prose translation that I like: http://oaks.nvg.org/beowulf.html As an aside, I don't understand why people translating works of martial glory choose rap as the modern equivalent. People who actually fight in wars, from ancient times to now, tend to talk in "high" language.

Regardless of how you think soldiers then or now may speak, a rap battle is the extremely obvious modern corollary of any flyting.

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#57

Post by patio11 »

tptacek wrote: post #11

This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language. If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the…

There are a lot of people whose single recollection of Romeo and Juliet is the garden scene, and who understand that scene to have Juliet aware that Romeo is present in the garden because of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", due to simple confusion in not knowing that "Wherefore" means "Why?" and that Juliet goes into an extended meditation on why Romeo was born as Romeo, in the rival family, and therefore off-limits to her despite the urges of her heart.

And that sort of thing repeats on a line-by-line basis through most of Shakespeare. I tend to think one gets better at reading it relatively quickly, even as a high school student, but there is a reason why the best way to read it is with one page of the historical text and one with extensive notes.

This skips a long discussion on "Should we teach Shakespeare?", "To what degree should we allocate resources to decoding Shakespeare given competing demands for resources to establish baseline proficiency in modern written English?", and "Is a production of Shakespeare in historically representative English a service to the broader community or is it a service to the class which already knows the story and therefore does not need the actors words, which they mostly will not understand, to impart it?"

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#58

Post by libraryatnight »

tptacek wrote: post #11

This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language. If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the…

I generally find updated language versions to be more interesting to those who are familiar with the original works. People only versed in modern language adaptations are useless for conversation about the piece.

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#59

Post by tptacek »

patio11 wrote: post #57
tptacek wrote: post #11

This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language. If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the…

There are a lot of people whose single recollection of Romeo and Juliet is the garden scene, and who understand that scene to have Juliet aware that Romeo is present in the garden because of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", due to simple confusion in not knowing that "Wherefore" means "Why?" and that Juliet goes into an extended meditation on why Romeo was born as Romeo , in the rival family, and therefore off-limits to…

McWhorter's argument, distilled, is that we should not teach Shakespeare. :)

Re: Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know

#60

Post by JJMcJ »

goto11 wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #11

This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language. If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the…

Shakespeare have a lot of references to biblical and classical mythology which was common shared knowledge at the time but less known today. I wonder what would be an appropriate translation to a modern context. WWII? Start Wars or Lord of the Rings references? (I'm not being sarcastic, I think it is a genuinely interesting question.) But in general the strength of Shakespeare is the language and poetry, so it will b…

This is true of much English writing before the 19th Century, and poetry even to a later date. No knowledge of the Bible or mythology and a lot of the writing loses its punch, even if you understand it in the literal sense.
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