Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously man, do you just follow me around and flag my comments? It means a weedy little narrow minded woman with no life experience of violence is probably incapable of writing about it, cabish? Edit add: image googling you after your flagging of the comment, well, just lol. Must be tough.
Personal attacks are not allowed here and will get you banned here. Obviously that's a bannable offense and I'm shocked and disgusted that you stooped to it. I wanted to think better of you. We've put up with a ton of shit in your posts because (a) there's often a good point in there—even your point about the Beowulf translation would have been a good HN comment if you had cared to post it that way, and (b) I think h…
Beowulf: A New Translation
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal attacks are not allowed here and will get you banned here. Obviously that's a bannable offense and I'm shocked and disgusted that you stooped to it. I wanted to think better of you. We've put up with a ton of shit in your posts because (a) there's often a good point in there—even your point about the Beowulf translation would have been a good HN comment if you had cared to post it that way, and (b) I think h…
You think there might be a good HN comment hidden in the sentiment that we should evaluate Beowulf translations by the physical appearance of their writers? I can't imagine that I could be reading that right.
I feel embarrassed right now.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think there might be a good HN comment hidden in the sentiment that we should evaluate Beowulf translations by the physical appearance of their writers? I can't imagine that I could be reading that right.
No, that part was gross. I feel embarrassed right now.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. The phonology is well reconstructed; that is not the issue. The issue is that it is not just a dead language, but a dead passive language which is only read, but never written, unlike, say Latin, which is both read and written — I seriously doubt that there are more than a handful of pe…
People do still write it, for fun: https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heafodtramet Here's a more fluent reading, if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI Enjoy it, don't enjoy it, hop in your time machine and go back to the 9th century to enjoy it; whatever floats your boat. Personally, I enjoy it, "pretentious" or not.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#65I 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
A classic example would be Homer and his wine-dark seas or green honey, to change the descriptions of colour would absolutely be introducing a modern bias but it's a necessary one if you're not going to explain why ancient people had less descriptive terms for colour, a failure to introduce that bias would lead to another unintentional bias in the form of thinking along the lines that ancient people (or Homer in particular) were colour blind.
For a more modern example go look at any works on Project Gutenberg that have recently entered the public domain, it won't take long before you'll find language that at the time of being authored was far less culturally charged or sensitive than it is today, if you were to 'translate' those books an immediate and obvious bias would be to change some of those words to more 'politically correct' ones that would better reflect the meaning and intention of the author, to not do so leads to misunderstandings when people read those works with a modern cultural lens. You can also see this sort of thing with the euphemism treadmill, where older terms can either become taboo or lose all meaning (like mad, insane, mental), and where modern terms can become more appropriate or become taboo (e.g., twitch.tv recently renaming the 'blind play-through' category in an attempt to be more inclusive to blind people).
Modern translations introducing bias and changing meanings like this may seem like a problem if you're inclined to take a more scholarly approach to understanding works by reading multiple translations from multiple eras, or better yet reading annotated works (like what is common in theology circles), but all of this is an incredibly laborious approach to reading that most people, even in universities, don't have the chops for. If you want people to actually read more and read ancient works especially it's better to accept that language and meaning is messy to begin with and to not get hung up on issues with particular translations, because after all there's no guarantee that the person reading the works is going to come to the exact same conclusions, that's something scholars who dedicate their lives to works can rarely do even if overall they converge on a much more consistent understanding of said works.
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I mention this because the video rubbed me the wrong way, the point about how the modern translation 'completely changes the meaning' by using 'human beings' and 'humanity' versus the older translations which use terms like 'men'. It could absolutely be the case that the modern translation is being lazy and substituting mankind/men for the more modern humankind/humanity, where the older translations are specifically using men, as in the male of the species, to better reflect what would originally have been written in ancient Greek. The answer to this isn't something I'm anywhere near qualified to answer (sorry), but what I can say is that men referring specifically to the male of the species rather than mankind is a fairly modern interpretation of the word that's both pushed by people that would consider 'humanity' to be 'hippie cultural marxist bullshit' (as the video puts it) as well the type of people that would prefer 'humanity' as mankind would be seen as a tool of the patriarchy or something along those lines.
If you take the older translations to be more authoritative and correct as the video did you need to understand that to not cloud your judgement with modern definitions and language as the video is doing, humankind only started becoming popular around 40 years ago so if you're taking a translation from Project Gutenberg (at least 75-100 years old) you're simply never going to see such terms and instead it's more likely you'll see 'men' where it's plausible that it could refer to people and not specifically males given the etymology of the word and its historic usage.
A generous interpretation of the video would be that the modern translation is full of such errors and is deserving to be called a 'forgery', but to focus 15 minutes on such a weak example seems so incredibly dishonest and lazy even if the videos interpretation happens to be the correct one. The entire substance of the video is that the older translation is correct because it better suits his particular choice of language, if the translation is so egregious to be called an Orwellian rewriting of history surely there's far more substance that could be packed into 15 minutes.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
a "young adult writer" of her physiognomy and smug disposition. What the fuck does this mean?
Seriously man, do you just follow me around and flag my comments? It means a weedy little narrow minded woman with no life experience of violence is probably incapable of writing about it, cabish? Edit add: image googling you after your flagging of the comment, well, just lol. Must be tough.
I originally decided not to, even though this personal attack was so awful, and so low. (I've left my earlier post intact below this one, for those who want the gory details.) But I changed my mind after doing something that I should have done in the first place: I looked at your account's recent history. I hadn't done that in a while, and much to my dismay, it had gotten considerably worse.
Obviously my efforts to persuade you have failed. That fucking sucks, because I have admired your technical comments; sympathy for APL/array languages is my Achilles' heel for one thing, and when you post substantively, your posts often contain information that doesn't otherwise appear here. But it seems the only way we can get that is with poison, and the poison levels have been going up not down. We simply can't have that.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#67Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do I. I stick up for this fucking place.
I went out for a walk, came back, and decided that came out dumb. I'm sorry.
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#69I 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
It's important to remember that modern translations exist because language and cultural contexts change over time, this is true for both classical and more recent texts. A classic example would be Homer and his wine-dark seas or green honey, to change the descriptions of colour would absolutely be introducing a modern bias but it's a necessary one if you're not going to explain why ancient people had less descriptive…
Re: Beowulf: A New Translation
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went out for a walk, came back, and decided that came out dumb. I'm sorry.
I don't see that at all. What you said was true and I'm well aware that it's true. This whole thing is complicated—you've taken a ton of shit sticking up for HN in places where people rack up points despising it, often in mean ways, and I'm deeply grateful about that.
I think the Beowulf thing just set me off. It came up a few months ago, and for some weird reason my "orange site" radar has been really keyed up on Beowulf ever since. It's weird and not your problem.