9 ms·

Beowulf: A New Translation

69 points by flannery 6y ago

tomcam 6y ago
Bought 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.
- dang 6y ago
  > Verbizes Is there a name for words like this, which are themselves examples of what they denote?
  - rdlw 6y ago
    Autological words, like pentasyllabic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word
    - dang 6y ago
      Thanks!
  - elygre 6y ago
    This just crazes the language, IIRC.
    - Y_Y 6y ago
      Verbing weirds.
  - Y_Y 6y ago
    You may also find the following interesting: List of such words: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_autological_terms https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_autological_... The antonym, heterological, produces a nice Russell-type paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_para...
- jayd16 6y ago
  Everyone knows the proper conjunction is verbify and verbifies anyway.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    "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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    "Verbing weirds language." * https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
  - tomcam 6y ago
    Damn should've known I was doing it wrong. All I know is dang noticed and now I can die happy
OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
> Back I come, for that reason, to hwæt. It’s been translated many ways. “Listen.” “Hark.” “Lo.” Seamus Heaney translated it as “So,” an attention-getting intonation, taken from the memory of his Irish uncle telling tales at the table. I come equipped with my own memories of sitting at the bar’s end listening to men navigate darts, trivia, and women, and so, in this book, I translate it as “Bro.” That's pretty funny. I'm surprised that she modernized the language and avoided preserving the original meter, but still kept the line-oriented format instead of using regular paragraphs.
hprotagonist 6y ago
Chickering’s translation is very good if you’re into kennings and prosodic structure. Despite how popular Heaney’s is, it’s not for me. roughly speaking if you like the fansubs that lean towards the literal and away from the trying to help, that’s the translation for you. It was a long time until i really realized why Beowulf is so profoundly tragic. If this translation preserves that, then that sounds good to me.
sanxiyn 6y ago
My favorite is Tim Romano's alliterative translation: http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm
- pmiller2 6y ago
  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.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    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.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      That reminds me of Uncleftish Beholding: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
throwawaylang3 6y ago
I 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KqkyNnm7Bc
- Sebguer 6y ago
  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.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    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.
    - Sebguer 6y ago
      I don't think there's any particular reason to be charitable with someone hiding behind anonymity.
      - scottlocklin 6y ago
        Particularly when you go look for "eugenics" statements and don't find any. Who died and made you internet cop, anon?
      - isitdopamine 6y ago
        Wrong. Many accounts here are more or less anonymous, probably a vast majority. Still, one of the things making HN a special place is that we assume good faith.
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
This 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-our-moment 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 akin to a dumb action movie than philosophy.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  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.
  - tephra 6y ago
    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.
- wolverine876 6y ago
  > the original authors and audiences were not dusty elbow-patched-tweed college professors. This was raucous and rowdy stuff, more akin to a dumb action movie than philosophy. Where can I find out more about that depiction of Beowulf? The post linked above, by the author of the new translation, quotes JRR Tolkien (possibly the leading scholar of Old English in the 20th century) saying, “If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.” I don't begrudge Maria Dahvana Headley doing her own interpretation of the story, but that doesn't change the original.
User23 6y ago
What’s a good side by side original/translation edition?
- libraryofbabel 6y ago
  There is a bilingual edition of the (excellent) Seamus Heaney translation.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Which, if you read old english, you know is an unconscionable travesty. No doubt not as bad as the desecration by a nitwit young adult writer discussed above, but pretty bad.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Poetry 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.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  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 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.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    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.
leshokunin 6y ago
What do you call a pack / group / murder of Beowulfs? A cluster.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Perhaps more seriously, hæleþa gedryht, I think. :P
dtt101 6y ago
My favourite translation is Michael Swanton's prose version, which you can read alongside the original Anglo-Saxon
Y_Y 6y ago
For those who are interested in the nuts and bolts of translating, and how they evolve over time, here are some fascinating articles giving glimpses of same: Machiavelli's The Prince: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/18/no-nonsense-machiavelli-the-prince/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/18/no-nonsense-machiav... Camus's L'Estranger/The Outsider etc.: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...
Causality1 6y ago
Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf— Then you would be wrong. One of the most important things about pre-Hastings English literature is that it was not in any sense casual writing. It was not being written by common people. Old English on the page was very different from Old English as spoken on the streets, just as different as a Twitch stream chat log is from a post-grad dissertation. Written Old English was institutionally formal to such a degree that it preserved grammatical forms that hadn't been in common spoken parlance for hundreds of years. If you choose to ignore this you're doing a rewrite, not a translation.
- macintux 6y ago
  I would suggest when disagreeing with someone about a topic this inherently devoid of absolute truth you refrain from statements like “you’re wrong”. You make some excellent points, but by starting out with an absolute assertion like that you undermine the value of the rest of your content.
- wolverine876 6y ago
  I think she might be arguing that she is going to do it her way, not Tolkien's way. Also, there's the thrill to onlookers of seeing her thumb her nose at 'authority', rather than expressing some curiosity about the other person's perspective as a human being - the same curiosity we should have about hers. In context, that statement of hers is a bit different: A “perfect” translation would require the translator to time travel fantastically rather than historically—more Narnia than Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As if this weren’t enough, the language of the poem is as much a world-building tool as the plot is, engineered with the poet’s own anachronistic filter, an archaic, lyric lexicography.5 “If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.”6 Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf—perceptions of “literary” and “traditional” language vary widely depending on who’s doing the perceiving, and Tolkien had a liking for the courtly that I do not share—but we agree that the original’s dense wordplay must be reckoned with. Amid a slew of regressions in the past half decade, I must cite a win—the democratization of information. Access to formerly gate-kept texts has been radically broadened. Until recently, it was a cotton-gloved privilege to view the original manuscript of Beowulf. Now a click, and there you are, looking at handwriting a thousand years old: “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon…” Not only is the original accessible to anyone with an internet connection, so are a huge number of translations and volumes of evolving scholarship, many long out of print. This translation exists because of that access.
5555624 6y ago
An NPR review of hte book was discussed earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300467
Jach 6y ago
I remembered this twitter thread a few months ago on this: https://twitter.com/kendrictonn/status/1299355615257559042 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.
ThinkingGuy 6y ago
This translation was discussed on a recent episode of the Lingthusiasm podcast: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/632086691477323776/lingthusiasm-episode-49-how-translators-approach https://lingthusiasm.com/post/632086691477323776/lingthusias...
scottlocklin 6y ago
This is a ridiculous PR puff piece by her publisher, and even a vague perusal of the translation indicates it's an atrocity, which is exactly what you'd expect from a "young adult writer" of her physiognomy and smug disposition. https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/cartes-de-visite https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/cartes-de-visite "Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf starts off like an exploding beer keg: “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!”3 Generations of scholars have limped along, translating Hwaet! as “Listen!” or “Yes!” or “Lo!” or “Hail!” (Why not “Belay that!” or “Tut! Tut! I say!”?) Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. If she had continued in this cheeky vein, Headley might have altered Beowulf Studies forever." and lol "Headley apparently knows little Old English, and it shows. In preparation, she read all the translations by women she could find." Stunning and brave. Do yourself a favor and put in the couple of hours it requires to just read it in the original language. Or if you can't be arsed to do the trivial work required, as apparently the author of this "translation," read Rebsamen.
- derefr 6y ago
  > Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. Maybe it doesn't apply to the cultural context of Beowulf, but from https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chivalry-and https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chiv..., I got the impression that "bro culture" is a valid — and illmuninating! — lens through which to at least view the concept of medieval chivalry.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    That's a great point (also cool article bro), but as a participant in "bro culture" (power lifting, BJJ, kick boxing, etc etc you name it; hell I used to be a goddamned auto mechanic, and the larval me had to chop wood to heat the house) -this lady didn't do her field research. She's regurgitating stale stereotypes about working class masculinity from the vantage point of a privileged self-regarding nitwit from Portland. At her present state of enlightenment she's about as capable of writing about violence or even bro culture in any useful way as I am about giving birth or the emotions experienced on a daily basis by resentful intersectional feminists.
wolverine876 6y ago
If you want a less interpretive translation, one designed to carefully reflect the original (IMHO, two different approaches for two different purposes; I don't favor either), another not mentioned is JRR Tolkien's, published for the first time in the 21st century. He wrote it in the 1920s, never published it, and his son Christopher (executor of his literary estate) finally published it in 2014. I imagine that I'm reading the private translation not only of the literature's leading scholar but, by unique coincidence of history, the leading fantasy writer. What an opportunity. The language is at times florid, though I imagine that's the original. Through Tolkien's Beowulf you can hear the voice the Lord of the Rings author, or perhaps it's that you can hear Beowulf coming through in the Lord of the Rings.
- TiredGuy 6y ago
  Since we're talking about epic poetry, Tolkien's experience and skill with writing poetry is also worth mentioning, which can be found throughout his works, especially in his great mythopoeic work The Silmarillion.

69 points by flannery 6y ago

Bought 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.

dang 6y ago
> Verbizes Is there a name for words like this, which are themselves examples of what they denote?
- rdlw 6y ago
  Autological words, like pentasyllabic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word
  - dang 6y ago
    Thanks!
- elygre 6y ago
  This just crazes the language, IIRC.
  - Y_Y 6y ago
    Verbing weirds.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  You may also find the following interesting: List of such words: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_autological_terms https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_autological_... The antonym, heterological, produces a nice Russell-type paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_para...
jayd16 6y ago
Everyone knows the proper conjunction is verbify and verbifies anyway.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  "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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- throw0101a 6y ago
  "Verbing weirds language." * https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
- tomcam 6y ago
  Damn should've known I was doing it wrong. All I know is dang noticed and now I can die happy

OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago

> Back I come, for that reason, to hwæt. It’s been translated many ways. “Listen.” “Hark.” “Lo.” Seamus Heaney translated it as “So,” an attention-getting intonation, taken from the memory of his Irish uncle telling tales at the table. I come equipped with my own memories of sitting at the bar’s end listening to men navigate darts, trivia, and women, and so, in this book, I translate it as “Bro.” That's pretty funny. I'm surprised that she modernized the language and avoided preserving the original meter, but still kept the line-oriented format instead of using regular paragraphs.

hprotagonist 6y ago

Chickering’s translation is very good if you’re into kennings and prosodic structure. Despite how popular Heaney’s is, it’s not for me. roughly speaking if you like the fansubs that lean towards the literal and away from the trying to help, that’s the translation for you. It was a long time until i really realized why Beowulf is so profoundly tragic. If this translation preserves that, then that sounds good to me.

sanxiyn 6y ago

My favorite is Tim Romano's alliterative translation: http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm

pmiller2 6y ago
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.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  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.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    That reminds me of Uncleftish Beholding: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...

throwawaylang3 6y ago

I 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KqkyNnm7Bc

Sebguer 6y ago
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.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  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.
  - Sebguer 6y ago
    I don't think there's any particular reason to be charitable with someone hiding behind anonymity.
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      Particularly when you go look for "eugenics" statements and don't find any. Who died and made you internet cop, anon?
    - isitdopamine 6y ago
      Wrong. Many accounts here are more or less anonymous, probably a vast majority. Still, one of the things making HN a special place is that we assume good faith.

Eric_WVGG 6y ago

This 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-our-moment 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 akin to a dumb action movie than philosophy.

sanxiyn 6y ago
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.
- tephra 6y ago
  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.
wolverine876 6y ago
> the original authors and audiences were not dusty elbow-patched-tweed college professors. This was raucous and rowdy stuff, more akin to a dumb action movie than philosophy. Where can I find out more about that depiction of Beowulf? The post linked above, by the author of the new translation, quotes JRR Tolkien (possibly the leading scholar of Old English in the 20th century) saying, “If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.” I don't begrudge Maria Dahvana Headley doing her own interpretation of the story, but that doesn't change the original.

User23 6y ago

What’s a good side by side original/translation edition?

libraryofbabel 6y ago
There is a bilingual edition of the (excellent) Seamus Heaney translation.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Which, if you read old english, you know is an unconscionable travesty. No doubt not as bad as the desecration by a nitwit young adult writer discussed above, but pretty bad.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Poetry 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.

pmiller2 6y ago
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 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.
- jfengel 6y ago
  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.

leshokunin 6y ago

What do you call a pack / group / murder of Beowulfs? A cluster.

pmiller2 6y ago
Perhaps more seriously, hæleþa gedryht, I think. :P

dtt101 6y ago

My favourite translation is Michael Swanton's prose version, which you can read alongside the original Anglo-Saxon

Y_Y 6y ago

For those who are interested in the nuts and bolts of translating, and how they evolve over time, here are some fascinating articles giving glimpses of same: Machiavelli's The Prince: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/18/no-nonsense-machiavelli-the-prince/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/18/no-nonsense-machiav... Camus's L'Estranger/The Outsider etc.: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...

Causality1 6y ago

Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf— Then you would be wrong. One of the most important things about pre-Hastings English literature is that it was not in any sense casual writing. It was not being written by common people. Old English on the page was very different from Old English as spoken on the streets, just as different as a Twitch stream chat log is from a post-grad dissertation. Written Old English was institutionally formal to such a degree that it preserved grammatical forms that hadn't been in common spoken parlance for hundreds of years. If you choose to ignore this you're doing a rewrite, not a translation.

macintux 6y ago
I would suggest when disagreeing with someone about a topic this inherently devoid of absolute truth you refrain from statements like “you’re wrong”. You make some excellent points, but by starting out with an absolute assertion like that you undermine the value of the rest of your content.
wolverine876 6y ago
I think she might be arguing that she is going to do it her way, not Tolkien's way. Also, there's the thrill to onlookers of seeing her thumb her nose at 'authority', rather than expressing some curiosity about the other person's perspective as a human being - the same curiosity we should have about hers. In context, that statement of hers is a bit different: A “perfect” translation would require the translator to time travel fantastically rather than historically—more Narnia than Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As if this weren’t enough, the language of the poem is as much a world-building tool as the plot is, engineered with the poet’s own anachronistic filter, an archaic, lyric lexicography.5 “If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1940, “your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made.”6 Tolkien and I wouldn’t have agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for a translation of Beowulf—perceptions of “literary” and “traditional” language vary widely depending on who’s doing the perceiving, and Tolkien had a liking for the courtly that I do not share—but we agree that the original’s dense wordplay must be reckoned with. Amid a slew of regressions in the past half decade, I must cite a win—the democratization of information. Access to formerly gate-kept texts has been radically broadened. Until recently, it was a cotton-gloved privilege to view the original manuscript of Beowulf. Now a click, and there you are, looking at handwriting a thousand years old: “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon…” Not only is the original accessible to anyone with an internet connection, so are a huge number of translations and volumes of evolving scholarship, many long out of print. This translation exists because of that access.

5555624 6y ago

An NPR review of hte book was discussed earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300467

Jach 6y ago

I remembered this twitter thread a few months ago on this: https://twitter.com/kendrictonn/status/1299355615257559042 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.

ThinkingGuy 6y ago

This translation was discussed on a recent episode of the Lingthusiasm podcast: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/632086691477323776/lingthusiasm-episode-49-how-translators-approach https://lingthusiasm.com/post/632086691477323776/lingthusias...

scottlocklin 6y ago

This is a ridiculous PR puff piece by her publisher, and even a vague perusal of the translation indicates it's an atrocity, which is exactly what you'd expect from a "young adult writer" of her physiognomy and smug disposition. https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/cartes-de-visite https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/cartes-de-visite "Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf starts off like an exploding beer keg: “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!”3 Generations of scholars have limped along, translating Hwaet! as “Listen!” or “Yes!” or “Lo!” or “Hail!” (Why not “Belay that!” or “Tut! Tut! I say!”?) Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. If she had continued in this cheeky vein, Headley might have altered Beowulf Studies forever." and lol "Headley apparently knows little Old English, and it shows. In preparation, she read all the translations by women she could find." Stunning and brave. Do yourself a favor and put in the couple of hours it requires to just read it in the original language. Or if you can't be arsed to do the trivial work required, as apparently the author of this "translation," read Rebsamen.

derefr 6y ago
> Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. Maybe it doesn't apply to the cultural context of Beowulf, but from https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chivalry-and https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chiv..., I got the impression that "bro culture" is a valid — and illmuninating! — lens through which to at least view the concept of medieval chivalry.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  That's a great point (also cool article bro), but as a participant in "bro culture" (power lifting, BJJ, kick boxing, etc etc you name it; hell I used to be a goddamned auto mechanic, and the larval me had to chop wood to heat the house) -this lady didn't do her field research. She's regurgitating stale stereotypes about working class masculinity from the vantage point of a privileged self-regarding nitwit from Portland. At her present state of enlightenment she's about as capable of writing about violence or even bro culture in any useful way as I am about giving birth or the emotions experienced on a daily basis by resentful intersectional feminists.

wolverine876 6y ago

If you want a less interpretive translation, one designed to carefully reflect the original (IMHO, two different approaches for two different purposes; I don't favor either), another not mentioned is JRR Tolkien's, published for the first time in the 21st century. He wrote it in the 1920s, never published it, and his son Christopher (executor of his literary estate) finally published it in 2014. I imagine that I'm reading the private translation not only of the literature's leading scholar but, by unique coincidence of history, the leading fantasy writer. What an opportunity. The language is at times florid, though I imagine that's the original. Through Tolkien's Beowulf you can hear the voice the Lord of the Rings author, or perhaps it's that you can hear Beowulf coming through in the Lord of the Rings.

TiredGuy 6y ago
Since we're talking about epic poetry, Tolkien's experience and skill with writing poetry is also worth mentioning, which can be found throughout his works, especially in his great mythopoeic work The Silmarillion.