Beowulf: A New Translation

> Verbizes

Is there a name for words like this, which are themselves examples of what they denote?

Everyone knows the proper conjunction is verbify and verbifies anyway.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps more seriously, hæleþa gedryht, I think. :P

There is a bilingual edition of the (excellent) Seamus Heaney translation.

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.

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.

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 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.