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Comment by DrStormyDaniels | Hacker News Reader

It takes less time than you might think to get aquatinted with older English spellings, especially if you start at the deep end with Chaucer; it’s plain sailing after. Personally I got to enjoy and prefer the absolute disregard for standard spellings, capitalisation, and punctuation, so much that I find it harder to read, e.g. Shakespeare in a modernised text. More interestingly, there’s the problem of translating or updating poetry. If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.

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A decade or so ago, there as a website called "Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog." It was a sort of present day Chaucer, compleat (one might say) with variant spellings, and full of anacronyms like "for the Pardoner himselfe hath written an emayle ful of grete care and wo and muchel language of lamentacioun." I thought it quite charming. The site is still there, but alas, no more doth Chaucer blog. But yea! you can still read the old posts.

If you read the Canterbury Tales, read one half way through and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. Plot twists hadn't been invented yet. Those now-cliche plots were new back then.

Perhaps, but I think that is beside the point. I read the tales for the voices of the characters, and for the poetry. It’s like Shakespeare, where the plot or story is usually a bit boring, more of a pretext to the poetry, and not really the purpose.

Not Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays are successful commercial theater. They were performed in his day, profitably. They have been widely performed for centuries since, in various adaptations, usually profitably. And usually, minus the poetry.

You are right of course. The plays are plays. And ”commercial” minus the poetry ;) and yet, the poetry is there, for the non-commercial reader. (I hear they exist)

> If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.

Tolkien essentially said this in "On Translating Beowulf". That it is essentially impossible to capture the artistry and effect of poetry by translating it, not only because of the flow and meter but also the specific choice of vocabulary.

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