Translating Beowulf for our Times (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beowulf I [translated by] Seamus Heaney.-1st ed. p. cm. Text in English and Old English.
Rewriting 'Beowulf': The Task of Translation
College English, 1993
Like any interpretive work, a translation is the result of a volatile hermeneutic process. In this paper I first discuss the material stages by which a poem composed in an ancient language and recorded on vellum is transformed--some would say transmuted--into one that we can read today in print in the language of our own time. I then review some specific examples of recent modern English translations of 'Beowulf, from the literal to the highly creative. While all translations represent a rewriting of the original text (and need not be disparaged on that account), some are more persuasive than others.
A Critical Companion to Beowulf and Old English Literature
Lulu Press, 2017
This book is the end result of my extensive researches carried out on and into the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics, Beowulf—a painstakingly laborious, yet pleasurable task through the journey of which I discovered, unearthed, gleaned, and absorbed a great wealth of previously-unknown-to-me information about Old English Literature in general and Beowulf in particular.
Beowulf By All Community Translation and
2021
I contributed lines 436-450. Edited by: Abbott, Jean Abbott, Elaine Treharne, and Mateusz Fafinski "Beowulf By All is the first ever community translation of the poem known as Beowulf, and is published here for the first time in workbook form as Beowulf By All: Community Translation and Workbook in order to provide space and an added incentive for readers to assemble their own working translations alongside this one." https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50261
Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a Modernist Medievalism
Essays in Medieval Studies
On the surface, the Old English Beowulf seems neither modern nor modernist, given that Beowulf is one of the oldest works in the English language. Yet, the connection is far less paradoxical than it seems, not only because of the fascination that high modernists, such as Ezra Pound, had for the medieval era engaging with it frequently through their own translations, but also because medievalism is itself modernist. 1 Medievalism is born out of the desire to remake or recreate the medieval, both in how it truly was, as well as how we like to imagine it. 2 However, due to the impossibility of true recovery, medievalism is not centered solely in the past, but is instead created by the collision and combination of the medieval and the modern, the exact sort of amalgamation that stands at the heart of the modernist genre. As such, engaging with a medieval texts and its translations through a kind of modernist medievalism helps us to understand how the text also lies on this collision point, existing across multiple modernities as its own kind of amalgamation. To expand on that, I will be examining the translations of Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley to consider and define modernist medievalism. 3 While both works exemplify the translation of a medieval work into a modernist piece, they do so in rather different ways. Heaney translates Beowulf through a focused form of spatial modernity, in which his use of regionalisms and dialect allows him to ground the work in his native land of Northern Ireland. Whereas, Headley works within a more strictly temporal modernity with her use of diffuse contemporary dialect that calls upon not only poetic turns of phrase but slang terms as well. Finally, I will use these works to construct a kind of Beowulfian palimpsest, in order to examine how Beowulf is not just Beowulf, the original text, standing alone a singular static object anchored in the past. Beowulf, as an object of study, is also a Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a
The reception history of Beowulf
SELIM, 2020
This paper traces both the scholarly and popular reception of the Old English epic Beowulf from the publication of the first edition of the poem in 1815 to the most recent English novel based on it from 2019. Once the work was first made available to the scholarly community, numerous editions in various languages began to appear, the most recent being in English from 2008; once editions were published, Old English scholars around the world could translate the text into their native languages beginning with Danish in 1820. Translations, in their turn, made the poem available to a general audience, which responded to the poem through an array of media: music, art, poetry, prose fiction, plays, film, television, video games, comic books, and graphic novels. The enduring, widespread appeal of the poem remains great and universal.
New "Beowulf" Should Take Its Place at the Head of a Rich History of Translations
Twelve Winters Miscellany, 2023
Sharon Turner initiated the process of translating the Old English poem "Beowulf" into modern English, a process that would continue unabated to the present, with "Beowulf" scholars estimating there have been some 350 modern English translations of the Old English poem, all stemming from the single manuscript two scribes produced around the year 1000. Therefore, it is a considerable achievement when a new translation can be called a milestone event, yet that is precisely how I would describe Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, translated by Tom Shippey and edited by Leonard Neidorf (Uppsala Books, 2023). Shippey’s verse translation combined with more than 170 pages of supplementary material (much of it written by Neidorf) has resulted in a uniquely well-informed and up-to-date dual-language edition.