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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 remembered this twitter thread a few months ago on this: 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The seemingly archaic quality of modern Icelandic is largely a myth. Over the centuries Icelandic absorbed a huge amount of Danish loanwords. That modern Icelandic has similar vocabulary to the sagas, is because the 19th-century language reformers called for restoring old words. It wasn't because Icelandic had kept them the whole time.
Modern Icelandic pronunciation, too, is vastly different from Old Norse, in spite of the similar orthography.
The one place where Icelandic has a legitimate claim to being archaic, is in the morphology.
It should also be noted that Icelandic has underwent spelling reforms to make the spelling more etymological.
It used to be spelled such that it better reflected the modern pronunciation, they at various points actually went back to spell based on older pronunciation, simply to make the language seem more archaic.
“ég” in Icelandic is pronounced “jeg”, and that is how it was spelled in the 1920's; they went back to “ég” simply to make it appear closer to Old Norse.
You are right, of course. I didn't want to delve into that sort of complexity, because I didn't want to confuse the issue terribly much. Nonetheless, the main point regarding Icelandic that I wanted to make was about the mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, and the fact that, as languages go, it is extremely conservative (meaning that it resisted change for a long time).
For instance:
> As a testimonial from those times, the author of the thirteenth century Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu makes a reference to the spoken English language in the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred (986 – 1016 AD):
> Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku.
“One was the tongue in England as in Norway and in Denmark” [0]
Interestingly, this sentence renders identically into Norwegian (Bokmål) as into Danish: Den ene var tungen i England som i Norge og i Danmark. [1, 2]
In Swedish, in case you were wondering, it translates as En var tungan i England som i Norge och i Danmark. [3]
In Icelandic: Ein var tungan í Englandi eins og í Noregi og í Danmörku. Notice how similar these are to the words of a man who's been dead for a millenium.
Google Translate doesn't have nynorsk or Faroese available, but, I expect these would render into something between Swedish and Bokmål; and, something nearly identical to Icelandic; respectively.
I also didn't mention modern English's closest living relative, West Frisian. [4, 5]. Old Frisian [6] and Old English were also mutually intelligible, even moreso than Old English and Old Norse. There is still a subset of modern West Frisian that, although written much differently from its English translation, sounds nearly identical. [7] My experience of it was that it was as if one pronounced Dutch with English vowels.
So, that's a fuller exposition of the family tree of Old English. Things start getting weirder in the Middle English period, when the Normans conquer England in 1066, causing English to start accreting French loan words while, at the same time, dropping the case system and most of its inflections, and acquiring silent letters. [8]
If you want to put this all together into a fuller story of how the sounds of Anglo Saxon were reconstructed, you have to know about vowel shifts [9], and, maybe a bit about consonant shifts [10].
Once you have those tools at hand, plus the rest of a graduate course in comparative linguistics, you can essentially reverse engineer the vowel and consonant shifts to reconstruct a probable phonology for Old English.
But, that would have made a much longer comment, you see. ;)
[8]: For instance, in Middle English, the word "knight" was spelled the same as it is today, but pronounced /kniçt/. In Old English, it was spelled variously as cniht, cneoht, cnyht, cneht, cnieht, and maybe even 1 or 2 more variants, but still pronounced the same as in Middle English.
English spelling didn't start to standardize until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in the late 15th century.
The Swedish version is intelligible (especially given some context) , but not correct/representative. "Tunga" only means the physical tongue that sits in your mouth. The old norse meaning lives on, fuzzily, in some compound words such as "tungomål" and "tungotal".
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.
> 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 people on this planet who can claim to have true Sprachgefühl for any period of Old English, and if they have it for 800's English, it is unlikely they have it for 1000's English.
It's simply prætentious to claim that one can enjoy the æsthetics of a poem written in this language, for which one requires an intimate sense of Sprachgefühl — I can Latin myself and understand the meaning of the text, but I cannot claim to have the same sense of æsthetics I have for English, where I can decide what phrasings sound beautiful, and what sound stiff, and that's very hard to ever acquire for a dead language.
Listening to the sounds is different from understanding the meaning and nuance, much of what you wrote seems to be about surface realization of sounds rather than appreciating the choice of words from an æsthetic standpoint.
That speaker also clearly sounds as what he almost certainly is: a non-native who would certainly appear to have an heavy accent and appear stiff and wooden to actual native speakers.
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.
And can you claim to have Sprachgefühl for 900s English and be able to feel the difference between a poetic phrasing an an ordinary phrasing in that language?
I don't know. Can you claim not to be "prætentious," while throwing around words like "Sprachgefühl", as if this isn't a forum for communicating with ordinary people in plain English?
PS, 9th century is from 801-900 CE. Might want to set the dial correctly when you hop in that time machine to get some Sprachgefühl.
Sprachgefühl is a completely normal English word, used all the time, not only that, much like Schadenfreude there is no alternative that captures the meaning.
But that response was simply an attempt to dodge the issue raised.
> 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-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.
I've banned this account. I don't see how we can let this continue.
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.
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 highly of your technical comments and think HN would be poorer without them. But we can't have you abusing the site and other users like this; we've banned many accounts for less. I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this, there won't be a choice.
It's in your interest to use the site in the intended spirit, because poisoning HN (which is what your behavior, compounded, amounts to) is only going to ruin it as anything interesting. We have a hard enough time trying to prevent this place from sinking. I wince at its mediocrity already and it pains me that someone with the talent to really help it be good prefers instead to piss all over it the way you've been doing.
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 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.
It's not transactional, and I made it sound that way. You're a lot better at this than I would be, and it's shitty for me to publicly second-guess.
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.
That's taking entirely the worst interpretation of what I said. I assume Thomas is sensitive about his appearance, took the worst interpretation possible and flagged all my posts. Which seems at least as shitty as noticing.
It's not like I'm making fun of the lady for having a big nose. She's simply completely ignorant in life experience, and even possible life experience to do justice to the source material.
I think it's also a damn shame my comments are seen as "toxic." I realize America is collapsing into a foment of witch hunts, statue topplings and city burnings, but if you really consider my writing on HN to be .... even "spicy" -the end can't be far off. God help you all.
Best of luck to both of you, Happy New Year, and apologies for rustling your jimmies.
Given what you say here, I have to think you don't realize your own strength, or how caustic and frankly brutal a lot of your stuff comes across. I tried to explain that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25350749, but I suppose it wasn't enough.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I should've used the word 'throwaway' instead of anonymity. The account was created to post this singular link, without any context to the author. That's the problematic piece, not that their identity isn't evident.
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.
--
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.
The video would've been marginally more interesting if he had actually looked at the original text instead of just various 19th century translations. I'm actually vaguely curious about which interpretation is more accurate, but if the guy making the video doesn't bother doing the legwork I don't think I will either.
That's what I was thinking as well, it's not uncommon to find translations of the Icelandic sagas along side original manuscripts or even Beowulf for that matter, but it's understandable if his class was one on Aristotle or politics rather than ancient Greek.
