[scottlocklin]

Heaney's translation is bloody awful too.

Reading a chunk of Beowulf in the original was, along with learning Maxwell's equations and reading Gibbon one of the best things I ever did for myself. It's ... fairly obvious it's one person. The latter half with the dragon could have been an add-on.

[libraryatnight]

Heaney's translation is pretty fun to read, I don't know what you're talking about with this "bloody awful" stuff. It's a poets translation for sure, and he admittedly takes license, but "bloody awful" feels like a stretch.

Heaney's translation felt like he took Tolkien's "The Monsters and the Critics" to heart with his understanding, and clear love of the source.

[scottlocklin]

I don't care if he loves the source; it was an awful translation and it gives me the heebie jeebies like nails on a chalkboard. Just picking it up gives me the creeps; vandalism.

Rebsamen is closer to something like what was actually written.

[libraryatnight]

Your Rebsamen comment is true - everything else you say makes you sound like those people who go around telling others they can't possibly appreciate or enjoy sushi if they've never been to Japan.

You may want to try dislodging the stick from your wart ridden anus.

[scottlocklin]

Well, at least you've read the damn thing. There's no accounting for taste, and unless you're Haney, there is no reason to be personally insulting.

[libraryatnight]

Disliking something is fine, calling it shit is pompous and ignorant for someone boasting of being well read.

[scottlocklin]

Man, you're really butthurt; are you a relative of Haney's? One of the terrible diseases of our time, along with things like never reading the anglo saxon classics (I learned OE and read Beowulf in the original because both my parents did so in high school, as, apparently did everyone in the US at one point in time) is not calling out terrible things as terrible, and ascribing importance to people the media has declared as "great." Haney's translation is bloody awful, and will be remembered as such for as long as anyone remembers what his name is.