This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language.
If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the impression that she's read all basically all the translations (apparently Tolkien makes it sound just like Lord of the Rings), so it's interesting to see where she's taking it.
There are a lot of people whose single recollection of Romeo and Juliet is the garden scene, and who understand that scene to have Juliet aware that Romeo is present in the garden because of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", due to simple confusion in not knowing that "Wherefore" means "Why?" and that Juliet goes into an extended meditation on why Romeo was born as Romeo, in the rival family, and therefore off-limits to her despite the urges of her heart.
And that sort of thing repeats on a line-by-line basis through most of Shakespeare. I tend to think one gets better at reading it relatively quickly, even as a high school student, but there is a reason why the best way to read it is with one page of the historical text and one with extensive notes.
This skips a long discussion on "Should we teach Shakespeare?", "To what degree should we allocate resources to decoding Shakespeare given competing demands for resources to establish baseline proficiency in modern written English?", and "Is a production of Shakespeare in historically representative English a service to the broader community or is it a service to the class which already knows the story and therefore does not need the actors words, which they mostly will not understand, to impart it?"
The "Wherefore" bit is actually an OKCupid question due to how commonly misunderstood it is.
When I tutored Shakespeare to kids, I always prepped the vocab for each scene, got extra copies ready, and made the parents act out bits. All out-loud. It really helps.
Is it? I've read some of the articles he's written about this and it seems to be mostly 'watching performances of Shakespeare's plays does not magically make you understand Early Modern English'.
I remember the first time I read a heavily-footnoted Shakespeare play and discovering that for every word or passage I thought I needed to look up there were two or three that I did as well but did not realize simply because the language has changed so much. I.e., the modern meaning made enough sense that I would have been none the wiser without the footnote.
But while an updated Shakespeare might be good thing if well done, to me it would be a new thing, and not Shakespeare.
Shakespeare have a lot of references to biblical and classical mythology which was common shared knowledge at the time but less known today. I wonder what would be an appropriate translation to a modern context. WWII? Start Wars or Lord of the Rings references?
(I'm not being sarcastic, I think it is a genuinely interesting question.)
But in general the strength of Shakespeare is the language and poetry, so it will be difficult to modernize without losing what makes him great in the first place.
That is the express reason with which Thomas Bulfinch wrote his "Mythologies", because his pupils were having trouble understanding English poems because they couldn't figure out allusions to mythology. Reading that small book could "unlock" a lot of English literature for one.
This is true of much English writing before the 19th Century, and poetry even to a later date. No knowledge of the Bible or mythology and a lot of the writing loses its punch, even if you understand it in the literal sense.
I think it may be more accurate to say that Tolkien intended Lord of the Rings to sound like Beowulf, but I'm not qualified to comment on how successful he was or what biases he may have introduced in his translation.
I generally find updated language versions to be more interesting to those who are familiar with the original works. People only versed in modern language adaptations are useless for conversation about the piece.
I sometimes wonder if some of the references to the mythical beasts like fire breathing dragons are simply, some now extinct species of animal with embellishments like fire breathing. Lets face it, oral tradition came with a certain degree of embellishment and we know dinosaurs used to exist, but what's the chances of finding the remains of an extinct animal if we tried to look for it? Perhaps the Dodo would be an exception as, iirc, they last lived on an island somewhere killed by sailors for food, but hopefully you get my point.
I doubt many skeletal remains would be found with Anglo-Saxon remains because none have been found so far, but do archaeologists looking for Anglo-Saxon remains ignore animal remains during the dig process? Its not something I'm familiar with.
Dinosaurs were not around during the period in question, but their fossils were, as were the crocodilians and large monitor lizards. So if dragons are based on a real thing, I prefer one of those things. But I also think it's a mistake to discount the imaginations and creativity of previous generations. They might simply have imagined a scaled up garden lizard, adding fire-breathing at some point along the way.
I’m no scholar, but have a distinct memory of reading the Heaney translation of Beowulf perhaps 20 years ago (it was new at the time). I don’t recall any of the language per se, but have the distinct memory of thinking “this is extremely badass”. It seems completely reasonable that a more vernacular translation would be in some meaningful way more accurate (if not precise). This article brought back some of the adrenaline, and I expect that when I read this version, it will be exactly as I remember it.
I'm also a huge fan of Heaney's Beowulf. While Headley chooses to vernacularise the language in the extreme, Heaney took a more sensitive approach, preserving kennings and searching for Ulster dialect cognates to Old English words to use in their stead, and always being careful to shun the aloof Latinate for the earthy Germanic. The consequence of his success is that the text seems to have sprung forth from the bloodied earth, the capricious sea, and the smoke-clogged longhouses of the tale.
So while I am always happy to see new editions of Beowulf, I can't help but feel that Headley's will feel a little trivial by way of its own unselfconcious anachronism. A wergeld seems an absurd concept when cast in the language of the iPhone, but when depicted in language that is sympathetic to its context it feels deeply natural - of the earth, even - a rightful price to pay as atonement for the shedding of blood, in an age when the sword was as fair and just as the High Court is today.
Absolutely amazing. Captures the ethos of the hero so well.
Sometimes, just like we thought the ancient statues were just stately unpainted stone, not realizing that they originally were brightly painted, we give these old stories a kind of formality and stuffiness, when in reality they were stories told by drunk warriors. This excerpt seems to capture that original essence. Looking forward to the book being released.
What is jarring to me are always the anachronisms. E.g. while I can imagine that some form of short "bro" could have existed earlier, when I read the line using "sushi" I can't help but remembering that "sushi" didn't exist until recently. Then I feel cheated, knowing that the original form said something with the different meaning, and I'm aware that I can't know what it is reading the "modern" "retelling".
Another anachronism I remember: in another otherwise easy to read translation of an antique text (as is, originally written around 2000 years ago) the translator decided to regularly use the word "sadistic" which is constructed from the name of a real person living less than 300 years ago:
Otherwise, modernizing meter (moving to another, more suitable to the the language of the new version, or even doing away with it if the goal is just to retell the story in a more approachable way, with the acceptance that it would simply be too clumsy in the target language) I consider very acceptable.
A strange aspect of our written culture is the extent to which documents are imbued with a sense of permanence from which they cannot easily escape. Beowulf was told and retold for at least decades - more likely centuries - before someone decided to write it down. Now, retellings[0] of the story are called translations, judged by many for their accuracy and historicity.
Sashimi's been around for a long time. "Gravlax" would've been less alliterative.
[0] It's telling that you put that word in quotes. Stories are things to be told, aren't they?
As the cousin thread points out, possible translations are a bit like Helen vs #nofilter Penelope: they may be either very beautiful or very faithful, but unless one has been blessed by the gods, that or is exclusive.
Ever watched some film about ancient Rome from around middle of 20th century? I am of course aware that the Romans didn't use shampoos and hairspray 2000 years ago, but that's the level of "incorrectness" that I'm used to accept in order to watch any such movie. Still, imagine that the protagonists in the same movie have Seiko watches -- that would be to me much more distracting.
I'm of course aware that in both cases for somebody from that time much more would seem "wrong."
Yeah, it is funny which kinds of anachronisms we accept and which we don't. In movies it is common to have people in authentic-looking historical costumes using modern language and having modern values and thinking. In theater it is often the other way around - historical texts acted in modern or anachronistic costumes.
I believe it is ancient, the way I remember the texts, the false etymologies of words and names are present even in the Bible. People always loved the stories about how why something is named something, even when the story is false, if it's good, it will be repeated. We are all storytellers.
Exactly because I know "the story of sashimi" that word is for me jarring in Beowulf. It's not only anachronistic for the setting where the story takes place, it is also from the wrong part of the world, implying today's global trade of culinary fashion to that time and place:
"skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters."
That's exactly what I mean. Pre-modern etymology was different than it is now. For example, the ancient greeks weren't interested in tracing a word back to some geographic-historical commodity. They were interested in tracing a word back to the source of its own meaning (which they often traced back to the gods), whereas for you, the meaning of a word is just the geographic-historical roots of its signified or whatever.
Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey is similar in goal (flowing English, modern imagery, "scrap[ing] away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup") though not quite the same tone - Greek theater isn't the Saxon tavern, after all.
I am not an expert in this area, but my understanding was that while the Iliad is not "Greek drama" per se, the job of the Greek rhapsode was considerably ritualized - i.e. theatrical - while Beowulf's origins are a little more mysterious, but comparable e.g. Icelandic sagas were definitely not so.
The opening invocations - to the muses vs. compatriots - point at very different contexts the stories pretend to be told in, even if that too was part of the fiction, now or then.
> "Rosy-fingered dawn, in this new version, takes on many minor variations. “When early Dawn revealed her rose-red hands.” “The early Dawn was born; her fingers bloomed.” My favorite rendering is “Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses.” It is so wonderfully delicate. It evokes, beautifully, the sky’s subtle changes at first light: how the colors phase in mildly, almost imperceptibly, the way a piece of white paper might blush if you rubbed it with a flower. And it is a perfect example of creative translation."
That's... Did the translator completely forget that was meant to be a euphemism? Dawn's rosey fingers is quite a nice imagery... But Dawn was conflated with Eos. And well, it's in the name.
I expect that the translator, being an expert user of multiple languages[1], was very aware of all the surface-level meanings of the language (and many others besides), and made many complex and well-thought-through compromises, as is always necessary when translating (not to mention regular writing).
1. To which I can personally attest, as I own emily wilson's odyssey—it is excellent.
If you want to understand where Homer comes from, the bardic traditions,and his cultural importance, I can highly recommend Adam Nicolson's "The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters". It is both really insightful and a cracking read.
No, but now I'm thinking about the early days of Slashdot, when "imagine a beowulf cluster of those" was a common in-joke. Along with the obligatory dozen claiming to be "frist".
I actually learned to code on a Beowulf cluster. The first programs I wrote to completion were on an LP mud that ran on a cluster in the creator's basement. Not because it was necessary for a mud with never more then ten users at once, but just because.
As an aside, I don't understand why people translating works of martial glory choose rap as the modern equivalent. People who actually fight in wars, from ancient times to now, tend to talk in "high" language.
Interesting point, but recall these narratives were spoken by bards and inscribed by scholars and monks, not warriors.
For the original authors, the tales of glory are the fantasy of victories they did not witness or commit but likely had to envision—just as modern rap is not the embodiment of power and wealth, but the fantasy and projection of power and wealth, the manifestation not of accomplishment, but of desire.
Narrativity and fiction have more kinship with what one doesn’t have than what one does—the actual ancient warrior’s “narrative” were his captors, heads on pikes, or the enemies he let live to tell the tale. In some respects the poets are responsible for sublimating the brutal, material symbology of war into something cultural, something detached from the event itself.
(a) Anglo-saxon poetry was beat-oriented and heavy on alliteration, wordplay, and external references. Why would rap[1] not be a suitable[2] choice?
(b) "People who actually fight in wars ... have always spoken in a more dignified[3] way." Pray tell, in which country's military have you served?
[1] it's done more than Milton could: popularised poetry in the hood.
[2] A cousin thread mentions "... an age when the sword was as fair and just as the High Court is today," which reminds me that the gangsta subgenre is slightly fonder of popping caps than filing briefs. (Compare OG Sinatra's "My Way" for commercially successful overclass braggadocio. Or, more recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 )
> As an aside, I don't understand why people translating works of martial glory choose rap as the modern equivalent. People who actually fight in wars, from ancient times to now, tend to talk in "high" language.
This isn’t borne out by the evidence. Homeric Greek, though a slight mixture of dialects because bards would travel from community to community performing it, probably would not have been seen as a "high language" by its original audience. The Kyrgyz Manas (the epic which can be readily compared to rap in both themes and, with many reciters, in the delivery) also isn’t appreciably “higher” than ordinary spoken Kyrgyz.
If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the impression that she's read all basically all the translations (apparently Tolkien makes it sound just like Lord of the Rings), so it's interesting to see where she's taking it.