By Hugh Magennis

A senior pupil writing right here on the top of his powers and bringing event and perception to a massive topic... the second one bankruptcy is without doubt one of the most sensible brief, normal introductions to the artistry of the poem i've got read...A dizzying and interesting narrative. Dr Chris Jones, Senior Lecturer in English Poetry, division of English, college of St Andrews Translations of the outdated English poem Beowulf proliferate, and their quantity keeps to develop. targeting the really wealthy interval when you consider that 1950, this publication provides a severe account of translations in English verse, surroundings them within the contexts either one of the bigger tale of the restoration and reception of the poem and of perceptions of it during the last 2 hundred years, and of key concerns in translation idea. realization is usually paid to prose translation and to the artistic variations of the poem which were produced in a number of media, now not least movie. the writer seems particularly at 4 translations of arguably the main literary and old significance: these by means of Edwin Morgan [1952], Burton Raffel [1963], Michael Alexander [1973] and SeamusHeaney [1999]. yet, from an ancient times, he additionally supplies a whole account of William Morris's unusual 1898 model. Hugh Magennis is Emeritus Professor of previous English Literature at Queen's college Belfast.

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15 See especially Orchard, A Critical Companion: ‘Style and Structure’, pp. 57–97, ‘Words and Deeds’, pp. 169–202. 16 See Frank, ‘Sharing Words with Beowulf’. 32 translating beowulf and so, especially in poetry, there is greater flexibility in constructing interweaving patterns of grammatically related phrases. Indeed, just as there is a special poetic vocabulary in Old English verse – ‘almost [. ] a language within a language’, as Michael Alexander has referred to it17 – so too a distinctive poetic syntax has been identified.

25. beowulf and translation 23 adopted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Donaldson achieves admirable accuracy but also hopes ‘that the reader unfamiliar with Old English [such as the target reader of the Norton] may derive from this translation some real sense of the poem’s extraordinary qualities’,72 an ambitious aim for a prose version. 73 Donaldson’s writing comes across as somewhat ponderous but achieves a dignified tone. 74 His rendering of lines 499–505 is as follows: Unferth spoke, son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the king of the Scyldings, unbound words of contention – to him was Beowulf ’s undertaking, the brave seafarer, a great vexation, for he would not allow that any other man of middleearth should ever achieve more glory under the heavens than himself.

As well as mann and wer, for example, Beowulf shares with Old English poetry in general the following ‘poetic’ words for ‘man’: beorn, eorl (used in a more restrictive sense in prose), guma (cf. also, in Beowulf, dryhtguma, ‘retainer, warrior’, seldguma, ‘hallretainer’), hæleð, rinc (cf. ). This metrical structure underlies the strongly aural quality of Old English poetry, giving it power and solidity. Lines have a strong caesura and discrete phrases stand out strongly in relation to each other, at the same time as being linked together through alliteration: ‘the iron / flash of consonants / cleaving the line’ (as referred to by Heaney in his poem ‘Bone Dreams’11).

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