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This is a list of translations of Beowulf, one of the best-known Old English heroic epic poems. Beowulf has been translated many times in verse and in prose. By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem, from Thorkelin's 1787 transcription of the text, and in at least 38 languages.
[85] [86] Thomas Gardner agreed with Watts, arguing that the Beowulf text is too varied to be completely constructed from set formulae and themes. [85] [87] John Miles Foley wrote that comparative work must observe the particularities of a given tradition; in his view, there was a fluid continuum from traditionality to textuality. [88]
Burton Raffel writes in his essay "On Translating Beowulf " that the poet-translator "needs to master the original in order to leave it", meaning that the text must be thoroughly understood, and then boldly departed from. His own effort to do this created what Marijane Osborn calls "the liveliest translation of Beowulf".
The commentary, occupying over 200 pages, provides a detailed picture of how he saw Beowulf, sometimes taking several pages for a short passage of the poem, and giving his interpretation of difficult words or allusions by the poet. The commentary formed the basis of Tolkien's acclaimed 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". [1] [2]
Remounted page from Beowulf, British Library Cotton Vitellius A.XV, 133r First page of Beowulf, contained in the damaged Nowell Codex (132r). The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Old English poetic manuscripts.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (also known as Heaneywulf [1]) is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into modern English by the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Faber and Faber , and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award .
Under a commission from the Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic government, Thorkelin had prepared Beowulf for publication by 1807. During the Battle of Copenhagen (1807) his house was burned and demolished due to fire, and the text (on which he had spent 20 years) was lost. The manuscripts survived, however, and Thorkelin began again.
Most linguists who have considered Kaluza's law hold that the patterns in Beowulf reflect a phonological constraint in early Old English poetic metre. However, several scholars have argued that the appearance of Kaluza's law patterns in Beowulf specifically may not reflect the continued distinction between long and short vowels in unstressed syllables at the time of Beowulf's composition, but ...