For starters, have a run at translating Tom Leonard into 14th century West
Midlands.

Who was it said that a language is a dialect with an army? Oh, yeah, it was me.

The only justification for translating late middle english into some kind
of modern is that sometimes the results are really fine--Dryden'sChaucer,
Economou's Langland.


At 01:52 AM 2/29/2004 +0000, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>Well if I don't wind you up, Robbie, somebody has got to, else you'll never
>do anything, clockwork robots are notoriously incapable of doing anything
>without external aid or prompts (grin)!
>
>Bah, bah and blah-bah: of course you introduced the term 'Middle English',
>not moi, it's one of those convenient symbolic categorisations that we can
>all tend to fall into, the truth lies, note the pun, somewhere in
>gurgle-land, for instance much of the North-East spoke a form of hybrid
>Norse and Saxon for a while, the language of government was a bastardised
>form of French, the Church used a Latin that probably no old Roman would
>have understood, Chaucer, the protege of John O'Gaunt used a kind of proto
>RSP that was mainly understood by the Court Ladies (male and female),
>Langland and the Gawayne poet raved away in forms of West Midlands, the
>Scots muttered to themselves about football fixtures between Dunfermline and
>Raith Rovers far in the future while poor illiterate Brummies found
>themselves, amid all the mud, alongside their scabby market, in the middle
>of all this.
>
>And in the middle we remain. Hellish place to be.
>
>It's enough to make you turn into an artificial Australian. Anywhere, but
>somewhere else, as Baudelaire said. 'Cept I can say 'Long live Warwickshire'
>(despite that Dutch fraud Tolkien and his fantasy crap). Come to think of it
>it's also despite Shakespeare's version of the Forest of Arden, George
>Eliot, Larkin, Barbara Cartland, Bruce Chatwin's Stratford, Stratford
>itself, the Archers and ....
>
>oh dear, this is threatening to become a long list.
>
>All the Best (wink)
>
>Dave
>
>
>
>
>David Bircumshaw
>
>Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
>& Painting Without Numbers
>
>http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2004 6:04 PM
>Subject: Re: the Poets' Corner
>
>
>dave:
>
><<
>Translating Middle into Modern English has always puzzled me -
> >>
>
>... except of course the term "Middle English" begs a thousand questions.
>
>{K, so I was the one who introduced it, but what the hell.}
>
>In one way you're dead right here, dave.
>
>In another way, you're dead wrong.
>
>I'm beginning to wonder whether i was right to shift some of this discussion
>from front to backchannel.
>
>I assumed that a discussion on this level of specificity would bore everyone
>out of their skulls, but maybe not.
>
><<
>in effect its
>translating a language into itself
> >>
>
>... and that's another point where one can quarrel -- can you talk about "a
>language" (and let's not even argue over the language/dialect distinction)?
>
>If one were being terminologically exact, you'd never *ever* say "language",
>but "languages".
>
><<
>- obviously I can see the differences
>between the usages of the periods but I still see the language as a
>continuous entity - I could equally say that I find it odd that sometimes
>people can speak of translating a poem in Scots into English, the speech
>forms are two of a kind, or a twain!
> >>
>
>I don't think I can even begin to decode the number of ways I'd want to
>quarrel with that paragraph.
>
>dave, dave, are you seriously trying to wind me up?
>
>Robin