I always remember when Christopher Logue read to us in the Nineties:
he had a fantastic reading voice, he was an actor too I believe, he
was appallingly arrogant and demanding, we had to give a taxi for a
five minute walk from the train station, but in his rendition of the
Iliad he made the mistake of quoting Milton: Logue is a very fine
reader of poetry and unfortunately his beautiful delivery of Milton
(and you have to be a fine reader to do Milton satisfactorily, I
couldn't) made War Music sound like papier-mache.

Best

Dave

2008/11/23 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
>> It is death to 'translate' it, even the term is a misnomer: how do you
>> translate from a language into itself?
>>
>> Best
>>
>> dave
>
> I see where you're coming from, I think, dave, but I'm not sure whether it
> applies to _Beowulf_.
>
> After 1500, at the latest, we're talking about (literary) texts which show
> *less linguistic deviation from present-day Standard (English<es>) than some
> currently printed.  I'd bet someone not from Edinburgh, let alone Scotland,
> would find Irvine Welsh's _Trainspotters_ more difficult to read and
> comprehend than Thomas Wyatt -- I certainly do.
>
> The language of _Beowulf_, for better or worse, has to be "learned" by any
> current native English(es) speaker as a foreign language.
>
> The odd moment is about 1375.  If you apply the transliteration test there
> on the Big Three, Langland comes over as not that strange at all, Chaucer as
> intelligible, but with the rhythms wrecked, and GGK as *still virtually
> unintelligible (to a *contemporary English ear).
>
> Dunno what this means ...
>
> I think if there is ever going to be a _Beowulf_ for our times, whoever
> translates it will have to do what Christopher Logue did with Homer.
>
> And whether you call *that "translation" or not ...
>
> Robin
>
> (Aside to Tina -- I'll be interested to hear what you think of the Alexander
> glossed text, when you get it.  I like it, but I've a little background in
> OE -- not as much as Candice, though, since I was taught from the Quirk and
> Wrenn text, not Klaeber, though my ex-wife [who was taught OE at London
> rather than Glasgow] did use that -- but just how it will work for a totally
> innocent reader, for whom it's intended, I dunno.  Unfortunately, I've
> misplaced my copy at the moment, so I can't go and look at it again just
> now.  R.)
>
> As a a further aside ...  The problems of translating _Beowulf_ begin with
> the very first word -- "Hwaet".
>
>  Hark...    Listen up ...   Oy, mush!    Lo ...    Lend me your ears ...
>
>   "What [the hell, here we go ...]"
>
> So near and yet so far, and each of the (valid) possible choices of
> translating "Hwaet" sets up linguistic and semantic expectations for what
> will follow.
>
> A real bummer ....
>
> R2.
>
> (Mind you, this isn't just a translation [in the normally accepted sense]
> problem.  Even a simple modernised *transcription of Wyatt crashes against a
> series of orthographic items in the original MSS which can be either
> modern-Englished as "truth" or "troth".  Which, however spelled, *were
> conceptually different in the 1520s.  Except the mapping of the 15thC
> spellings and meanings [insofar as the spelling variants allow you to use
> spelling rather than context as a determinent as to which term to use in a
> modern English transcription] don't transparently map onto the contemporary
> English distinctions between "truth" and "troth".  So you have ambiguities
> at *both ends.  Elephants all the way up ...  :-(
>
> Angels weep territory, this.
>
> RxR)
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk