Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know (opens in new tab)

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?"

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.

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.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade

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.

Might it help if someone put a beat under the flow?

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 )

[3] Those who prefer their argot middle class might try Nice Wicket Average's "Straight outta Surrey": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSflRlHPay4

> 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.

Soldiers talk in "high" language? You obviously don't watch the soldiers I watch.

'People who actually fight in wars, from ancient times to now, tend to talk in "high" language.'

Most people I've known who were at the sharp end in wars tend to avoid talking about it at all.

Regardless of how you think soldiers then or now may speak, a rap battle is the extremely obvious modern corollary of any flyting.

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.

https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey

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".

Came here for the cluster.

Was disappointed.

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.

I suspect these were stories meant to be told to drunk warriors.