Translacyoun

I've never read Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf. I read some very interesting reviews, in which the bits quoted as particularly good all seemed to be precisely the places where he had hardly translated at all. But I'm fortunate enough to be able, with a good annotated edition, to read Beowulf without needing to translate it, and I'd rather do that than read someone else's version. Nonetheless, I do realise that Beowulf is pretty far removed in language from most people's leisure time, and that a translation is probably a necessary thing.

But I was very sad to see that he has now published a translation of Henrysoun's Testament of Cresseid. I encountered that poem in an anthology while I was doing my GCSEs -- I used to read poetry anthologies, and then follow up any bits I particularly liked. It really is not that hard to read in the original; the anthology just had a few marginal glosses for difficult words, and with those supplied it was possible to read it straight off. You might as well translate Shakespeare. (Actually one of our more annoying English teachers made us do that once.) We were allowed to write essays on our own topics for GCSE, so I wrote one on the Lament of Cresseid, which starts "O sop of sorrow sonken into care", though I can't remember any further now. It was a terrible essay because I knew nothing of the background or context -- I pointed out the intensive use of alliteration, which I didn't realise was just how early English verse worked -- but still, I'd count it as a major part of what led me to do medieval things at university. I'd encountered Chaucer before, but it was Henrysoun which led me on to look out harder and harder stuff, like a gateway drug. (Including Gawain and the Green Knight, which Simon Armitage has translated, entirely unnecessarily.) The fact that Heaney has translated it makes it sound like it needs translating; it's not making the poem more accessible but less. I hope people will still put the original in anthologies, for nerdy kids to discover and enjoy.

Translation culture is certainly something which you need to learn to move away from at university. I did Latin GCSE and no further, and if I didn't memorise entire translations of the set texts it was only really because I was too lazy. In our Part I Old English and Latin classes certain of my contemporaries, who had not been too lazy back at GCSE and A level, would ask as we went through texts for definitive translations which they could write down and later memorise, and the teachers would, of course, refuse to be bound down to a single order of words. I'd be interested to know if this attitude among students is more or less of a problem all these years later.

Anyway, I realised the other day that I have never read Julian of Norwich in the original. My Penguin paperback, which I picked up when I was a sixth-former and Penguin classics had a lot of authority for me, is in modern English. So I have got hold of a student's edition of the Long Version, which starts like this:

This is a revelacion of love that Jhesu Christ, our endles blisse, made in xvi shewynges, of which the first is of his precious crownyng of thornes. And ther in was conteined and specified the blessed Trinitie with the incarnacion and the unithing betweene God and man's sowle with manie fayer schewynges and techynges of endelesse wisdom and love, in which all the shewynges that foloweth be groundide and joyned.

Translating that is ridiculous. I'm going to read it in stages, because I enjoyed the discipline of working through Cassiodorus on the Psalms.

In news of a different order, there has been a real spate of funny autotune stuff on Youtube recently, like this crying baby, and this autotuned news. And I do like this terrifying advert for cheese curry. (I think it's the Japanese equivalent of pot noodle.)