Word: anglo-saxon
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...joked about Beowulf's current success, but called Heaney's work "a treasure horde of poetry more valuable than any treasure horde of Anglo-Saxon gold he has made us see," before calling Heaney forward...
Nobel Laureate Seamus J. Heaney recited his own poetry and read excerpts from his new best-selling translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf yesterday evening in Lowell Lecture Hall...
...Admittedly, this division between seeing meat on one's plate and recognizing the animal it comes from has long been a part of Anglo-Saxon culture, a part that one pitiful little endpaper like this could hardly hope to explode. Consider the fact that the meats in the English language have different names from the animals they come from (pig, pork; deer, venison; cow, beef) because the Norman rulers in England were the ones who got to enjoy meat while the poor peasants could only herd the animals, or at best raise them for dairy products. But that doesn...
...squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines...
...preface, Heaney acknowledges the irony of a Celtic poet's attempting to revivify an Anglo-Saxon poem. When younger, he notes, "I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands." But this notion faded the deeper he got into his translation. Digging, delving into the loam of language, has been a central metaphor throughout his poetic career. (His most recent selection is titled Opened Ground.) What Heaney has brought to the surface with his Beowulf is an old and newly burnished treasure...