Word: anglo-saxon
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...seconds or more while formulating some answers. When the going got tough, he rocked back and forth in his chair like a toy dog in a car window. He testily parsed fine distinctions (Microsoft's "deal" with Apple vs. their "relationship") and professed to be nonplussed by common Anglo-Saxon words ("I have no idea what you're talking about when you say 'ask.'"). At times the wiry, high-pitched, tousled-haired billionaire morphed into Woody Allen riffing on Bill Clinton's deposition in the Ken Starr inquiry...
Heaney, however, wanted to have another go at the 3,182-line epic, but not only as a sort of "prescribed" poetic exercise for himself. His return to the Anglo-Saxon (or so-called "Old English") text was also an act of cultural reclamation. In his own words, he wanted "to subvert all notions of the English language as a racial possession...
...Irish poet's project to revive Anglo-Saxon for today's audiences, however, is not just another indulgence of "ethnic swank," he says. Because, 0 as he argued in one of the Wednesday "Talking Shop" discussions, "The English tongue is something that's grown beyond the nation." English speakers who are not English nationals can claim the poem as part of their linguistic genealogy as legitimately as those who carry English passports, he argued...
...anthology containing a large selection of poems from Heaney's previous books (up to and including 1996's The Spirit Level), several excerpts from his translation work and his Nobel acceptance speech on "Crediting Poetry." The latter promises to be an amazing and innovative translation of the oft-interpreted Anglo-Saxon epic, due to be published over a thousand years after the epic's initial creation at the end of the first millenium--a worthy task for a poet so critically and popularly beloved...
...some of his political poems became of use to him, as he noted in his lectures, when he approached the translation of Beowulf. A motif of his political poems is the conflict between the rich vowel sounds of the Irish language and the consonant-heavy word-clumps of the Anglo-Saxon. In approaching the Beowulf translation, Heaney faced a different problem--cramming what he called the "giant ingots" of the Anglo-Saxon tongue into the "itty bitty tiny" parameters of moden English, parameters Heaney has broken through with consummate skill in much of his own poetry. His main means...