Description
Contending that translations true to venerable rules can succeed, Trask places his alliterative transliteration of these epic poems aptly preserved in the same manuscript adjacent to the Old English original, as his solution to the dilemma of crafting either a new "Lucy Goosy" poem (in modern parlance which strays from the structure and rhythm of its source) or an "Old Fogey" non-poem (losing the poetry via rigid loyalty to the original). No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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The two great epic-theme poems Beowulf and Judith, paired in the Beowulf Manuscript preserved in the British Museum, are here presented in a translation with a unique fidelity that restores the true Anglo-Saxon rhythmical line of five subtypes of four beat stress adhering scrupulously to the alliterative strictures of Anglo-Saxon verse and exploiting its epithetical style. This is a ground breaking piece of work in that it recreates the indispensable stylistic and esthetic effects of the original while attaining a natural modern idiom, something that had been thought impossible to achieve.
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