"Are the in-laws swearing?": editing Old English manuscripts for translation through Beowulf's Galician aliterative rendering

• Jorge Luis Bueno-Alonso ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidade de Vigo

     Universidade de Vigo

     Vigo, España

     
• Localización: Of ye Olde Englisch Langage and Textes: new perspectives on Old and Middle English language and literature / Rodrigo Pérez Lorido (ed. lit.), José Carlos Prado-Alonso (ed. lit.), Paula Rodríguez Puente (ed. lit.), 2020, ISBN 9783631817957, págs. 281-297
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Many different attempts have been made to make Beowulf accessible since the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Besides its difficulty as a text and its "baff- ling range of unique forms and linguistic pyrotechnics" -as Andy Orchard (2005) iron- ically put it-, Beowulf keeps on being edited, translated and transmitted more than ever. For instance, Kevin Kiernan's new DVD-ROM edition of the Beowulf manuscript (2011), Heaney's successful and almost classical translation of the poem (1999 & 2002), Ringler's text for oral delivery (2007) or Meyer's "cummingesque" translation (2012) constitute some of the most remarkable recent instances of a such a transmission. Following this old trend of making Beowulf accessible by adding a new language to the "surprising array of the world's languages" (Osborn 1997: 343) Beowulf has been rendered into, the main aim of this paper will be to explain the editorial approach I followed in my translation of Beowulf (Bueno 2010), paying special attention to the problems posed by "kara ymbsittendra" (9), "kæt [...] elan cwen" (62) and "alnidotlessm swerian" (83). I will describe the different editorial steps that were carried out to produce the translation (Bueno 2010) and comment on the different decisions that were made at all levels to translate and edit the Anglo-Saxon text when collating the problems with some relevant and canonical editions ofthe text -Kiernan (2000 & 2011), Mitchell & Robinson (1998), Swanton (1997), Fulk et al. (2008), Jack (1995), Wyatt & Chambers (1968), Wrenn (1973) and Alexander (1995)- that were representative enough of different editorial styles and approaches.