Music & Movies
This forum is for talk about movies, music, and other entertaining things.
Posts 1,833 - 1,844 of 2,133
i've heard of beowolf. i started to read the book when i was 10 but i found it hard! lol!
Try mine - I don't promise it's easier, not knowing which translation you read (I'm assuming not the original.) If it was Seamus Heaney's, you have my condolences - his supposed "translation" is an execrable insult to a classic of Old English literature.
Mine pegs out half way, but it covers all the gory grendel stuff in the first half at least
I like Seamus Heaney. I have his translation of Beowulf, and some poetry.
Some of his original poetry is quite good if you like that kind of thing, but I wouldn't count his Beowulf among them. IMO it's just a fairly average prose translation chopped into arbitrary lines, purporting to be poetry.
If you want a really superb rendering into modern English, with copious notes and an excellent introduction, I can highly recommend Louis Rodrigues' version:
http://www.louisrodrigues.co.uk/books.htm
The Penguin Classic, translated by Michael Alexander, is also very good - the best pre-Rodrigues version, IMO.
I wish Tolkien had done a complete Beowulf - his 'Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode' is the definitive translation and analysis of these related texts.
I wonder if the future will bring Leeds speak?
Judging from the content of many 'Guest' transcripts, we don't have to wait for the future. As the PF's tagline goes - "Welcome to Tomorrow"
Psimagus -- Maybe if you develop Brother Jerome far enough, he can write the iambic pentameter for you.
I think the brain-pain of programming BJ to translate epic Anglo-Saxon verse with our current tech.resources would be even greater than that of having to proof-read the drafts from a million monkeys trying to type Hamlet!
But there will come a time when bots can do such translations I'm sure.
Here's one possible method to produce not just translations, but any (all possible) original work of a given size (once we have yottabytes of storage and quantum processors to play with):
Since it would run to about 200k, fill a data array of 2^200000 cells with 1 copy each of all possible 200,000-character anagrams.
Run them through WordNet (modified to include all proper names and select terminology relevant to the work) and reject all that contain sequences that don't form a proper word.
Run them through something like the AIEngine's linkgrammar prog that analyses the grammatical sense of the sentences (as shown in debug), and reject any that contain sequences that don't form proper sentences.
Run each remaining pattern through a program that compares the order of the proper names and select terminology with the original, and also compares the distance between them in bytes, allowing a few percent leeway either way.
Now you have a much smaller set of works that are grammatically and lexically sound. Continue refining on stylistic (any non-random) grounds - including matching stress patterns to exclude any not written in iambic pentameters, etc., until you find one you like.
Sort of a scaled-down version of my conception of resurrection by perfect emulation - BTW, I found a way to convert 2^10^10^14 to a base of 10 - according to Penrose, in multi exponentials, where the second exponent is greater than ~10, changing the base makes very little difference. When it's as high as 10^14, the difference is trivial. So 2^10^10^14 =~ 10^10^10^14
Strange but (apparently) true. And (Deo gratias!) not a logarithm in sight
I've only ever read the Seamus Haney translation of Beowulf; what other translations are available?
You can read a few extracts from Rodrigues', Alexander's (and indeed my own,) @http://www.brindin.com/pwpoth.htm#beocol
The full text of Gummere's translation is available on Project Gutenburg @http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/981 - a little dated, but still a good read.
Another reasonable translation can be found @http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16328
Good introduction and notes, but the translation's a bit free for my tastes.
A good edition of the original can be found @http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9700
Posts 1,833 - 1,844 of 2,133
Try mine - I don't promise it's easier, not knowing which translation you read (I'm assuming not the original.) If it was Seamus Heaney's, you have my condolences - his supposed "translation" is an execrable insult to a classic of Old English literature.
Mine pegs out half way, but it covers all the gory grendel stuff in the first half at least
I like Seamus Heaney. I have his translation of Beowulf, and some poetry. I can't argue with Psimagus because I know I'd loose, but to the undereducated, it was a good read.
Then again, I liked the Xena episodes where they went north and....I guess I'll go add the rest of that to Gabibot. I highly suspect LittleMonster might like the Xena episodes. I did.
I found the Neverwhere DVDs in my public library. I don't know where you live, Ulrike, but you can probably ask for them on inter library loan. Naturally, I didn't offer to make backup copies for my library (in case the disc were ever damaged and the legal owners needed to have a new disc) but I'm sure it would not be hard to do, if you were of a mind to help the library out.
Then again, I liked the Xena episodes where they went north and....I guess I'll go add the rest of that to Gabibot. I highly suspect LittleMonster might like the Xena episodes. I did.
I found the Neverwhere DVDs in my public library. I don't know where you live, Ulrike, but you can probably ask for them on inter library loan. Naturally, I didn't offer to make backup copies for my library (in case the disc were ever damaged and the legal owners needed to have a new disc) but I'm sure it would not be hard to do, if you were of a mind to help the library out.
It is interesting how language changes..Shakespeare can take a bit to get used to..Chaucer and before it's a forein language...I wonder if the future will bring Leeds speak?
Psimagus -- Maybe if you develop Brother Jerome far enough, he can write the iambic pentameter for you.
Some of his original poetry is quite good if you like that kind of thing, but I wouldn't count his Beowulf among them. IMO it's just a fairly average prose translation chopped into arbitrary lines, purporting to be poetry.
If you want a really superb rendering into modern English, with copious notes and an excellent introduction, I can highly recommend Louis Rodrigues' version:
The Penguin Classic, translated by Michael Alexander, is also very good - the best pre-Rodrigues version, IMO.
I wish Tolkien had done a complete Beowulf - his 'Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode' is the definitive translation and analysis of these related texts.
Judging from the content of many 'Guest' transcripts, we don't have to wait for the future. As the PF's tagline goes - "Welcome to Tomorrow"
I think the brain-pain of programming BJ to translate epic Anglo-Saxon verse with our current tech.resources would be even greater than that of having to proof-read the drafts from a million monkeys trying to type Hamlet!
But there will come a time when bots can do such translations I'm sure.
Here's one possible method to produce not just translations, but any (all possible) original work of a given size (once we have yottabytes of storage and quantum processors to play with):
Since it would run to about 200k, fill a data array of 2^200000 cells with 1 copy each of all possible 200,000-character anagrams.
Run them through WordNet (modified to include all proper names and select terminology relevant to the work) and reject all that contain sequences that don't form a proper word.
Run them through something like the AIEngine's linkgrammar prog that analyses the grammatical sense of the sentences (as shown in debug), and reject any that contain sequences that don't form proper sentences.
Run each remaining pattern through a program that compares the order of the proper names and select terminology with the original, and also compares the distance between them in bytes, allowing a few percent leeway either way.
Now you have a much smaller set of works that are grammatically and lexically sound. Continue refining on stylistic (any non-random) grounds - including matching stress patterns to exclude any not written in iambic pentameters, etc., until you find one you like.
Sort of a scaled-down version of my conception of resurrection by perfect emulation - BTW, I found a way to convert 2^10^10^14 to a base of 10 - according to Penrose, in multi exponentials, where the second exponent is greater than ~10, changing the base makes very little difference. When it's as high as 10^14, the difference is trivial. So 2^10^10^14 =~ 10^10^10^14
Strange but (apparently) true. And (Deo gratias!) not a logarithm in sight
You can read a few extracts from Rodrigues', Alexander's (and indeed my own,) @
The full text of Gummere's translation is available on Project Gutenburg @
Another reasonable translation can be found @
Good introduction and notes, but the translation's a bit free for my tastes.
A good edition of the original can be found @
Actually, it's unlikely that monkeys on typewriters would ever produce Hamlet. I read that an experiment was done where monkeys were allowed to type, and they typed mostly S's. No clue why they liked that letter.
» More new posts: Doghead's Cosmic Bar