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Genesis A Translated from the Old English By: Lawrence Mason (1882-1939) |
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YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR XLVIII GENESIS A TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD ENGLISH BY LAWRENCE MASON, PH.D. INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1915
PREFACE
The purpose of the translator in offering to the public this
version of the Genesis is to aid in forwarding be it by but one
jot or tittle the general knowledge and appreciation of Old English
literature. Professed students in this department will always have
an incentive to master the language; but to the public at large the
strangeness of this medium will prove an insurmountable barrier, and
the general reader must therefore either remain in ignorance of our
older literary monuments or else employ translations. The present
contribution[1] to the growing body of such translations possesses,
perhaps, more than a single interest or appeal, in that it renders
accessible not only a poem of considerable intrinsic worth, a poem
associated with the earliest of the great names in English literary
history, and a forerunner and possible source of Paradise Lost , but
also an important example of a literary genre once immensely popular,
though now quite fallen into abeyance namely, the lengthy versified
Scriptural paraphrase. For some idea of the prominent part played by
this form, even so late as the seventeenth century, the reader is
referred to any comprehensive manual of English literature. In this translation, prose has been employed instead of verse, for two
reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which,
in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English
the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave rime. And in
the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should
attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few
and far between, unless prose were used. But even granting the value of the Genesis as a fit subject for
translation, and the necessity for the employment of prose, the reader
may still quarrel with the particular kind of prose hereinbelow
essayed; so a brief explanation and, it is hoped, vindication of the
theory of translation here followed would seem desirable, inasmuch as
considerable divergence is intended from the methods adopted by the
various translators of the Beowulf , for example. First, Biblical
phraseology has been eschewed, partly because in a modern writer it
savors of affectation, but chiefly because his Bible was the point
of departure for the Old English author, and to return now in the
translation to our Bible would be a stultification of his purposes by a
sort of argumentum in circulo . Secondly, archaisms, poetic diction,
and unusual constructions (the "translation English" anathematized by
the Rhetorics) have been so far as possible avoided, contrary to the
practice of most translators from Old English poetry, because it is
felt strongly that such usages will not produce upon modern readers the
effect that this poetry produced originally upon the readers or hearers
for whom it was intended. For this poetry could not have seemed alien
or exotic to its original public: either through familiar poetic
convention, or owing to the staccato and ejaculatory character of
ordinary spoken language at the time, this spasmodic, apostrophic poetry
must have seemed natural and beautiful, in the seventh or eighth
century. But Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastodon,
Nor we those times. To translate is to modernize. This rendering, therefore, is not an
artificial, pseudo antique hybrid, but frankly endeavors to convey its
original to modern readers in idiomatic modern literary English, devoid
of any conscious mannerisms whatsoever... Continue reading book >>
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Poetry |
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