The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393079015 ISBN 13: 9780393079012

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

The dazzling variety of Anglo-Saxon poetry brought to life by an all-star cast of contemporary poets in an authoritative bilingual edition.

Encompassing a wide range of voices-from weary sailors to forlorn wives, from heroic saints to drunken louts, from farmers hoping to improve their fields to sermonizers looking to save your soul―the 123 poems collected in The Word Exchange complement the portrait of medieval England that emerges from Beowulf, the most famous Anglo-Saxon poem of all. Offered here are tales of battle, travel, and adventure, but also songs of heartache and longing, pearls of lusty innuendo and clear-eyed stoicism, charms and spells for everyday use, and seven "hoards" of delightfully puzzling riddles.

Featuring all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets―including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Jane Hirshfield, David Ferry, Molly Peacock, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, and many others―The Word Exchange is a landmark work of translation, as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

About this title

About the Authors

Greg Delanty is an artist-in-residence at Saint Michael’s College. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Michael Matto is an associate professor of English at Adelphi University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Seamus Heaney (1939―2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, County Derry, he resided in Dublin until his death.

Reviews

Starred Review. Hefty and easy to like, fit at once for the classroom and the kitchen table, this anthology is a rare beast, a commercial opportunity that also fulfills a real literary need. Most of the corpus of surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry--though it has been translated before--has had no recent, high-profile rendering until this capacious book. Most of the short poems and passages from all the long ones are rendered into modern English, sometimes (but only sometimes) in Anglo-Saxon alliterative metrical form, by several dozen British, Irish, and American poets of some repute, and the results are consistently good and sometimes stunning. The editors (one Irish but resident in Vermont, one American) do well to mix famous Americans such as Robert Hass with talented poets known mostly across the Atlantic, such as Paul Farley and David Constantine. Delanty and Matto divide their selections by genre--accounts of historical events (mostly battles), charms and recipes, proverbs and advice, lyrical laments, and the famous riddles, broken up into seven œhoards � throughout the book. Anglo-Saxon culture was stark and practical, deeply Christian once converted, and with few illusions about life on Earth: œHolly must be burned, � says a maxim translated by Brigit Kelly, œand the goods of a dead man divided./ God's judgment will be just. � The riddles are sometimes easy, sometimes hard to solve, and many are double entendres: riddle 45 ( œI saw in a corner something swelling, � in Richard Wilbur's version) might be bread dough, or something else. To these light moments--and there are plenty of them--such poems as œThe Damned Soul Address the Body � (in Maurice Riordan's choice words) add force and gravity. The editors have produced a book the many fans of Heaney's Beowulf might take home and dip into, almost at random, for years.
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During the ostensibly Dark Ages, the Anglo-Saxons created one of the first bodies of vernacular literature in Western Europe. The star in this corpus is unquestionably Beowulf, but there is much more, including quite a trove of poetry. This anthology is probably the most generous one ever published for general readership. Rather than corralling extent translations, its editors asked a host of contemporary poets—many experienced translators from other tongues, classical and modern—to make new renderings. So here are versions by Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, Jane Hirschfield, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, and their peers. Refreshingly, a preponderance choose to echo the alliteration characteristic of Old English verse. Rewardingly, the explanatory prefatory matter is clear as a boy soprano, and the back matter includes 12 of the translators’ observations about their work. Best for some, this is a bilingual edition, providing irresistible temptation to crack the originals on their own; just give them an Old-to-modern English dictionary. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393079015
• ISBN 13: 9780393079012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576
• Editor: Delanty Greg, Matto Michael