shit slaps
I like the part were Beowulf is underwater for weeks
>>23557348Read it in high school
>>23557348(yaaawn) read this shit in middle school. you losers are really only discovering this shit now?
>>23557663You know what the nurse said grandpa if you start yawning it's time to go to bed
>>23557348Is that Kanye West?
>>23557348
>(yaaawn) read this shit in middle school. you losers are really only discovering this shit now?
>>23557348>seamus heaneyThe Hibernian mind can’t comprehend the Anglo-Saxon spirit.
>>23557348Colossians 3
>>23557348Heaney is so talented. North was my first exposure to good contemporary poetry.Quagmire, swampland, morass:The slime kingdoms,Domains of the cold-blooded,Of mud pads and dirtied eggs.But bogMeaning soft,The fall of windless rain,Pupil of amber.Ruminant ground,Digestion of molluscAnd seed-pod,Deep pollen-bin.Earth-pantry, bone vault,Sun-bank, embalmerOf votive goodsAnd sabred fugitives.Insatiable bride.Sword-swallower,Casket, midden,Floe of history.Ground that will stripIts dark side,Nesting ground,Outback of my mind.
Heaney translation is mid. It takes like 2 weeks of casual study to read it in Old English if you're EFL. Otherwise Wackerbarth, Morris, or Morgan have the best translations that make the poem seem truly ancient and foreign and bleak
>>23559525>And yet to persuade myself that I was born into its language and that its language was born into me took a while: for somebody who grew up in the political and cultural conditions of Lord Brookeborough’s Northern Ireland, it could hardly have been otherwise. Sprung from an Irish nationalist background and educated at a Northern Irish Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking but I had been robbed of. I have also written, for example, about the thrill I experienced when I stumbled upon the word lachtar in my Irish-English dictionary, and found that this word, which my aunt had always used when speaking of a flock of chicks, was in fact an Irish language word, and more than that, an Irish word associated in particular with County Derry. Yet here it was surviving in my aunt’s English speech generations after her forebears and mine had ceased to speak Irish. For a long time, therefore, the little word was – to borrow a simile from Joyce – like a rapier point of consciousness pricking me with an awareness of language-loss and cultural dispossession, and tempting me into binary thinking about language. I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was an attitude that for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question – the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland.
>>23560318>There was one area, however, where certain strangeness in the diction came naturally. In those instances where a local Ulster word seemed either poetically or historically right, I felt free to use it. For example, at lines 324 and 2988 I use the word ‘graith’ for ‘harness’, and at 3026 ‘hoked’ for ‘rooted about’, because the local term seemed in each case to have special body and force. Then, for reasons of historical suggestiveness, I have in several instances used the word ‘bawn’ to refer to Hrothgar’s hall. In Elizabethan English, bawn (from the Irish bó-dhún, a fort for cattle) referred specifically to the fortified dwellings that the English planters built in Ireland to keep the dispossessed natives at bay, so it seemed the proper term to apply to the embattled keep where Hrothgar waits and watches. Indeed, every time I read the lovely interlude that tells of the minstrel singing in Heorot just before the first attacks of Grendel, I cannot help thinking of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading the early cantos of The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh, just before the Irish would burn the castle and drive Spenser and Munster back to the Elizabethan court. Putting a bawn into Beowulfseems one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history that has to be clearly acknowledged by all concerned in order to render it ever more ‘willable forward / again and again and again’.
