Which book starts with these lines

Amigo wrote:

Mills75 have you read "burmese Days" by Orwell

No, though it does sound interesting.

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"Shooting an elehpant" could be a chapter out of "Burmese days". The material for both of these were taken from Orwells expireance in the British Imperial Police during the English ocupation of india. Orwell took this job to please his parents who had made sacrifices to put him through military school (were he became a bed wetter). Orwell decided to do what he really wanted to do and be a writer so he quite (his parents were pissed). He wrote himself off as a failure but at least he was doing what he wanted, write. From there he went to france and became a bum.

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Alright, try this one (it's an epic poem):

Quote:

The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had
courage and greatness.
We have heard of these princes' heroic
campaigns.

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Beowulf

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Merry Andrew wrote:

Beowulf

Yes. Have you read the Seamus Heaney translation?

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I don't know which translations I've read. I had to struggle through it in the original Old English during a course in Medieval English Lit. I took way back in the Pleistocene Epoch. Hwaet we Cardena in geardagum etc. I can't transcribe it in full because my keybord doesn't have the thorn or a few other early English characters. It helps to understand the Old English if you know modern German. It doesn't help much, but it helps some.

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My hat's off to you. Many universities allow students to take Middle English as a foreign language, much less Old English. The Seamus Heaney translation is fairly recent and it's simply beautiful. First Pinsky's translation of Inferno, then Heaney's translation of Beowulf...I'm hoping it's the beginning of a trend where the great poets of today are re-translating the great epic poems of antiquity. (They're faithful translations, but these guys capture the lyrical quality of these epics as I've never seen in any other translation.)

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Middle English as a foreign language? That's the English of Chaucer. Anyone conversant and articulate in modern English should be able to read Middle English easily, with the aid of a glossary. The syntax and grammar are quite modern, unlike OE.

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Mills75 wrote:

My hat's off to you. Many universities allow students to take Middle English as a foreign language, much less Old English. The Seamus Heaney translation is fairly recent and it's simply beautiful. First Pinsky's translation of Inferno, then Heaney's translation of Beowulf...I'm hoping it's the beginning of a trend where the great poets of today are re-translating the great epic poems of antiquity. (They're faithful translations, but these guys capture the lyrical quality of these epics as I've never seen in any other translation.)

When Edward Fitzgerald translated the Rubbiyat, he was immediately taken to task by "Orientalists" for having failed to produce an "accurate" translation. So in his second edition, he translated the quatrains word for word, for as much as he was able to do and still make sense in English. The second edition sucks big time. In the third, and especially the fifth edition, he returned to rendering a faithful translation, which was at the same time poetic and beautiful in English. I rather think Omar would have applauded the effort.

Hell, in college, i learned to read Anglo-Saxon, but i sure as hell didn't get any foreign language credit for it.

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Weelll...Fitzgerald did more than just "translate" the Rubaiyat. In his hands it became a brand new work of art. This is not to knock ole Fitz, you understand, merely to point out that he was a better poet than translator.

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P.S. You can see just how much originality is in that "translation" by comparing the first edition to the later ones. Even in the lyrical third (which is usually printed as the "standard" version today) there are significant departures from even the first.

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I think that having produced the second edition to silence the critics by demonstrating that he could read and translate Farsi with as much facility, or more, as any of them, the third edition was an FU kind of effort.

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Which book starts with these lines

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