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A stunning experimental translation of the Old English poem "Beowulf," over 30 decades old and woefully neglected, by the contemporary poet Thomas Meyer, who studied with Robert Kelly at Bard, and emerged from the niche of poets who had been impacted by the brief moment of cross-pollination between U.K. and U.S. experimental poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a movement inspired by Ezra Pound, fueled by interactions among figures like Ed Dorn, J. H. Prynne, and Basil Bunting, and quickly overshadowed by the burgeoning Language Writing movement. Meyer's translation - completed in 1972 but never before published - is sure to stretch readers' ideas about what is possible in terms of translating Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as provide new insights on the poem itself. According to John Ashberry, Meyer's translation of this thousand-year-old poem is a "wonder," and Michael Davidson hails it as a "major accomplishment" and a "vivid" recreation of this ancient poem's "modernity."
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! ! Beowulf: A Translation ! ! ! ! BEOWULF A Translation Thomas Meyer punctum books ✶ brooklyn, ny ! ! BEOWULF: A TRANSLATION © Thomas Meyer, 2012. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2012 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York punctumbooks.com punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the full-length book—id est, novellas in one sense or another. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an aleserving church for little vagabonds. ISBN-10: 0615612652 ISBN-13: 978-0615612652 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. Front flyleaf drawing by Heather Masciandaro. The drawing on the frontispiece of Part II: Homelands is a plan of a large building at Hofsthahir, Iceland, most likely a farmhouse, although the element hofsuggests it may have once been a pagan temple. ! ! ! ! P for MJW Anew Again ! ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS m PREFACE An Experimental Poetic Adventure David Hadbawnik 1 INTRODUCTION Locating Beowulf Daniel C. Remein 5 BEOWULF: A TRANSLATION Part I: Oversea Part II: Homelands 37 155 APPENDIX A Interview with Thomas Meyer 261 APPENDIX B Selective Critical Bibliography 275 APPENDIX C Meyer’s Glossary and Notes 283 ! ! PREFACE: AN EXPERIMENTAL POETIC ADVENTURE David Hadbawnik Last year, I had the opportunity to edit and publish a portion of poet Jack Spicer’s Beowulf translation, unde