Original link: http://www.ideobook.com/3246/beowulf-preface/
Last June, the translation of the scriptures was completed, and the second half of the holy record (kethuvim), namely five small volumes, the book of Daniel and the later history (two records and one chronicle) were finally completed. Since I wrote the story of “Genesis” in 2002 and started translating and annotating the Pentateuch, I have been doing it for exactly twenty years. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot, write a series of articles, and study the holy records. The wife said: Let’s revise “Beowulf” first. Readers have been urging me for a long time. This order also makes sense, in accordance with the principle of making learning difficult first and then easy. I remember what Mr. Qian Mocun said, for writing work, it is easy to compile bulky textbooks, followed by dissertations; annotations are a little more difficult, but if you encounter obstacles in the way, you can still leave them alone or make them “to be tested”; the most difficult thing is to translate, even a single word is escaped. don’t go. Of course he was talking about serious translation. So I dug out several new and old annotations of “Beowulf”, read them, and reviewed relevant historical documents by the way. I feel that the translation can be revised a lot, some expressions and proper names need to be reconsidered, and the commentary part should be greatly expanded. There is a reason for this. In the 1980s, when Shen Huihui, a friend of the Institute of Foreign Languages, contacted Mr. Shen Changwen of Beijing Sanlian to publish a book, the domestic publishing industry was still very difficult and paper was in short supply. In the past, I didn’t add many notes when I wrote a book, which is different from now. So I only wrote 115 comments, and Mr. Shen accepted them all, breaking the convention. The ancient English epic “Beowulf” is the originator of English literature and the first monument of Anglo-Saxon civilization. “” “Song of Cid”), in the English-speaking world, it is a must-read classic for college students and middle school students. It is not easy to do a good job in translating classics; in my experience, it is a lifetime career. Let me talk about the origin of this career and the teachers on the way to study—it happened decades ago. These days, because of re-reading their works, I come back to my eyes—especially my Ph.D. The mentor, Mr. Larry D. Benson, is “a humorous, free-spirited and pious soul” (the preface of “The Book of the Prophets”). * I am a junior high school student in the 1968 class, the tail of the “old third class”. I only studied for one year before the Cultural Revolution. He went to the countryside and went to Yunnan to “jump in the queue and settle down”, taught himself a foreign language, and became a middle school teacher. In retrospect, the young man does not do anything, but he is not too afraid of hardship and illness, and has strong adaptability. If you are an adult, the feeling is different. For example, cadres and intellectuals went to cadre schools to train, and later “scar literature” complained a lot with blood and tears. But when we saw them at the time, we were so envious. With the salary, I eat the national grain, build a row of dormitories, open two pieces of wasteland, plant some crops, and raise a few pigs. I went back to the city after not working for two years, and we educated youths want to “take root in the frontier for a lifetime”. Mainly mental distress. In 1970, universities began to enroll workers, peasants and soldiers. But I am not qualified, because I am from a “nine black” family, and I am included in the list of “children who can be educated well”. It is impossible to transfer jobs. Transfers from frontier areas to inland areas are not approved across the board. I fought for it. Yunnan People’s Broadcasting Station issued a transfer order, and I was transferred to the radio station to do an English teaching program. After Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, there was an upsurge of learning foreign languages across the country. But the leader of the County Education Bureau said: Don’t pester me. You talk nonsense during the day and talk nonsense at night, which is against policy (see “Song of Isaiah-Roga”). The road is blocked, what should I do? I had no choice but to grit my teeth and fight a protracted battle, and set a goal for myself: to translate a Western classic, and then write a book, leaving a record for the “turned upside down” era. Isn’t there a quote from Marx in the textbook: Foreign languages are weapons in the struggle of life? Many years later, I went to teach at the University of Hong Kong, and often returned to China to give lectures. After comparison, I realized in the 1990s that people are like that: sometimes they fall into adversity and hopelessness, but they can cultivate and establish an ideal. These two tasks, translating classics and writing about the times, require reading a lot of books, foreign books. Gradually, tracing the roots of various ideas in the book, I came across classical languages and medieval literature. In the later period of the Cultural Revolution, they engaged in “criticizing the law and criticizing Confucianism”. My father and Mr. Hu Quyuan (head of Fudan Philosophy Department) were called to the General Trade Union Building (formerly the Bank of Communications Building) on the Bund to help the Workers Theory Group annotate legalist works. This is the first time he was allowed to go home to live after he was knocked down and “quarantined for review”, although he still has to accept criticism. At that time, I liked to translate poems, and I chose some ancient and modern poems to practice. My father then asked Mr. Fang Zhong (Lu Lang) to correct it. Mr. Fang is the director of the English Department of the Shanghai Foreign Studies University. He has translated Tao Yuanming and has a deep skill. A line of poetry, a long sentence, often he changes one or two words, adjusts the order, and the taste comes out. He graduated from Tsinghua University and studied in the United States. He first entered Stanford to study Chaucer with a famous teacher JSP Tatlock, and then transferred to Berkeley to study for a Ph.D. Later, due to unbearable racial discrimination and hearing of the victory of the Northern Expedition, the Chinese students studying abroad were inexplicably excited, so they “determined to return to China early” and put down the first draft of the thesis “English Literature and China in the Eighteenth Century” (see Mr. “). Chaucer (about 1343~1400), known as the “father of English poetry” in history. But Mr. Fang used prose when translating “The Canterbury Tales” and “Trolles and Criside”. After reading it against the original text, I wondered if I could reproduce Chaucer’s verse style? However, I didn’t write a letter to ask for advice. I forgot the reason, or I was afraid that discussing the “poisonous weeds” planted by Mr. Fang would not be discovered. But it may also be that I have other interests, and my interest has turned to Latin (I used a Soviet textbook, which I bought at a second-hand bookstore on Fuzhou Road for 20 cents). This practical issue of translating poems into poems was later discussed with Mr. Yang Zhouhan. Mr. Yang said that when he was at the Southwestern Associated University, he tried the translation method with the sixth volume of Virgil’s epic poem “Aeneas”. I feel that the rhythm of the new poems is not yet mature, and the modern poems and Qigu have too few syllables to accommodate the hexameter rhythm of the original text. So he decided to abandon the poetic style, so in the 1950s and 1960s, he translated Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” and Horace’s “Poetry” in prose (see the preface of the translation of “Aeneas”). Two days ago, as if by God’s will, my friend Shi Junhui gave the electronic version of the first issue (1957) of the journal “Western Chinese” of Beijing Foreign Academy, which included Mr. Yang’s article, and commented on Mr. Fang’s translation of Chaucer’s “Kan” and “Te”. While discussing some translation methods, he affirmed the “wiseness” of translating prose to poetry in an emergency, saying that at least faithfulness is guaranteed, and the “extremely subtle” humor of the original work can also be conveyed occasionally. The implication is that I still look forward to a poetic Chinese translation that reproduces Chaucer’s “strong musicality, clear and smooth, effortless, natural and vivid style”, just like Mr. Bian Zhilin’s translation of “Hamlet” (with Wu Xinghua at the same time). Mr. commented on Bian’s translation). This book review, Mr. Yang’s six-volume “Collected Works” has not been received, it is considered a lost article, and it is extremely precious to me. Closer to home. I really switched to Chaucer and medieval literature after I was admitted to the Department of Western Languages of Peking University. Enrolled in February 1982, but Mr. Li Funing, the dean of the supervisor department, visited Yale that academic year. I started to learn Greek and asked Mr. Yang Yezhi (Yu Gong) for advice. The old gentleman was the German teacher of my parents when they were studying in Tsinghua University in the 1930s, so he was my great teacher. He also graduated from Tsinghua University and stayed in the United States with boxer indemnities, studied for a master’s degree at Harvard, and then traveled to Heidelberg for four years. In addition to Germanic studies and classical Chinese, he is also proficient in Western music theory, and edited the “German-Chinese Dictionary”, with extremely high attainments. His translation of Austrian musicologist Hanslick’s “On the Beauty of Music” was said by friends at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music to be compulsory reading for their exams and had a great influence. Coincidentally, like Mr. Fang, he also translated Tao Yuanming (Chinese to German). I went to Mr. Yan Dongyuan’s house to chat and talked about medieval epics. He said that there was an encyclopedic scholar in the English Department of Harvard, George Kittredge, who taught Beowulf. read it. I have read the modern English translation of “Beowulf”, and I know a thing or two about the storyline and mythological motifs such as heroes fighting monsters and slaying dragons to win gold. Now, after listening to Teacher Tai talking about the ancient Germanic heroic society and Nordic (ancient Icelandic) Sharjah, I feel the depth, irony and sadness of the epic after reading it again. So I wanted to learn Old English. In May and June, Mr. Li came back from the United States and was very happy to learn that my interest was in the Middle Ages. It turned out that when he studied at Yale in his early years, he specialized in this section. His doctoral dissertation was on a famous fourteenth-century manuscript, MS Harley 2253 of the British Library (including Middle English, Norman French and Latin poetry, commonly known as Harley Lyrics), Compiled and annotated political satires. The tutors are Robert Menner, a philologist, and Talbot Donaldson, a scholar and translator of Beowulf. But in the middle of writing, New China was established. Mr. Mei Yiqi visited President Mei Yiqi at the China Institute in New York. History, pp. 98, 102). My husband gave me two books: the Oxford edition of Chaucer’s Research Catalog and Sweet’s Introduction to Old English. Let me familiarize myself with the progress in various fields of “Qiao Xue” to prepare for the topic selection of the thesis. Then, starting from autumn, two nights a week, I went to Mr. Wei Xiuyuan’s home to learn Old English. In terms of Middle English, I read Chaucer (representing the London dialect) and local dialect documents by myself, compared the French scholar Mauss’s classic “Handbook of Middle English”, and wrote a book report to discuss with my husband (see “Wooden Legs of Justice·Honey and Wax” for details remember”). The direction of the dissertation is set on Chaucer’s rhythm. This language training method, together with other courses in the Department of Western Languages (such as Shakespeare taught by foreign teachers, and seventeenth-century English literature taught by Mr. Yang Zhouhan), is quite suitable for me. In two and a half years at Peking University, Mr. Li laid the foundation for me in Old English and Qiao Xue. However, when studying medieval literature, there were very few domestic books and periodicals at that time. Many of the materials involved in the dissertation, including Qiao Xue’s new work, Old French knight legends, and collections of Provence/Occitan troubadours, were all sent by me from Mrs. Boss, a foreign teacher, from France (see St. Essay on Poetry · The Tranquility of the Gods”). Among them is “Chaucer and the French Tradition”, which is often cited by scholars. I later learned that the author, Charles Muscatine, was the supervisor of my doctoral supervisor. * In 1984, recommended by Mr. Li, Mr. Yang Zhouhan, and Miss Bernard, a French expert who taught Latin, I entered the English Department of Harvard University, and my tutor was Mr. Ban Sheng, the head of the department. Mr. Ban is a master of medieval literature and Chaucer, and was editing his riverside version of “The Complete Works of Chaucer”. On the day of registration, he asked me all kinds of questions, which books he had read, and so on. Seeing that I already had a foundation in Chinese and poetry, he asked me to skip the introductory course and go directly to the assistant tutor, Mr. William Alfred, a Broadway playwright. Read Beowulf. He also asked me to go to the Hou Dun (Rare and Rare Books) Library to listen to Mr. Bond (William Bond), the old curator, talk about version studies, and learn a little knowledge about medieval manuscripts and ancient books (see “Faith and Forgetting: The Ideal University” for details). In view of the majority of medieval documents in Latin, I was introduced to the Department of Classics to attend lectures. I chose Mr. Richard Tarrant’s Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” and Jan Ziolkowski’s medieval Latin drama. After that, I learned Hebrew and listened to Mr. James Kugel talk about the Bible and Hebrew poetry. Mr. Ban himself opened a “Chaucer Studies” course for me, with a teaching assistant in charge of operating the computer that stored all the transcripts and glossarial concordances of Chaucer’s works. At that time, personal computers were still a rarity and could not be connected to the Internet. We used a huge computer on the top floor of James Building (Department of Behavioral Science). In this way, in the small basement classroom of Warren House (the small building of the English Department), with the silver screen of the LAN terminal flickering, the gentleman smoked a cigarette and discussed Chaucer: the characteristics of manuscripts, dialect vocabulary and rhetoric Style, the order of the chapters in “The Canterbury Tales”, characters and historical background, etc., are all issues that need to be clarified when compiling the “Complete Works”. Thanks to this kind of teaching method of “learning and applying, immediate results, and hard work on the word ‘use'”, I soon decided on the topic of the thesis, which is the Middle English translation of the old French poem “Legend of the Rose” (Glasgow Fragment) In the three fragments, the authenticity of Chaucer’s handwriting. The advantage of this topic is that it has nothing to do with the new theory that old gentlemen hate, and it is purely to settle a Qiao Xue lawsuit that has been fought for centuries. When the dissertation was completed, Mr. Derek Pearsall, the assistant tutor, had just completed the draft of “The Biography of Chaucer”. He said: After reading your textual research, I have changed a few places in the manuscript. Mr. Pi is an English gentleman who speaks with wit and restraint, unlike Americans. In the spring of 1987, after passing the Ph.D. qualification examination and having free time, I prepared to translate Beowulf. Report to Mr. Li, who is very supportive and personally wrote to Mr. Shen Changwen to recommend publication. The following year, Mr. Yang Zhouhan came to Duke University and the National Humanities Center (NHC) to give lectures, and I sent the chapters I tried to translate for advice. Mr. Yang replied with many pointers, and talked about his studying in Oxford and listening to lectures on epic poetry and Chaucer by JRR Tolkien, CL Wrenn, and CS Lewis. That was the last teaching he gave me before he fell ill (see “Song of Isaiah: Drinking Water and Thinking of the Source” for details). The choice to translate “Beowulf” was largely inspired by Mr. Alfred. Not only does he give wonderful lectures—”listening to his lectures, the students absolutely congested their brains, rubbed their eyes and stretched their waists, each and every one of them seemed to come out of a movie theater” (the preface of “Wooden Leg Justice”)—he is also the translator of the modern series “Beowulf” ; His prose translation is graceful and luxurious, both restrained and poetic. Therefore, whenever I have any doubts in the interpretation, I would ask him for advice; sometimes I would go to his apartment on Athens Road to have afternoon tea and listen to him talk: how to drive a tank to Germany, the traps, mistakes and luck along the way, like “a time-ridden The veteran misses his boyhood” (“Bei” 2111). Mr. A is a celibate, and people from the entertainment industry and students from the Harvard Drama Club often come and go in and out of the apartment, which is filled with a chic and unrestrained atmosphere. After his death in 1999, the students established the Alfred Institute, and the house was donated to the institute as a “home for lovers of medieval literature and drama” (see “Genesis Stone Shoulders”, “I It’s Alpha Preface”). Mr. A is a New Yorker, of Irish descent, and a devout Catholic. He made friends with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who taught rhetoric, and together with Mr. Pi, the three of them held regular poetry readings, and “Beowulf” was their repertoire. One day, Mr. Xi suddenly announced that he would also start translating Old English epics, and wanted to replace the “lead singer” of Ireland’s feuding Anglo-Saxons with the voice of an oppressed person. Although he is a famous poet (won the Nobel Prize in 1995), he is not good at teaching, he can only read lecture notes, and the students are drowsy. But this sentence made me suddenly respect. Mr. Xi translated very slowly, deliberating over and over again, looking for a serious and thick vocabulary and rhythm with an Irish accent. The translated version was published in 1999 and is very popular among readers. * When I went to Peking University, I felt very lucky. I caught the last train, and most of the old gentlemen were still alive. Now think about it, Harvard in the 1980s was not the last train? In Mr. Ban’s generation, the humanistic tradition of university autonomy and self-discipline has declined, together with the ethical personality that carries it. In today’s campus, bureaucracy has become utilitarian; and everything is politically correct, and there are many taboos – it is true that from a historical perspective, it is also reasonable (or as Hegel said, was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig) – Mr. Ban If he had been forty years younger, he would have been kicked out of class just because of his self-deprecating identity as an “incorrigible Republican”. Mr. is a Southerner, son of Arizona. He joined the army after graduating from college, and served in the Marine Corps for four years (in addition, he joined the army for five years after graduating from high school, see Harvard College of Arts and Sciences Commemorative Announcement), one of which was in the Korean battlefield. So he is a veteran who has fought against the Volunteer Army. But he never mentioned this experience, it was said in private by his classmates. After demobilization, he entered the English Department of Berkeley and studied for a Ph.D. with Muska Kim. I asked Mr. where the surname Muscakin came from. He said he was a Russian Jew in New York and the record-breaking first Jewish student in the Yale English Department. When World War II broke out, he signed up for the Navy and participated in the D-Day Normandy landings. I didn’t know until I went to Yale Law School that he is also a famous figure in the history of the US Constitution and the history of public education in California. At the time of McCarthy’s “Red Scare”, the left-wingers were persecuted, and the California government made a pledge of allegiance. Mr. Mu took the lead. Thirty-one Berkeley teachers refused to sign the affidavit and were expelled from public office. He then filed a constitutional lawsuit, which lasted three years and won. Many professors at Berkeley supported his just cause, and the university asked him to return to school and resume his post. Throughout his life, Mr. Mu actively participated in the education reform and affirmative action movement in California, and appeared in court many times as an expert witness. His main achievement and handed down work in terms of Qiao Xue is the book “Chaucer and the French Tradition” presented by Mrs. Boss. Mr. Ban’s assistant tutor is also very famous. He is the grandson of the French Impressionist master Renoir, a child star of movies and a top Harvard student, a machine gunner and a “beginner” on the Pacific battlefield, Alain Renoir (Alain Renoir). Once, my husband recalled the old days and said that Mr. Ray was rich in French talent and acting talent, and his “Beowulf” class fascinated a large number of students. Everyone said, why did this outstanding talent fall into the English department? Should go to Hollywood. Mr.’s doctoral dissertation is to explore the poetic art and meaning of the alliterative long poem “Sir Gavin and the Green Knight” in Middle English in the 14th century. Apparently the dissertation was well received, because he was hired by Harvard right after graduating from Berkeley in 1959 and never left. Mr.’s intellectual contribution can be divided into three parts. One is Chaucer, represented by “The Complete Works of Chaucer” (1987) and “Concordance of Chaucer’s Words” (1993), benefiting the academic community. The second is the legend of King Arthur. Starting from his doctoral dissertation, he edited and annotated ancient books, researched the source and development, and elucidated new theories, covering the entire field, including Middle English stanzas and alliterative “Arthur’s Death”, Sir Mallory’s prose ” The Death of Arthur, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Old French Arthurian series of the twelfth century. Thanks to my husband’s teaching, I am also very interested in medieval legends, from The Story of the Holy Grail, Merlin, Lamentation, and The Legend of the Rose to Welsh and Irish myths and legends. This is why I later wrote the story collection “The Glass Island” of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The third is “Beowulf” and Old English poetry. Sir, there are several popular essays, which are a must for all kinds of literary works. The earliest article “Literary Features of Anglo-Saxon Stylized Poetry” still left an anecdote at Harvard. Folklore and mythology studies at Harvard began when Francis Child, the first chair professor of English and a pioneer of Qiao studies, collected and compiled eight volumes of “England and Scotland Folk Songs” (1857~58). After Chai’s student Kitterich (Mr. Yang Yezhi’s teacher) relayed the promotion, it was in the hands of Francis Magoun from the English Department, Milman Parry and Albert Lord from the Classical Department, and it finally became a grand sight . Now it seems to be led by Stephen Mitchell of the Department of Germanic Literature. Teacher Mi was still a “green pepper” (young teacher) in the 1980s, teaching us ancient Icelandic and Nordic Sharjah, a small class with seven or eight students. In 1934, Parry took his student Lord to investigate folk songs in the remote mountains of Yugoslavia, recorded folk singers’ singing, and summed up a set of ballad singing formulas and corresponding poetics. And from this, it is assumed that Homer’s epic also follows the same singing technique, and there was no fixed text at first. However, Parry died young and did not have time to expound his theory—in December 1935, he visited his mother-in-law in Los Angeles and died in his hotel room. The police say the pistol he kept in the suitcase went off and hit the heart (but his daughter suspects it was a homicide)—Magong supported Lord to complete Parry’s unfinished business and went out himself, extending the theory to Old English poetry, arguing that Beowulf is also a product of an oral rather than (monastic or court) written culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ma Gong’s words were prominent. However, Mr. Ban went upstream, naming Ma Gong and Lord at the beginning of the thesis. His argument is very coincidental, starting with translation. A considerable part of the handed down Old English poems was translated from Latin religious documents. Mr. Ban used a series of examples to illustrate the criteria identified by Ma Gong and Lord for judging oral works sung impromptu, such as alliterative compound words and phrases, metaphors (kenning) used as lining words, verses that rarely cross lines (enjambement), etc. It also abounds in Old English translations. If these characteristics cannot be used to distinguish translations from original works, including hymns, hagiography, heroic ballads, and even “Beowulf”, then it does not matter whether the “Parry-Lord theory” advocated by Magong is valid for the interpretation of Homer’s epic poems. No, it is meaningless to determine whether an Old English poem was spoken orally, or recorded extemporaneously. Because those religious poems and fable poems translated from Latin, such as “Genesis”, “Exodus” and “Phoenix”, must have come from the hands of monastery monks and scholars who are proficient in Latin, not from the mouth of illiterate singers . In December 1964, the thesis was read at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in New York. One stone caused a thousand waves, and the academic circle began to re-understand “Beowulf” and Old English poetry. It is said that Ma Gong was a little displeased. After that, Mr. Ban applied for tenure with this article and the new book “Sir Gavin and the Green Knight: Art and Tradition” (1965) as representative works. The chairman of the judging committee is none other than Ma Gong, a senior professor in the English Department. This old Mr. Ma is not a pedant in an ivory tower, he is a flying ace of the First World War, a combat hero. It turned out that he graduated from Harvard, just as the war was tense. He falsely claimed that he was a Canadian (British Dominion), and went to the UK to enroll in the Royal Air Force and became a biplane pilot; soon he was so ambitious that he shot down five enemy planes. After the war, he returned to Harvard, read a Ph.D. in Chinese, stayed on to teach, and became the successor of the genius Kitteridge. The old man is knowledgeable and keen on collecting and researching folk songs and fairy tales. In his later years, he taught himself Finnish and translated the Finnish epic “Kalevala” (Kalevala, 1963). The Finns were greatly moved and awarded him with the country’s highest honor. He was also Lord’s doctoral dissertation supervisor. Therefore, Mr. Ban’s thesis challenged two big-name professors (English Department and Classical Department) of their teachers and students. So the old hero faced a new problem: Can he kill this thorny head that popped up in the Arizona wilderness? After hesitating for a long time, suddenly a gust of wind blew in through the window, opened the young man’s resume, and revealed a line, “Marine Corps…Korean Battlefield”. His heart skipped a beat, and he “remembered his own glory” (mærþo gemunde), just like the old Danish king’s longing for “Bee Wolf” Beowulf (below 654 in “Bei”)… The above is Harvard Old House ( Harvard Yard). I searched on the Internet. Ma Gong retired in 1961, and Mr. Ban was promoted to professor in 1965 (according to the editor’s preface of his anthology “Refutation Collection”, it was 1964). In this way, Ma Gong should not participate in the review when the husband applies for a tenure-track teaching position. Of course, it is not ruled out that there are professors on the committee who belong to Ma Gong’s faction, but uphold the principle of contention among a hundred schools of thought and voted for it. There is no impenetrable wall, and the inside story spreads out, and the troublemakers are attached to Ma Gong. After all, everyone would like an old hero to have one more anecdote. * Now Mr. Ban is also a legend. He died in February 2015 at the age of eighty-six. The commemorative texts of students and colleagues all mentioned his unkempt appearance, smoky office, and wine bottles standing guard on the bookshelves. Smoking, not banning smoking, was a human right in those days. So when he lectures, he can use a cigarette as chalk for a while, and hold it in his mouth for a while. A few times, the mouthpiece was turned upside down, with the filter tip facing out, and the hand reached into the trouser pocket to touch the lighter. At this time, everyone’s hearts were suspended, and they all wanted to see the embarrassment of him lighting the cigarette holder. But he always turned over the cigarette or put the lighter back into his pocket at the last second, causing silent sighs in the classroom. The husband is not interested in the theoretical trend that emerged in the 1980s. When receiving books from others, post-structuralism, feminism, etc., they would be stuffed into the mailboxes of graduate students who he considered “playing with theory”, with a yellow note on the cover: “Donation does not mean approval”. What we graduate students enjoyed most was the potluck he hosted on Thursday afternoons before the Medieval Literature Seminar. That was the system established by my husband when he became the dean of the department. At noon on Thursday, everyone was dispatched from Warren House to the Dolphin Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. Usually he starts it, makes a couple of cold jokes that are now politically incorrect, and then everyone chatters nonsense. After chatting and eating, they turned back to the meeting room on the second floor of Warren House, each with a glass of Spanish sherry, and the seminar began. The speakers are experts invited by Mr. Wang, including visiting international scholars from Canada, Europe and Japan. Doctoral students are also arranged to give lectures on their thesis. I have spoken twice, once on Chaucer’s style of translation (that is, my doctoral dissertation), and once on the heresy of the Beowulf poet. After the speaker finished speaking, the gentleman stood up and poured wine for everyone while commenting or asking questions. His mind seemed to be able to do two things at the same time, learning and drinking. In the words of a female classmate who is now teaching at the University of Minnesota, at that time, every Thursday “was a feast for our city of Camelot and the ancient castle of Gaohuangbo”. Camelot (Camelot) is the capital of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, and the residence of the heroic Knights of the Round Table; The owner of the castle in “The Knight”, the knight of Morgne la Faye – the green robe and green horse, the green-haired giant who plays the game of beheading (see “Glass Island·Green Knight”). Sir is old school gentleman. In his later years, his wife got Parkinson’s disease, and he took good care of her for ten years without a single complaint. I didn’t know this before, but it was revealed by Mr. Pi’s eulogy. Before Mr. Pi came to the United States, he taught at York University in England, where he founded the Center for Medieval Studies. After retiring, he returned to the old house in York; he also went first with his wife. The year before last, when the British crown was at its worst, Mr. Pi also passed away at the age of ninety. * In June 1992, my humble translation of “Beowulf” came out. I applied for a research fee at Yale to go back to China for research, and I visited relatives and friends by the way, including visiting Mr. Shen and the female histories of “Duoshu”, and sampling books. It was the first trip back to China after studying abroad for eight years. After returning to the United States, he visited Mr. Ban in Warren House and gave him a new book. The gentleman was very happy, opened the book, and recited the introduction “The Shipburial of Hilde the Son of the Wheat Sheaf” in old English, and said: What will Chinese readers think, such a pagan hero, a heretical tradition ? He still remembers the topic of my seminar on Thursday. Then I showed it to Mr. W. Jackson Bate in the office next door, and said: Jack, “Beowulf” came to China, isn’t it a merit in the history of thought? Mr. Pei is an authority on literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for his critical biography of intellectual history, “The Life of Keats” and “The Life of Johnson”. It was as if something had hit me in my heart. On the way home while driving, a thought quietly arises: Maybe in terms of “history of thought”, the contribution can be even greater, try translating and annotating holy books? So ten years later, in the spring of 2002, I started another merit: translating scriptures. In the Spring Festival of 2020, the translation and annotation of the most philosophical part of the Hebrew Bible, the “Book of the Prophets”, was completed. The dedication is to commemorate Mr. Ban, quoting two verses from the fourth chapter of “Divine Comedy: Inferno” he likes: Uscicci mai alcuno, o…
This article is transferred from: http://www.ideobook.com/3246/beowulf-preface/
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.