Salvete! Wæs hæl!

Introduction
Purposes
Wrap Up


Introduction

This blog is a platform from which I'm going to be writing, gushing, and otherwise working through the sense of my various translation projects. Currently I'm working on a translation of Beowulf from Anglo-Saxon, and another of the thirteenth century song "Tempus adest Floridum" from Latin.

Two old and gone languages might seem a little, well, anachronistic in this internet-set age of ours, but as Facebook offers its site in Latin and other blogs for old languages exist, there is definitely a readership for the thoughts and meanderings of a wit as he moves meaning from one language and into another.

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Purposes

Of course, to reach the conclusion that there is an audience for this sort of thing I'm applying an idea that I've always tried to keep firmly in mind: that among a finite number of people with access to print media there's definitely a sizable audience for anything from a slightly more finite number of genres and forms.

To put it more simply, there are a lot of people in the world, and somewhere out there there's got to be a solid 5000 of them interested in what I have to say or the stories that I have to tell. Scale that number up or down as you please.

However, the primary purpose of this blog is to give me a space to write about my own reactions to what I translate. These will definitely include bits where I wax academical, but there will also be bits where I just laugh at the literal translation of a word, or sit in wide-eyed wonder at how a perfectly awesome word did not make it into casual Modern English.

I might even flex some alumni muscle and pull out etymologies from the Oxford English Dictionary Online (hereafter the OEDO) to show these words' journeys if they've been traced.

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Wrap Up

So, as you might guess, what I write here is going to generally be scholarly but with a more casual tone than that which you'll find in an academic journal or book. I'll be keeping the long sentences, though.

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