Tag Archives: poetry

Teaching Literature

Beowulf: Lost in Translation

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A lot of folks do a translation exercise with Beowulf.  If I remember correctly, the old Scott, Foresman books I used in high school had one.  This ReadWriteThink lesson plan looks like a good one.  I created one for my own students, and I thought I’d share it here.

This translation exercise examines one of my favorite parts of the poem: the scene when Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm off.  I took four translations done by Michael Alexander, Seamus Heaney, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Constance Hieatt.  The last is a prose translation.  I found all of these translations at BeowulfTranslations.net.

After examining the translations, students will answer the questions on the second page (I refer on the handout to pages on the reverse because I always make double-sided copies when I can).  The excerpts in our particular texbook, Prentice Hall’s Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes: The British Tradition (also true of their new Penguin edition, though pages differ) are from the Burton Raffel translation.  This is most likely because the Raffel translation is published by Signet, who is owned by Penguin-Putnam.  I’m not sure of the exact relationship between Penguin and Prentice Hall, but there appears to be some sort of understanding.  If readers know, feel free to chime in.

These are the questions:

  1. Compare the translations. What are the major differences that you see? The major similarities?
  2. Burton Raffel translated the version in your textbook (p. 48, lines 381-393) in 1963. Compare this version with the others on the reverse.
  3. Which translation do you think is most interesting/exciting/easy to understand/appealing?
  4. What Anglo-Saxon literary devices that we’ve studied (kennings, caesuras, alliteration) appear? In which versions are these devices preserved?
  5. Which Anglo-Saxon literary devices don’t seem to translate well—in other words, they don’t appear to be easy for translators to work into their versions of Beowulf? Speculate: why do you think this might be?
  6. I included one prose translation of Beowulf, though many more exist.  How do you think a prose translation differs from a poetic one? What qualities might be compromised in a prose translation?
  7. What conclusions can you draw about the process of translation?
  8. What would your advice be to translators (consider the following:  What do they need to think about in order to produce a readable translation that is still faithful to the spirit of the poem? What should they avoid doing?)

I freely admit an affinity for the Heaney translation, but I think others make a more poetic statement with this particular passage.  I am not a huge fan of Raffel’s translation, despite having written a teacher’s guide for this version.  What I hope students gain from this exercise is an understanding that translation is somewhat subjective.  They may not be getting the most accurate, word-for-word version in modern English, and different translators focus on different elements.  Like the ReadWriteThink lesson states, I want them to understand translations are rarely the literary works themselves so much as they are an “imaginative reconstruction” of these works.  I also want them to think about the number of decisions translators must face.

You can download the handouts here:

They are also available on the Handouts page.

Teaching Literature, Teaching Writing

Teaching Poetry

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Inspired by this post by Traci Gardner at the NCTE Inbox Blog, I thought I would share some of my own resources for teaching poetry.

Getting the KnackAs Gardner mentioned, Getting the Knack by Stephen Dunning and William Stafford is a really good resource with lesson plans and ideas for poetry writing assignments.  I have used their found poem exercise many times, always to great success.  I don’t care how old students are, they always enjoy using scissors and glue.  These poems can be surprisingly good and surprisingly challenging to write, too.  What I like about the book is that it presents poetry as a craft, and the exercises enable all students to become poets.  This book has been in my professional development collection for years.  It is a good addition to a middle grades or secondary high school English teacher’s teaching and writing toolbox.

Gardner didn’t mention this book, probably because it is out of print, but Joseph I. Tsujimoto’s Teaching Poetry Writing to Adolescents is another handy book to have in your collection, and you can find it through used book sellers at Amazon (follow the book link).  It’s a shame this resource was allowed to go out of print!  The strength of Tsujimoto’s work is in the variety of poetry writing assignments (18) and the student models.  In this NCTE article from Classroom Notes Plus (October 2002), Rosemary Laughlin writes glowingly of Tsujimoto’s models, and this article written by Betsey Coleman in VOYA (PDF) also praises his work highly, and both say pretty much what I would say.

Inside OutI have also used Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing by Dan Kirby and Tom Liner (in an earlier edition not including third author Dawn Latta Kirby, but instead with writer Ruth Vinz).  The focus in this book is not strictly on poetry, but on teaching writing in general, including research writing and expository writing.

Lisa Huff has a a new series of posts on teaching poetry at her blog, and the Reflective Teacher’s Literature Pocket Mod could easily be focused on just poetry.  Finally, I posted my poetry unit idea to the UbD Educators wiki, and I would love feedback.