Here s what made the front page of the Kilkenny People on November 26, 1971 - 50 years ago The Guardian’s 200 guinea fiction prize has been won this year .
In the introduction to his 1952 translation of
Beowulf, the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan ventured that in translation ‘communication must take place; the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush, as with original poetry’. Morgan’s aim was to ‘interest and at times to excite the reader of poetry without misleading anyone who has no access to the original’. Fidelity and accuracy are all well and good, but a true translation must
speak to the reader. It must connect in a way that sparks a dialogue with the tingling life fluttering within their bone-house, to borrow a much-loved Old English kenning. And it is precisely this deeply exciting conversation – between translator and reader, between the Old English epic and the 21st-century moment – that Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical verse translation of