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Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 3494242" data-attributes="member: 10412">They're in the mail. Should arrive any day, now.Though, honestly, if you're interested, there are these buildings called libraries.For Beowulf, I prefer the dual-language edition of Howell D. Chickering for overall quality, but there is no denying that Seamus Heaney's translation is probably the most interesting and poetically solid one out there right now. The prose translations, with near universality, both suck and blow.John Gardner was working on an interesting translation of Gilgamesh at the time of his death. His translations varied widely in quality, but that one looked like it was working out to be one of the good ones. Akkadian cuneiform, though, is even more unknown to us than Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old English or Latin, and its poetic devices and pronunciation more alien than many other languages, so prose doesn't really lose anything since, poetically, we don't know what we're losing, or what we've lost.In any case, Tolkien's scholarly work on Sir Gawain was invaluable and ground-breaking. His translation, meh. Having read it a couple of times, I'll never read it again.</blockquote>