Old English: This isn't Shakespeare

Ok, sorry if it's prideful, but I have to take a moment and shout it from the rooftops, because I'm proud and it feels fantastic:

I JUST FINISHED TRANSLATING BEOWULF, FROM THE ORIGINAL OLD ENGLISH (ANGLO-SAXON, IF YOU PREFER) TO MODERN ENGLISH!!! 3,180 LINES OF OLD ENGLISH VERSE--THAT'S JUST COOL!!!

Thanks for listening to that. Really, though, I can read this incredible language and actually translate something ancient and brilliant, and that feels wonderful. Maybe even more so because I've only been studying it since September and can do this and make transcriptions from original manuscripts (in crazy scripts like "square miniscule," where there is little to no punctuation and spacing is random so you have to decide which letters go together to make which words--it's such a remarkable puzzle!).

Now for the apology to all of you who may have read the Heaney or other translation of Beowulf, they are good, but it is nothing like reading it in the original. There is something special about the process of pondering how to render a word from one language into another, sifting through a number of possible definitions and meanings and ultimately choosing one while recognizing that your choice is colored and nuanced by all the possibilities you didn't choose--that meaning is made more rich because of the things that it isn't, as well as what it is. That's antithesis, for you, and I love it.

Here's a link, so you can see what it is I can read now...pretty cool, really: http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html