My head is spinning! For an A&S50 challenge and a Pentathlon entry, I’m going to do a rendition of an Old English poem (“The Wife’s Lament”) with a Modern English translation. I’ll be taking parts of the poem and reading the Old English for a few lines and then the Modern English translation. It will be cool, but I’ll definitely be entering it in the “Dramatic READING” section. No way am I going to try to memorize 53 lines of Old English. Right now I’m learning pronunciation and will write the OE out phonetically to do that. I’m also translating so I understand the meaning of the words so I can modulate my voice properly.

This is a LONG way from actually learning OE. I’ve never been good at learning new languages although I pronounce them well. This means I can read well from text but don’t have a clue what I am actually saying. Ah well.

“The Wife’s Lament” is an interesting project. It’s meaning is unclear as the narrator seems to tell a  disconnected story. I don’t pretend to know OE but I do have access to dictionaries and different translations. My aim is to compare them and then put my own construction on them, since modern English translations differ quite a bit in their interpretation of what the narrator is saying.