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Transcribers Note: Typographic errors in the original have beenretained. In the table of contents there are two sets of page numbers.The first appears to be the page numbers from the original MS. Thesecond set in parentheses are the page numbers from this facsimile.As the body of the text is referred to by line numbers, that sectionhas not been rewrapped.

Page 134

YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH

ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR

XLVIII

GENESIS A

TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD ENGLISH

BY

LAWRENCE MASON, PHD.

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1915

Page 135

Page 136

PREFACE

The purpose of the translator in offering to the public this version ofthe Genesis is to aid in forwarding—be it by but one jot ortittle—the general knowledge and appreciation of Old Englishliterature. Professed students in this department will always have anincentive to master the language; but to the public at large thestrangeness of this medium will prove an insurmountable barrier, and thegeneral reader must therefore either remain in ignorance of our olderliterary monuments or else employ translations. The presentcontribution[1] to the growing body of such translations possesses,perhaps, more than a single interest or appeal, in that it rendersaccessible not only a poem of considerable intrinsic worth, a poemassociated with the earliest of the great names in English literaryhistory, and a forerunner and possible source of Paradise Lost, butalso an important example of a literary genre once immensely popular,though now quite fallen into abeyance—namely, the lengthy versifiedScriptural paraphrase. For some idea of the prominent part played bythis form, even so late as the seventeenth century, the reader isreferred to any comprehensive manual of English literature.

In this translation, prose has been employed instead of verse, for tworeasons. In the first place, no metrical Page 137form has yet been found which,in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern Englishthe effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And inthe second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet shouldattempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be fewand far between, unless prose were used.

But even granting the value of the Genesis as a fit subject fortranslation, and the necessity for the employment of prose, the readermay still quarrel with the particular kind of prose hereinbelowessayed; so a brief explanation and, it is hoped, vindication of thetheory of translation here followed would seem desirable, inasmuch asconsiderable divergence is intended from the methods adopted by thevarious translators of the Beowulf, for example. First, Biblicalphraseology has been eschewed, partly because in a modern writer itsavors of affectation, but chiefly because his Bible was the point ofdeparture for the Old English author, and to return now in thetranslation to our Bible would be a stultification of his purposes by asort of argumentum in circulo. Secondly, archaisms, poetic diction,and unusual constructions (the "translation English" anathematized bythe Rhetorics) have been so far as possible avoided, contrary to thepractice of most translators from Old English poetry, because it is feltstrongly that such usages will not produce upon modern readers theeffect that this poetry produced originally upon the readers or hearersfor whom it was intended. For this poetry could not have seemed alien orexotic to its original public: either through familiar poeticconvention, or owing to the staccato and ejaculatory character ofordinary spoken language at the time, this spasmodic, apostrophic poetrymust have seemed natural and beautiful, in the seventh or eighthcentury. But—