Notes on Beowulf (review)

Reviews 195 translators (especially Jean de Meun, Chaucer and Walton) as not only contesting the original (Latin) text but also as budding on, and even competing with, the earlier translations. This section of Copeland's book is especially interesting because of various astute comments on the several audiences which can be supposed for the vernacular texts from an examination of the translators' prologues which so often accompanied them. It is a pity the concept 'audience' is not listed in the General Index because important observations and speculations on the nature of the medieval pubtic the vernacular versions may have been addressedtoare scattered throughout the work. In the final two chapters, reversing now her emphasis, Copeland examines in minute detail how the exegetical role of translation assumes the productive force of rhetoric. Her task is to trace the fortunes of rhetorical invention in the medieval theories of discourse and in medieval translation. Of these two chapters, Chapter six ('Rhetorical invention as hermeneutical performance') is the more theoretical, while Chapter 7 ('Translation as rhetorical invention: Chaucer and Gower')tilustratesthe author's concept of 'secondary translation' by an examination of the Legend of Good Women and the Confessio amantis. A valauable bibliography and notes to the several chapters complete this exceUent book which shouldfinda place on every medievalist's shelves. MaxweU J. Walkley Department of French Studies University of Sydney Cosijn, P. J., Notes on Beowulf, Introduced, translated and annotated by Rolf H. B r e m m e r jr., Jan van den Berg and David F. Johnson (Leeds Texts and Monographs, N e w Series 12), Leeds, Leeds Studies in English, 1991; paper; pp. xxxvi, 120; R.R.P. £28.00. To those who came to their Beowulf in N e w Zealand in the 1940s lacking Dutch, the name Cosijn was known at least well enough to suffer constant mispronunciation, though it was not as hard done by in this respect as that of Johannes Hoops. For students in Auckland and Wellington universities this misdemeanour would be likely to draw conection from the great N e w Zealand teacher, P. S. Ardern, whose running glosses and commentary were an indispensable adjunct to the reading of Beowulf'in those times at those places. A modified 'philological' tradition was still in strong command of teaching. The Klaebertextwas standard. Cosijn was among the many names strewn about in Klaeber's and Ardern's notes. Reading Cosijn's own Notes for the first time in full was a pleasandy nostalgic excursion. To do so in the centenary year of their pubUcation against a background of Klaeber's notes, and those of several earlier and later editions of Beowulf, was a stimulating experience as weU. The exercise was greatiy helped 196 Reviews by the translator's painstaking expansion of each of Cosijn*s own references and by Bremmer's biographical essay. It was given piquancy by a startling etching of Cosijn at 57, a man of serious but hirsute countenance, with features so strong astobe almost a caricature, of Don Quixote perhaps. Klaeber's obvious high opinion is shown not only by the forty or more references his edition makes to Cosijn (Notes p. xi) but also by the fact that of the 85 textual and interpretative commentators listed on pp. clix-clxv and 449, only Cosijn for his Aanteekeningen (1892) ('Concise, acute, illuminating') and Hoops for his Kommentar (1932), receive unrestricted approval. This dip into the history of Beowulf scholarship was otherwise salutary. One tends to forget that a whole process of gnawing on small bones has gone into shaping the skeletal concision many m o d e m references. Often, of course, the bones to be picked are as much those of, or antipodeanly, with, rival commentators as of the text. Cosijn's robust open jeering ('To insist that O E wist has the sense of "prey" is equivalent to a public confession of utter incompetence', p. 4) is likely nowadays to be replaced by sneering innuendo. Though Cosijn's effect on m o d e m texts may not go much further than a general acceptance of Drihten wedera (2186) or a partial acceptance of, for example, inwitpanculum (749), there are many...