When I was teaching formal poetry at Emerson College, I started one class by asking the 15 students to read three blinded translations of Beowulf: Heaney, Sullivan/Murphy and the hideous Raffel version I was taught in high school. I then asked them to rank (with no ties) the three works, and to list some reasons for their rankings. Fourteen ranked Sullivan/Murphy the best, one ranked Heaney the best, and they all ranked Raffel the worst.
So Tim & Alan can claim a clinical trial proved their translation was the best!
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