erature.

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

But even granting the value of the _Genesis_ as a fit subject for
translation, and the necessity for the employment of prose, the reader
may still quarrel with the particular _kind_ of prose hereinbelow
essayed; so a brief explanation and, it is hoped, vindication of the
theory of translation here followed would seem desirable, inasmuch as
considerable divergence is intended from the methods adopted by the
various translators of the _Beowulf_, for example. First, Biblical
phraseology has been eschewed, partly because in a modern writer it
savors of affectation, but chiefly because his Bible was the point
of departure for the Old English author, and to return now in the
translation to our Bible would be a stultification of his purposes by a
sort of _argumentum in circulo_. Secondly, archaisms, poetic diction,
and unusual constructions (the "translation English" anathematized by
the Rhetorics) have been so far as possible avoided, contrary to the
practice of most translators from Old English poetry, because it is
felt strongly that such usages will not produce upon modern readers the
effect that this poetry produced originally upon the readers or hearers
for whom it was intended. For this poetry could not have seemed alien
or exotic to its original public: either through familiar poetic
convention, or owing to the staccato and ejaculatory character of
ordinary spoken language at the time, this spasmodic, apostrophic poetry
must have seemed natural and beautiful, in the seventh or eighth
century. But--

Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastodon,
Nor we those times.

To translate is to modernize. This rendering, therefore, is not an
artificial, pseudo-antique hybrid, but frankly endeavors to convey its
original to modern readers in idiomatic modern literary English, devoid
of any conscious mannerisms whatsoever. The writer has aimed at the
utmost literal fidelity consistent with the observance of all