SOURCE: Raffel, Burton. “Judith: Hypermetricity and Rhetoric.” In Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, edited by Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese, pp. 124-34. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Raffel reflects on the reasons for his “disquiet” while translating Judith into modern English and explores some of the problematic aspects of the poem.

I hope it will not seem sententious if I explain that the validity of literary criticism depends, for me, on there being some substantial connection between the critic's criticism and his own interior world. My purpose in this essay, in accordance with that notion, is to account for the sense of disquiet—sometimes reaching rather intense levels—which I experienced while translating Judith.¹ I do not propose an elaborate self-analysis; neither do I intend self-advertisement. Simply stated, my primary relationship to Judith is as a translator into modern...