Comparing Two Versions Of The Seafarer

Promt: Compare the two versions of The Seafarer by Raffel and Pound and give reasoning for why one is a better translation, in terms of preserving the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition and the overall feel of the poem.

It would not be possible to translate The Seafarer perfectly, keeping all of its patently Anglo-Saxon poetic devices intact. Because much of their poetic tradition involves the sounds of the words themselves, unless there were similar-sounding synonyms in modern English for each there is no way to duplicate the original feel. Regardless, both of the translations we looked at took some measures to preserve the Anglo-Saxon artistry that went into The Seafarer. The translation by Ezra Pound did more to capture the original essence of the poem than Burton Raffel 's version, though.
Raffel takes the line and translates it for meaning, ignoring the word order. Pound 's version, on the other hand, keeps the word order mostly the same as the original, even though the syntax doesn 't really make sense. Raffel 's line is more immediately understandable, but it loses some of the meaning and makes it sound less like a poem and more like the beginning to any old story. In the second line Raffel moves even farther from the original, while Pound once again adopts as similar a word order as possible, and even has some of the alliteration. Line three has only three words, but Raffel extrapolates a few extra meanings from the word earfoth, meaning harsh, and throwian, to suffer. His interpretation seems technically accurate, but Pound uses less words to make the line feel more like its Old English counterpart. He even keeps the word oft, since its meaning has not really changed. Theres more alliteration in line four, and once again Pound elects to stay true to the poetics while Raffel 's translation talks about a hundred ships, something apparently invented by the translator