I was doing some reading on Chaucer just now, and ran across a Literature Network post on reading 'The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales' aloud. The text cited to be read was a modern English verse translation.
One of the repliers noted that you should not buy a prose translation to Chaucer, which, for some reason, made me a little annoyed. I'm a visiting student at Oxford for the next two terms, and I would be destroyed academically if I did not read texts in prose translations. Motivated and aggravated, I decided to share my personal experiences with you all in hope of enjoying and studying verse in translation all the better.
To be very blunt, if you're reading for academic purposes, you need to read translations in prose. If you read no further, just read that one sentence over again: Reading for academic purposes? Yes? Go prose or go home. When an editor/translator takes a passage and re-places it in verse, they have to meet the same restrictions the original author placed upon themselves - alliteration, meter, rhyme scheme, etc. This convolutes the text and, if you end up writing an analysis on Beowulf's brawn when the poet never actually wrote a word congruent to 'brawn,' you might be in a tough (*shhnap*) spot when it comes time to receive commentary from you teacher.
My favorite example is Simon Armitage's excellent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a contemporary piece to The Canterbury Tales but, because it came from a different region less affected by Anglo-Norman, also often unreadable. Armitage adapts everything to verse in the same alliterative scheme as the Gawain poet, but by necessity he also ends up cutting some words out and placing some words into the poem. Guenivere, Armitage acknowledges in his prologue, is never said to have quartz eyes. But the implication of the Middle English text is that her unadorned self is more worthy than all the gems that surround her, and as such to convey that same impression in modern English verse he takes liberties.
A prose translation, on the other hand, does not suffer from any of these faults. It is necessarily distanced from the text by translation, but, given cognates, you can usually locate the prose-to-verse passage and begin to understand the...sens of the original. Your professors will one day, if not are already, ask(ing) you to quote in the original language, so this becomes extremely relevant when you are actually in the writing process.
My rant over, I hope I've made it clear that this is solely for academic purposes. Armitage's translation is excellent for exposure to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - in fact, I most highly recommend you get the audio version. But when you become extremely accustomed to working in between prose and verse translations, you'll find that given the time you will love a work even more in the original as you both understand the literal meanings of the words and the shape in which they were originally crafted.
Best of luck to you all.
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