The Literature Collection

Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.RinglBeowulf

Beowulf is the oldest narrative poem in the English language, embodying historical traditions that go back to actual events and personages in fifth- and sixth-century Scandinavia. During the long preliterate centuries when these traditions were transmitted in the form of oral poetry, they were combined with with a number of legendary and folktale elements (among these are Grendel and his mother, the dragon, and probably the hero Beowulf himself). The written text of the poem, as we have it today, took shape in England during the middle or late Anglo-Saxon period and survives in a single manuscript from around the year 1000. < more >

The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.DeipnoSub

The author of The Deipnosophists was an Egyptian, born in Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile. The age in which he lived is somewhat uncertain, but his work, at least the latter portion of it, must have been written after the death of Ulpian the lawyer, which happened A.D. 228.

Athenaeus appears to have been imbued with a great love of learning, in the pursuit of which he indulged in the most extensive and multifarious reading; and the principal value of his work is, that by its copious quotations it preserves to us large fragments from the ancient poets, which would otherwise have perished. There are also one or two curious and interesting extracts in prose; such, for instance, as the account of the gigantic ship built by Ptolemmus Philopator, extracted from a lost work of Callixenus of Rhodes.

The work commences, in imitation of Plato's Phaedo, with a dialogue, in which Athenaeus and Timocrates supply the place of Phaedo and Echecrates. The former relates to his friend the conversation which passed at a banquet given at the house of Laurentius, a noble Roman, between some of the guests, the best known of whom are Galen and Ulpian.

Athenaeus was also the author of a hook entitled, On the Kings of Syria, of which no portion has come down to us.

Fables, by Robert Louis Stevenson
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.StvnsnFables

Robert Louis Stevenson's Fables was published in New York by Longmans, Green in 1902. Previously, the thirteen fables had been published with other works. Stevenson had a long-standing fascination with the fable as a literary form. In 1888, he approached his publisher with a collection of fables that he had composed over the years. This edition includes six etchings by Ethel King Martyn.

Nordic Translation Series
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.NordicTrans

The Nordic Translation Series was published by the University of Wisconsin Press between 1965 and 1970. The series presented here contains eleven texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. The works were translated into English from their original languages, which include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Finnish.