Book is v + 106 pp. Miscellaneous translations from many languages, as the subtitle indicates: as their names are listed in the table of contents, “Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Tartar, Tibetian, Chinese, Mandchon, Russian, Malo-Russian, Polish, Finnish, Anglo Saxon, Ancient Norse, Suabian, German, Dutch, Danish, Ancient Danish, Swedish, Ancient Irish, Irish, Gaelic, Ancient British, Cambrian British, Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, [and] Rommany.” Within this book, "The Words of Beowulf, Son of Egtheof" is the only representative of Old English ("Anglo Saxon").

An 8-line stanzaic rendering of Beowulf, ll. 1386-89, presented in the manner of a lyric poem:

Every one beneath the heaven
Should of death expect the day,
And let him, whilst life is given,
Bright with fame his name array.

For amongst the countless number
In the clay-cold grave at rest,
Lock'd in arms of iron slumber,
He most happy is and blest. (39)

Targum was printed in a run of 100 copies by the same publishing house that had just printed the 8-volume Manchu Bible overseen by Borrow on his assignment in St. Petersburg for the British and Foreign Bible Society. A few weeks later, Schulz and Beneze printed another booklet by Borrow (14 pages), also in 100 copies: The Talisman: from the Russian of Alexander Pushkin, with Other Pieces. Some copies of Targum were issued by the publisher with The Talisman … with Other Pieces included as a kind of appendix; see separate entry for this bibliographical form.

Borrow would later lightly revise "The Words of Beowulf" and print it in a prospectus of future publications appended to his novel The Romany Rye (1857; see separate entry), but the collection for which the revised version of the poem was intended never appeared.

• Michael Collie and Angus Fraser, George Borrow: A Bibliographical Study (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1984).

• Britt Mize, "Beowulf Translation in the 1830s: An Unseen Reflection, an Unremarked Debut, and an Unnoticed Text," Journal of English and Germanic Philology (forthcoming).

Not in Fry, MO1, GR, or MO2.

Collie and Fraser (see Scholarship, above) specify that “Targum was printed in May and June … and sewn in July” of 1835 and that “The Talisman was printed in August and September” of the same year (George Borrow: A Bibliographical Study, 102). It is unclear how this timeline relates to the publisher's issue of some copies of Targum bound together with The Talisman … with Other Pieces.

BAM.