Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

Beowulf is an epic Old English poem, written in the strict metre of alliterative verse. Each line consists of two half-lines, separated by a caesura; each half-line contains two stresses but a variable number of syllables. A sentence may end mid-line. Rhyme is rare throughout the poem. Stressed words alliterated; all vowels were considered to alliterate with each other. Half-line phrases are compact; they are often made indirect using metaphorical kennings. Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator, born and raised in a Roman Catholic family in Northern Ireland. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. He hoped that translating Beowulf would result in "a kind of aural antidote," and a "linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor." Heaney began work on the translation while teaching at Harvard, but a lack of connection to the source material caused him to take a break from the effort. The translation was reinvigorated once he realized connections between the form and manner of the original poem and his own early poetic work, including how his early poems diverted from the conventional English pentameter line and "conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics." == Book ==

Publication history Beowulf: A New Verse Translation was first published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York, and by Faber and Faber in London, followed in 2000 by a paperback edition and a bilingual edition. It was included in the seventh edition (2000) of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Contents The book is dedicated in memory of Heaney's friend, the poet and translator Ted Hughes. An introduction gives first an overview of Beowulf as a poem. Heaney notes that "one publication stands out" when considering it as a work of literature: J. R. R. Tolkien's 1936 essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Heaney then provides a note about his translation, writing that "I suppose all I am saying is that I consider Beowulf to be part of my voice-right." He at once follows this by stating that coming from an Irish nationalist background and having learnt Irish in a culture which saw that as the language it had been robbed of, it took him "a while" to persuade himself that he was born into the language of Beowulf. The translation is followed by family trees of the Danish/Shielding's, Swedish/Ongentheow's, and Geat/Hrethel's dynasties; and a note on Old English names by Alfred David. Plot Heorot, the mead-hall of King Hroðgar of the Danes, is under nightly attack by the monster Grendel, killing the king's men as they sleep. The Prince of the Geats, Beowulf, comes to defend Heorot and defeat the monster Grendel, which he accomplishes by wounding the monster through unarmed combat. Soon after, Grendel's Mother comes to avenge her son, but Beowulf slays her as well, this time by using a sword found among the hoard of treasure in the Mother's cavernous abode. Beowulf returns to the Geats and becomes their king, ruling for 50 years up until a great dragon begins to terrorize his people. The now old Beowulf attempts to fight the new monster, which he accomplished but at the price of a fatal wound. As he lies dying, he declares Wiglaf as his heir. The old king is buried with a monument by the sea. == Reception ==

Prizes and accolades Heaney's translation was widely welcomed by critics, scholars, and poets, winning the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The scholar James S. Shapiro states in The New York Times that Heaney's Beowulf is "as attuned to the poem's celebration of the heroic as he is to its melancholy undertow". Another poet, Andrew Motion, wrote in The Financial Times that Heaney had "made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece". In his introduction, Heaney recalls that he had noticed the likeness of Old English þolian to the Northern Irish (often described as "Ulster") dialect "thole", meaning to suffer or endure; it was a word his aunt and his "big-voiced" relatives had used, giving him a link between the poem and his family. Megan Rosenfeld, in The Washington Post, wrote that the translation was "not criticism-free" The scholar and literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote in the London Review of Books, republished in The Guardian, that it was a mistake to imagine that poetry could somehow get right to the heart of material things by using a certain choice of language; it was nonsense to imagine that "Northern" poetry like Beowulf and Ted Hughes's The Hawk in the Rain were "craggy and brawny" while "southern ones are more devious and deliquescent". All poems, Eagleton wrote, make use of linguistic tricks to create the feeling of real phenomena, of restoring words to their full value, and Heaney liked that impression; "hence, perhaps, the rural-born Heaney's affection for Beowulf's burnished helmets and four-square, honest-to-goodness idiom, its Ulster-like bluffness and blood-spattered benches." He contrasted it with those of two earlier Harvard professors, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's stumbling and unidiomatic 1838 version of a short passage, and William Alfred in the 1960s, accurate, confident, but rather literal, where "The craft of Heaney's verse line is to make artifice seem natural, so that the syntax of the sea-journey, for example, sails along as swiftly and effortlessly as the ship." Katy Waldman, in Slate, writes that there is "no real contest" between Heaney's verse and J. R. R. Tolkien's prose translations. She quotes Tolkien's remark that "it is a composition not a tune", adding at once that "Heaney made it both". In her view, Heaney's translation "at once airier and rougher, feels more contemporary, less bogged down in academic minutiae" than Tolkien's prose, which she grants was never intended for publication. Critical Howell Chickering, whose Beowulf verse translation appeared in 1977, called the translation long-awaited in The Kenyon Review, and noted that most reviewers came to it with little or no knowledge of Old English. He admired many aspects of the translation, while criticising specific details for what he saw as failures of Heaney's own poetic logic. He noted that "professional Anglo-Saxonists" In Chickering's view, the best of Heaney's work is in the dramatic speeches, some 40% of the text, offering "the sense and tone of the Old English with effortless grace"; he notes that Nicholas Howe called the speeches faithful to the point of "ventriloquism". Shippey noted the opening "So", commenting that if "Right" is the "English English" for hwaet, then there were two folk narratives in Heaneywulf, one personal and one academic; and that if Heaney thought that his dialect somehow "preserves a native purity" lost in other dialects, that was a delusion. He observed also Heaney's intention to be "foursquare", and analysed some passages for this quality, concluding that the Anglo-Saxon was at once more uncompromising and more open-ended (using the subjunctive) than Heaney, treading "much more delicately". The scholar Thomas McGuire disagrees with Howe's assertion that Heaney's rendering of Beowulfs opening "levels the diction" and "flattens their claim on the audience". On the other hand, McGuire agrees with Howe that Heaney has reduced the poem's "ceremonial" quality, by splitting the "single grammatical [unit] into two parts", where Liuzza's opening, quoted by Howe, retains the structure of the original: == Notes ==