The book was widely but not universally welcomed by critics, scholars, and poets in Britain and America. The poet Andrew Motion wrote that Heaney had made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece, while David Donoghue called it a brilliant translation. The critic Terry Eagleton wrote that Heaney had superb control of language and had made a magnificent translation, but that Heaney had failed to notice that treating British and Irish culture as one was a liberal Unionist viewpoint. Howell Chickering noted that there had been many translations, and that it was impossible for any translation to be pure Beowulf, as no translation of the poem could be faithful. He admired the dramatic speeches, but was doubtful of Heaney's occasional use of Northern Irish dialect, as it meant he was writing in "two different Englishes". The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey wrote that if Heaney thought his dialect had somehow maintained a native purity, he was deluded.
Background
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.[2]
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.[3] 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."[4]
The book is dedicated in memory of Heaney's friend, the poet and translator Ted Hughes.[6]
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".[7] 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."[8] 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.[9]
The translation is followed by family trees of the Danish/Shielding's, Swedish/Ongentheow's, and Geat/Hrethel's dynasties;[10] and a note on Old English names by Alfred David.[11]
Ðá cóm of móre under misthleoþum Grendel gongan· godes yrre bær· mynte se mánscaða manna cynnes sumne besyrwan in sele þám héan·
In off the moors, down through the mist-bands God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth, hunting for prey in the high hall.
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 lays dying, he declares Wiglaf as his heir. The old king is buried with a monument by the sea.
Heaney's translation was widely welcomed by critics, scholars, and poets, winning the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.[12] 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".[4]Joan Acocella, writing in The New Yorker, compares Heaney's version to the posthumous translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but states that Heaney focuses more on the poetics rather than the details and rhythm of the original, creating a necessarily free version more fit for the modern reader.[13] Another poet, Andrew Motion, wrote in The Financial Times that Heaney had "made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece".[13]
Other commentators, while respecting the translation, noted that it brought a distinctively Northern Irish voice to the poem.[14] 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.[15] Megan Rosenfeld, in The Washington Post, wrote that the translation was "not criticism-free"[16] but had been "hailed as newly accessible"[16] in the press, for example by The Independent in London.[16]
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".[17] 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."[17] He called the translation "magnificent", but wrote that treating British and Irish culture as one is a viewpoint of "liberal Unionism", intended "to rationalise British rule of part of the island" of Ireland; Eagleton calls it typical of Heaney to fail to notice this; and difficult to see how Beowulf could be the origin of the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough or Simon Armitage. All the same, he writes, Heaney is "so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases" in his translation, dealing casually with the poem's alliterative structure.[17]
Daniel G. Donoghue, in Harvard Magazine, called Heaneywulf a "brilliant translation ... resonant with the old, [but] innovative at every turn".[18] He contrasted Heaney's version 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."[18]
Beornas gearwe on stefn stigon; streamas wundon, sund wið sande; secgas bæron on bearm nacan beorhte frætwe, guðsearo geatolic; guman ut scufon, weras on wilsið, wudu bundenne. Gewat þa ofer wægholm, winde gefysed, flota famiheals fugle gelicost, æt ymb antid oþres dogores wundenstefna gewaden hæfde þæt ða liðende land gesawon, brimclifu blican, beorgas steape, side sænæssas;
Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank, sand churned in the surf, warriors loaded a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear in the vessel's hold, then heaved out, away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship. Over the waves, with the wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird. until her curved prow had covered the distance and on the following day, at the due hour, those seafarers sighted land, sunlit cliffs, sheer crags and looming headlands, the landfall they sought.
Donoghue commented that "every translation negotiates a set of relationships among the original, the translator, and the audience"; the philological skill of a translator such as Alfred is no guarantee of success in translating poetry.[18]
Mel Gussow, in The New York Times, mentioned the translation's surprising success both in Britain and in the United States. He wrote that both written poem and Heaney's recitation had "an Irish tinge", noting Heaney's remark that the version is "about one-third Heaney, two-thirds 'duty to the text'", and his claim that the word "gumption" had "an Anglo-Saxon forthrightness about it".[19]
Katy Waldman, in Slate, writes that there is "no real contest" between Heaney's and J. R. R. Tolkien's 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.[20]
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"[1] gave it the originally derogatory name "Heaneywulf", because in their eyes it was "just not Beowulf", agreeing that of course it could not be, as no translation could be faithful. He remarked, too, on the large number of translations, the "persistent genetic fallacy" of continuity between Old English and the modern variety, the continuing disagreement over what a faithful translation would be, and the difficulty of translating Beowulf given its alliteration, kennings and so on.[1] 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".[1] He comments that Heaney's stated aim of creating a firm, level tone with "foursquare" language brings clarity and force, and a "decorum of language", but can also be dull, and often causes him to "[recast] the shape of sentences in startling and distracting ways".[1] Chickering regrets that Heaney, in his view ironically, "breaks his own decorum" with overwrought imagery, excessive alliteration that the form doesn't require, and wild variations of diction, from chummy colloquiality to clichés like "laid down the law" and "deliberate Ulsterisms". He notes that all can be found in the opening lines of "Heaneywulf", including the controversial "So." for the poem's first word, "Hwæt!". He writes that this start, which in his view should set the tone of the whole work, sounds to various American ears tight-lipped, or "buddy-to-buddy", or "like a Yiddish greeting, or like urban guy talk"; Heaney meant it to recall his rural Northern Irish heritage.[1]
Chickering writes that Heaney's claim in the introduction to have been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start, part of his claimed "voice-right" on the model of "birthright", shows "his desire to appropriate Beowulf for his own poetic voice".[1] He debates Heaney's claim that the choice of Northern Irish dialect offered "a release from cultural determination", stating that instead it reinstated it. The dozen "Ulsterisms" in the translation, like "hirpling", "keshes", "[a] wean", "reavers", and "bothies", are in Chickering's opinion "a signal of cultural difference", incomprehensible to many readers, and rightly glossed in footnotes.[1] A "deeper difficulty" in Heaney's use of two "different Englishes" is that it is "bad cultural and linguistic history", ignoring the shaping of language variants by social forces; he comments that Heaney knew exactly that his name "Seamus" meant that he was an Ulster Catholic, and concludes that Heaney wanted "Heaneywulf ... to be seen as a poem by Seamus Heaney ... more than as a translation from the Old English, despite his assertions to the contrary."[1] To create his own Romance myth, Chickering writes, Heaney pulls "thole" from his memory as King Arthur pulled the Sword from the Stone.[1]
The philologist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey wrote that, with its inclusion in The Norton Anthology, a set text for the mandatory introductory course in English for all American undergraduates, Heaney's was "the poem now, for probably two generations".[21] 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".[21]
The scholar Nicholas Howe, like Shippey among the few early reviewers familiar with Old English, noted the many translations of Beowulf already in existence, and their difficulties with rendering the text into modern English poetry. He states that Heaney, like Roy Liuzza, has an ear better attuned to modern poetry, and deduces from their versions that alliteration is not so important that sense must be sacrificed, nor awkward kennings invented. He adds that alliteration can be used to cover slack language in the less dramatic parts of the poem; the translator's duty is to use variation to delight the audience's ears: but that requires skill. In that context, the way that some reviewers praised Heaney for directness, and for not sounding like some older versions, might, Howe writes, indicate a betrayal of the Old English of Beowulf and the possibility of rendering variation in modern English. Geoffrey Hill demonstrated this with his Mercian Hymns in 1971, where it serves, "wonderfully adapted", to create a grim but "sly joke" about praise poetry in a modern context. Howe concludes that in the history of approaches to translating Beowulf, Heaney joins William Morris, Edwin Morgan, and Burton Raffel as examples of "high poetic translation", where literal accuracy is sacrificed to the spirit of the original and the presence of the poet-translator; he lists Charles Kennedy, Marijane Osborn, Stanley Greenfield and Liuzza as examples of "verse translation", somewhat faithful to Old English technique, with the translator much less visible; and versions such as John R. Clark Hall and E. Talbot Donaldson as "prose translations", accurate to the narrative and parts of the poetic technique "while sacrificing most of its poetic spirit".[22]
The scholar Thomas McGuire disagrees with Howe's assertion that Heaney's rendering of Beowulf's opening "levels the diction" and "flattens their claim on the audience".[23][24] In McGuire's view, "when read aloud (as Heaney's translation ought to be read), even a British or North American pronunciation will reproduce some of the elaborate sound system Heaney has erected here".[24] 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:[24]
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes, how these noble lords did lofty deeds.
Notes
↑ Heaney rearranges some sentences, so his lines do not correspond one-to-one with the Old English.
Related Research Articles
Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating is for the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025. Scholars call the anonymous author the "Beowulf poet". The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 6th century. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a barrow on a headland in his memory.
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Grendel is a character in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. He is one of the poem's three antagonists, all aligned in opposition against the protagonist Beowulf. He is referred to as both a eoten and a þyrs, types of beings from wider Germanic mythology. He is also described as a descendant of the Biblical Cain and "a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our human kind". He is usually depicted as a monster or a giant, although his status as a monster, giant, or other form of supernatural being is not clearly described in the poem and thus remains the subject of scholarly debate. The character of Grendel and his role in the story of Beowulf have been subject to numerous reinterpretations and re-imaginings. Grendel is feared by all in Heorot but Beowulf, who eventually kills both him and his mother.
In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principle ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.
A scop was a poet as represented in Old English poetry. The scop is the Old English counterpart of the Old Norse skald, with the important difference that "skald" was applied to historical persons, and scop is used, for the most part, to designate oral poets within Old English literature. Very little is known about scops, and their historical existence is questioned by some scholars.
Hrunting was a sword given to Beowulf by Unferth in the ancient Old English epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf used it in battle against Grendel's mother.
"Deor" is an Old English poem found on folio 100r–100v of the late-10th-century collection the Exeter Book. The poem consists of a reflection on misfortune by a poet whom the poem is usually thought to name Deor. The poem has no title in the Exeter Book itself; the title has been bestowed by modern editors.
Beowulf is a legendary Geatish hero in the eponymous epic poem, one of the oldest surviving pieces of English literature.
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections.
Grendel's mother is one of three antagonists in the anonymous Old English poem Beowulf, the other two being Grendel and the dragon. Each antagonist reflects different negative aspects of both the hero Beowulf and the heroic society that the poem is set in. Grendel's mother is introduced in lines 1258b to 1259a as: "Grendles modor/ides, aglæcwif".
Michael Joseph Alexander is a British translator, poet, academic and broadcaster. He held the Berry Chair of English Literature at the University of St Andrews until his retirement in 2003. He is best known for his translations of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems into modern English verse.
"On Translating Beowulf" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the difficulties faced by anyone attempting to translate the Old English heroic-elegiac poem Beowulf into modern English. It was first published in 1940 as a preface contributed by Tolkien to a translation of Old English poetry; it was first published as an essay under its current name in the 1983 collection The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
The final act of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf includes Beowulf's fight with a dragon, the third monster he encounters in the epic. On his return from Heorot, where he killed Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules wisely for fifty years until a slave awakens and angers a dragon by stealing a jewelled cup from its lair. When the angry dragon mercilessly burns the Geats' homes and lands, Beowulf decides to fight and kill the monster personally. He and his thanes climb to the dragon's lair where, upon seeing the beast, the thanes flee in terror, leaving only Wiglaf to battle at Beowulf's side. When the dragon wounds Beowulf fatally, Wiglaf attacks it with his sword, and Beowulf kills it with his dagger.
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is a prose translation of the early medieval epic poem Beowulf from Old English to modern English. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien from 1920 to 1926, it was edited by Tolkien's son Christopher and published posthumously in May 2014 by HarperCollins.
The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his high fantasy novel of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.
Leonard Neidorf is an American philologist who is Professor of English at Nanjing University. Neidorf specializes in the study of Old English and Middle English literature, and is a known authority on Beowulf.
The difficulty of translating Beowulf from its compact, metrical, alliterative form in a single surviving but damaged Old English manuscript into any modern language is considerable, matched by the large number of attempts to make the poem approachable, and the scholarly attention given to the problem.
1 2 Acocella, Joan (2 June 2014). "Slaying Monsters: Tolkien's 'Beowulf'". The New Yorker. I have no doubt that Heaney grieved over some of the choices he had to make, but by his rules he had to act as an artist, create a new poem. This is the sacrifice always made in a "free" translation.
Schulman, Jana (2012). Beowulf at Kalamazoo: essays on translation and performance. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. ISBN978-1-58044-152-0. OCLC757177299.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
