Academics in the humanities do not often contribute to the world in ways as dramatic or evident as their brethren working in the sciences. English professors don't discover how the universe might have been born, and history professors can't conjure up bosons and mesons through the precise invocation of equations and experiments.
But an Oxford medievalist named J.R.R. Tolkien did the world a real service when he delivered a lecture to members of the British Academy entitled "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics." Tolkien delivered "Beowulf" from the hands of linguists, historians and archaeologists, bringing it to the poets and the readers of poetry who cherished and challenged the poem in the decades to come.
Almost 70 years after Tolkien's speech, people are still reading "Beowulf" for the value of its poetry. This despite gruesome images of a monster getting ripped apart by a man's bare hands, despite the bog, and despite the poem's tale of a man's bloody battle against the chaotic, ruthless bitch that Mother Nature used to be. And these days, people are often choosing to read Seamus Heaney's new translation.
Three possible reasons:
1. Heaney is a world-renowned poet and Nobel laureate famed for his powerful, classically-infused verse. His work, borne of a marriage between the tumult of Belfast and the lyrical grace of grand old bards like Virgil and Dante, has a reputation for forcefully confronting nature's ancient mysteries and Ireland's modern political turmoil.
2. "Beowulf" is the dark, dank, bloodstained epic that is the artistic father of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterful "Lord of the Rings" series. By extension, it is the grandfather of generations of pimply, sarcastic role-playing gamers hunched over their graph paper, lead figurines and "lucky" 20-sided dice.
3. The book's cover is spectacular. Never before has the back of someone's head possessed such fortitude, intrigue and shiny metallic beauty.
By translating "Beowulf," Heaney attempted something that many have tried, and few have done well. The poem dates from the eighth or ninth century, and it was written in a version of English so ancient as to be almost completely unreadable by modern eyes. Its subject matter is challenging, too — it's a long tale of a great hero, Beowulf, who comes to the aid of a Danish king besieged by the ravenous and brutal monster Grendel. Its themes of duty, honor, man against nature and the glory of combat in the service of God are ancient, but the poem's action is taut, and, despite the passage of 1300 years, the words still exert a powerful emotional pull.
The Farrar, Straus and Giroux version of Heaney's translation is billed as a "bilingual edition," and while the Old English may be of little use to any but the most serious of scholars, it's nice to have it there. There's something intriguing about reading:
pæt hie ne moste, pa Metod nolde,
se syn-scapa under sceadu bregdan
and knowing that some far-gone dead voice is chanting:
that as long as God disallowed it,
the fiend could not bear them to his shadow-bourne
The most remarkable thing about Heaney's translation is its ability to make visceral and accessible a poem that has often been shackled to unsuitably intricate verse. When Beowulf's sword crumbles, Kevin Crossley-Holland's translation stumbles, tripping on parenthetical asides and stiff language:
Then the battle-sword
began to melt like a gory icicle
because of the monster's blood. Indeed,
it was a miracle to see it thaw entirely,
as does ice when the Father (He who ordains
all times and seasons) breaks the bonds of frost,
unwinds the flood fetters; He is the true Lord.
But Heaney's verse stands up to the moment:
Meanwhile, the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles,
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it melted as ice melts
when the Father eases the fetters off the frost
and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power
over time and tide: He is the true Lord.
In a sense, much of Heaney's strength comes from his flexibility — when "Beowulf" presents one of its many ambiguities, Heaney's reaction is to insert language that is smooth and readable, but also vivid and jarringly fresh. While his translation has the grace of a classical poem, it lacks the stiff, unyielding crust that seems to so often form around great old works of literature. Heaney has oiled, polished and restored an ancient and ornate suit of armor, presenting it to the modern world to be appreciated.
Heaney's translation stands out quite favorably against other versions, such as the serviceable but flat version presented by Burton Raffel, or the clinking elegance of Crossley-Holland, or the choppy-but- passionately-poetic interpretation presented by Frederick Rebsamen.
100 years from now, someone else may need to take Heaney's version of "Beowulf" and once again challenge the great poem to keep trudging forward alongside us. But, for now, Heaney's interpretation is all we need to experience the poem's power and bloody affirmation of humanity's will to survive.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
Beowulf