Customer Reviews

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation for Fireside and Class Room

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Beowulf is one of the oldest extant works in English, and a glorious, thrilling epic poem in its own right. Heaney's new translation does justice to the history, the spirit, and the poetry of the text.

The poem is written in Anglo-Saxon or Old English, which is vastly different from today's English language. Unless you are a scholar of Anglo-Saxon, it's unlikely that you will understand much of the original (which is, for the scholarly and the curious, reproduced here in facing-page translation style). Ergo, it needs to be translated. Heaney has done a remarkable job, capturing the energy in lucid and eminently readable prose. Reading this new translation of Beowulf is not like being back in Brit Lit I, plowing through another dry old text in order to regurgitate facts on the midterm. It's much closer to reading a fascinating fairy-tale or modern day sci-fi story.

Heaney, whose original work has earned him the reputation of being one of today's most important and influential poets, also must be lauded for his faithfulness to the spirit and conventions of Anglo-Saxon verse. He retains the typical caesura and, in most lines, the alliterative parallel between the first and latter halves of the line. His language is smooth, resonant, and expressive, without degenerating into pretentiousness or overt cleverness. At no point does his language become self-conscious, or interrupt the story, which moves as quickly in his capable hands as in the original.

The physical book itself, as well, is gorgeous: a streamlined cover design featuring a warrior in chain-mail armor and an unusual graphic approach to the page layouts. This is a book to curl up with on the proverbial dark stormy night, to savor reading, to save for re-reading. If only Heaney would turn his hand to Paradise Lost!