Keely's review of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
by Anonymous

Keely's review

rating:

bookshelves: epic-poetry, poetry

status: Read in October, 2005

Usually I like to keep my translators and authors separate, but I will make an exception for Heaney. The problem is that most creative authors have such a strong voice and sense of story that they will overwhelm the original author's intent. As Bentley wrote of Pope's Iliad: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer".

Now, sometimes this sort of indirect translation is just what one needs, such as during the transition of the Renaissance from Italy to Britain. Many of the British poets rewrote Italian sonnets into English, and though the line of descent was unquestionable, the progeny was it's own work. Another example might be the digestion of Wuxia and Anime into films such as Tarantino's or The Matrix (though Tarantino's sense of propriety is often suspect).

However, in these cases, we can hardly call the new work a translation of the old. You are not experiencing the old work but the inspiration it has wrought. Beowulf, however, is one of those ...more Usually I like to keep my translators and authors separate, but I will make an exception for Heaney. The problem is that most creative authors have such a strong voice and sense of story that they will overwhelm the original author's intent. As Bentley wrote of Pope's Iliad: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer".

Now, sometimes this sort of indirect translation is just what one needs, such as during the transition of the Renaissance from Italy to Britain. Many of the British poets rewrote Italian sonnets into English, and though the line of descent was unquestionable, the progeny was it's own work. Another example might be the digestion of Wuxia and Anime into films such as Tarantino's or The Matrix (though Tarantino's sense of propriety is often suspect).

However, in these cases, we can hardly call the new work a translation of the old. You are not experiencing the old work but the inspiration it has wrought. Beowulf, however, is one of those rare exceptions. Though it is an English to English translation, I don't think Heaney's adroit understanding of both ends of the vast linguistic spectrum that defines 'English' can be overstated. His Nobel is safe from my machinations.

I tried to read Beofulf some years before Heaney's version came out, and though I could understand the tale, it did not inspire me. It did not play with language and reference in a way I recognized, and failed to ever draw me in. Beowulf is a good story, but Chekhov showed that the quality of the story is in the telling. Even the drama of an epic can fall flat by telling. Without my years of Latin, who knows if even Milton's Paradise Lost could have failed to find me.

Heaney is conscientious of his creation, of its origins, and of its destination. He has wrapped up a gift from another age and brought to us on a silver tray. When Cotton's library burned, Beowulf was one of the few works and the only epic to survive to reach us from both Old and Middle English.

Such things were poorly valued by the Helenophile Christians, and so we have. Unfortunately, lost a great deal of that art, all placed unfairly under the epithet 'Pagan'. That this survives, and tells its own history by the curiously tacked-on Christian sentiment and internal Saxon rebellions, and so becomes much more to us than a simple story, but for those of us who wonder what the Isles brought to the Italianate literature they digested, Our Story. It is a wonder that modern day 'Pagans' muck about with Tarot Cards (14th century Italy), Ouija Boards (19th Century America), and Druids (of which we have no relaiable knowledge) when their ancestry does survive, at least in part, in Beowulf....less

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