Beowulf: A New Translation. By Seamus Heaney. Faber and Faber. 104pp. £14.99 in UK
From early in his career Seamus Heaney has been recognised as a major critic as well as poet, in the great English tradition of artist/ commentators from Sidney to Coleridge to Eliot. What has dawned on us more slowly is that he is also - to borrow a phrase used to describe Chaucer - a great translator. The impulse to translate has been evident in snatches throughout his poetry: inevitably perhaps in a writer with such a good ear. But the list of major poetry translations is now imposing: from Irish (Sweeney Astray, and Merriman in The Mid- night Verdict), from Greek (The Cure at Troy), the beautiful Kochanowski laments from Polish, the Janacek opera, and now Beo- wulf. In an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll when Sweeeney Astray was published, Heaney memorably said that when he encountered this story of the misplaced Ulster poet he thought "there's something here for me."
But what, we are tempted to ask, is Beowulf to Heaney or Heaney to Beowulf that he should rise to it? - this strange barbaric epic elegy, half fairystory and half legendary history, best known for its reserved place, not always welcome, in English literature courses. (Woody Allen, you remember, advises Annie Hall that the only consideration in choosing the elements of your English course is "don't do Beowulf"). So what was in it for Heaney? He answers this question intriguingly in the compelling and witty introduction to his translation, noting for a start that he was struck by how much his earliest poems took over the shape of the Old English alliterating half-lines, learnt through Hopkins as well as directly from John Braidwood at Queens ("The spade sinks into gravelly ground/my father digging "). Heaney had gradually come to feel that Beowulf was part of his "voice-right"; to translate it was to make the strongest possible claim for a native place in the English poetic tradition.
But Beowulf, Heaney claims, also has a more substantial bearing on our modern condition: "the Great woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo." And the poem's very strangeness has meaning for our times. Beowulf is not mediated directly to us in the way that classical literature is: a modern reader has heard of Helen of Troy or Dido or Penelope but not of the characters in Beowulf. As Heaney puts it: `Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scefing." Since we don't know the fates of these characters (an uncertainty that the poem works to preserve throughout by a brilliant series of time-shifts from future to past to present), they symbolise very aptly the sense of modern anxiety.
As for the translation itself, it is everything we have come to expect from Heaney. His gift, above all, is to throw himself into the act of translating with the same insightful exuberance that keeps thrusting itself forward in the introduction: "Grendel comes alive in the reader's imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark"; "Gold pervades the ethos of the poem the way sex pervades consumer culture." What characterises this Beowulf is its energetic, relentless driving forward "Again, and again, and again " (in the words of Heaney's epigraph from his own The Settle Bed).
Like his other translations, this is a miraculous mix of the poem's original spirit and Heaney's voice. The linguistic weight that the poetry needs is provided, we are told, by farmer-relatives of Heaney's father's people, "the big-voiced Scullions." They provide the inspired first word of the translation "So", followed by a portentous full-stop (to represent the notorious `Hwaet!' of the original's opening, usually translated by feeble explanations like "Lo!"). Heaney reserves the right to colour his version with Northern Irishisms, like "graith" and "hoked" and "bawn." There are other kinds of Irishism too: the strange old English word "thyle" is translated as "brehon." The phrase "the gap of danger" (from both Amhran na bhFiann" and Heaney's own Bloody Poem) is twice used - somewhat twinkingly - to represent the "dangerous place" where Grendel's monstrous violence occurs.
Heaney's Beowulf is destined to have a long life in the new Norton Anthology. Its finest historical irony, though, is that this Catholic product of the cultural conditions of Lord Brookeborough's Northern Ireland has exercised his "voice-right" in English with a power that will help to secure Beowulf in the academic canon for another generation.
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford. His last poetry collection, Here nor There, was published earlier this year