Details
Synopsis
Winner of England's 1999 Whitbread prize, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's translation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon epic is meant to retrieve the poem from its schoolbook purgatory and establish it as a living, powerful poem for contemporary readers. More than the story of a hero's battle with a gruesome monster, BEOWULF is a story of loyalty, nationalism, and--some say--the dawn of Christianity on what had previously been a violently pagan land.
| Size | | Length: | 213 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Industry Reviews
"This translation does something other than bring [Beowulf] up into our time. It transports us to his and lets us wander there;after which home will never seem entirely the same....Mr. Heaney's translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again."
Eder
"There is one thing that Heaney's BEOWULF does better than any translation of the poem that I know....[T]he voice of the old Beowulf seems not so much translated by Heaney into Modern English as ventriloquized into it....In [the book's] thrilling passages, it reads better than any other translation that we have; and in its dullest passages, it is no worse than many others."
Howe
"[At the task of] bringing the personality of the BEOWULF-poet up from the ocean bottom...Heaney is inspired. His inspiration arises, as he explains in his introduction (itself a profound essay on the poem, and an immediate classic), from a kind of miraculous chiasmus, where the extreme of the known met and crossed the extreme of the unknown....[C]ertain poems create a kind of acoustics within which their translator can better hear his own language, the language for him most saturated with tragedy. Heaney has done just that in this brilliant millennial BEOWULF, just in time for the next century's atrocities."
Chiasson
"Within Heaney's writing, the civic and the chthonic have always slogged it out, and this magnificent translation is no exception....[This translation] is a marvelously sturdy, intricate reinvention, which betrays its author's poetic dabs less in its earthiness than in its airiness. It is the canny colloquialisms ('in fine fettle,' 'under a cloud,' 'blather,' 'big talk,' 'gave as good as I got') which are most Heaneyesque, not the smell of the soil....This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day.' He has a casual way with the alliterative patters of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly....Heaney [is] an artist so exquisitely gifted and imaginatively capacious that only a work of such mighty scale would answer to his abilities."
London Review of Books - Terry Eagleton (11/11/1999)
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