Classic Book: Beowulf

Beowulf: Text and Translation Translator: John Porter Published by: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2003 ISBN 0951620924 Other Reviews Buy it from Amazon.com Buy it from Amazon.co.uk	Beowulf Translator: Seamus Heaney Published by: Faber & Faber 2000 ISBN 0571203760 Other Reviews Buy it from Amazon.com Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

       ... Weard unhiore,
gearo guðfreca     goldmaðmas heold
eald under eorþan;     næs þæt yðe ceap
to gegangenne     gumena ænigum.
(Beowulf, lines 2413-6)

       ... Monstrous guard,
wary war-fighter,     held gold-treasures
old under earth;     that was no easy bargain
to get     for any man.

English understatement was alive and well twelve hundred years ago. The old king, going to certain death to save his people from the dragon, armed with chain mail, iron shield, boar-crested helmet and ancient sword, is described as "bargaining" for the beast's treasure-hoard. Not half he was!

Some things, then, never change. But while we can recognize in the lines above that (for instance) Weard = ward, guard, and see with pleasure that c(h)eap = bargain, the grammar of Old English is certainly very different from that of our language today. Tolkien, of course, dared to reintroduce a few resonant old words such as 'mathom' (like the gold-mathoms guarded by the dragon, line 2414), but there is no denying that reading Beowulf in the original requires a serious effort of the reader.

Most readers, therefore, will look for a good translation. Beowulf has been translated well over a hundred times: something of a record. Clearly the poem holds a certain fascination. Unfortunately, many of the translations are terrible, though no doubt some appeal to one audience, some to another: you should take care to choose translations that feel right to you.

The problem for the translator is that you can't make a translation at once faithful to the original and readable in modern English. That is true of all literature, but especially poetry: metre, rhythm, alliteration, rhyme and meaning cannot all be preserved. Any prose translation at once loses all but bare meaning, disastrous for a poem that depends for many of its effects on the sound of words, the balance of half-lines, and the peculiar 'alliterative' metre of Old English. The incredible strength of the syntax where a few terse words are simply placed right next to each other (in apposition) without woolly conjunctions or prepositions, is impossible to reproduce. Seamus Heaney calls it "the hand-built, rock-sure feel of the thing" (page xxii): the words are chosen and fitted into place so solidly that nothing else will do. Once you come to that conclusion, you have no choice but to read the poem in the original (or to give up the quest). The attraction, however, is powerful: reading Beowulf is like looking into the glittering green eyes of a dragon, or glimpsing the precisely-overlapping armoured scales of its lithe and muscular tail. One does not return unchanged from such an experience.

John Porter offers an enticing way into the poem: a parallel text - the original on the left, and a "literal translation" on the right. That, naturally, leads the reader into the sound and syntax of the original; the translation is wonderfully terse, bringing the original to life. The trouble is that the big picture, the context and meaning, are hard to grasp. The poem exactly does not follow a simple time-sequence. There are asides, reminders, hints as to how the poem and Beowulf's life will end, comparisons with other kings and heroes, word-pictures, moral conclusions.

Seamus Heaney brought a poet's ear for words to the task of translation; and a strong sense of place, his native Ireland, with its forceful diction. His introduction describes both the poem and the problem of translation in a welcoming and helpful way. The poem itself is beautifully translated, with an almost perfect unity of tone and seriousness essential to the subject. Marginal notes ("The sword-blade melts") index the text, and the major asides are indicated clearly by a change of typeface and of metre. The result is that one can read the poem with immediate understanding and enjoyment; and Heaney has managed to preserve many elements of the ancient metre.

Between them, Porter and Heaney make Beowulf readily approachable. Read Heaney first to enjoy Beowulf as a whole, and to see what it is trying to do, how it fits together, what the story is, how it all works. Then dip into Porter and start to decipher the original metre and word-meanings; and admire the poem's rugged construction. Finally, read Tolkien's fine criticism of the poem (and of its critics), and you will start to understand why Beowulf matters. Tolkien did much with his famous lecture/essay The Monsters and the Critics to correct our vision of the poem. In his 'On Translating Beowulf' in that book of collected essays, he writes:

On the strength of a nodding acquaintance of this sort (it may be supposed), one famous critic informed his public that Beowulf was 'only small beer'. Yet if beer at all, it is a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death.

Indeed. But it is also a tightly constructed poem with a rich and beautiful metrical structure on every scale, an astonishing wealth of word-patterns. Tolkien concludes the 'Monsters' essay with an unmatched hymn of praise for 'The Beowulf':

When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are at once both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this; and though Beowulf may not be among the very greatest poems of our western world and its tradition, it has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity; it would still have power had it been written in some time or place unknown and without posterity, if it contained no name that could now be recognized or identified by research. Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal - until the dragon comes. The Monsters and the Critics, p33-4

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© Ian Alexander 2004