Beowulf (Bilingual Edition)
Page 32
round him who stood his ground in the steel-hail,
when the arrow-storm shot from bowstrings
pelted the shield-wall. The shaft hit home.
Feather-fledged, it finned the barb in flight.”
He goes with seven thanes to remove the treasure from the hoard
3120 Next the wise son of Weohstan
called from among the king’s thanes
a group of seven: he selected the best
and entered with them, the eighth of their number,
under the God-cursed roof; one raised
a lighted torch and led the way.
No lots were cast for who should loot the hoard
for it was obvious to them that every bit of it
lay unprotected within the vault,
there for the taking. It was no trouble
3130 to hurry to work and haul out
the priceless store. They pitched the dragon
over the clifftop, let tide’s flow
and backwash take the treasure-minder.
Then coiled gold was loaded on a cart
in great abundance, and the grey-haired leader,
the prince on his bier, borne to Hronesness.
Beowulf’s funeral
The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf,
stacked and decked it until it stood four-square,
hung with helmets, heavy war-shields
3140 and shining armour, just as he had ordered.
Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it,
mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
and wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
A Geat woman’s dread
3150 A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
Beowulf’s barrow
Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
3160 It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it, behind a wall
as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it.
And they buried torques in the barrow,
and jewels and a trove of such things as trespassing men
had once dared to drag from the hoard.
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.
His people lament
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
3170 chieftain’s sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper
thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
3180 They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
Family Trees
Family trees of the Danish, Swedish, and Geatish dynasties.
Names given here are the ones used in this translation.
Acknowledgements
The proposal that I should translate Beowulf came in the early 1980S from the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, so my first thanks go to M. H. Abrams and Jon Stallworthy, who encouraged the late John Benedict to commission some preliminary passages. Then, when I got going in earnest four years ago, Norton appointed Professor Alfred David to keep a learned eye on what I was making of the original, and without his annotations on the first draft and his many queries and suggested alternatives as the manuscript advanced towards completion, this translation would have been a weaker and a wobblier thing. Al’s responses were informed by scholarship and by a lifetime’s experience of teaching the poem, so they were invaluable. Nevertheless, I was often reluctant to follow his advice and persisted many times in what we both knew were erroneous ways, so he is not to be held responsible for any failures here in the construing of the original or for the different directions in which it is occasionally skewed.
I am also grateful to W. W. Norton & Co. for allowing the translation to be published by Faber and Faber in London and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York.
At Faber’s, I benefited greatly from Christopher Reid’s editorial pencil on the first draft and Paul Keegan’s on the second. I also had important encouragement and instruction in the latter stages of the work from colleagues at Harvard, who now include by happy coincidence the present Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology, Professor Stephen Greenblatt. I remember with special pleasure a medievalists’ seminar where I finally recanted on the use of the word “gilly” in the presence of Professors Larry Benson, Dan Donoghue, Joseph Harris, and Derek Pearsall. Professor John R. Niles happened to attend that seminar and I was lucky to enjoy another, too brief discussion with him in Berkeley, worrying about word choices and wondering about the prejudice in favour of Anglo-Saxon over Latinate diction in translations of the poem.
Helen Vendler’s reading helped, as ever, in many points of detail, and I received other particular and important comments from Professor Mary Clayton and Peter Sacks.
Extracts from the first hundred lines of the translation appeared in The Haw Lantern (1987) and Causley at 70 (1987). Excerpts from the more recent work were published in Agni, The Sunday Times, The Threepenny Review, The Times Literary Supplement; also in A Parcel of Poems: For Ted Hughes on His Sixty-fifth Birthday and The Literary Man, Essays Presented to Donald W. Hannah. Lines 88–98 were printed in January 1999 by Bow & Arrow Press as a tribute to Professor William Alfred, himself a translator of the poem and, while he lived, one of the great teachers of it. Bits of the introduction first appeared in The Sunday Times and in an article entitled “Further Language” (Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. XXX, no. 2). The epigraph to the introduction is from my poem “The Settle Bed” (Seeing Things, 1991). The broken lines on p. 151 indicate lacunae in the original text.
S.H.
Winner of the Whitbread Award
“How did he do it? How did Seamus Heaney fashion verses, singularly handsome verses that not only capture the somber grandeur and mythic vigor of the Anglo-Saxon original, but also reflect the rhythm and timbre of the English we speak today…. This newborn translation makes accessible to everyone the first supremely great poem to be written in the English language.”
—Colin Campbell, Christian Science Monitor
“Mr. Heaney’s translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again. The great battle scenes are rendered with a power and grisly horror both increased and made oddly transparent by a freshness and innocence of diction…. In sustaining contrast is the lyricism, quiet yet immediate, of the small passages.”
—Richard Eder, New York Times
“As vivid as a tabloid headline and as visceral as a nightmare. Heaney’s own poetic vernacular … is the perfect match
for the Beowulf poet’s Anglo-Saxon. Heaney uses this idiom not to modernize the epic but to showcase its surprisingly contemporary feel…. As retooled by Heaney, Beowulf should easily be good for another millenium.”
—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“Heaney’s word choices succeed brilliantly in reconstructing a barbaric world…. Could well become the classroom standard for the 21st century.”
—Edward Southern, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Seamus Heaney’s splendid verse translation and bilingual edition of Beowulf bring the poem into focus again as a work of the greatest imaginative intensity…. Beowulf has an elemental grandeur, a ruthless beauty, and an incandescent dignity that belong only to the greatest poetry.”
—Edward Hirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review, front-page review
“Heaney’s Beowulf is a rhythmic masterpiece. He employs a wonder-fully malleable ‘sprung’ or ‘broken’ tetrameter…. Heaney gleefully mixes the stresses, creating a thundering battle of anapests, iambs, amphibrachs and other accents as explosive as Beowulf’s brawl with the monster Grendel.”
—John Mark Eberhart, Miami Herald
“Credit for this surge of interest should rest squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again…. Heaney’s poetry makes eloquently persuasive the hero’s tragic stature…. [A] newly burnished treasure.”
—Paul Gray, Time
“Heaney’s alliterative translation marches to an ancient beat that drives the poem forward…. It’s hard to miss [Heaney’s] own flair, his grasp of language at once earthy and other-worldly, his bold descriptions and his loud exclamation. Beowulf is exciting again.”
—Deirdre Parker Smith, Salisbury (N.C.) Post
“Heaney has transformed Beowulf into a hit—a vivid, gripping tale written in an elegant flowing style…. Heaney’s version is flawless … And [his] marvelous introduction … is alone worth the price of the book.”
—Eve Claxton, Time Out N.Y.
“How powerful the oldest, most archetypical literary works remain, especially when newly rendered by so accomplished a hand…. A new standard for versions of the old epic.”
—Booklist
“Beowulf is a fantastic, crackling good yarn…. [An] astoundingly warm, briskly paced, blazingly readable reworking…. Thanks to Seamus Heaney, [the] tale feels as fresh today as it must have felt all those years ago around the campfire.”
—Dave Ferman, Star-Telegram
“Both casual readers and serious academics should find this new Beowulf extremely exciting. A great translation of a great poem must give us glimpses of the original’s greatness—but it must have its own particular kind of greatness. And Heaney’s does.”
—Ron Smith, Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Looking back, I wish I had been able to read a translation like Heaney’s. It has persuaded me that the poem is indeed a masterpiece.”
—D. M. Thomas, Toronto Globe and Mail
“[Heaney] has given us a grand, noble, and sorrowful book from a far distant world. To give ourselves up to that world wholly for the length of a concentrated reading can be a spiritual voyage that is profound and unforgettable.”
—Peter Neumeyer, San Diego Union Tribune
“Heaney’s 21-page introduction shines with characteristic clarity and freshness—and should well equip the unfamiliar reader to make a romp, if not a study, of the work itself…. [The] translation is utterly enchanting.”
—Micheal Pekenham, The Sun
“[Heaney] renders the poem in vigorous, fluent lines that read with the directness and ease of good prose. The result is a fresh work, moving and vivid….”
—Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle
“[A] stunning new translation … [that] makes this northern Gilgamesh gripping and racy, startlingly contemporary.”
—Cynthia L. Haven, San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
“Heaney is inspired…. His introduction [is] itself a profound essay on the poem, and an immediate classic…. [A] brilliant millennial Beowulf.”
—Dan Chiasson, Boston Book Review
“An extraordinary accomplishment.”
—Newark Star-Ledger
“Heaney’s Introduction does everything it should…. The abiding impression is one of devotion and enthrallment. We end the Introduction sensing that Heaney might have found a great poetic ancestor, and touched hands with him across the centuries. And he has—no question.”
—Andrew Motion, British Poet Laureate, in The Financial Times
“Thanks to Seamus Heaney’s marvellous recreation—in both senses—this dark and gloomy work finally comes out into the light.”
—The Economist
“Heaney has turned to Beowulf, and the result is magnificent, breathtaking…. Heaney has created something imperishable and great that is stainless—stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem.”
—James Wood, The Guardian
“The translation itself rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship…. Beowulf, an elegy for heroism and a critique of feud and fratricide, is alive and well.”
—Michael Alexander, The Observer
“Heaney’s excellent translation has the virtue of being both direct and sophisticated, making previous versions look slightly flowery and antique by comparison. His intelligence, fine ear and obvious love of the poem bring Beowulf alive as melancholy masterpiece, a complex Christian-pagan lament about duty, glory, loss and transience…. Heaney has done it (and us) a great service.”
—Claire Harman, Evening Standard
Copyright © 2000 by Seamus Heaney
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Cynthia Krupat
First bilingual edition 2000 published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beowulf. English & English (Old English)
Beowulf / [translated by] Seamus Heaney. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Text in English and Old English.
1. Heroes—Scandinavia—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry, English (Old).
3. Monsters—Poetry. 4. Dragons—Poetry. I. Heaney, Seamus.
PE1583.H43 1999
829'.3—dc21 99-23209
ISBN 0-393-32097-9 pbk.
ISBN 978-0-393-06975-4 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU
The Old English text of the poem is based on Beowulf, with the
Finnesburg Fragment, edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton
(University of Exeter Press, 1988), and is printed here by kind
permission of W. F. Bolton and the University of Exeter Press.