Beowulf

Cafe Society
1

In another thread someone mentioned they had enjoyed reading Beowulf, I asked around and some friends also said they recommended it.

I checked on Amazon and they have a couple of translations here

Can anybody recommended one above the other?

2

::feling sheepish::
I have just notice the only versions of Beowulf that arn’t translated by Seamus Heaney are in the childrens section.

But its a new translation, and there have been others. So the question still stands. Can anybody recommend a specific translation?

Thanks

3

If such a thing is available, get a facing-page translation. So you can easily see which line of Anglo-Saxon goes with the translation. Because some of the original bits just sound amazingly better in Old English.

Particularly Grendel, biting the bones or something. Then whenever you come to a particuarly gory bit, check what the original was. A much more rewarding experience.

4

I first met Beowulf in the Michael Alexander verse translation - which is, well, serviceable, but not inspired. I keep meaning to look at the Seamus Heaney one. (With the Old English version in my other hand, of course…)

5

Seamus Heaney’s translation is brilliant. Un-put-down-able. Read it.

6

The Heaney version I have also does have the Old English on facing pages. There is simply no ME substitute for sceadugenga, walker in shadows.

7

Thanks guys, I have found a Heany version with the origional text facing which I think I’ll get.

Thanks again

8

I agree wholeheartedly.

9

I haven’t read the new Seamus translation. I’m not fond of either of the Penguin translations (they have one poetry, one prose). The one I like best is a small-press edition published by a University Press, but I can’t recall which University or which author. I’ll have to look it up when I get home. But it reminds me of Fitzgerals’s translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey. The cover is a repeated pattern of red and blue on white, as if they were trying, for some reason, to make an anaglyphic 3-D cover.

10

Heaney’s translation is, to my mind, the best of the bunch. I did a fair amount of translating Old English verse in my younger days (I did a full version of The Battle of Maldon as an undergrad), so I’m acutely aware of the difficulties involved. Heaney has created translation that’s not only faithful (though not slavishly literal) but a good, at times great, poem in its own right. I’m also delighted that Farrar Straus Giroux elected to produced the book as a facing-page edition. I also recommend the audiobook with Heaney reading the poem, even if it’s only the abridged version; if you’ve never heard Heaney read, you’re in for a huge treat. If you have heard him before, you’ll already know why.

11

You probably won’t be able to find it, but let me put in a plug for “Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary” by Marc Hudson. Just because Marc Hudson was my professor when I was an undergrad, and I’m sure he could use the royalty money. I actually don’t think it’s such a hot translation, to be honest. But how many other times do I get to say, “Yeah, I know the translator.”

12

I’m a Ph. D. student in philosophy, and I teach in the philosophy department and in the humanities program at a major research university. I’m not an expert on Beowulf, but I know it well enough to have taught it several times, using several different translations. Heaney’s translation is by far the best. I’m confident many others will agree.

13

You know, it didn’t even occur to me at the time that the credit for that decision might belong to Faber and Faber, his British publishers (no doubt he pushed for it, and it’s awfully hard to say no to a Nobel Laureate, but I’m sure there were marketing types at both publishers saying, “What, you mean half the pages are gonna have, like, Old English only on them? Dude, people are gonna drop that like a parboiled porcupine. Isn’t it bad enough that the part that’s in English is poetry?”). In any case.