RF - Review of new Beowulf translation

[Kief av Kiersted]

Heilsa all...!

Here is an interesting article/book review:

=============================================
Review of new Beowulf translation

>From LA Times:

Dragonslayer
Lying Down in the Word-hoard of Our Pagan Past
By EDWARD HIRSCH
"Beowulf" is a flamboyant adventure story, an
indispensable Saxon epic and the first great heroic poem in English
literature. It was composed more than 1,000 years ago, most probably in
Northumbria in the first half of the 8th century, when England was
widely converting from paganism to Christianity. It survives as the
longest poem (3,182 lines)--the only one of its type--in the language
now known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon. It is also the first major poem
in a European vernacular language. Think of it as a book of origins
welling up from the pagan past, a foundational work like "The Aeneid."
It has a somber grandeur, a mythic vitality. Its clamorous alliterative
cadences rise from the dark sea floor--the unconscious sound stratum--of
English poetry.
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. Heaney supplements his supple and highly
readable version with an insightful introduction, which serves as both
an aesthetic defense and a classical explanation of the poem. He
supplies a useful personal note about the nature of the translation and
helpful marginal glosses throughout the text ("The Geat hero announces
himself and explains his mission," "Wiglaf stands by his lord" and so
forth), which should help readers puzzled by the absence of recognizable
reference points and the plethora of unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon names.
The elegiac narrative recounts the adventures of a
Scandinavian hero, a legendary prince named Beowulf, who saves the Danes
by slaying a ferocious and seemingly invincible monster, Grendel, and,
later, a second grim demon, Grendel's avenging mother. He returns to his
own country, where he reigns with great renown ("He ruled it well / for
fifty winters, grew old and wise / as warden of the land") and dies an
old man after mortally wounding an ominous fire-eating dragon.
Although "Beowulf" may have an unfortunate reputation as
an official text ("Just don't take any course where they make you read
'Beowulf,' " Woody Allen advises English majors), Heaney's work goes a
long way toward deepening a wondrous quality in the poem that students
might have missed in their required study of it. "Beowulf" is not a
series of isolated passages translated for a textbook anthology or a
penal lesson for students struggling to get a handle on the grammar and
vocabulary of Old English, which now feels like a foreign language.
Rather, it is a poem operating at the highest level of mythic
attainment, a work with the knowledge and wisdom of tragic dreams, an
epic phantasmagoria. The epic truly is, as the fabulist Jorge Luis
Borges once observed, "one of the necessities of the human mind."
Heaney has been preparing himself for this task all his
life. "Lie down / in the word-hoard," he instructed himself in his 1975
poem "North," and he does so here with a marvelous burrowing
credibility. As a poet, he has always had an affinity for northern
things, mythic grounds, peat bogs, archeological digs, archaic texts. He
was in part instigated into his own poems by reading his great Welsh
forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose heavily accented consonantal
music he linked to the Ulster writer W.R. Rogers, another poet "lured by
alliteration." All three sank root in a bumpy Anglo-Saxon ground. In
acknowledging his debts, Heaney also points out that without any
conscious intention on his part, certain lines in "Digging," the first
poem in his first book, "Death of a Naturalist" (1966), conformed to an
Anglo-Saxon metric pattern. They consist of two balancing halves, each
with a pair of stressed syllables. As the "Beowulf" poet might have
lineated them:
the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father digging. I look down.
The repetition of the letter D in the second line
("digging," "down") pulls the rhythm and meaning across the dividing
caesura. "Part of me," Heaney says, "has been writing Anglo-Saxon from
the start." He calls "Beowulf" part of his "voice-right." It is also
part of ours.
Heaney's translation begins with a lively conversational
push, a down-to-earth, exclamatory "So" (rather than "Lo" or "Hark" or
"Attend," as the opening word is sometimes translated) that thrusts us
into the narrative presence of the poem:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and
greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
We are placed immediately in the hands of a storyteller
eager to remember the days of great legendary exploits, and he looks
back with yearning nostalgia and pride to the heroic lineage of an
ancient people, a lost ancestral world. It's as if the "Beowulf" poet
were imitating an Anglo-Saxon scop, the minstrel-poet who both composed
his own poems and sang or recited the compositions of others. He is akin
to the singers he describes, such as Hrothgar's minstrel:
Meanwhile, a thane
of the king's household, a carrier of tales,
a traditional singer deeply schooled
in the lore of the past, linked a new theme
to a strict metre.
So begins the first of two such entertaining performances
by royal scops within "Beowulf." "For a moment it is as if we have been
channel-surfed into another poem," Heaney explains, whereas ". . . we
are in fact participating in a poem within our poem. . . ."
Heaney's flexible adaptation has its own adhesive music,
a keen contemporary authority, though for the sake of readability it
also must deactivate some of the harsher sea-churning effects of the
original. The translator loosely--skillfully--maintains the fundamental
metrical pattern but bridges the strict medial pause at the heart of the
Anglo-Saxon poetic line. He downplays the extraordinary number of
kennings, or compound words, in the text--there are hundreds of verbal
yokings in "Beowulf," such as when the poet calls the sea swanrad
(swan-road) or the human body banhus (bone house)--and at times he
effaces the alliterations. But he can also physically forge the sounds,
as when Beowulf boasts:
They had seen me boltered in the blood of enemies
when I battled and bound five beasts,
raided a troll-nest and in the night-sea
slaughtered sea-brutes.
Heaney's translation has riled some scholars who prefer a
more literal rendering of the poem. But many such literal translations
get the gist of the poem while missing its cosmic meaning and music. The
deep value of Heaney's free adaptation is that it opens the poetic world
of "Beowulf" to us. He captures the overall swing and pitch of the poem,
even as he pursues the direct narrative utterance and the larger
architectonics. As with his own poems, he has found a capable strategy
for transforming mythic energy into verbal action.
One of the peculiarities of "Beowulf" is that the teller
is Christian, injecting scriptural references and supplying a religious
moral compass while recounting events that take place partly in the 6th
century, partly in the legendary space of "long ago." Written in
England, set in Scandinavia, the poem has the texture of a written work
rooted in oral tradition. It harks back to the ethics and values, the
territorial imperatives and discomfiting male violence of a warrior
culture. And it evokes an animistic natural world, Earth alive in all
its parts.
In entering "Beowulf" we enter another world, an earlier
consciousness delivered through a primal language. The momentum builds
toward the conclusive illumination. As Heaney puts it: "[T]he poet is
more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things
than any transcendental promise. Beowulf's mood as he gets ready to
fight the dragon . . . recalls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus
at Colonus, Lear at his 'ripeness is all' extremity, Hamlet in the last
illuminations of his 'prophetic soul.' "
Going into final battle against that fire-eating dragon,
that totemic creature, "a figure of real oneiric power," as Heaney calls
it, Beowulf already recognizes his destiny:
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.
The entire last part of the epic reverberates with
Beowulf's uncanny comprehension, his spiritual sense of wyrd, or fate,
his capitulation to the wheel of necessity.
Beowulf was obsessed with trying to combat the fatality
of evil. It came at him in three demonic forms, a triad of monstrous
shapes, and Heaney acutely locates the deadly struggles in what he calls
"three archetypal sites of fear: the barricaded night-house, the
infested underwater current, and the reptile-haunted rocks of a
wilderness." These sites have a permanent hold on our imaginations.
Beowulf's warrior code may be archaic ("Let whoever can / win glory
before death," he cries out), but his ferocious confrontation with the
blood-stained claw of evil is timeless.
The storybook element in "Beowulf" gives it the quality
of a book of marvels and wonders--part Germanic folk tale, part
Scandinavian saga. The sense of a world going under--a dynastic culture
passing away--also lines it with the feeling of a prototypic English
elegy--for a legendary hero, for a doomed civilization. There is a
melancholy fatalism to the end of the poem: Enemies are amassing at the
borders and, with Beowulf dead, no one can protect his people from the
tragic future awaiting them. There is something utterly foreseen and yet
perpetually surprising about the grief-stricken conclusion to "Beowulf."
The poetry itself partakes of the ritual mourning of a tribe building a
funeral pyre for a renowned warrior and gracious king, going about the
grim business of cremating his body and then building him a memorial
barrow. One almost has to hold up an arm to fend off the unforgiving
sight of the warriors laying the body into the middle of the fire,
wailing aloud for their lord's decease. Heaney nobly captures the
unbearable dread--the wild lament--of an ordinary woman:
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.
In the end, "Beowulf" has an elemental grandeur, a
ruthless beauty and an incandescent dignity that belong only to the
greatest poetry.


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com