[In the following review, Murphy evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Heaney's translation of Beowulf.]

The Anglo-Saxon scholar Jess Bessinger used to refer to the poem we call Beowulf as the libretto of a lost musical composition. He wanted to draw attention to the fact that the Anglo-Saxon scop, in whom the roles of singer and poet were not yet divided, probably recited this alliterative and mesmerizing poem while accompanying himself on a harp. It is, therefore, an event when the poet of the English language with the best ear of any now living tackles the task of translating this enormously important work. The poem was composed in the West Saxon dialect probably in the seventh century; the unique manuscript copy that survives was made around the end of the tenth. Where it spent the centuries between the turn of the millennium and 1563, when the early Anglo-Saxon enthusiast Lawrence Nowell apparently wrote his name and the date at the top of it, is a mystery.

But what is certain is that Beowulf long ago fell into the same hole that, for Americans, Moby Dick occupies: being a book that everyone “has” to read. Generations of students encountered the poem in nineteenth-century translations like this one by Francis Gummere:

Lo, praise of the powers of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped—

These are only the first two lines, and already Gummere is in trouble, having stumbled over (1) the difficulty of recuperating the alliterative metrics; (2) the Germanic penchant of Anglo-Saxon for compound words (on average in Beowulf there is a compound every other line); and (3) a nineteenth-century folkloric conception of what a Germanic epic about a mighty hero (the strongest man on earth, in fact) who battles monsters and dragons ought to sound like.

Heaney has done a great service by demythologizing Beowulf in this sense, stating that “as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.” The second half of the sentence is the key: the poem's cruel realities (political and physical) and its fantastic elements add up to a reality no less valid than the one that, at this moment, is composed of what we know or think we know and what we choose to believe. When the hero escapes from a rout, swimming home carrying thirty coats of mail so that his people will live to fight another day, the marvel is his fealty as much as his prowess. In the first part of the poem, the Geat hero Beowulf crosses the sea from his own land (in southern Sweden) to Denmark to vanquish the hall-ravaging monster Grendel, plague of the Danish court. Eschewing weapons, he rips Grendel's arm off and part of his shoulder; then he dives into a lake wyrm-cynnes fela (“crawling with worm-kind,” i.e., teeming with reptiles) and kills Grendel's equally monstrous mother. In the second part, fifty years later, Beowulf is king, and battles a dragon who is savaging the beleaguered Geatish kingdom because a cup has been stolen from his treasure hoard. It is Beowulf's last battle, and after a spectacular funeral it seems that the unrelenting wars of revenge that haunt the poem are about to break out again.

Heaney gives the poem back its earthy and unearthly reality. He praises its “mythic potency,” and at the same time its “hand-built, rock-sure feel”: “What I had always loved was a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living inside a constantly indicative mood. … There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet's sense of the world which gives his lines immense emotional credibility.” Though a champion of the Beowulf poet, Heaney's account in his introduction of the genesis of his translation, and especially the cultural-political corona that surrounds the work for him, has brought forth some comment. He sees Beowulf as a “loophole” through which to escape the “binary thinking about language” of his upbringing, in which English is the tongue of the oppressor and Irish is the native language which has been stolen. But this epic poem becomes an escape to “a region where one's language would not be a simple badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official imposition.” Looking back toward his early acquaintance with the poem, he remembers his delight in finding in Anglo-Saxon words that some still survive in the English spoken in Ireland today, though they have died out in everyone else's English, and words that are cognate with words in the Irish language itself. And he speaks of his use of “local Ulster” words in his translation as “one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance.” Yet that Heaney should translate the poem seems peculiarly appropriate, given that the Beowulf poet himself was living in England, writing in Anglo-Saxon about Scandinavian characters, and using Germanic myths as background. He is presumed to have been a scholarly poet at one of the courts of the period, who knew his Bible and had read Virgil and perhaps Homer. Thus, his cultural patrimony was also complex. Curiously enough, it was long ago suggested that the Beowulf poet was resident at the court of the Irish-born King Alfrid of Northumbria, who himself wrote poetry—in Irish.

But whether you want to call gryre-geatwum “war-gear” or like Heaney “war-graith” isn't really the point. It is his linguistic resources that strike one again and again in the translation, and Ulster words comprise only a small part of these. Heaney apologizes for not following “the strict metrical rules that bound the Anglo-Saxon scop”—which, because languages are designed to explain reality and not to explain other languages, is an impossible thing in modern English—but it is amazing how much of the alliterative music of the original he is able to keep alive, and this is because of his own particularly broad and deep idiolect. Thus, when translating the praise of Hrothgar, whose hall Heorot is blighted by Grendel, Heaney writes “Nor did he renege, but doled out rings / and torques at the table.” Dœlan is often translated as “give,” as in E. Talbot Donaldson's prose translation of the poem, but Heaney hits on just the right alternative, and in the next half line (“sinc æt symle”), which literally means “treasure at the feast,” he gives a faithful translation that is also more specific than the original (which is loaded with stock phrases and formulas). He shows versatility and flexibility in cases like the particularly difficult word scriðan, which is often used to describe the dreadful oncoming of the monsters. In his translation, Kevin Crosley-Holland simply uses “shrithing,” which, despite onomatopoetic value (slinking along, gliding), is unavoidably archaic. Heaney translates the word this way one time, and another way the next (one example: “stealthy night-shapes came stealing forth.”

Of course, the Irishisms are noticeable: “They collected their spears / in a seafarers' stook, a stand of greyish / tapering ash.” But Heaney has other reserves as well. Fr. Klaeber, the greatest editor of the poem, remarked that “the large part which the sea played in the life of the Beowulfian peoples, finds expression in an astonishing wealth of terms applied to it”; Heaney, of an island people, makes precise, effective use of nautical language: “They stretched their beloved lord in his boat, / laid out by the mast, amidships”; “Whoever escaped / kept a weather-eye open and moved away.” In both cases, it is this mot juste (amidships, weather-eye) that is the key to replicating rhythm and alliteration. Only once does he fail to take advantage of this nautical element, when Beowulf and his crew are leaving for Denmark:

sand churned in surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.

The last two lines have a kind of vagueness (how is a ship “wreathed” in wood?) that the Beowulf poet, who takes great relish in the tactile features of seafaring, doesn't have. The words ut scufon beg to be translated almost literally as “shoved off,” enabling a translation something like “the seamen shoved off in their wood-sheathed ship.”

There are some odd things about the translation. The poem begins with the untranslatable word “Hwæt,” calling the listeners to attention (in New Yorkese, it could be translated as “Yo!”), and has been rendered in the past with such stale exclamations as “Lo!” and “Behold.” Heaney comes up with an understated, elegant solution: “So.” He calls it a piece of “Hiberno-English Scullionspeak,” a word that “obliterates all previous discourse and narrative.” But the rest of the opening section is treated rather obliquely; some of the verb expressions, which are rousing, become nounal and adjectival, undercutting the straightforwardness Heaney prizes:

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.

Donaldson's more literal prose translation is “Often Scyld Scefing took mead benches away from enemy bands, from many tribes, terrified their nobles.” (Even this is too mild; Bessinger used to take great glee in how Scyld “snatched away the mead seats”). The chieftan is actually shown doing these actions and frightenening his enemies (and, no doubt, stirring the scop's audience). A few lines later, when dealing with the eloquently simple and forceful “þæt wæs gōd cyning!” Heaney is over-ingenious, rendering it colloquially as “that was one good king,” instead of “that was a good king” (Donaldson). However, one has only to remember Gummere's version (“a good king he!”) to realize how nit-picky this is. It is a feature of this translation that it really only leaves itself open to quibbling.

Beowulf has over 1300 lines devoted to speeches (out of 3182 total) and forty instances of direct address. Heaney is most impressive when delivering dialogue. Klaeber pointed out that the Beowulf poet “takes the keenest interest in the inner significance of the happenings, the underlying motives, the manifestations of character. He loses no opportunity of disclosing what is going on in the minds of his actors.” Heaney has made the most of this, as in his rendering of the subtle play of pride, anxiety, and devotion to duty in the Danish coast guard's considered response to Beowulf's explanation of just what his band, armed to the teeth, think they are doing on his beach:

the coast-guard answered, “Anyone with gumption
and a sharp mind will take the measure
of two things: what's said and what's done.
I believe what you have told me: that you are a troop
loyal to our king. So come ahead
with your arms and your gear, and I will guide you.”

Near the end of the poem, after Beowulf is killed by the poisonous neck-bite of the dragon, the young thane Wiglaf envisions catastrophic consequences for the Geats, doomed to be attacked by their more powerful neighbors. This majestic speech combines the Beowulf poet's pervasive melancholy with spine-tingling realism:

                                                                                Many a spear
dawn-cold to the touch will be taken down
and waved on high; the swept harp
won't waken warriors, but the raven winging
darkly over the doomed will have news,
tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,
how the wolf and he made short work of the dead.”

“At these moments of lyric intensity,” Heaney intuitively understands, “the keel of poetry is deeply set in the element of sensation while the mind's lookout sways metrically and far-sightedly in the element of pure comprehension. Which is to say that the elevation of Beowulf is always, paradoxically, buoyantly down to earth.” His translation is so successful perhaps because the virtues of this poetry are so like those of his own. It isn't a matter of Germanic or Irish moroseness, however; Paul Bauschatz put it well when he said, “If death is gloomy, then the Germanic peoples were gloomy; so, unfortunately, is everybody else.” But that original imaginative leap of faith that grasps the equality between the reality of the poem and that of the present time opens a kind of door, permitting the flow of resonances that are not mere analogies but truth: “the Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo.”

The first duty of the translator is to produce a readable poem, without stepping beyond a certain boundary (which of course everyone sets for himself) into unlikeness. Like all great poets Heaney is willing to push the envelope, so to speak, and comes up with striking lines like “to that far-famed man I bequeath my own / sharp-honed, wave-sheened wonderblade.” He takes risks, and produces the best translation of the poem as a poem that has yet been made. We can honestly say of it what Klaeber said of the original: “It contains passages which in their way are nearly perfect, and strong, noble lines which thrill the reader and linger in the memory.” One comes away with nostrils filled with the smells of smoke, steel, and the sea, and the earth on Beowulf's barrow high on a headland seems as fresh as ever.