SOURCE: Howe, Nicholas. “Scullionspeak.” New Republic 222, no. 9 (28 February 2000): 32-7.

[In the following review, Howe singles out the humanity and energy of the narrative speeches in Heaney's translation of Beowulf, but concedes that Heaney's use of Ulster idiom is inappropriate since he does not fully re-invent the tale in terms of Anglo-Irish relations.]

I.

For all that it seems to begin English literature, Beowulf is a relative newcomer to the canon. First edited by a Danish scholar in 1815, the year of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and Jane Austen's Emma, the poem as a whole was not translated into Modern English until 1837. In subsequent years, Beowulf has found numerous translators, many of them scholars and few of them possessing any poetic gift. Of the sixty or so translators who have done the complete poem into English, only two have had any larger literary reputation. William Morris published a version in 1892; and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the English translator of Proust, published a version in 1921. But their talents lay elsewhere, and neither produced a Beowulf that can be read today with pleasure or even much comprehension.

That the poem made it into the canon, much less into the cliché “from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf,” is something of a miracle. Unlike most European epics, this poem exists in a single, unadorned manuscript that barely survived a fire in 1731 and today rests, charred edges and all, in the British Library. We know nothing about the manuscript's existence between the early eleventh century, when it was created, and the sixteenth century, when it re-appeared. Most likely it sat unnoticed in a monastic library for centuries, when nobody could read its Old English or, as it is also called, Anglo-Saxon.

That the manuscript did not circulate during these centuries should make us leery of celebrating the poem as the start of the English literary tradition, and also of demonizing it. Beowulf never enjoyed the currency and the prestige that Homer or Virgil had in their respective literary canons. It was not discussed in commentaries, or quoted by later writers, or honored as part of a common culture. Indeed, if the single manuscript of Beowulf had disappeared when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in England—as might easily have happened, given its physical homeliness and its incomprehensible language—we would not have the faintest suspicion that such a poem had ever existed. No other writer mentions the story of Beowulf, even in passing; nor is any part of it embedded in other works.

The mystery around Beowulf extends to such basic matters as who composed it and when. No name attaches itself to the poem, not even one of dubious historical veracity like Homer. Nor is any single date commonly accepted for its composition. Reputable scholars have placed it as early as the middle of the seventh century or as late as the beginning of the eleventh century—a period of 350 years or so, about as long as the period that separates Paradise Lost from today. It is hard to know if the undateable poem came at the start of the Old English literary period or at its end. We cannot know, therefore, whether it was composed in a culture that had been (at least in recent memory) oral in form and style, or in an increasingly literate culture that made England into a center of Christian learning.

Having neither an author nor a date for Beowulf poses problems for scholars, and temptations for translators. This lack of facts leaves them free to render the poem in the image of their various desires. And so translations of the poem range from effusive bardic performances that bear little relation to the original to scholarly transcriptions that are so close to the original that their Modern English makes sense, paradoxically, only to those who know Old English. It is certainly true that there are features of Old English poetry that contribute to any translator's difficulties in rendering Beowulf in Modern English.

For a start, the poetry in the original is heavily alliterative, so that each line marks out three of its four main metrical stresses with the same initial sound: “and find friendship in the Father's embrace,” to borrow an example from Seamus Heaney's version. These days alliteration survives most audibly in rap lyrics and advertising jingles, so the translator of Beowulf must use it sparingly and knowingly. Nothing kills a translation faster than relentless alliteration; but nothing can help a good one more than the subtle use of alliterative emphasis, especially if the translator avoids ransacking the language for obscure synonyms to fill out the sound pattern.

More difficult to handle in Modern English than alliteration is the pervasive use in Old English poetry of variation or syntactically parallel expressions to describe the same person or object. Thus, a character in Beowulf will describe a king as “lord of the Danes,” “king of the Scyldings,” “giver of rings,” and “famous chief” in three and a half lines of poetry. For the modern reader, accustomed to believing that a poet must use the exact word, Old English poetic variation can seem mindless repetition, the piling up of formulaic expressions to pad out a line, a sure sign that the Beowulf poet did not really know what he was doing.

As one reads the poetry, however, variation comes to seem evidence not of ineptitude, but of a desire to display a being or an object in all its richness. The more one reads Old English poetry, the more one senses that variation is what stands in the way of its successful journey into Modern English. Either you cut out some of the variants, and thin out the poem; or you render all of them as they appear, and clog the movement of the narrative. The two poetries seem to find little common ground: the modern is exact and sparing in its inevitability, the early medieval is accretive and multitudinous in its generosity. The closest any twentieth-century poet has come to making Old English variation work in Modern English is Geoffrey Hill, in his Anglo-Saxon-inspired cycle called Mercian Hymns, which appeared in 1971.

That Old English and Modern English are not all that different at times, especially at the level of vocabulary, also renders the translation of Beowulf tricky. Anyone reading through a translation of Beowulf soon encounters some term or phrase that seems archaic, but is in fact perfectly good Old English smuggled in by the translator for lack of an adequate equivalent in Modern English. This usually occurs when the poet offers a rich run of variation for warrior gear—shields, helmets, armor, and so on. Without an equivalent technical vocabulary, the Modern English translator has few choices: either pretend that the Old English word for a piece of armor is still current or else invent some metaphoric rendering. Scholarly translators usually go for the first choice, poetic translators for the second choice. Either way, the original gets distorted. Words that are familiar and specific in Old English—such as words for vehicles are in Modern English—are made quaintly archaic or poetically ornate. Of course, such words are neither archaic nor ornate in Beowulf. They are as specific to their language, and circulate as easily in it, as do “minivan” or “sport-utility vehicle” in ours.

The markedly episodic shape of the narrative also raises problems for translators. The first two-thirds of Beowulf, a little more than two thousand lines, tells of the young Beowulf's journey from his home in Geatland (perhaps modern Sweden) to the court of Hrothgar, king of the Danes. There he vanquishes the monster Grendel, who has raided Hrothgar's hall and eaten his men for years. That victory is followed, the next night, by the appearance of Grendel's Mother, who raids the hall for the first time to avenge her son. In turn, Beowulf tracks her to the underwater cave where she lives, and kills her. These feats accomplished, Beowulf returns home to Geatland where, after a series of events, he becomes king and rules his people well for fifty years.

The poet effects the transition from the young Beowulf to the old Beowulf in ten lines or so, because the intervening years are of little interest compared to the appearance of a dragon that burns Beowulf's hall and ravages his lands. Beowulf must thus prepare himself for a last fight. And, with his young comrade Wiglaf, he defeats the dragon, but not without receiving a fatal wound. His death leaves the Geats without a leader, and without hope of resisting the onslaught of their traditional enemies. In the absence of Beowulf, the Geats face a future of death and captivity. As a poem about two defining moments in a life, Beowulf offers little narrative continuity. It places heavy demands on the audience's attention.

II.

All this said, it is hardly surprising that we have had no translation of Beowulf to match those of Homer by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Christopher Logue, or Robert Fagles, of Virgil by Fitzgerald, of Horace by David Ferry—to cite only recent renderings of dead white European males. Even Dante's Divine Comedy, for all its technical virtuosity, has been better rendered in Modern English than Beowulf. Readers who know Beowulf through the poetic versions of Burton Raffel, Kevin Crossley-Holland, or Michael Alexander may have some sense of its verbal style but little of its forceful directness; and readers of E. Talbot Donaldson's prose version, usually found in the canon-setting Norton Anthology of English Literature, know a Beowulf that retains the original's powerful narrative but little of its poetic inventiveness.

Now comes, like an “interloper from the Celtic realms,” Seamus Heaney and his poetic version of Beowulf, intended for use in that same Norton Anthology but also appearing in a separate volume with a facing-page Old English text. For the first time, a major poet has taken on Beowulf. Heaney is an “interloper” in much the same sense as he meant when he applied the epithet to Yeats. Both are Irish by birth and cultural affinity; both write and read in English; both occupy an uneasy ground.

This crossing of historical and linguistic allegiances has its value for translating Beowulf, because the poem shows an analogous kind of crossing. It is written in Old English and was recited to an English audience, but its narrative is set entirely in north Germanic regions of the European continent in the years before the Anglo-Saxons made their migration to the island of Britain. Reading through it, you will never learn that there is in fact such a place as England or such a people as the Anglo-Saxons. Its religious and cultural landscape is pagan or at least pre-Christian, its geography is Scandinavian, and its ethos is distinctly military. It portrays not the Anglo-Saxons in England, as one might expect from an epic poem, but the world of their fathers in the fifth and early sixth centuries.

From the start of his career in the 1960s, Heaney has shown an affinity for Old English poetry. Having studied the language at Queen's University in Belfast, he could shape some of his lines by Old English metrical practices, as in “Digging,” one of the poems that announced his arrival as a significant voice. In a fine lecture of 1976 on “Englands of the Mind,” he located the poetry of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill in the English landscape and poetic tradition. When he spoke of these poets and their desire “to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry,” he was also describing one strand in his own work.

Still, there is some surprise in reading Heaney's Beowulf, because it reverses the process that he described in “Englands of the Mind.” In very forthright ways, Heaney's version demands to be read as his connection back to the stations of his Ulster ancestry. And it does so from the very first word of the poem, the Old English interjection “Hwæt.” This word has no fixed semantic meaning but serves instead as a call to attention, a signal that something important is about to be said. Our equivalent in a loud or colloquial setting might be “Yo!”; but that would hardly do for the opening of a canonical poem. Recent translators have used “Attend” or “Indeed” or “Yes” or “Hear” for it; older translators used “Lo” or “Hark.”

Heaney offers the less literary “So”; and he notes that in his Ulster colloquial, what he lovingly calls “Hiberno-English Scullionspeak,” this word “came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.” His rationale for using “So” is precise, even plausible; but one wonders if it holds for those who use other varieties of English. To my ear, “So” sounds too understated, too domestic for the start of a poem such as Beowulf. I also hear it with a bit of a Yiddish intonation, an ironic questioning that does not match the poem at all—an inappropriate response, I know, but one that the word carries in my variety of Scullionspeak.

In his translation of the poem's opening, Heaney seems intent to downplay its assertion of epic temporality and heroic achievement: “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.” As he levels the diction of these lines and flattens their claims on the audience, Heaney writes two sentences where the original has one grammatical unit. In the original, the subject and the verb of Heaney's second sentence govern the first sentence as well. A recent version of the passage by the scholar Roy Michael Liuzza goes: “Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days / of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes, / how those noble lords did lofty deeds.” The original stresses from the start, as does Liuzza's version, that the “we” of the audience knows all the matter of the poem because poets have recited it so others can hear and learn it. Perhaps Heaney thought that splitting the single Old English sentence into two would make for an easier entry. What gets diminished, though, is the ceremonial opening claim, the reminder to the audience that all they know and can know about the past comes from poets.

That opening assertion matters for the understanding of Beowulf and for the appreciation of its style. The poem makes allusive use of the past in ways that speak to the circulation of stories and legends in a traditional culture. Similarly, the poem employs maxims and other terse statements of culturally shared belief. The narrator of the poem and its characters show a gift for the tight laconic expression that speaks to a common sense of how the world works and how one is to live in it. Heaney rightly praises “the cadence and force of earned wisdom” in such passages. To a modern reader, they can seem platitudinous, even trivial, if they are not translated with epigrammatic force. (And some seem so even when they are translated well.) The danger is that the narrator or the characters will seem pompous and verbose in Modern English when, in Old English, they are forceful and direct.

Consider a few examples, taken from high points in the poem. When Beowulf and his band of retainers land in Denmark on their way to help King Hrothgar fight the monster Grendel, they are greeted by a coastguardsman who challenges them. After hearing Beowulf speak, the coast-guardsman recognizes that his intentions are honorable and that his status is aristocratic. He adds that learning to judge a man by his words and his works is a survival skill in a warrior culture. In E. Talbot Donaldson's prose version, he says: “A sharp-witted shield-warrior who thinks well must be able to judge each of the two things, words and works.” The sentiment is not original to the coastguardsman, and thus its expression can be tight and understated. And that is why it carries conviction in the poem. In Heaney's version, however, the coastguardsman sounds folksy and long-winded: “Anyone with gumption / and a sharp mind will take the measure / of two things: what's said and what's done.” This is accurate enough, but it misses the original's proverbial tone, which is at once a stylistic feature of the poem and the coastguardsman's compliment to Beowulf, who is smart enough to get the point even when it is made in a highly elliptical form.

Later in the poem, Grendel's mother comes out of the darkness to avenge the death of her son at Beowulf's hands by killing one of King Hrothgar's beloved comrades. As he tries to encourage Hrothgar after this calamity, Beowulf tells him tersely: “It is better for a man to avenge his friend than to mourn much.” The young hero's admonition to the old king risks being disrespectful, and thus it seems to violate protocol, but it is allowed because it is maxim-like in expression. He is saying what anyone in the culture must know, and so he says it as simply as possible. Heaney gets the sentiment right, but in ways that make it seem platitudinous and thus offensive in context: “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.” This misses the force of Beowulf's words: that the old king, for all that he mourns, needs only a glancing reminder that his duty is to seek revenge. To say “indulge in mourning” makes the point obvious to the modern reader, but it also makes Beowulf less hard-bitten than he must be at this moment.

Heaney seems throughout to resist the tight, compressed style of Beowulf. It is not that his version has more lines or even more words than the original, though the latter is almost unavoidable, but that it seems looser and less edgy as it moves forward line by line. Yet there is one extended section in Heaney's Beowulf in which he brilliantly captures this poetic style. As he renders the so-called “Finnsburg Episode,” a poem within the poem told by a performer in Hrothgar's court, Heaney moves powerfully and accurately from Old to Modern English, as in these lines:

                                                  Wind and water
raged with storms,
                                                  wave and shingle
were shackled in ice
                                                  until another year
appeared in the yard
                                                  as it does to this day,
the seasons constant,
                                                  the wonder of light
coming over us.

Heaney rightly notes that his version of this passage is marked “by a slight quickening of pace and a shortening of metrical rein.” Perhaps a translation of all 3,182 lines of Beowulf in this style would prove unreadable. Still, these lines do sound truer to the original than other parts of Heaney's translation, precisely because they avoid being tediously explicit or drawn out. Here we are not burdened with an overly long line that uses more language than it needs to render the original.

The overly long line is especially evident in passages in which Heaney has to translate the original's use of variation or apposition. In his introduction, he admits to slighting this aspect of the poem's style. His frankness is winning, but it cannot obscure the fact that some of the dullest lines in his rendering are the consequence of this slighting of variation, as here: “Then he saw a blade that boded well, / a sword in her armoury, an ancient heirloom / from the days of the giants, an ideal weapon, / one that any warrior would envy. …” This kind of passage may not sound like poetry to us, but passages like it appear throughout Beowulf. To make them work in Modern English, the translator needs to do more than dutifully fill out the list of synonyms. There needs to be also a sense of why the poet clusters so many synonyms at that particular moment in the poem.

Writing about any translation means judging it for its faithfulness to the original as well as for the quality of its own expression. It also means looking at local moments and large passages. As Heaney once remarked, in an essay on John Clare: “I am reminded of a remark made once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a minor point of major importance.’” In the judgment of translation, certainly, minor points have major importance; and to my ear Heaney's translation tends to flatten or to elongate the Old English line, to make it seem heavy with words rather than direct and flowing with alliterative stress and verbal energy. His Beowulf sounds at times more like some poetry of medieval Ireland than it does like that of Anglo-Saxon England, and this is not unrelated to Heaney's objective as a translator.

III.

There is one thing that Heaney's Beowulf does better than any other translation of the poem that I know. The most moving and powerful moments of his translation appear in the speeches delivered by characters during the last third of the poem. This section takes place fifty years into the reign of Beowulf. His triumphs over Grendel and Grendel's mother are in the distant past; all that remains is the final contest. In these speeches, which are addressed at least as much to the audience as to other characters, we hear a wise and weary Beowulf, a man who knows that his time on earth is nearing its end. But first he must fight and defeat the dragon who has burned his hall and ravaged his land, even though that fight will likely end in his death and thus, because he leaves no heir, in a new peril for his people.

After killing the dragon and receiving a mortal wound in exchange, the king takes the measure of his life:

                                                  No king
of any neighbouring clan would dare
face me with troops, none had the power
to intimidate me. I stood my ground
and took what came, cared for things in
          my keeping,
never fomented quarrels, never
swore to a lie.

The note here is exact: the voice of the old Beowulf seems not so much translated by Heaney into Modern English as ventriloquized into it. The record of a life is finely caught in the dignified, modest assertions of half-lines such as “I stood my ground” or “and took what came.” These are almost uncannily accurate renderings of Old English poetic form, especially of direct speech. In such passages, when Heaney seems to enter characters such as the old Beowulf, he finds the right melody for translating Old English.

To expect that Heaney would work at this level throughout would be unfair. And here it may also matter that his translation originated as a commission for the Norton Anthology of English Literature. A translation meant for students encountering Beowulf for the first time probably should prefer the clear and the accurate over the brilliant and the allusive. Some of the passages that I have criticized for being overly explicit can also be read as attempts to explain the poem to first-time readers. Yet the rationale for the translation is not that simple, despite Heaney's gracious acknowledgement of assistance from various medievalists. What complicates Heaney's translation, and in many ways makes it deeply interesting as a contemporary statement on literature and politics, as a redress of poetry, is that he sets out to make the poem Irish.

At the most immediate level, this means that Heaney is willing to use various words that are current in the English of Ulster but do not circulate widely if at all in the standard English of either England or North America. Some of these words are survivals from Old English that have lasted in Ulster but not elsewhere, such as the verb “thole,” meaning “to suffer.” Others are forms current in Ulster English that Heaney sets into his translation carefully and sparingly, but also polemically: “bothies,” “war-graith,” “bawn,” “keens,” “brehon,” “wean,” and “hoked.” Even if you know Old English, many of these words are puzzling and intrusive, for they introduce an element of what one might call political dialect into the Modern English version that is not in the Old English version. The original does not use words from one specific dialect to make a larger political and poetic claim. What Heaney does with words such as “oawn,” “brehon,” and “hoked” is his own remaking of the poem. That they are mystifying, at least at the immediate level, is admitted by the practice of the Norton Anthology in glossing these words with notes, some written by Heaney.

Adding words that need glossing to a translation when there are reasonably usable words at hand is a provocative thing to do. I think that the method would have been far more successful if Heaney had gone all the way and written a fully Ulsterized version of Beowulf, instead of a version that stands at times awkwardly between a textbook version for undergraduates and a remaking of the poem to gather in his own heritage. Heaney's Beowulf would have been far more exciting if it had followed the practice of Derek Walcott's Omeros, and traveled the full and exhilarating distance from translation to poetic remaking.

Why didn't Heaney do so? It is hard for a reader to say. What can be usefully explored is how this version of Beowulf relates to other aspects of Heaney's career. Over the last several years, Heaney has located his fascination with Old English poetry in the figure of the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon. Lamenting the death of Ted Hughes, he wrote: “This modern poet from Yorkshire who published in the 1960s a poem called ‘The Bull Moses’ would have had no difficulty hitting it off with Caedmon, the first English poet, who began life as a farmhand in Northumbria, a fellow northerner with a harp under one arm and a bundle of fodder under the other.” It is a lovely image of the poet: a harp and a bundle of fodder. It reminds one vividly of some of Heaney's early poems about his youth in rural Ulster where, as a Catholic in a Protestant region, he sometimes seemed to be more at home with the countryside and its creatures than with most of his fellow citizens. It is a fine image, this poet with harp and fodder; but it is not an accurate image of Caedmon and it may not be fair to Hughes either, who was a learned poet in his terrifying way.

Heaney's retelling of the Caedmon story matters a great deal to his intentions as a translator of Beowulf and, more radically, to his use of the poem to graft himself onto the English literary tradition. It also matters to some of his most obvious moves as a translator, especially his use of Ulster vocabulary. The story of Caedmon first appears in 731 in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People, and this fact alone should make one hesitate to treat him simply as a bucolic harper. Bede records that Caedmon was a cowherd at the monastery at Whitby, who would withdraw from the drinking when the harp circulated and his turn to sing came round. One night, after slipping away and tending to his animals, Caedmon fell asleep and dreamed that a mysterious figure ordered him to sing a song. Puzzled but awestruck, Caedmon asked of what he should sing, and was told to sing of God and His Creation. The result, spontaneous but technically perfect, is known today as “Caedmon's Hymn.”

Bede also tells us that once the cowherd's gifts were recognized, the abbess of the monastery ordered the learned monks to read the Bible to him so he could meditate on these readings like (in Bede's image) a cow chewing its cud and then retell them in traditional vernacular verse.

At that moment, Caedmon ceased to be a cowherd. He matters as the first English poet because he put the oral bard out of business when he became the mouthpiece for a highly literate tradition of Scripture. But Heaney prefers to read Caedmon as the bard who stands “as a reminder of the daemonic strengths of the art, its covenant with the singing voice of Orpheus, the sheer spellbinding power of rhythmic speech,” as he recently wrote in The Threepenny Review. His preeminent recent example of such a poet is Dylan Thomas.

Perhaps so, but to make the comparison work, to invent a lineage from Caedmon to Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes and, implicitly but no less firmly to himself and to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney has to forget that Caedmon matters because he composed thoroughly orthodox poems in English to persuade pagan Anglo-Saxons to renounce their faith and their culture in order to become good and dutiful Christians. Caedmon is an agent of conversion, of Christian conversion, which means that he is an agent of cultural betrayal. Whichever way one reads him, he is the figure who makes poetry the vehicle for a written scriptural tradition that has little place, or no place at all, for the bardic Orpheus.

Heaney loves his version of Caedmon, so fervently that he makes me want to believe and love it, too. One of his strongest recent poems begins: “Caedmon too I was lucky to have known.” This Caedmon is the bard who beneath the learned poet remains unspoiled and earthy: “And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp / His real gift was the big ignorant roar / He could still let out of him, just bogging in / As if the sacred subjects were a herd / That had broken out and needed rounding up.” Heaney ends on a note of vernacular praise: “Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.” This evocation of the Old English poet is alluring, and it is designed to advance Heaney's own ends as a poet. For this particular poem is called “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” the first name being the site of Caedmon's monastery in the north of England and the second being a river that flows near Heaney's childhood home in the north of Ireland. The French preposition between the place-names looks forward and backward to the arrival of the Normans in 1066, another part of Heaney's heritage.

Whitby-sur-Moyola belongs on the most beautiful of maps, in the atlas of imaginary places, because it is a fictive setting for the tension that has driven Heaney's poetry from the start. And this tension can also be felt in his Beowulf, as he acknowledged proudly in his lecture on translating the poem, “The Drag of the Golden Chain.” Irish by birth, English by language, a partisan of neither side in the religious troubles of Ireland, Heaney can find no spot in the real atlas to fix his poetic home. And so Whitby-sur-Moyola is a place deeply attractive in its gesture toward political, cultural, linguistic, and religious harmony.

Yet Whitby-sur-Moyola is a curious place to work from as a translator of Beowulf. One might even argue that someone writing from there is not really a translator of the poem at all. He is, rather, a reinventor of the poem, who turns Old English into Modern English to remake the literary and cultural history of the British Isles. And there is an argument in this remaking. The argument is that there is a deep affinity between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic, between two peoples and traditions that have rarely been at peace with each other from the time when the Germanic tribes arrived on the island of Britain in the fifth century A.D.

One can only roar like Heaney's Caedmon at the irony of a revisionist Beowulf appearing in that most canonical of textbooks, the Norton Anthology; but for Heaney's purposes, where better than a textbook that will assure his Beowulf of several generations of readers? Or one would roar at this irony if Heaney had really rewritten Beowulf to be the poem of Whitby-sur-Moyola. As it is, he has added some Celtic echoes to an Old English poem because that can be, in his words, “one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism” that has characterized Anglo-Irish relations since the time when the Irish burned the poet Edmund Spenser out of Ireland and back to Elizabeth's court.

As a translator, Heaney does not work forward from the start of a literary tradition, as a scholar might. He looks back from his moment in that tradition, as a poet seeking out connections, trying to refashion the Old English in ways that can disturb a scholar, but always locating his poetry and his history on his own grounds. The result is a Beowulf that is sometimes deeply exciting to read for its energy, for its allegiance to the colloquial and idiomatic rather than the academic and official, for its sometimes astonishing acts of ventriloquism in rendering some of the characters' speeches into Modern English. Whether this makes it as well into a good translation is a more complicated matter, because Heaney sometimes seems at a loss to render some of the poem's most essential stylistic features.

For reasons that have as much to do with its virtues as with poetic reputation and publishing houses, Heaney's Beowulf is likely to be the most commonly read version of the poem over the next few years. In its thrilling passages, it reads better than any other translation that we have; and in its dullest passages, it is no worse than many others. Does it belong with the best recent translations from Latin and Greek? Probably not. For that Beowulf, we await a translator who has worked deeply through Old English poetic style and who has thus, in Geoffrey Hill's words, “exchanged gifts with the Muse of History.”