Word: beowulf
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...much of the past three weeks hopping from lectures and readings by him to discussions about him. It was wonderful to hear him read aloud some of those poems I had only rehearsed in my head, but it was as wonderful to hear lines from his new translation of Beowulf. His wry running commentary--that the genre demanded the heroic "Charlton Heston or Clint Eastwood bit" or that he pictured the monster Grendel as a sort of "reeking dog-breath in the dark"--helped to underscore that Heaney was coming at the old staple of high school English classes from...
...Beowulf of all poems, does not seem in desperate need of another translation, Originally written sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries, it has been exhaustively redone into prose, verse, literal verse, alliterative verse and "modern" alliterative verse, in dozens of different languages...
When translating the poem's "pre-chivalric diction," then, Heaney tried to leave his "Ulster fingerprints" on it, to reintroduce Beowulf in the formal, but simple, idiom of his father's relatives. "Scullions," according to Heaney, had just as much right to Beowulf as the Early English Text Society. After all, the geographically-defined "England" does not exclusively own what is called the English language. Though he is considered an Irish poet, Heaney's medium is exactly that language which is not contained by national boundaries...
Though the Irish and the English have historically fought bloody battles over every sort of territory, Heaney's move is not one that furthers that conflict. His reclamation of Beowulf does not violently uproot the epic poem from its English context and encourage ethnic possessiveness. In fact, it bridges at least one gap between the two parties...
Heaney, in declaring that "we're all together in this language," extends the Good Friday Agreement-the political end of hostilities between the Irish and English peoples--into a literary and cultural realm. This new translation of Beowulf, then, is more of a gesture of commonality than an aggressive assertion of distinction or superiority. As much as their violent history has pulled them apart, the English and the Irish do at least speak the same language. This helps explain why Heaney did not necessarily resent his inclusion is an anthology of "English" literature compiled by Faber and Faber, Co. Though...