In addition to the four discussed in previous chapters, many other English-language verse translators have been busy on Beowulf in the past fifty years or so, particularly in America. Earlier in the book I noted the comment from the prose translator David Wright in 1957, ‘Almost everyone has heard of Beowulf.’1 That was overstating things then and would be today as well, but Beowulf – though not in the original language – is now known about more widely than at any time in the past. Recent film versions have brought it into popular culture, its association with the magic name of Tolkien has given it visibility, and the work of translators and adaptors in recent decades has introduced it to new audiences.2 The version of Seamus Heaney has been especially popular but a wide range of other verse translations, some good, some not so good, have also found ready markets. The readiest market has been among students studying Beowulf in translation at university, but Heaney’s version didn’t get onto best-seller lists in the English-speaking world by being bought only by students. Other versions too have aimed to appeal well beyond the campus.
This chapter surveys briefly the Modern English verse translations of Beowulf printed on both sides of the Atlantic in the last half-century or so,3 other than those treated separately in other chapters, taking account of their historical circumstances and attending to their aims, their approaches to translating the Old English poem, and their poetic qualities. Aware that there are very contrasting kinds of translations among those published in the relevant period and that the translations have different ambitions, I will nonetheless venture to offer some critical assessment of the success of the translations, guided by consideration of their engagement with the poetry and poetics of Beowulf as well as their ‘accuracy’. The translations reviewed here are generally much better than those of the previous period (no great accolade in itself) and in their multifariousness they are testimony to the kinds of interest that Beowulf has engendered in the last couple of generations.
As well as the versions by Morgan, Raffel, Alexander and Heaney, more than twenty verse translations have been produced since 1950, the vast majority in America. Indeed, only four British verse translations have been published since that of Morgan, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, Michael Alexander, Paula Grant and Louis Rodrigues.4 Of these, the last two made little impression but the first two appear to have satisfied the British market in the decades after their publication, with Alexander in particular being widely read and Crossley-Holland also maintaining a steady popularity. Since the appearance of Heaney’s version they have lost their dominant position but they are still very much in circulation and both of them have appeared in new editions since Heaney’s came out. As mentioned below, one verse version was recently published in Ireland – a ‘performance’ version – by the Australian actor and writer Felix Nobis.
The absence of other versions before Heaney may point to the perceived excellence of Crossley-Holland and Alexander but may also reflect a relative lack of interest in Beowulf in the wider culture of Britain and Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. In the second half of the century Beowulf became one of the books ‘most necessary for educated people to know’ (to allude to King Alfred again), or perhaps ‘to know about’, but its status in the wider culture was fairly marginal for most of the period and creative people were not queuing up to produce new versions of it. And for the educated British and Irish readership that wanted access to Beowulf in verse translation there were the versions of Crossley-Holland and Alexander (two versions very different in their approach to translation), while the version by Raffel (different again) was also on the shelves of some bookshops. The appearance of Heaney’s translation in 1999 may have contributed to changing perceptions of Beowulf in Britain and Ireland in recent years but we await further significant creative engagement with the poem.
The version by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which has been in print ever since it first came out in 1968, continues to be popular as an accessible and attractive ‘teaching’ text for courses in which Beowulf is studied in translation, as well as appealing to the general reader.5 Crossley-Holland has a traditional English-literary-history view of Beowulf, seeing it uncomplicatedly, as had earlier generations of commentators, as an originary English text, and he wishes to make this canonical work straightforwardly available to a new readership. For Crossley-Holland, Beowulf has an ‘essentially English character’ (as reflected in its ‘out-and-out heroism, a dogged refusal to surrender, a love of the sea, an enjoyment of melancholy, nostalgia’), and in publishing his translation he sought to present Beowulf as a poem that ‘has the power to stir us to the roots of our being; through it we can come to understand more about our origins; and thus achieve a deeper sense of perspective’.6
Though, like Morgan and Alexander, adopting a non-syllabic four-stress metre, Crossley-Holland contrasts with Morgan and Alexander in his approach to translation. In making the poem available to a new – general – readership he aims at fluency and naturalness and does not attempt to suggest the otherness of Beowulf or to convey the feel of its verse: this is very much the domesticating approach to translation. Alliteration is light and intermittent and there is an absence of a pronounced caesura, with pauses tending to come at the end of the line. Grammatical connectives and explanatory details are added, contributing to a sense of brisk and smoothly flowing narrative. In the ‘Translator’s Note’ to the 1968 edition, Crossley-Holland writes, ‘My diction inclines towards the formal, though it is certainly less formal than that of the Beowulf poet; it seemed to me important at this time to achieve a truly accessible version of the poem, that eschewed the use of archaisms, inverted word orders and all “poetic” language.’7 In fact there are occasional examples in the translation of archaism and inversion, and colloquial forms are also introduced,8 but the overall effect is unobtrusive and fairly plain, but with a dignified tone maintained throughout.
Crossley-Holland’s version brings the story of Beowulf to a modern readership with directness and vigour and in a manner that also reflects its elegiac tone. The translation is astute and imaginative, with attractive touches such as Grendel occupying Heorot ‘on cloudless nights’ (line 167; Old English sweartum nihtum, ‘dark nights’), or the mind of the Danish watchman being ‘riddled with curiosity’ (line 234; Old English hine fyrwyt bræc, ‘curiosity pressed him’), but the style is often so subdued as to verge on the prosaic:
So those warrior Danes lived joyful lives,
in complete harmony, until the hellish fiend
began to perpetrate base crimes. (lines 99–101)
To my mind a limitation of the translation is, as noted above, that it doesn’t give a feel of the quality of the verse of the original poem. Crossley-Holland’s translation achieves its modest ambition well, however, and the 1999 edition in particular is user-friendly in its layout and in its inclusion of supplementary material. In the balancing act that the translator engages in, Crossley-Holland consciously leans towards the modern reader in his versification, seeking in an assimiliationist approach to present Beowulf as an accessible and unproblematic classic of English literary history.
The translation by Paula Grant, published in 1995,9 is an eccentric one, which is in an archaizing form of free verse rather than, as claimed in its Introduction, in blank verse.10 The translation is loose and inaccurate, reflective of an insecure grasp of the sense of the original, as in
We have from Gardanes in yore days learned (line 1)
or
When Scyld’s fated hour drew near
Awesome the voyage in Frean was. (lines 26–7)
Grant hints in her Introduction that she worked from Garmondsway’s [sic] prose translation rather than the Old English. The translation’s title, Aldfrith’s Beowulf, proclaims its underlying premise, that Beowulf was composed by King Aldfrith of Northumbria.11 Grant believes indeed that the Geats of the poem are not continental Scandinavians but Deiran Northumbrians.
The remaining, and most recent at time of writing, verse translation published in Britain is that by Louis Rodrigues (2002), in a free stress-based metre with light alliteration.12 Presenting his version in a parallel-text (Old English–Modern English) format, Rodrigues has produced a serviceable enough translation in that he follows the sense of the Old English as closely as Modern English grammatical considerations will allow. In key respects the translation reads more like a work of the nineteenth century rather than the twenty-first, however. Particularly evident in the speeches, it has an archaizing diction:
Art thou that Beowulf who strove with Breca,
competed at swimming in the open sea?
There ye two for pride tackled the waters,
and ventured your lives in deep water
for a foolish boast. (lines 506–10a)
This archaizing reflects Rodrigues’s intention in his version, which he insists on calling a rendering rather than a translation, of attempting ‘to transfer a very old idiom into its nearest modern equivalent’,13 though the suggestion that the register adopted is the ‘nearest modern equivalent’ requires justification. Generally, Rodrigues’s version seems pedestrian, with many of the translation choices recalling those of prose translators. The translation is accompanied by basic summarizing notes on selected passages.
In addition to the verse translations of Beowulf produced in Britain, an ‘adaptation’ of the poem was published in Ireland in 2000 by the Australian performer Felix Nobis.14 Following in the footsteps of the British actor Julian Glover,15 Nobis produced a verse version of Beowulf for theatrical performance, with which he successfully toured for several years. Unlike Glover, who used existing translations for his performance, chiefly Michael Alexander’s, Nobis prepared his own ‘performance translation’, a version that emphasizes the oral dimension of the work: ‘While I have remained faithful to [the] manuscript’, writes Nobis in his Introduction, ‘I admit that my translation is coloured by the greater goal of remaining faithful to the spirit of the poem as an oral, rather than written work.’16
As suits its primary function as a script for recitation, Nobis’s version, which was praised by no less a luminary than Seamus Heaney,17 has a strong aural quality and a gripping and urgent forward movement, while maintaining a dignified tone. It adopts a stress metre and is freely alliterating. As reflected in his own term ‘adaptation’ to describe it, Nobis’s arresting version is not a translation of Beowulf in the narrower sense represented in the versions I have been concentrating on in this book but is rather a much abbreviated paraphrase. It is a reduced and reimagined version tailored for a new specific artistic purpose. It covers the whole story of Beowulf but at about 1200 lines it is not much more than a third of the length of the original poem, omitting whole episodes, speeches and digressions and insistently foregrounding storytelling, thereby successfully capturing a key element of Beowulf itself, though inevitably sacrificing others.18
In the past fifty years there was evidently a more lively interest in Beowulf in the United States, as reflected strikingly in the fact that eighteen American verse translations have appeared in print since Raffel’s, and it is significant that Heaney’s version too was commissioned in the first place by an American publisher (Norton); meanwhile Morgan, Crossley-Holland and Alexander have also been available to American readers. Until Heaney’s version appeared it is difficult to identify translations that became widely accepted as ‘standard’ or definitive for Americans. Though many versions became favourites for particular users and have been much reprinted, none can be seen as having satisfied American readerships in the way that Crossley-Holland’s and Alexander’s ostensibly did in Britain and Ireland. Heaney’s translation must now be by far the most widely used but it is not to everyone’s taste and new translations continue to appear, catering for college courses and for interested general readers and various kinds of enthusiasts. Some older translations, such as those by Gummere and Garnett, are now cheaply available again as well.
The first American verse translation after Morgan was that of Raffel (1963, discussed in detail in an earlier chapter), which was followed a decade and a half later by the dual-language version of Howell D. Chickering, Jr (1977).19 Raffel’s version had been intended for audiences of students and general readers who would not be accessing the original poem. By contrast, Chickering’s translation was not really meant to be free-standing at all but was to be used along with the Old English text by students working with the original. In what is a substantial scholarly volume, the translation appears in parallel-text format facing Chickering’s critical text of the original poem, accompanied by a thorough introduction to Beowulf, a section on how to read the poem aloud and a comprehensive commentary of nearly one hundred pages covering literary and linguistic issues and background material, informed by Chickering’s mastery (though sometimes an unwieldy mastery) of Beowulf scholarship. The translation is conceived of as one of ‘two aids’ (the other one being the commentary) by means of which the reader ‘can experience [Beowulf’s] poetic power first hand’.20
In line with the ancillary function of the translation, Chickering sets out to provide in it ‘the plain sense of the original’, ignoring ‘the alliteration and other audible features of the facing original’.21 He adopts a four-stress line with a heavy caesura, employing some alliteration and assonance, though ‘only sparingly’, but he acknowledges in his preface, ‘The translation has few other pretensions to literary form’, and he explains that he has tried to keep the translation ‘always one step lower in pitch than the original’.22 Chickering is perhaps being overly modest here, as his version is not without imaginative touches, but the translation is mostly not interesting or suggestive in itself. It generally sticks close to the original, which makes for a stilted effect, as in
Many awful sins against mankind,
the solitary fiend often committed,
a fearsome shaming. (lines 164–6a)
It gives a reliable guide to the surface sense of the original and enables detailed study of that original but is not, and does not claim to be, a modern poem that lives. It is Beowulf that Chickering wishes the users of his book to read, not the translation.
One year later Albert W. Haley, Jr, brought out a version of Beowulf not as a study aid but with the more ambitious aim of representing the original as a free-standing modern poem.23 Haley’s translation, presented in a slim volume with no introductory or supplementary material, not even a preface, is fast-paced and studiously unornate and it adopts a register that is considerably less high-sounding than that of Beowulf itself. The translation is a paraphrase rather than a literal translation, with much syntactical recasting. According to the blurb on the book’s cover,24 the translation is the product of its author’s insistence that ‘a translation must be completely natural in the new language, and also be of the time and place of the original’. Haley puts the former principle into effect by eschewing Old English rhythms, alliterative patterns and other poetic devices, while the latter principle leads him, as the blurb puts it, to select ‘words and expressions closely resembling those given in the original text’; random examples are aethelings (line 4), midyard (line 873), glee-wood (line 2486). The result is an uneasy combination of plain modern language –
it entered into his mind that he should
order men to put up a hall-building (lines 77–8) –
and discourse of a more distancing kind:
Often Scyld Sceffing wrested mead-seats from
troops of foemen and many tribes. (lines 5–6)
Haley’s translation attracted no attention from Old English scholars and was not widely noticed elsewhere. Though relevant and interesting as an attempt to represent Beowulf in a new idiom its verse may be seen as too prosaic to engage convincingly with the poetry of the original.
Stanley B. Greenfield, widely regarded as the major critic of Old English poetry of his generation, produced a translation of the poem in 1982. His intention in doing so is reflected in the title he chose for the translation, A Readable Beowulf . Greenfield elaborates on this intention in his Introduction, where he explains that he has set out to write a ‘faithful’ translation but wishes also to produce a work that is (echoing John Lennon), ‘A Poem in its Own Write’: ‘I wanted it to “flow”’, he says, ‘I wanted it both modern and Old English in its poetic reflexes and sensibilities, delighting both the general reader and the Anglo-Saxon specialist’.25 Greenfield’s translation is indeed ‘readable’; it is also one of the most attractive versions with regard to presentation and user-friendliness.26
Greenfield’s version is, in line with what has been the dominant translation philosophy of the modern period, fluent and accessible, and it reliably though not slavishly transmits surface meaning. As his mode of translation, Greenfield adopts what he calls the principle of ‘equivalency’, as opposed to the more restricting method of ‘imitation’,27 a principle that allows him to explore the possibilities of Modern English rather than always having to look over his shoulder towards Old English patterns but one that also works against the shock of the old. Greenfield’s is a smooth translation, but smoothness is not generally what we find in Beowulf.
The chosen metre of the translation is a distinctive one, a form of syllabic verse, in which each line has nine syllables, with occasional allowance of eight-and ten-syllable lines, and each syllable notionally receives equal stress, as in the following lines, which also illustrate the relative freedom of the translation (there is nothing in the original corresponding directly to the suggestive life’s first dawn and breaking):
who launched him forth in his life’s first dawn,
a boy alone on the breaking waves. (lines 45–6)
In practice such lines are less unlike Old English ones than they might seem in theory.
As is also evident in these lines, Greenfield is flexible in his employment of alliteration. The verse form allows him to introduce a wide range of poetic effects without distracting from the flow of the narrative. He cultivates a pronounced caesura but makes much use of enjambment, ensuring a steady forward flow, also aided by the use of grammatical connectives – so, thus, yet, etc. He writes in a fairly formal register but a modern one, avoiding archaism, inversion of word order and obvious poeticisms. Especially in direct discourse, there is a strong sense of careful and precise wording, as in Beowulf itself, but the effect is somewhat prosaic. As John D. Niles observes in his largely favourable assessment of Greenfield’s translation, ‘The virtues of syllabic meter are largely the virtues of good prose.’28 Niles adds, ‘syllabic verse tends to be marked by a certain taut quality, for the discipline of finding the right mathematics can lead to artful avoidance of the easy phrase.’29
Greenfield’s version is ‘readable’ in the sense of being an easy and enjoyable read for a general audience; it is a version for reading, as is also reflected in visual cues on the page, such as the apostrophe in kings’ in line 2, disambiguating the word’s grammatical function – ‘Indeed, we have heard of the Spear-Danes’ glory / and their kings’’(lines 1–2) – or the enclosing of triumph in inverted commas at line 532, to indicate irony. It also reads fluently aloud, being direct and unostentatious in style. The grandeur and elaborate artifice of the original poem are jettisoned in Greenfield’s more modest refashioning, but the translation maintains a strong narrative. The translation is not as ‘tepid’ and ‘limp’, as Burton Raffel finds it, but Raffel is surely right in seeing it as the work of a scholar rather than a poet.30
Working at about the same time as Greenfield, Marijane Osborn produced a version that echoes some of the qualities of his translation. Osborn, stimulated by her evident passion for the poem, has been one of the most active promoters of Beowulf to a wider audience in recent decades and in 1983 she brought out her Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North, a book that is even more visually attractive than Greenfield’s publication.31 It is a rather de-luxe-looking volume in large format, with the text set out landscape and accompanied by a wealth of well-chosen line drawings and black-and-white photographs of artefacts. It was produced not as a cheap paperback for students to buy but very much as an artistic production to be savoured and enjoyed. There is a thoughtful Introduction by Fred C. Robinson to lend authority, but Osborn herself is a wise and eloquent commentator on the poem, as is evident here and elsewhere.
Osborn seeks to convey through her book a sense of the compelling splendour of Beowulf to an uninformed audience and does all that she can to make the poem appealing to such an audience and the reading of it a pleasurable experience. With regard to the translation itself, she declares her primary aim as being ‘to achieve clarity in a resonant narrative verse that moves as freely as prose’.32 She approximates her verse form to that of the original, adopting a four-stress imitative alliterative metre but not applying this so rigidly as to compromise her primary aim of clarity and freely moving narrative:
The fall of night brought Grendel forth
to see how the Danes, with drinking done,
had gone to rest in that gabled hall. (lines 115–17)
The metre does not impede the naturalness of style or distract from the narrative. And along with the fairly formal diction it lends dignity to the tone.
In line with the principles of clarity and freely moving narrative, Osborn adds names and explanatory details, avoids archaism (though she introduces some Old English words ‘that have a technical meaning and give a flavor to the poem’, e.g., byrnie, atheling, shope [should that not be shop, though?]),33 adopts modern literary syntax, and is sparing in her use of compound words. In her section ‘On Translating Beowulf’ at the end of the book, she wonders if she has made Beowulf ‘much too readable’.34 Her aim is to transmit her sense of the attraction of the poem and to bring new readers to it but she does indeed bend over backwards in doing so, carrying out much of the hard work for the reader and reconstituting the poem in the process. She explains, for example, that she decided to translate beot not as ‘boast’ but, because of the negative connotations of ‘boast’ in modern culture, as ‘pledge’; ‘boast’ would have been constructively defamiliarizing, however.35 To aid the reader she italicizes the many passages in the poem that are not part of the immediate narrative; this facilitates reading but is highly interpretative and interventionist (and curiously it has the effect of foregrounding the perceived digressions).36
Like other translators, then, Osborn succeeds in making Beowulf readable, but at a cost, that of eliding a sense of the power of its poetry and of the otherness of its world. The otherness of Beowulf is brought out in the book’s fine illustrations but the translation itself accommodates the poem to the experience of modern readers. In commenting on her approach Osborn expresses the hope that the translation ‘is so transparent that one may pass through it into the world the poet envisaged, of an age before his own’.37 All translations mediate, however, especially ones that are as obligingly domesticating as Osborn’s.
1987 saw the publication of the translation of Bernard F. Huppé, the layout of which reflects Huppé’s decided views of the structure of Beowulf and his Augustinian interpretation of its theme.38 The translation sets out to provide ‘a suggestion of the [Old English] metrical form in its simplest and loosest form’ (with alliteration and a strong caesura),39 and Huppé declares that the translation will be successful if it turns the reader ‘to the labor of reading the original’.40 Huppé sees his translation as ‘in accord with the aim of faithfulness’,41 but is by no means closely literal in his treatment:
Hear the ancient tale that we are told
of the great deeds of Danish kings,
and their lordly lives of valor. (lines 1–3)
The translation, domesticating in approach, is the work of a scholar rather than a poet, but it is fairly vigorous in style.
Most of the translations of Beowulf discussed in this book adopt metrical structures based freely on the four-stress line of Old English poetry. As indicated by the title of her 1988 translation, Beowulf: An Imitative Translation, Ruth Lehmann goes further, setting herself the challenge of ‘imitating’ the Old English alliterative metre itself,42 something that, as we have seen, S. B. Greenfield for one went out of his way not to do. In her own words, Lehmann seeks to be ‘accurate in interpretation and keep to the alliterative meter’.43 Though referring to her translation as ‘more or less’ imitative of Old English metre, arguing that ‘[a] more exact imitation is compromised by an effort not to distort modern English into something awkward and unintelligible’,44 in fact Lehmann applies the Old English rules to her verse in a strict way, certainly much more strictly than anything we have seen in this chapter so far. She allows herself somewhat greater leniency in her use of anacrusis (the introduction of unstressed syllables at the beginning of a verse) in verse-types A, D and E than is found in the original, but each of her half-lines is carefully based on one of the Sievers five types.
Lehmann’s translation, last reprinted in 2000, is interesting as a scholarly exercise but does not work as a poem. Lehmann, a student of Old English metrics (I quoted from one of her articles in Chapter 2),45 has the scholarly equipment to produce modern English verse using Old English metre but may be seen not to possess the poetic equipment to do so convincingly – perhaps no one could (as shown below, Frederick Rebsamen, a better poet than Lehmann, doesn’t produce a satisfying imitative version either). She is far from creating poetry that lives. There are vigorous passages that suggest the excitement of the original but generally the translation comes across as stiff and stilted, with an abundance of unnatural-sounding expressions in evidence, as Lehmann struggles with the demands of the metre. This version is full of archaisms, a few examples being forth-faring (line 27, etc.), weeds of battle (line 39), bills (line 40), foeman (line 142), fell (adjective, line 193), quaffed (line 629), and mannered and curious usages, often also archaic-sounding and/or involving inversion, are ubiquitous; the following examples give a flavour: thaneguards (line 123), Who may ye be, having armor? (line 237), Guard of the seashore / for a time am I (lines 240–1), Be our good tutor (line 269), naught but a child (line 372), A dangerous journey you dared swimming (line 512). Clumsy and inapposite renderings distract and detract from the flow of the narrative: not at all the less (line 43), had chosen choice fighting men (line 205), fearless official (line 287), delightful chorus (line 611, referring to warriors in the hall). In the terms of her own reflections as referred to above, Lehmann’s spirited translation is ‘intelligible’ but it does not consistently avoid being ‘awkward’.
1990 saw the publication of Raymond Tripp’s highly idiosyncratic verse translation (with a flexible stress-based metre),46 a translation that sets out to be as literal as possible and that reflects the approach to the poem and its interpretation outlined in Tripp’s 1983 publication More About the Fight with the Dragon.47 Tripp finds elaborate wordplay everywhere in Beowulf, even in words that look perfectly straightforward in meaning (as in the quotation below). His concentration on close translation and on multiple meaning at the lexical level is at the expense of overall tone and style, resulting in a register that is an uneasy combination of the formal, often specifically chivalric, and the colloquial, and an expression that seems heavy-handed and insensitive to the real subtlety and associative power of the language of Beowulf. The multiple meanings themselves mostly strain credulity to breaking point, and although Tripp insists that he wishes to bring out these multiple meanings, the one meaning that he tends not to give is the ostensibly obvious one. Thus, for example, the passage at the beginning of the poem which is usually (and correctly) interpreted as being about Scyld depriving his enemies of their mead-benches is rendered
Often would a benchman among brawling men,
At many a meeting shove Scyld Scefing aside,
And bully the earl, as soon as his bounty was
Found unforthcoming. (lines 4–7a)
Tripp’s translation, which did not achieve wide circulation, might be viewed as refreshingly iconoclastic but it must be seen as presenting too much of a distorted image of Beowulf to be of benefit to the general reader or to be useful in the classroom.
We have already looked at Marijane Osborn’s 1983 translation of Beowulf. In 1990 Osborn was part of another high-production-value publication, one that presented the version of the poem by Raymond Oliver. This publication was Beowulf: A Likeness, a collaboration between Oliver, the designer Randolph Swearer and Osborn, the latter providing a seven-page essay, ‘Imagining the Real World Setting of Beowulf’.48 Here again we see Beowulf beautifully packaged and presented, and again there is an Introduction by Fred C. Robinson. Beowulf: A Likeness is a coffee-table-size volume on glossy art-paper, illustrated with black-and-white photographs (of artefacts and landscapes) and other images, with some use of blue in the illustrations; each page opening is conceived as a single unit, with generous margins on text pages and some pages having white print on black for dramatic effect while some have text printed on photographs. The book is designed as a visual experience.
I refer to Oliver’s text as a version of the poem but in fact it is such in only the broadest of senses. This is not a direct translation but rather a reimagining and rewriting of the poem in new poetic terms, what Dryden would have referred to as an ‘imitation’.49 Howell Chickering compares it to John Gardner’s Grendel: ‘it is a new work of art, a literary experience in its own right, that takes great imaginative liberties with its parent text and yet also translates portions of it very closely.’50 Oliver himself compares his approach to that of Malory in treating his French sources, which involved ‘much adding, subtracting, and rearranging of large structural units as well as thorough rewording; it can be securely described neither as translation nor “imitation”’.51 In Oliver’s case such an approach enables the introduction of new characters and narrative details and entails the simplification of what Robinson refers to in the Introduction as the ‘spiritual climate’ of the poem, ‘free[ing] readers to turn their attention to other matters in the story which would have equal importance for an Anglo-Saxon and a modern audience’.52 Oliver uses a variety of metres, including rhyming stanzas and heroic couplets, and is not interested in producing a ‘likeness’ of the poetry of Beowulf itself.
The opening stanza of Oliver’s Beowulf reads as follows:
When Scyld the distant-father died of time,
Old in winters, come to the end of deeds,
His body being fresh as in his prime,
Sweet as flowers newly mown in the meads,
They wrapped it all in linden trimmed with gold,
And otter-furs against the snowy cold. (lines 1–6)
This is a thoughtful reworking and development of ideas prompted by the prologue of Beowulf; it is not a translation of the opening lines of the poem, however.
Oliver’s poem overall is insightful and suggestive, bringing aspects of Beowulf vividly to life and exploring its silences. It is a living poem in its own right but must be viewed as a response to rather than a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem in the narrow sense. And it is very partial in its interpretation of the original. It misleadingly implies that Beowulf comes from a world of crude experience: we have already noted Oliver’s simplification of the religious dimension of the poem but he also elides the elaborate decorum of life at Heorot and the complexity of interaction between the warriors. As Kevin Kiernan notes, ‘Oliver is not interested in the polished behavior of Hrothgar’s royal thanes. In the loutish setting he creates, the complexities of Hunferth’s character are simplified by crude insults, delivered in mock-heroic rhyming couplets.’53 Oliver provides a provocative read but he is highly selective, and subjective, in his treatment, which is not intended to be seen as a faithful translation. Rather than being aimed at bringing the general reader to a knowledge of Beowulf, it would be best appreciated by readers who know the original poem already.
1990 also saw the publication of Marc Hudson’s verse translation of Beowulf, accompanied by an extensive and interesting ‘Commentary’ by him on issues in poetic translation in general and in the translation of Beowulf in particular, with reflection on his own practice.54 Hudson’s translation is flowing and dignified, generally restrained in tone and attentive to the meditative quality of Beowulf. Hudson refers to his version as paraphrase, picking up on Dryden’s distinction between metaphrase (close literal translation), paraphrase (‘translation with latitude’, in Dryden’s terms) and imitation (‘taking only some general hints from the original’, the approach adopted by Raymond Oliver, for example).55 Hudson’s translation sticks close to the general sense of the original but is strikingly free in expressing that sense, with many original touches and much recasting of imagery. Describing the first coming of Grendel, for example, Hudson writes,
So that company of men lived in a circle
of light, until one began,
a fiend in hell, to work evil. (lines 99–101)
This follows the original literally, except for the imaginative recasting of the Old English dreamum lifdon, / eadiglice, ‘lived in joys, happily’ (lines 99–100), as ‘lived in a circle / of light’, conveying something of the associative depth of dreamum.
In his Commentary Hudson identifies the principles that provided a framework for his translation: ‘The four-stress line, the diction of a higher note, the resolution of kennings into phrases, the fidelity to the rhetorical figures and to the contemplative character of the poem – these represent controlling biases that informed my choices, providing the work as a whole with a unity it would not have otherwise possessed.’56 In applying these principles, Hudson sacrifices some of the excitement of the narrative of the original and eschews obvious virtuosity but he conveys the reflective quality of Beowulf effectively. He aims at a natural-sounding syntax, preserving the Old English feature of variation where he can do so, but only ‘within the limits of Modern English syntax’.57 He greatly reduces the number of compound words, though some striking ones are included, such as edge-keeper (Old English mearcstapa, ‘traverser of the borderlands’, line 103), dawn-lament (Old English morgensweg, ‘cry in the morning’, line 129) and death-gear (Old English gryregeatwum, ‘terrifying equipment/war-gear’, line 324), the latter being particularly arresting in the adjectival phrase, describing the Geatish warriors, ‘beautiful in death-gear’ (there is no equivalent to beautiful in the original).
In Hudson’s version we see a poet engaging thoughtfully with the poetry of the original in a way that is also designed to appeal to the ‘general’ modern reader. The verse form itself is mostly unobtrusive, to the extent of being prose-like. The register is notably formal, with some limited use of archaic and poetic vocabulary (whither, line 163; unto, line 183; whelming, line 394; blithe, line 604), obscure words (cumbered, line 15; falchion, line 40; jinked, meaning ‘jingled’, line 227) and Old English terms (aethelings, line 118; wyrd, line 455; scop, line 496); shape and Shaper (from Old English scyppan and Scyppend) are used in a mannered way for ‘create, make’ and ‘Creator’. There are some notably prosaic words, however (e.g., recalcitrant, line 137; achievement, line 857), and a few colloquialisms here and there (e.g., ‘set the record straight’, lines 532–3; ‘belly up’, line 565); ‘just dessert’ (line 423) is either distractingly clever or a mistake.
Hot on the heels of Hudson’s version came the translation by Frederick Rebsamen, first published in 1991 and brought out again in 2004 in an ‘updated’ version.58 Twenty years earlier Rebsamen had produced a prose adaptation of the story of Beowulf, narrated by the protagonist and incorporating much extra-textual material, including new scenes and lines from other Old English poems.59 Rebsamen’s verse translation is completely independent from the prose appropriation. It is a daring and vigorous piece of work in which, like Lehmann (whose version he doesn’t know), he imitates the metre of Old English poetry as closely as possible, observing the rules of verse-type and alliteration. This is a constricting verse form for Modern English and even though Rebsamen’s translation is very much a free paraphrase (far more so than is Hudson’s version), metrical considerations dominate expression. The rhythm is abrupt, based insistently on half-line units (with strong caesura), and word order is affected by the demands of the metre and by the adoption of Old English syntactical structures. The diction is resolutely modern but is heightened by the frequent use of invented compound words (goldgifts, anger-flames, swordswings, throne-battle and blood-minded in one short sequence at lines 80–5), words based on Old English usage (gleemen, line 52; Deemer, line 187; wyrd, line 572, etc.), and new formations and extensions of modern words (eagering, line 535; sleepened [by sword-swings], line 567). The result of the combination of such features is a verse that is modern, strange and striking. This is no easy read in the tradition of the invisible translation.
A sense of the distinctiveness of Rebsamen’s translation is suggested by its opening lines, which also provide a vivid illustration of the freedom with which he treats his source:
Yes! We have heard of years long vanished
how Spear-Danes struck sang victory-songs
raised from a wasteland walls of glory. (lines 1–3)
This is clearly a considerable rewriting of the first lines of Beowulf, with new imagery introduced and elements of contrast (struck, wasteland) adding to the passage’s abruptness. The reader has to work at the syntax but the sense of ancient glory and excitement is unmistakable.
There are many exhilarating touches in the translation – ‘bright bench-laughter borne to the rafters’ (line 88) is just one example – but hammering intensity is relentless throughout and soon begins to wear. Rebsamen’s poetry seems muscle-bound and in many places awkward, with expression frequently appearing dense to the point of opacity. The translation is bold in its strangeness but the strangeness overwhelms the poetry. Hampered particularly by the strictness of the chosen metre and by his unwieldy syntax, in the assessment of one reviewer, Rebsamen’s version ‘is a hybrid that is neither modern English poetry, nor in any way an accurate rendering of the Old English poem’.60 In my own view, in his Beowulf Rebsamen does write modern English poetry which is idiosyncratic and in places interesting, but it is also limited. It is incapable of adequately sustaining the narrative of Beowulf over the expanse of the translation and is a blunt instrument for conveying the sophistication of the original’s poetry.
In 1994 the translation of E. L. Risden appeared, aimed explicitly at a student readership; like other great works from the past, writes Risden, Beowulf ‘deserves the attention of all students interested in literature’.61 With this general readership in mind and perceiving that existing verse translations ‘tend to sacrifice literal meaning for aesthetic value’, Risden sets out to provide ‘the most accurate translation possible, while maintaining readability and keeping in mind the poet’s technique and the concerns of interested readers approaching the poem for the first time’.62 His artistic aspiration is limited to producing a translation that is ‘not entirely unbeautiful’63 and in this modest aim he succeeds, though, inevitably, little of the power of the original poem comes across. Risden writes in a style that is dignified but generally unobtrusive. As he puts it in his Introduction, echoing sentiments we have seen widely displayed by other translators, ‘The translation should sound as though the poem has come from the past rather than from Main Street, but it shouldn’t sound as though the translator is struggling to make it so.’64 The verse is in a form of half-line alliterating metre, freely adapted by Risden from that of Old English in a manner that does not unduly constrict syntax or intelligibility.
The translation is generally accurate, though there are some lapses, and the decision not to capitalize ‘god’ (on the grounds that it is not capitalized in the original manuscript and that Risden doesn’t ‘feel comfortable asserting that [some references] defin[i]tely do not suggest Othin or perhaps both Christian and Germanic gods at once’65) is an eccentric one, and is contradicted by the capitalization of ‘Almighty’. And although the style is generally unobtrusive the concern to suggest that the poem comes from the past can lead to curiousness of expression, as in
Not at all was he less provisioned with gifts,
heirlooms of his people, than they once did
who sent him at birth far over the sea,
alone on the waves when he was a child. (lines 43–6)
Here the litotes is overdone and the sentence ends up being ungrammatical.
Risden’s version is in the tradition of readable Beowulfs catering for literature students, with somewhat heightened, and slightly archaizing, diction and dignified expression. It would soon be overtaken by other translations for students studying Beowulf in translation which, while similar in approach to Risden’s, were more attractively packaged, offered more in the way of introductory and supplementary material and in some cases were more interesting stylistically.
At the other end of the spectrum is the version by Richard M. Trask (1998),66 which sets out to follow the ‘old rules’ of metre, alliteration and compound poetic metaphor, seeing key aspects of Old English prosody as still operative in Modern English. ‘Fortified with the conviction’, writes Trask, ‘that the kenning as well as alliteration is appropriate to, and at home in, Modern English, we proceed afresh to translate Old English verse into Modern English using the alliterative pattern, retaining as many compound poetic metaphors as we are able and perhaps even throwing in some of our own making.’67 Aimed at students and the general reader, the translation sets out to take the reader to the original poem and succeeds in capturing aspects of its form but hardly of its vitality. It has some nicely creative touches and arresting phrases (and some misleading renderings68), and it is far from bland, but, as is the case with other imitative translations, comes across as somewhat stilted and awkward:
Behold! We from the Spear-Danes in days of old
found out the glory of our folk-hero kings,
how the princes proved their courage. (lines 1–3)
The translation is printed interlinearly with an Old English text but is not a half-line for half-line gloss but a freer imitation of the lines of the original, with some syntactical adaptation.
One of the most vigorous recent translations is that by Thomas Kennedy (2001), a version in eight-syllable verse with varying patterns of stress within the line.69 Kennedy eschews the use of alliterative metre, arguing that for a modern reader ‘alliteration does not seem to be versification at all’,70 and adopts a less obtrusive verse form that nonetheless, with its short phrases, gives a strong sense of half-line units. Kennedy has the interesting idea of directly taking over the metaphorical language of the Old English into Modern English: ‘A principal aim of this translation is to uncover the metaphorical texture of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, a texture sometimes obscured in the attempt to find modern equivalents.’71 The result is a strongly foreignizing translation that does succeed in conveying the shock of the old, though at the expense of producing a version that is too literal and consequently too curious to work as modern poetry. Kennedy’s version reads not as a modern poem but as a self-consciously reconstructed Old English poem in Modern English, in which the Anglo-Saxon metaphorical language sounds stilted in its modern garb.
Kennedy’s literalness is not primarily at the grammatical level, though he does reproduce the additive, appositive style of the original and imitates Old English in omitting articles before nouns. Rather Kennedy is particularly literal at the level of diction and metaphor. Thus we read that ‘all those around sitting / over the whale path’ (lines 9–10; echoing ymbsittendra, Beowulf, line 9) yielded tribute to Scyld; Scyld’s retainers are ‘journey comrades’ (line 25; echoing wilgesiþas, Beowulf, line 23); God is the ‘Helmet of Heaven’ (line 172; cf. also Hrothgar as ‘helmet of Scyldings, line 351, etc.); ‘Care seethed in Healfdene’s son’ (line 179); and so on. In such renderings Kennedy brings out the metaphorical meaning of Old English phrases; he also uses Old English words and Old-English-derived words, closely following the phrasing of Beowulf itself: Scyld attacks ‘scather gangs’ (line 5), a scather being one who injures; Scyld ‘waxed straight and strong under welkin’ (line 8); God is ‘Wielder of fame’ (line 15); no one can say ‘for sooth’ (line 46) who received the cargo of Scyld’s funeral ship. Other archaic/Old English usages, modelled on the language of the original, include brim (line 26), weeds (line 34), wading (line 210, ‘going’), one-fold (line 244), heap (line 379, ‘group’), doom (line 412, ‘judgement’), wyrd (line 431, etc.), cringe (line 611, ‘fall’).
Such defamiliarizing language is accompanied in the translation by a marked use of inverted word order that looks highly artificial in Modern English, especially as articles are also omitted:
Wielder of fame to child of Scyld
world honor gave. (lines 15–16)
Elsewhere formulations that directly imitate the Old English can sound not only artificial but a bit wooden: ‘Of mankind we are of the Geats’ (line 248, literally translating We synt gumcynnes Geata leode, Beowulf, line 259), and ‘We have, to the king of the Danes, / a great errand’ (lines 259–60a, literally translating Habbað we to þæm mæran micel ærende, Beowulf, line 270).
Like Rebsamen’s, Kennedy’s translation may be seen as lacking subtlety and in its adoption of Old English poetic patterns rather clunky. It is lightly abbreviating in its treatment of the original, simplifying and telescoping syntactical structures and, very occasionally, omitting details (such as the name of Scyld’s son Beow/Beowulf at line 18 of the original), so that the total line-count of the translation is 3174, as compared to 3182 in the original. Some renderings might also raise scholarly eyebrows, for example deeds of love (line 22) for Old English lofdædum (Beowulf, line 24), ‘deeds of praise’; fearful garments (line 3040) for gryregeatwum (Beowulf, line 324), ‘fearsome war-gear’; and Living alone was their reward (line 106), a very free interpretation of he him ðæs lean forgeald (Beowulf, line 114), ‘he gave them requital for that’.
At the other extreme from foreignizing translations like those of Rebsamen and Kennedy are the recent versions of Roy Liuzza, Alan Sullivan/Timothy Murphy and John McNamara. Roy Liuzza’s translation came out in 2000,72 just after that of Seamus Heaney, and it was well received, even eliciting favourable comparison with Heaney’s version. Frank Kermode considers that one could compare passages in the two versions line by line ‘and say that Heaney wins some and loses some’.73 Carolyne Larrington is of the view that ‘Liuzza’s imagination and ear rival Heaney’s; in particular, lifbysig in line 966 is “squirming for life”, gryrefahne, line 2576, is “mottled horror”, and in line 2829 heaðoscearpe is the onomatopoeic “battle-scarred shard”’.74 Examples of such felicitous renderings could be multiplied.
As well as presenting his own version, Liuzza’s volume is a resource pack for studying Beowulf and its translations. He includes specimens of other translations down the generations as well as invaluable supplementary material, the whole informed by scholarship of the highest quality and laid out attractively. The translation is fluent and unshowy. In Liuzza’s view a translation is not a substitute or simulacrum of the original but ‘in the end, a gesture towards an empty space where a text used to be’: it is ‘a suggestion’.75
In his Introduction to the translation Liuzza describes his approach to the poetry of Beowulf. He aims above all at ‘fluency and precision’, choosing a verse form that will enable him to achieve these goals:
I have tried to write in a poetic idiom that is analogous to, not imitative of, the character of the original; the end result has been a translation that is quieter than most others. Each verse has four stresses, a medial pause, and alliteration, but these are by no means as marked as they are in the original, and on rare occasions are foregone altogether.76
The verse form gives structure to the narration but is not distracting; caesuras are not too pronounced, rhythm not too pounding, and alliteration is used for rhetorical and ornamental effect rather than structurally. Liuzza makes some use of Old English stylistic features such as apposition and compounding but sparingly and without generally straining his modern idiom.
His register is consistently fairly formal but also idiomatic. Like other aspects of the translation the diction is mostly natural-sounding and unostentatious, with little in the way of colloquialism (one example is ‘They asked for trouble’, line 423), no cultivation of the archaic (apart from the odd appearance of hither, thence, unto and the like) and only the occasional suggestion of stiffness: ‘wielded speech’ (line 30). Some phrases seem well worn (e.g., billowing waves, line 217; crest of the waves, line 471), which may be viewed as reflecting formulaic diction, and indeed formulaic phrases too are passed on (e.g., Hrothgar spoke, protector of the Scyldings, line 371, etc.; hardy in his helmet, line 341, etc.). In this context the occasional use of strange-looking compound words and Old English words (such as byrnies, scop, wyrd, glossed by means of footnotes) is particularly arresting.
Syntax, while allowing some apposition and interweaving of elements, is modern, with frequent substitution of grammatical subordination for parataxis and insertion of explanatory connectives, such as and, but and dashes, the latter as in (with need and dire distress also in apposition here):
whom God sent
as a solace to the people – He saw their need,
the dire distress they had endured. (lines 13b–15)
Liuzza’s is a domesticating translation but with defamiliarizing touches every so often that in my view add an important dimension. Kermode picks up on this when he comments that ‘Liuzza is more confident [than Heaney] in the strangeness of the literal’, noting, for example, the ‘odd’ adjective bone-adorned (line 780) in Liuzza’s description of Heorot.77 Other striking compounds include folk-stead (line 76), battle-minded (line 306) and sword-panic (line 583), and I have already alluded to the introduction of Old English words. Heaney it isn’t – Liuzza himself writes modestly, ‘My own version was not produced with any great pretensions to poetic beauty, or with the kind of profound wrestling with the poetic tradition that Heaney offers’78 – but the translation admirably fulfils Liuzza’s objectives of fluency and precision. Understandably, it (and its supplementary material) is popular with students and instructors, and it is likely to remain so in the years ahead.
The translation by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy (2004) is in a volume of the same kind as Liuzza’s, but one that provides even more supplementary material, clearly aimed at the beginning student.79 It includes plot summary, a table of dates, detailed textual annotation, translations of Latin contextual material and translations of extracts from a wide range of poetry and prose in Old English and Old Norse; there are also extracts from a number of previous translations of Beowulf (from Turner to Lehmann). The book presents an attractive and convenient package, making life easy for students with no background in Anglo-Saxon literature who are studying Beowulf in translation.
The translation also makes life easy for the reader. Written in an imitative metre that is not overly strict, it is freer in its treatment of the sense of the original than that of Liuzza, with considerable restructuring of syntax and recasting of expression, as illustrated by the opening three lines:
So! The Spear-Danes in days of old
were led by lords famed for their forays.
We learned of those princes’ power and prowess.
Explanatory and descriptive additions are inserted (‘brusquely brandished / spear-haft in hand’, lines 205–6; ‘envious Unferth’, line 444; ‘their elk-horned hall’, line 698; etc.); formulaic language largely dispensed with, and compound words are few and far between, though there are some examples (soul-slayer, line 155; wave-courser, line 173; man-scather, line 639; etc.).
The register is rather formal, with a modern diction punctuated by ‘near-archaisms’ (fell affliction, line 130; helms, line 271; couched with his queen, line 595; sojourn to [sic] Hell, line 721; fire-drake, line 2376; etc.), rare words (fulmar, line 190; berm, line 196; thews, line 386; etc.) and Old English terms (byrnies, scop, glossed). With regard to such unusual lexical choices the translators declare that they have taken their cues from Tolkien’s practice in his fantasy writing.80 The resulting diction can appear quaintly mannered and curious: World’s Warder, line 25; bevy of devils, line 677; Folk-leaders fared, line 748; and so on.
There are many nice touches in the translation but plenty of wrong notes too: ‘raising the rafters’ at line 68 sounds more like having a good time than building a hall; ‘I knew him once’ (line 333) refers more naturally to acquaintance with an adult rather than a child; ‘whose gilded gables he knew at a glance’ (line 642) suggests that Grendel had to quickly make sure that he was approaching Heorot and not somewhere else; and there are also plenty of questionable translations: ‘fair dealing’, for example, at line 22, for lof-dædum, ‘praiseworthy deeds’ (Beowulf, line 24); ‘whose word held his land whole’ (line 71), for se þe his wordes geweald wide hæfde, ‘who widely had power of/by his word’ (Beowulf, line 79); ‘spell’ (line 776) for spel, ‘tale’ (Beowulf, line 873). And lexical choices often seem distractingly dictated by the requirements of alliteration: obtrusive-looking words invariably occur in stressed alliterating positions (beach, line 26; Baltic, line 44; fulmar, line 190; berm, line 196; etc.).
Sullivan and Murphy present the story of Beowulf in a lively and fast-paced way. In the process, like other translators, they sacrifice the possibility of conveying much of a feeling of the poetry of the original. Reflective of the pace of the narrative is the fact that this is a translation of Beowulf of 2800 lines, not the expected 3182 – not because the translators have left chunks out but because they speed on so swiftly. The passage corresponding to the prologue consists of 47 lines (not 52), that corresponding to fitt 1 has 54 lines (not 62), that corresponding to fitt 2 63 lines (not 74), and so on.
Also aimed at students is the version by John McNamara (2005), which appears in a concise volume in the Barnes and Noble Classics series.81 This book has an Introduction helpful to beginning students, stressing the importance of the Germanic oral tradition to the poetry of Beowulf, and the translation is accompanied by short explanatory notes and glosses of particular words. There is a brief section at the end presenting some well-chosen comments on Beowulf, from Conybeare to Tolkien, and there is a three-page survey of creative works inspired by the poem. The translation is accurate, intelligent and readable, in a four-stress metre with caesura and extensive use of alliteration and a formal but largely natural-sounding register. It attempts to strike a balance between the domesticating and foreignizing approaches, though tending more towards the former. The balance comes out in a sentence like
Then was Beow of the Scyldings a beloved king
for a long time, in the town-forts of the people,
famed among the folk – his father had passed on. (lines 53–5)
Here we have inversion in the opening phrase, an imitative compound in town-forts and a formulaic-sounding alliterative phrase in famed among the folk, which are all heightening effects, but the vocabulary is otherwise that of ordinary speech and the closing half-line presents a well-worn modern euphemism for ‘died’. McNamara would not claim to be a great poet but his nicely produced book is well positioned to cater for the Beowulf-in-translation college market.
The most recent verse translations of Beowulf at time of writing are the contrasting versions of Martin Puhvel and Dick Ringler, published in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Martin Puhvel’s accessible and unshowy translation, ‘intended primarily for readers who possess no, or limited, knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and are thus unable to enjoy the great poem in its original language’,82 is accompanied by a succinct scholarly Introduction and explanatory and interpretative notes and comments, as well as maps, genealogies and a glossary of proper names; Puhvel shows particular interest in matters of legendary history and mythology.
Written in a flexible imitative metre, the translation is a sound, if perhaps unexciting, version that flows well, presenting a clear narrative line while keeping close to the sense of the original. It succeeds, through the use of apposition and other Old-English-like syntactical patterns, in suggesting something of the ‘austere terseness and concentrated impact’83 of the original. Puhvel cultivates a dignified but fairly plain register, in which an elevated tone finds expression through the use of formal, though mostly unornate, language, with much deployment of rhetorical inversion, often with a touch of the archaic about it (On his pledge he reneged not, line 82; until empty stood / the best of buildings, lines 149–50). There is some stilted phrasing in the translation (started to utter a speech of contention, line 498; much vexed was he with the venture of Beowulf, line 499), but well-chosen imaginative renderings are also much in evidence (thoughts of hell / haunted their minds, lines 181–2, for helle gemundon / in modsefan, lines 179–80, ‘they thought of hell in their minds’; Then he laughed in his heart, line 720, for Þa his mod ahlog, line 730, ‘Then his mind laughed/exulted’). The translation may be seen as catering particularly for courses that have an interest in studying folkloristic and legendary aspects of Beowulf.
The last translation to be noticed here, that of Dick Ringler,84 is also one of the most interesting. As the title of the translation, Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery, proclaims, this is a version for reading aloud, and indeed audio-recordings of oral renditions of Ringler’s text are available on CD and online (the full performances of these lasting some three hours).85 Ringler’s translation is preceded by a substantial Introduction (more than one hundred pages) focusing particularly on the poetry of Beowulf and the perceived themes of the poem, and the volume also includes translations of three other Old English poems, ‘The Fight at Finnsburg’, ‘A Meditation’ (the poem usually referred to as The Wanderer) and ‘Deor’, and a glossary of proper names. Thus it incorporates useful material for studying Beowulf (though no annotation or commentary); Ringler’s underlying purpose, however, is to present a version of the poem that people today will enjoy orally.
For his translation Ringler adopts a strict form of Old English metre, thus producing a version that gives a strong sense of the sound patterns of the original poetry. In formatting his text on the page he reverts to the nineteenth-century practice of arranging the verse in short lines (half-lines), intending thereby to emphasize the rhythmic independence of each verse-unit. Though this arrangement downplays the linking together of pairs of half-lines, as Ringler declares, ‘it also encourages a more fluent and fast-moving reading of the text than the line-by-line layout’.86
It is a considerable achievement of Ringler’s that despite the constrictions of a metre so ostensibly unsuited to the resources of present-day English the translation reads excellently as convincing narrative verse. Ringler has to sacrifice the intricacy of style of the original and much of its formulaic dimension but his vigorous translation strikingly transmits the rhythm of Old English poetry while effecting a mode of expression that is mostly neither stilted nor strained. Part of the secret here is that Ringler allows himself latitude in his treatment of the sense of the Old English: the translation is free and incorporates judicious pleonasm rather than sticking literally to the surface meaning of the original. The language is formal and decorous but natural-sounding. It conspicuously lacks the archaizing tendencies of many other modern translations and eschews interference with normal Modern English word order.
Ringler’s translation lacks the flashes of poetic brilliance we have seen particularly in the versions by Morgan and Alexander but it is lively throughout and has many imaginative touches, not least in additions which expand on the sense of the original: thus, in one short passage, Grendel approaches the ‘silent hall’ (line 231), he goes ‘shambling home / with his shameful spoil’ (lines 248–9), his destruction is visible ‘in the grey / light of morning’ (lines 251–2), and, as a result, Hrothgar
sat bowed with grief,
dazed by the dreadful
death of his friends. (lines 260–2)
The latter clause is a free rendering of the more restrained, and more formulaic, Old English
unbliðe sæt,
þolode ðryðswyð, þegnsorge dreah. (lines 130b–1)
[literally: he sat joyless, the powerful one suffered, endured sorrow for his friends.]
Ringler’s register is different from that of the Old English and his language is more graphically descriptive. There is significant losing as well as gaining in evidence in the translation but it presents a compelling and accessible narrative, and it is rich in sound effects, rather than being tiresomely repetitive in its rhythm, a fault of other imitative versions.
These translations, increasing throughout the period in the frequency of their appearance, tell a story of widespread interest in Beowulf particularly on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean and of a desire to make the poem available to new general readers and to provide access to it in forms helpful to those studying it in translation. Clearly, it is the latter group that many of the translations are targeted at, and in general the translations for student use have got more attractive in appearance as time has gone on, with the incarnation of the Heaney translation in the Norton Critical Editions series also conforming to this pattern. Another group of Beowulf versions belongs to the ‘beautiful book’ variety. These are more expensive publications, in which the translation is accompanied by art work and photographs, the whole ensemble making the poem look good and offering a pleasing aesthetic experience; the recent illustrated version of the Heaney translation edited by John D. Niles also comes into this category.87 A final group is made up of translations and adaptations that are essentially poetic engagements with Beowulf aimed in the first place at the general reader or the reader of poetry, in the tradition of Edwin Morgan. The groups are not discrete, however, and some versions cater for more than one type of reader. American editions of the version by Heaney, for example, are aimed at all three markets.
In the versions surveyed we see translators being fascinated and challenged by Beowulf and responding to it creatively in different ways. The sheer variety of responses to Beowulf among our translators is striking, though they operate within familiar theoretical parameters with regard to register, literalness and their degree of foreignness/domestication. Some versions may be seen to work better than others but overall there is an impression of vitality and imagination in them that is to be applauded. None of them provides the last word on the poem, of course, and we can expect new versions to continue to appear in the future. One translation that has not yet been published is that by the American poet/scholar Stephen Glosecki, completed just before his tragically early death in 2007. Published portions of the translation attest to its muscular imitative and emphatically foreignizing style.88
Some literary people still find Beowulf irrelevant or are suspicious of its long-standing canonical status (I referred to Terry Eagleton’s view in a previous chapter [here]) but it is no longer really the ‘dinosaur’ at the beginning of English literature that it was when Michael Alexander or Frank Kermode were studying it, a philological text that bored or irritated most students. Since those days the story of Beowulf has been brought accessibly by the translations we have been looking at to new readers not necessarily aware of its inherited canonical status or its academic history. Some of these versions give little sense of the poetry of Beowulf or little sense of what it is like to read it in Old English, but even they may encourage some people to experience the poem in the original.
Meanwhile in the academic world Beowulf has begun to be reimagined in recent decades, entering more than in the past into the mainstream of contemporary critical concerns. Its identity as a patriarchal English monolith has fragmented and scholars are now engaging with it intellectually from a wide range of critical positions. Some of the most interesting approaches were brought together recently in an anthology of essays edited by Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey,89 but this does not cover the full range of ‘new angles’ on Beowulf; among the most interesting areas of study has been that concerned with the history of the scholarship of the poem and of its reception in the modern period, to which I hope the present book will make a small contribution.
At the intersection of the academic and the literary stand the verse translators of Beowulf, the best of whom bring the poem to life for modern readers and stimulate us to think about it in new ways.
1 Wright, Beowulf, p. 9.
2 In a recent discussion of ‘the future of Beowulf’ two US college instructors attest, ‘Many freshman students at our university sign up for the medieval section of the mandatory Western civilization course because of Beowulf’ (Momma and Powell, ‘Death and Nostalgia: The Future of Beowulf in the Post-National Discipline of English’, p. 1350).
3 A number of separate online translations have also appeared, of varying degrees of academic respectability. For further details, see Syd Allen’s comprehensive website www.beowulftranslations.net/.
4 John Porter’s translation, in his Beowulf: Text and Translation, looks like verse at first sight but is not a literary translation but rather a half-line by half-line gloss of the Old English text, which it accompanies in parallel-text fashion. A similar approach is adopted in the online version Beowulf on Steorarume (trans. Slade).
5 Crossley-Holland, trans., Beowulf.
6 Beowulf, ‘Translator’s Note’, p. xi (original 1968 edition).
7 Ibid.
8 Archaic usage includes references to ‘shrithing’ (line 162, etc.) and ‘quaffing [beer/mead]’ (line 480, etc.); examples of inverted word order are ‘so did they cross the sea’ (line 223), ‘Thus was the lay sung’ (line 1160); colloquialisms include ‘not give them no for an answer’ (line 367), ‘asking for trouble’ (line 425).
9 Grant, trans., Aldfrith’s Beowulf.
10 Grant, Aldfrith’s Beowulf, p. 12.
11 Beowulf had been linked with King Aldfrith and Northumbria by Albert C. Cook, ‘The Possible Begetter of the Old English Beowulf and Widsith’: Cook argued that the poem had been commissioned by Aldfrith, a view that has no support among scholars today.
12 Rodrigues, trans., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh.
13 From the back cover of Rodrigues’s Beowulf.
14 Nobis, Beowulf: An Adaptation.
15 In the late 1980s and 1990s, Glover toured widely with his acclaimed performance of Beowulf, the text of which appears in his glossy publication Beowulf.
16 Nobis, Beowulf, p. viii.
17 Seamus Heaney: ‘As a translator and narrator of the Beowulf story, Felix Nobis has found a style that is high but not inflated, true to the poetry of the original and enthralling to a contemporary audience’ (quoted on the back cover of Nobis’s book).
18 Contrast the performance version (in Old English) by Benjamin Bagsby mentioned below (p. 218), which covers only the fight with Grendel (lines 1–1062); the recitation of this part alone lasts one hour and forty minutes on the DVD recording of the show.
19 Chickering, ed. and trans., Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition.
20 Chickering, Beowulf, p. ix.
21 Chickering, Beowulf, p. x.
22 Chickering, Beowulf, p. xi.
23 Haley, trans., Beowulf.
24 The blurb is enthusiastically romantic and high-sounding in its appeal to the potential reader, employing a mannered register that contrasts with the relative restraint of the actual translation: ‘Here is the saga of the glory hoarders, first sung to the harp in an age of ring bestowing, when battlemoody warriors competed in deeds story-worthy, and mead ran aplenty in the wide-doored halls.’
25 Greenfield, A Readable Beowulf, p. 29.
26 It is laid out in a broad-page format, with brief on-page explanatory notes (111 in all), marginal descriptive section-headings and running line-numbers, a number of illustrative line drawings (by Sarah Higley, in a plain modern style), supplementary information, and an authoritative introduction to Beowulf by Alain Renoir).
27 Greenfield, A Readable Beowulf, p. 29.
28 Niles, ‘Rewriting Beowulf: The Task of Translation’, p. 872.
29 Ibid.
30 Raffel, review of A Readable Beowulf, p. 93.
31 Osborn, trans., Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North.
32 Osborn, Beowulf, p. 126.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Osborn, Beowulf, pp. 126–7.
36 Osborn, Beowulf, pp. 127–8.
37 Osborn, Beowulf, p. 128.
38 Huppé, trans., Beowulf: A New Translation. Huppé’s Augustinian reading is set out in detail in his book The Hero in the Earthly City: A Reading of Beowulf.
39 Huppé, Beowulf, p. 27.
40 Huppé, Beowulf, p. 29.
41 Huppé, Beowulf, p. 27.
42 Lehmann, trans., Beowulf: An Imitative Translation.
43 Lehmann, Beowulf, p. 17.
44 Lehmann, Beowulf, p. 16.
45 See above, p. 30, n. 12.
46 Tripp, trans., Beowulf: An Edition and Literary Translation in Progress. As Tripp explains in his Introduction, the translation is not based on any existing edition: ‘the present translation returns to the manuscript and restores the text in many places, eliminating numerous editorial emendations and re-punctuation according to the new story which emerges’ (p. i), but he does not provide an Old English text or any editorial discussion: hence, presumably, the in Progress of his title. The translation is accompanied by a short Introduction but no further supplementary material.
47 Tripp, More About the Fight with the Dragon: Beowulf 2208b–3182: Commentary, Edition, and Translation. The translation of the corresponding part of the poem in Tripp’s 1990 translation is considerably re-worded.
48 Swearer, Oliver, trans., and Osborn, Beowulf: A Likeness; for Osborn’s essay, see pp. 119–27.
49 For Dryden’s classification of kinds of translation, see ‘John Dryden: From the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles’; on Dryden, see further below, p. 204.
50 Chickering, review of Mark Hudson, trans., Beowulf, and Swearer, Oliver and Osborn, Beowulf: A Likeness, p. 690.
51 Beowulf: A Likeness, p. 8.
52 Fred C. Robinson, ‘Introduction’, Beowulf: A Likeness, p. 5.
53 Kiernan, review of Swearer et al., Beowulf: A Likeness, p. 264.
54 Hudson, trans., Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.
55 Hudson, Beowulf, pp. 16–18; see further ‘John Dryden’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti.
56 Hudson, Beowulf, p. 61.
57 Hudson, Beowulf, p. 51.
58 Rebsamen, trans., Beowulf: A Verse Translation; Beowulf: An Updated Verse Translation.
59 Rebsamen, Beowulf Is My Name and Selected Translations of Other Old English Poems.
60 Schipper, review of Rebsamen, Beowulf: A Verse Translation, p. 377.
61 Risden, trans., Beowulf: A Student’s Edition; quotation at p. xiii.
62 Beowulf, pp. ii–iii.
63 Beowulf, p. iii.
64 Beowulf, p. iv.
65 Beowulf, p. v.
66 Trask, trans., Beowulf and Judith: Two Heroes.
67 Beowulf and Judith, pp. 6–7.
68 E. g., ‘to him four male children […] / woke into the world’ (lines 59–60), where one of the children (bearn) is female; Grendel is a ‘soulless man’ (line 104) (there is nothing to warrant this in the Old English); ‘bidding / to get some help against the soul slayer’ (lines 176–7), where it is the soul slayer’ (gastbona) that the Danes are praying to.
69 Thomas C. Kennedy, trans., Beowulf.
70 Beowulf, p. iv.
71 Beowulf, p. ii.
72 Liuzza, trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Liuzza reflects on translation and on his own translation in ‘Beowulf in Translation – Problems and Possibilities’.
73 Kermode, ‘The Modern Beowulf’, p. 11.
74 Larrington, review of R. M. Liuzza, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, p. 247.
75 Liuzza, Beowulf, p. 46.
76 Liuzza, Beowulf, p. 47.
77 Kermode, ‘The Modern Beowulf’, p. 11.
78 ‘Beowulf in Translation’, p. 24.
79 Sullivan and Murphy, trans., Beowulf.
80 Sullivan and Murphy, Beowulf, p. xix.
81 McNamara, trans., Beowulf: A New Translation with Introduction and Notes.
82 Puhvel, trans., Beowulf: A Verse Translation and Introduction; quotation from p. vii.
83 Puhvel, Beowulf, p. v.
84 Ringler, Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery.
85 See bibliography below, under ‘Ringler’, for details.
86 Ringler, Beowulf, p. cii. As Ringler also points out (pp. ci–cii), his layout also enables readers visually to distinguish ‘normal’ verses from the occasional light and heavy verses which the translation takes over from the original. Light verses (which have only one stressed syllable) are indented, and heavy verses (which have three stressed syallables) are set out as beginning further to the left on the page, beyond the ‘normal’ verse margin.
87 Heaney, trans., Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, ed. Niles.
88 Passages from Beowulf translated by Glosecki were published in Birmingham Poetry Review (Fall–Winter 1999 and Fall–Winter 2000). See further Glosecki, ‘Skalded Epic (Make it Old)’, in which he reflects about working on translating Beowulf and includes his version of lines 2444–71.
89 Joy and Ramsey, The Postmodern Beowulf.