"Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens
By RICHARD EDER
Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" rises from the
dead.
Except for the minutely few who mastered
Anglo-Saxon in graduate school (of the merely very
few who struggled with it) our first English classic,
read in translation, has been a museum piece. We
patrolled it dutifully with a sense of importance, a
flash or two of insight and sore feet.
Now, as he did in his great archaeological poems,
"The Tollund Man," for instance, Mr. Heaney drops
a ladder deep into the literary Cenozoic. It is not
excavation but a dialogue in situ. Addressing the
same mummified figure we once addressed -- with
whatever interest but little love -- he breaks our
hearts.
Mr. Heaney's verse rendition of the epic's 3,182
lines has percolated for 15 years. The excavation
became a double one: into the poet's own national,
poetic and linguistic roots as well as the poem's.
His Beowulf is no Geat in modern get-up (the
monster-slayer belonged to a Scandinavian people
of that name). This translation does something other
than bring him up into our time. It transports us to his and lets us wander there; after which
home will never seem entirely the same.
Take the notion of fate. Yes, we had learned that this is what those murky figures with
consonant-clotted names -- Ecgtheow, Hygd -- are about as they splash through northern
meres and mists, hacking at ogres or each other with iron swords and wooden shields.
Dark and strange, it seems; and we are not likely to recall that the lucid light and language of
Greek tragedy rested upon, though it did not rest in, a sense of fate. Mr. Heaney brings the
light and the lucidity. His Beowulf circles with fate as humanly and naturally as a woodcutter
maneuvers around his falling trees.
As Beowulf goes into the three battles of the epic: his victories against the cannibal monsters
Grendel and Grendel's mother and, after a prosperous 50-year reign, his fatal combat with
the "wyrm" (dragon), we get lines like:
Whichever one death fells
must deem it a just judgment by
God.
If Grendel wins, it will be a
gruesome day. . . .
Then my face won't be there
to be covered in death: he will
carry me away
as he goes to ground, gorged and
bloodied. . . .
No need then
to lament for long or lay out my
body. . . .
Fate goes ever as fate must.
And as an old man, going out to rid his land of
the wyrm, while knowing he will perish:
He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his
death.
And, after receiving his mortal wound:
For the son of Ecgtheow, it was no
easy thing
To have to give ground like that
and go
Unwillingly to inhabit another
home
In a place beyond; so every man
must yield
The leasehold of his days.
As belief in salvation allowed the religious martyrs to undergo all kinds of painful handling,
belief in fate does something similar for the figures in the "Beowulf" epic. Each is a means of
stepping out of your own self so you can dispatch it, respectively, toward the stake or an
ogre's supper. Before Hamlet's "to be or not to be" was the "not to be so as to be" of the
martyr and the pagan warrior. Has this abstract notion ever come so alive? Mr. Heaney's
translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back
again.
The great battle scenes are rendered with a power and grisly horror both increased and made
oddly transparent by a freshness and innocence of diction.
Beowulf tells of a battle with sea monsters:
. . . in the morning, mangled and
sleeping
the sleep of the sword, they
slopped and floated
like the ocean's leavings.
After the fearsome struggle in which Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm and shoulder, the
monster flees, "hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain."
He retreats to his fen
exhausted in spirit
and beaten in battle, bloodying the
path,
hauling his doom to the demons'
mere.
The bloodshot water wallowed and
surged,
There were loathsome upthrows
and overturnings
Of waves and gore and wound-slurry.
In sustaining contrast is the lyricism, quiet yet immediate, of the small passages.
"I . . . have wintered into wisdom," the aging Danish king tells Beowulf, his deliverer,
discoursing on the vanity of power. Morning comes, "a hurry of brightness/overran the
shadows." A sense of evening pervades the most rousing actions.
Mr. Heaney renders the sunset light, sadly or wryly or even with gaiety.
Anticipating, performing or recalling his great deeds, Beowulf remains intently human. Not
by substituting a present colloquial for the old strangenesses: "word-hoard" for language,
"wave-vat" for sea, "ring-giver" for king and once, at least, "battle-torch" for sword.
However, Mr. Heaney writes -- in a preface that is part biography, part a testament of faith in
language and all shining essay -- "I have tended to follow modern usage and in the main have
called a sword a sword."
We chew vertically; we read horizontally. Much of the Old English chewiness -- the rigorous
alliterations, the craggy epithets, the caesuras in the middle of each four-beat line -- has been
retained, but some has been softened. An epic must flow to remain alive.
Mr. Heaney's flow of language, action and character is poetry's fight against dying.
There are those who will mind. Prof. Alfred Davis, an Old English scholar, was detailed to
keep an eye on Heaney by Norton, whose editors commissioned the translation back in the
mid-1980's for its Anthology of English Literature. (Later it arranged to share publication
with Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
"Nevertheless, I was often reluctant to follow his advice and persisted many times in what
we both knew were erroneous ways," Mr. Heaney writes.
It was at least as fortunate, and of course less bloody, than Nelson's clapping his blind eye
to his spyglass so as not to see the signal to retreat. Translation is not mainly the work of
preserving the hearth -- a necessary task performed by scholarship -- but of letting a fire burn
in it.
February 22, 2000
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