Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

      Seamus Heaney’s new version of Beowulf began as a commission for the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He has described how the General Editors were so concerned to ensure he remained true to the literal meaning of the poem that they appointed a “minder, an academic controller” to scour his drafts for dangerous veerings and bring him back on track. From that very narrow focus they were probably wise, since this new translation is super-charged with characteristic coinings and imaginings which make it unmistakably his own. But it should be clear, too, that these characteristics are the greatest possible tribute to his source. 

      Heaney is sensitively tuned to the Beowulf poet’s vision, and especially that magical fusion of the poet’s excitement (what Heaney locates as the “indomitable vitality” of the poetry) and his earnest engagement with the themes of order, justice and courage. Heaney finds such a poised and satisfying music to imaginatively recreate that world. His tone veers towards the excited and amused, rather than the earnest, as if in some way he is also celebrating the lineage of poets writing in English which springs from the Beowulf poet.

      Heaney refers explicitly to the importance for him of this lineage in his introduction (just as, indeed, he had done in his address at the Memorial Service for Ted Hughes last year). It is there too in the poetry; in the way he taps into a source of inspiration which enables him to transcend the formality of the metrics, and produce poetry with a real dramatic pace and edge. He barely ever seems constrained by the rigours of a formal commission. In the best passages there is an irresistible pulse with delicate lyricism. When he pulls off effective alliteration, it propels the verse forward like a prevailing wind:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood.

But Heaney’s special gift is to be able to respond, also, with exquisite delicacy to the subtle longing for peace and balance behind the sword-clashings. After Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, he writes:

                                                         The Geat captain
had boldly fulfilled his boast to the Danes:
he had healed and relieved a huge distress,
unremitting humiliations.

Here the alliteration and assonance work very differently. And in similar passages Heaney delves into the domestic roots of his language, with its Biblical undertones, to find a demotic colloquialism which dramatically highlights the starkness of the original vision without the sense of straining for effect:

Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema,
and out of the curse of his exile there sprung
ogres and elves and evil phantoms.

      Heaney has said that the most satisfying literary translation is a cross between “crib and appropriation”. In Beowulf he combines the North European rigour and earnestness of the original – and of course a faithfulness to meaning – with his own brand of Celtic-Breton romantic exuberance. The result is entirely faithful to the mood and breadth of the original. In the passage which charts Beowulf’s departure from Denmark, for example, with its subtle evocation of the ship’s progress, there is a delicately achieved balance of the order and energy which is the hallmark of the original:

The guard who had watched the boat was given
a sword with gold fittings and in future days
that present would make him a respected man
at his place on the mead bench.

            *              *            *

Right away the mast was rigged with its sea-shawl; 
sail-ropes were tightened, timbers drummed
and stiff winds kept the wave-crosser
skimming ahead.

The description of the ship’s journey has a rich sensuousness. But just as arresting is that small detail of the guard “at his place” on the mead-bench. Here is a hint, realised with simplicity, of the key themes of order and justice which underpin the action and give it resonance.

      And perhaps this passage also, therefore, helps answer two of the questions which resurface like Grendel’s mother as we read this archaic tale: why at the turn of this millennium should we bother ourselves with its account of an obscure Swedish warrior fighting mythic monsters? And why is Heaney so entranced by the tale and its teller?

      On the evidence of this version the answers appear deeply intertwined. The focus of the tale is a struggle for honour and order through the righting of wrongs, in a harsh environment where survival itself is an art. For all the formal metrics and occasional longueurs, this world and that quest for peace are vividly imagined, and shared with selfless humanity. Listening to the voice Heaney finds for his translation, it is clear he is responding to all of this: the elemental struggles in the tale with their resonances for modern day Ulster. But most of all the vitality of the poet: his “slipping” (in Heaney’s phrase) of the bonds of the metrics.

      There are echoes here, too, of the sense of justice and the value of family bonds, which recur throughout Heaney’s poetry. He has pointed out how the emphasis on righting wrongs in Beowulf can be traced right back to the first family: the very blood-root of the monster Grendel is the punishment exacted on Cain for Abel’s murder.

      But above all there is a more fundamental link between these two poets which is perhaps the most important: a complete mastery of the storyteller’s craft. One obvious danger with a translation like this, bringing into the electric age a tale of sword-wielding derring-do, is that its tone can descend into almost self-parodying whimsy and hyperbole. Heaney’s descriptive passages do sometimes touch on this but in a deliberate self-conscious way and with a reverential humour. In his telling the story-teller’s getting carried away is a strength not a weakness.

      And Heaney is, if nothing else a natural storyteller, revelling in the tale and its telling. The lineage he celebrates in this version is not just that family of poets to which he belongs, but the lineage of oral storytelling with which he has such strong kinship. It is this gift which helps makes his re-creation of Beowulf ultimately so compelling.