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Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)
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Original price was: $15.95.$9.48Current price is: $9.48.
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New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel’s mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the “four-squareness of the utterance” in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
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Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy
Product name:
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)
Price:
Original price was: $15.95.$9.48Current price is: $9.48.
roxana rosales –
Love the detail it has in the front.
HELENA B. –
Libreria Chiari deserves to be praised – contrary to Rarewaves.de!
Amazon Customer –
Excellent translation and annotations
John Earle –
I’ve read every translation of Beowulf. This one sparkles with its pace and fluidity. It really comes alive. The introduction gives the reader some insight into how you gear up before plunging into a story from 1500 years ago. The magic of Beowulf always makes me wonder how much Anglo Saxon poetry was lost.
ACToplasm –
Earlier this year a new version of Beowulf was published, translated by the Irish Nobel Prize Winner (for 1995) Seamus Heaney. Heaney has spent many years trying to get this translation just right, and I believe he hit the nail on the head in this case. This book presents a different insight into reading Beowulf, adopting a more archaic viewpoint in both language and imagery. Henry does not bother much with fancy words to make the poem seem more fantastic, but sticks to the original terms, translating them as closely as he possibly can. The book is set up so that on the left is the poem in its original Anglo-Saxon or Old English text and on the right is Heaney’s translation.
For this translation, Heaney had to return to his long misused Irish tongue of Gaelic. He had learned the language when he was a boy, but has since spent more time using English. His main source was his grandmother, who is still fluent in the archaic language. In talking to her, he would hear strange words and terms that simply do not exist in modern English. Heaney would then turn to the original text of Beowulf. There he would notice similarities between these strange expressions uttered by his grandmother and the poem. In one case he found an exact match with the word “Þolian” which means to suffer and his grandmother’s expression, “They’ll just have to learn to thole”; here the thorn symbol Þ is pronounced with a “th” sound. Heaney considered these unique insights “loopholes” through which he was able to translate this magnificent piece of literature.
It remains unknown as to when Beowulf was written and by whom. Quite likely a monk wrote it, since monks were really the only people of the time who were able to write; also the poem was written by a Christian, since there are numerous points throughout the codex where the “Almighty” and “God” are thanked and respected.
The poem was composed first orally some time during the middle of the seventh century, and then written down in the eleventh century. It is a tale about a great hero of the Geats know as Beowulf, who travels to Denmark, where the king, Hrothgar, is being attacked by a monster in the night known as Grendel. Beowulf fights with the beat and rips off its arm, whereupon the creature flees into the darkness from whence it came. The next night, Grendel’s mother comes to avenger her son; she takes a life and flees back to her lair beneath the mere (a lake). Beowulf pursues, tracks her down and with a magic sword decapitates her.
After being greatly rewarded by Hrothgar, Beowulf and his army return to their homeland in the south of Sweden. There, after years of attacks by enemies, he inherits the throne and rules for fifty years. In his fiftieth year, a dragon is disturbed from its lair, where it has been guarding a mound of ancient treasure, left by a long-dead warrior. Beowulf confronts the dragon but is gravely injured. Wiglaf, one of his soldiers, comes to his rescue and stabs the dragon in the stomach, killing its ability to make fire. Beowulf draws his dagger and stabs the dragon a lethal blow. But Beowulf has been poisoned by the dragon’s bite and dies shortly after.
A great funeral pyre is built and set ablaze, while his many followers watch. His cremated remains are added to a special mound that is created on a hilltop overlooking the sea, where any ship passing will see the mound and know that Beowulf lies beneath. Thus, the poem ends with the forever-lasting memory of a great hero.
Heaney’s new twist on this translation of Beowulf is through using the most exact word possible; the result are terms like “ring-hoard,” “lake-birth,” “shield-clash,” and “sky-roamer.” What makes this so magical is how the words fit so well, and flow like the soft voice that once spoke them. These specific terms help to create an image in the reader’s mind of just what the original composer was intending: a story of gallantry, gold, fighting, Christianity, and the triumph of good over evil. As one begins reading, one can not help but be caught up in the thrashing current that pulls you along with the weight of the past, taking you step-by-step along Beowulf’s paths, his wins, and his eventual loss. And at the poem’s climax and conclusion one is left with a deep-set feeling of remorse for this might warrior, Beowulf, who most likely never existed, or at least has not existed for over a thousand years.
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Caio –
É um livro curto, mas de ritmo intenso. Não aproveitei em nada o original em anglo-saxão, mas o inglês é belo, rico e carrega grande autenticidade. Um livro para ser lido devagar, transportando a mente para outros mundos.
xiggie –
Beowulf, The Iliad, and Gilgamesh give windows into how three very different cultures saw the hero. This translation makes the north european accessible.
JPLongo –
I have been wanting to read Grendel for years and to re-familiarize myself with the Beowulf legend. Grendel, however, by John Garner, first published in 1971, turned out to be one of the strangest books I have every read. It is the Beowulf story told from the point of view of Grendel, a seeming invincible monster and probably one of the first serial killers in English literature.(The tone of this novel reminded me of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Zombie, about a teenage serial killer.) Before reading this novel, I read Seamus Heaney 2000 translation of Beowulf : an epic poem which was originally written in Angelo-Saxon between the 8th and 11th centuries. I found it to be mostly readable and beautifully written. In brief, Beowulf, a Scandinavia superhero (he can swim for six or seven days and in the process kills water monsters) goes to Demark to help the king whose “mead hall,” or feasting hall, has been terrorized for years by the monster Grendel, who has been killing his subjects by biting off their heads and eating them. Beowulf ultimately kills Grendel. Then he kills Grendel’s mother who is out for her son’s revenge, and then in old age Beowulf slays a dragon. This epic poem, an adventure story with loads of vivid action, is exciting to read. It pretty much focuses with Beowulf. Not too much is learned about Grendel. We learn, however, that he, his mother and other creatures were created by God after Cain killed Able.
Grendel is told from the first-person point of view of the monster himself. He is an articulate creature. “Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin.” How he learned to speak so well – and become so educated – is never explained. In fact, Grendel himself glosses over those points. He can even speak to the Danes that he is killing and terrorizing. Grendel lives with his mother in a cave. She does not have any language; she grunts and groans, but she is a mother who loves her son. Also, dwelling in the cave are shadows , the creatures created after Cane slew Able. The novel humanizes (dehumanizes?) Grendel, shows how he became a killer, a mass murderer. He does have a soft side. He falls for the queen, whom he cannot kill. The novel also paints a not-too-rosy picture of the Danes: they are greedy, immoral, duplicitous war-mongers. In a way, Grendel kills because of his treatment by the Danes (they treat him like a monster!) and also because that is what he is expected to do. The most awesome character in the book is the Dragon. He is erudite and philosophical. “The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally. But there is nothing average about expression: it is essentially individual.” He lives in a cave and is surround by his pilfered gold, which is what he lives for. He says to Grendel, “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.” He also tells Grendel that killing is Grendel’s purpose in life : “You improve them, (the Danes) my boy? Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves.” In the end, Grendel is killed by Beowulf, who is a shadowy figure in the novel and mentioned by name maybe only once.
I recommend both Grendel and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Both books are beautifully written, have depth, stay with you, but not always easy to read. Yet they are well worth the patience and time spent on them.
Margarita –
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