Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid
- 2 Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics
- 3 Louis MacNeice among the islands
- 4 Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry
- 5 Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland
- 6 Contemporary affinities
- 7 The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry
- 8 Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
- 9 Reading in the gutters
- 10 ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry
- 11 Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East
- 12 Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names
- 13 Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry
- 14 ‘The ugly burds without wings’?: reactions to tradition since the 1960s
- 15 ‘And cannot say / and cannot say’: Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the dialogue of the deaf
- 16 On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
- 17 ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner
- 18 Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000
- 19 Outwith the Pale: Irish–Scottish studies as an act of translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
8 - Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid
- 2 Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics
- 3 Louis MacNeice among the islands
- 4 Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry
- 5 Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland
- 6 Contemporary affinities
- 7 The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry
- 8 Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
- 9 Reading in the gutters
- 10 ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry
- 11 Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East
- 12 Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names
- 13 Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry
- 14 ‘The ugly burds without wings’?: reactions to tradition since the 1960s
- 15 ‘And cannot say / and cannot say’: Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the dialogue of the deaf
- 16 On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
- 17 ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner
- 18 Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000
- 19 Outwith the Pale: Irish–Scottish studies as an act of translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
Summary
Edwin Morgan started on his translation of Beowulf soon after he got his degree in 1947, his undergraduate studies having been interrupted by the war, and he published it in 1952. He was working in Glasgow at this time in a literary context in which questions of identity and language politics were being hotly debated. In his Beowulf, however, as in most of his other work, Morgan looks out beyond this immediate context, writing for a wider audience and not striving for a self-consciously Scottish inflection in the language of his poetry. As discussed below, in 1953 he produced a translation of a passage from Beowulf into Scots, but in the translation of the complete poem into English (and published in England) he is placing himself in the wider context of poetry in English. Morgan was fully aware then, as later, of issues of English cultural supremacy that weighed heavily on Scottish writers: ‘the Scots have, and have long had, to worry about their relation and attitude to England’, he would write; and in translating Beowulf he knew he was appropriating a great monument from the edifice of English literary history. He was appropriating it, however, on behalf of modern English poetry rather than for a more local constituency, though in doing so he was making a statement to that constituency.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry , pp. 147 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011