IN A RECENT survey of verse translations of Beowulf I highlighted that by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, published in 1952, as one of the most significant of the very many produced since the initial recovery of the Old English poem in the nineteenth century. Morgan was the first translator who set out to render Beowulf in an authentically modern poetic idiom, in a version written specifically for readers of poetry. Previous verse translations, produced primarily for popular audiences or for students, had generally adopted some kind of archaising register and, with the exception of the startling attempt by William Morris, were the work of uninspired versifiers. By contrast, Morgan's translation used the medium of living poetry in a sophisticated way and in doing so succeeded in conveying, as never before, an enabling sense of the power and artistry of the original poem.

Morgan produced his Beowulf translation early in a career that would prove to be a long and highly distinguished one, to the extent that in 2004 he was honoured as the official national poet of Scotland, the ‘Scots Makar’. He died in 2010 at the age of ninety. Morgan's literary output is recognised as endlessly varied in form and content but also as highly crafted, a characteristic evident in his experimental as well as his more conventional work and apparent not least in his translations and appropriations, including his Beowulf.

By 1952, when he published his Beowulf, Morgan was a lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, where he had also graduated in 1947, his studies having been interrupted by the Second World War. As an undergraduate he had developed an interest in Old English under the guidance of Ritchie Girvan. Morgan would spend his whole academic career in the department at Glasgow and he remained connected to it to the end of his life. Though he was far from parochial in taste and experience, Glasgow was very much Morgan's base, and Glasgow's literary scene provided the context in which he worked.

Beowulf was not the only Old English poem translated by Morgan, nor indeed was Morgan the only Scottish poet to engage with Old English poetry in that postwar period that saw the publication of his Beowulf.

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.

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.’ 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. 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, 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.

The present chapter takes us back to Beowulf itself, presenting a discussion of its poetry and poetics in the historical context of the larger tradition to which the poem belongs. Having briefly explored key poetic features of Beowulf in general terms, it will go on to focus on two specific illustrative passages from the poem (lines 1–11 and 867b–74). In subsequent chapters we will be considering the responses of modern verse translators to the features covered in this chapter and we will also be looking at versions of the illustrative passages in some translations.

Aspects of the Poetry and Poetics of Beowulf

Beowulf is viewed in the modern criticism of Old English poetry, as it has developed in the last seventy years or so, as a work of great artistry, originality and depth. It is ‘solid and dazzling’, in Seamus Heaney's memorable phrase, as critics continue to demonstrate through close study. It is also, however, a work of a highly traditional kind, participating at all levels in what has insightfully been referred to as ‘the aesthetics of the familiar’. It stems from the oral culture of the Anglo-Saxons and their continental ancestors: it is traditional in its metrical and syntactic structures, its ‘word-hoard’ of poetic vocabulary and its formulaic patterns of phrasing; and it is traditional too in the themes that it deals with and in the value-system that motivates its action.

A veritable industry of popular Beowulf adaptations and spin-offs has been in evidence in recent years, bringing our hero to life on the page, on the stage, on the cinema/television screen, and on the computer/game-console screen. Beowulf has made it into popular culture at last. There is supposed to be no such thing as bad publicity, and so this unprecedented popular attention to the story of Beowulf and its hero should be taken as good news for the poem. The new versions of Beowulf may even eventually bring some people to the poem itself, curious to sample the original.

There have been notable adaptations of the Beowulf story in novelistic form, by Frederick Rebsamen, John Gardner and Michael Crichton, all three of these dating from the 1970s. Rebsamen's Beowulf Is My Name takes the form of a retelling of the story in the voice of Beowulf himself, who speaks from an imagined position outside his life and is thus able to include his own death in the narration; this appropriation fills in details about Beowulf and his story which are not given in the poem and includes additional narrative and descriptive material derived from other sources and from the imagination of the adaptor. Gardner's Grendel relates the story from the point of view of the monster Grendel, who becomes a conflicted anti-hero, suffering anguish in his hostility to humankind.

Burton Raffel's translation of Beowulf appeared in 1963, eleven years after that of Edwin Morgan. Raffel would go on to be a prolific and admired translator of poetry (and prose) from many languages, ancient and modern, but, as was the case with Morgan, his translation of Beowulf comes from early in his literary career. It is the confident and energetic work of a young writer, and it comes indeed from a time that was one of ostensible confidence and optimism in the larger dominant culture as well. Like Morgan, having previously done translations of other Old English poems, Raffel had moved very soon afterwards to the much more ambitious undertaking of translating Beowulf (using Klaeber's third edition as his basic text). Since then, of course, both poets have had long and distinguished careers, though moving in very different directions.

Raffel on Raffel

Raffel has written much in explanation and justification of his translation of Beowulf in particular and of his approach to translation in general. He insists in his Yale Review essay ‘On Translating Beowulf’ on the creative subjectivity of the poet-translator, who ‘needs to master the original in order to leave it’. The poet-translator must not be trapped by the original but must be guided by ‘the necessity of self-expression’ and by an ‘inner voice’: ‘The greatest sin a translator can commit, accordingly, is to fail to breathe life into his recreation. He can never breathe life into it if he is unable to force himself away from the original, and far enough away so that he can be close in spirit and yet be free to create in the new linguistic medium.’

Introductory

Throughout its modern history the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has inspired translations into Modern English. In the last century and a half or so, some forty verse translations have appeared in print, producing a range of different takes on the Old English poem, in everything from iambic pentameter, to jaunty ballad rhyme, to strict Old English metre, and even more prose translations have been produced. Meanwhile, Beowulf has been a source of interest too for literary translators/adaptors in a broader sense and for other creative artists, though interestingly it has only entered into popular culture to a significant degree in recent years. The present study focuses most closely on verse translations in English, particularly those produced in the last sixty years, though it also pays attention to prose translations and to previous verse translations, as well as referring to other creative adaptations.

The verse translation by Edwin Morgan (1952) is argued here to be of special significance in its own right but also as the beginning of translation of Beowulf into a genuinely modern poetic idiom, leading the way for many later followers down to and beyond Seamus Heaney (1999). With the exception of William Morris's uncompromisingly strange version (1895), discussed below, which creates its own – medievalizing – idiom, Morgan's may be seen as the first serious sustained poetic engagement with the poem in Modern English.

Edwin Morgan had a clear aim in mind when he published his translation of Beowulf in 1952. As he brings out in the manifesto-like ‘Introduction’ to the translation and indicates in its very title, Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English, he wanted to produce a version of Beowulf in the living medium of modern English poetry, a version that, while properly guided by its author's commitment to ‘the care of accuracy’, is written for the reader of poetry and that works as poetry. As he worked on Beowulf, Morgan had already produced or was working on translations into Modern English of the Anglo-Saxon poems The Ruin, The Seafarer and The Wanderer and some Old English riddles; slightly later (1953) he produced a translation of a twenty-two line passage from Beowulf into Scots.

Dating from early in what was to be a long and distinguished literary career (Morgan was thirty-three in 1952), Morgan's version of Beowulf must be seen as being on a different level poetically from any translation of the poem that had been produced up until that time and a very significant piece of work in its own right. Only Morris's version approaches it in the depth of its engagement with the Old English poem and Morris had gone for a distinctly unmodern register. As the analysis below brings out, Morgan's translation did not fully achieve his aim in writing it, but it is a work of great critical interest and taken in the context of its time it represents a key milestone in the history of Beowulf translations.

The version of Beowulf by the British translator Michael Alexander appeared in 1973, when Alexander was in his early thirties. He had studied English at Oxford, receiving his training in Old English from Christopher Tolkien, Bruce Mitchell and others, and had embarked upon what would be a successful – and wide-ranging – academic career. Alexander had published some original lyric poems in the early 1960s, eventually collected together in an elegant small volume published in 1978, but most of his poetry has been translations from the Old English, among which his most signal achievement has been the translation of Beowulf. His career has been one that has integrated scholarship and art and this integration is reflected above all in his work on Beowulf. His translation of the poem proved extremely popular, staying continuously in print until it was recently reissued in a new revised edition. Alexander points out that his Beowulf and an earlier volume of translations, The Earliest English Poems, have between them sold more than half a million copies over the years.

Among British verse translations of Beowulf of the second half of the twentieth century, Alexander's version is highlighted in the present chapter as being not only the most popular and the one used most for teaching purposes but also, in my view, as a particularly interesting and enabling translation, reading well in its own right while bringing a lively sense of the poetry of the original poem to the modern reader.

When I came to Queen's University in Belfast as an undergraduate in 1966 one of our lecturers in the first year was a Mr Seamus Heaney. 1966 was the year that Heaney published Death of a Naturalist, though I was not aware of that at the time. Mr Heaney was a young lecturer with thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern poetry. I particularly remember him giving lectures on Eliot and Frost.

After the first year I specialized as much as possible in medieval studies on my English degree and didn't come across Heaney much. The key teachers who guided me were two very different figures but they made an effective and complementary team. One was the no-nonsense Scot John Braidwood, an oldstyle philologist who seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the history of every word you could think of; as well as Old English, he had a special interest in the English language in Ulster. The other was one of Tipperary's finest, Éamonn Ó Carragáin, who was equally as inspirational as Braidwood, but in a different way. Ó Carragáin's enthusiasm for Beowulf was exceeded only by his enthusiasm for The Dream of the Rood. Both men were intellectually generous, and modest, and, despite all the other delights of English language and literature, they made Old English seem to me the most exciting part of the curriculum.

Heaney has written eloquently of the influence that John Braidwood had on him as a student, a few years before me, and of how that influence eventually fed into his 1999 translation of Beowulf, one of the major translations to be discussed in this book.

Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf was published in 1999 to a reception that was mostly very enthusiastic indeed. Attracting a level of interest unprecedented in recent times for a verse publication, the translation caught the imagination of modern readers, even having lengthy stints at the top of the best-seller lists in Britain and Ireland and in the United States. It was praised by poetry critics for its freshness and vigour, and, for the most part, Anglo-Saxon scholars approved of the translation too. They hailed it as a sensitive and generally accurate rendering of the great Old English poem, based on good scholarship, and as a production which brought welcome public attention to Beowulf and to Old English literature more generally. Among dissenting voices have been those of Tom Shippey, who disapproves of what he refers to as Heaney's ‘fashionable gestures towards post-colonialism and other anachronisms’, and Loren C. Gruber, who objects that Heaney's Irish diction politicizes Beowulf, that his grammatical renderings sometimes lose the subtlety of the original and that his English diction ‘is sometimes off’. Michael Alexander, on the other hand, is full of praise for Heaney's translation. Sympathetically reviewing it in The Observer, he refers to Heaney as ‘a generous poet [who] has brought back our own, in his own words’ (I will need to come back to that quotation, however).

Subsequent chapters will focus particularly on verse translations of Beowulf from Edwin Morgan's on, covering the period from the 1950s down to the present. There were plenty of attempts at rendering Beowulf in English verse before Morgan, of course, and I wish to give an overview of these before coming to the more recent period. In the present chapter I will sketch in something of the earlier larger reception history of Beowulf in the modern era and trace some inherited and changing perceptions of it, with particular reference to the history of its translation into verse. I have already referred to some of the translations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a previous chapter, focusing on ideas of translation theory and approach. At the risk of some duplication of material, I consider verse translations again in the present chapter but as well as taking account of the features of the translations just mentioned I will also emphasize the understandings of and attitudes to the poem that animate them. Invaluable groundwork has been done by Andreas Haarder, Tom Shippey and others on material covered in this chapter and, though their focus was not primarily on translation, my debt to these scholars will be clearly evident below and is gratefully acknowledged.

Beowulf in the Nineteenth Century, and up to 1914

The beginnings of significant knowledge of Beowulf date only from the turn of the eighteenth-to-nineteenth century, and the poem remained largely the preserve of scholars throughout most of the nineteenth century, achieving more widespread interest and popularity only towards the end of the century and particularly in the twentieth century.