Most people today have heard of Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, since it won an award when it was published in 1999, four years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time Heaney attempted the poem, it had been translated at least 42 times before, and I think many more. 42 is the number I can count at Wikipedia’s list of translations, but when I was doing research for my book in 2004, I noted more than 100. As I was writing my book, I knew a young man who was working on his own translation at the time.
Each translator feels, probably rightly, that something is missing from the attempts that have been made so far. I think this feeling is inherent in the relationship of modern English to Old English. It’s a foreign language, all right, but it’s one that keeps tossing familiar words our way. In some ways it’s an easy foreign language, especially for anyone who first learned German (which I did not), because it does feel familiar. It’s not nearly as close to our daily speech as Biblical Hebrew is to Israeli Hebrew, nor even as close as modern Greek is to Homer’s Greek. And yet: it feels like there should be some way to just draw a magic circle, turn round three times, and find the old language leaping into our speech without much alteration.
The translations into English run parallel to English poetry norms, too. In Tennyson’s time, they aspired to capture the story in iambic pentameter or heroic couplets, or at least in some kind of meter and rhyme. That’s how Professor Wackerbarth put it, in 1849:
“But haughty Hunferth, Ecg-láf’s Son
Who sat at royal Hróth-gár’s Feet
To bind up Words of Strife begun
And to address the noble Geat.
In 1876, Thomas Arnold gave us prose:
Hunferth spake, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the master of the Scyldings; he unbound the secret counsel of his malice.
And between these two extremes, in 1860, Benjamin Thorpe provided verse, but only in a literal word-for-word translation, abandoning any attempt at poetic decoration:
Hunferth spake,
Ecglaf’s son,
who at the feet sat
of the Scyldings’ lord;
unbound a hostile speech.
In 1892, Stopford Brooke produced the fourth possibility, which was only made possible by the growing body of Old English poetry scholarship. His version may have been the first to attempt using modern English vocabulary to imitate the Old English poetry style:
There at haven stood, hung with rings the ship,
Ice-bright, for the outpath eager, craft of Aethelings.
So their lord, the well-beloved, all at length they laid
In the bosom of the bark, him the bracelet-giver,—
By the mast the mighty king.
Those are really the only four logical choices for how to do it. Each way has some gain, some loss. The Victorians’ love of meter and rhyme is not shared by our time, so that option has not been much attempted in the last century. But taking the other three, with prose there is the most clarity of meaning, as it just tells the story. With literal word-for-word translation, something like modern free verse emerges, but the rhythm of the Old English verse is lost. With an attempt to capture Old English’s alliteration and four-beat meter, but in modern words, we lose literal precision.
I had to choose a translation in 2004, for the purpose of quoting lines in my book. I chose the 2000 translation by Roy Liuzza, a professor at the University of Tennessee. I wasn’t trying to slight Heaney, and one consideration was that I needed to get reprint permission and once you’ve won the Nobel Prize, your publisher will charge dearly for the privilege. Heaney was too expensive. But as good as his translation is, I really liked Liuzza’s better. But if you want to read along in Beowulf as I blog about it on Facebook, really you may choose any translation that suits you. After his death, Tolkien’s prose translation was published, so that is also a good choice. In our time, they’re really all very good.
Reference: Project Gutenberg’s The Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker