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More copies of this ISBN:Beowulf: A New Verse Translationby Seamus Heaney
Staff Pick
"I resignedly picked it up at last on the tail end of a history binge, telling myself, 'Okay, I'm finally going to slog through it. Just get it over with.' And I discovered all my trepidation had been for naught. This isn't an 'accessible for a scholarly book' type of read; it is just plain a good book....The work itself reads like a pint of fine winter ale, complex and intoxicating, the end arriving quick and unwelcome." Synopses & ReviewsReview:"Heaney has turned to Beowulf, and the result is magnificent, breathtaking....Heaney has created something imperishable and great that is stainless — stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem." James Wood, The Guardian Review:"Reads very well and comes to life...[It] will have a permanent place among Beowulf translations." Fred Robinson, Yale University Review:"Heaney's introduction does everything it should to dust down and exhibit the poem, exploring its origins, investigating its form and establishing its structure....Heaney has caught the balance of these things brilliantly; he has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece." Andrew Motion, Financial Times Review:"The translation itself rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship....Beowulf, an elegy for heroism and a critique of feud and fratricide, is alive and well." Michael Alexander, The Observer Review:"Anglo-Saxon verse is celebrated for its alliterative riffs, its ringing and singing, and...Heaney does it full justice....Beneath the battledress, Beowulf is a peacemaker, a man who eases trouble. This fine translation is worth our trouble too." Blake Morrison, The Independent Review:"Heaney's excellent translation has the virtue of being both direct and sophisticated, making previous versions look slightly flowery and antique by comparison. His intelligence, fine ear and obvious love of the poem bring Beowulf alive as melancholy masterpiece, a complex Christian-pagan lament about duty, glory, loss and transience....Heaney has done it (and us) a great service." Claire Harman, Evening Standard Review:"Within Heaney's writing, the civic and the chthonic have always slogged it out, and this magnificent translation is no exception.... [This translation] is a marvelously sturdy, intricate reinvention, which betrays its author's poetic dabs less in its earthiness than in its airiness. It is the canny colloquialisms ('in fine fettle,' 'under a cloud,' 'blather,' 'big talk,' 'gave as good as I got') which are most Heaneyesque, not the smell of the soil.... This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day.' He has a casual way with the alliterative patters of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly.... Heaney [is] an artist so exquisitely gifted and imaginatively capacious that only a work of such mighty scale would answer to his abilities." Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books Review:"[At the task of] bringing the personality of the BEOWULF-poet up from the ocean bottom...Heaney is inspired. His inspiration arises, as he explains in his introduction (itself a profound essay on the poem, and an immediate classic), from a kind of miraculous chiasmus, where the extreme of the known met and crossed the extreme of the unknown....[C]ertain poems create a kind of acoustics within which their translator can better hear his own language, the language for him most saturated with tragedy. Heaney has done just that in this brilliant millennial BEOWULF, just in time for the next century's atrocities." Dan Chiasson, Boston Book Review Review:"This translation does something other than bring [Beowulf] up into our time. It transports us to his and lets us wander there;after which home will never seem entirely the same.... Mr. Heaney's translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again." Richard Eder, New York Times Review:"There is one thing that Heaney's BEOWULF does better than any translation of the poem that I know....[T]he voice of the old Beowulf seems not so much translated by Heaney into Modern English as ventriloquized into it....In [the book's] thrilling passages, it reads better than any other translation that we have; and in its dullest passages, it is no worse than many others." Nicholas Howe, New Republic What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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