Seamus Heaney's Translation of Beowulf

Part 1
Part 2

4 comments:

Grim said...

It's a good translation, Haney's. It's very hard to make the poetry come out to the Western ear, which has for so long now been attuned to rhymes rather than alliteration.

Tom said...

He had a great talent with words.

I wonder when & why we moved to rhyme. That's an interesting historical question.

Grim said...

In English, it was when the Normans adopted French forms of poetry in preference to the older Scandinavian ones. There were, in their defense, a couple of very powerful and moving fashions of poetry coming out of the French-speaking world at that time.

Sometime during the early Middle English period, the period in which French transformed the English language, that elite fashion jumped from French to English poems and came to dominate it.

Tom said...

Interesting. Thanks.