It’s not bad, it’s very readable in fact and the story, as expected, is pretty damn cool. Maybe it’s just because it’s Beowulfand I was expecting something truly awesome… Whatever the reason I ended up feeling disappointed with the poem and disappointed with myself for picking this translation. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone for one translated by a poet I studied and disliked at school – but I assumed I’d grown out of that rather juvenile ‘I studied it so I hate it’ dislike and had only heard good things about his translation. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone for an edition translated by a poet who’s famous in his own right – but then that never bothered me with Simon Armatage’s translations of Arthurian epics. When I finished the book I didn’t feel ‘yes I’m done with Beowulf, I’m one badass classics reader’ but, ‘I should probably go buy/borrow the Oxford World Classics edition’.

It’s just a gut feeling that, really, I’d have been better off with a different translation. I don’t read Old English, have never read an unabridged Beowulf translation before, and this one is very highly and widely regarded – so I’m not anywhere near qualified to say anything about how faithful/good a translation it is. I have no particular reason not to trust him as a translator, let’s get that straight. And it will be brief because basically all I have to say is that I like the story itself, but I simply can’t make myself trust Heaney as a translator. Taking a quick break from Les Misérables (great, but fucking long) to type up a brief review. But it also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating. It is not hard to draw parallels between this story and the history of the twentieth century, nor can Heaney’s Beowulf fail to be read partly in the light of his Northern Irish upbringing.

The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature.

Beowulf by Unknown