Poem into poem

G. K. CHESTERTON seems to have remarked once that all great medieval art is anonymous. "Beowulf", a heroic-elegiac narrative poem in Anglo-Saxon, named after its eponymous superhero, Beowulf, is no exception. It is supposed to have been composed orally toward the end of the first millennium but written down by monks many years later. During its life of oral performance, there must necessarily have been several changes. Considered the earliest long secular poem of English literature and one of the oldest epics of Europe, its manuscript suffered total neglect until it was luckily unearthed by one Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631) in the early 17th Century. A fire that broke out in 1731 caused widespread damage to Cotton's library but luckily the manuscript survived with a few pages partly charred. This manuscript is now preserved in the British Library. An Icelandic scholar G. J. Thorkelin transcribed the poem in 1787 in Anglo- Saxon prose and all subsequent editions and translations use this as the definitive next.

Modern editors arranged the text in the form of a verse conforming to metrical patterns. The poem did not bear a title till 1805. It was printed for the first time at Copenhagen in 1815. Commissioned in the mid-1980s by the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (later arranged to share publication with Farar, Straus and Giroux), it has now been translated into modern English towards the end of the second millennium for the 66th time by the Northern Irish Catholic poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who won the much-coveted Whitbread Prize for this exceptional translation. Among the distinguished early translators some were scholars like C. L. Wren and others were poets like Kevin Crossley, Holland (1956), Longfellow and William Morris (1895).

The story runs thus: Hrothgar is the king of the Danes. He builds a magnificent hall for his subjects. A fiery bloodthirsty monster, descended from "Cain's clan" called Grendel, time and again attacks the people causing panic and large-scale destruction to public property and human lives. A young intrepid warrior, Beowulf the Geat, crosses the sea, arrives in Denmark and, in a single combat in the hall, wounds Grendel mortally. The jubilance caused by the triumph is short-lived since the mother of Grendel, another malevolent and spiteful cannibal monster, arrives to revenge herself upon her son's adversary. Beowulf dives into the sea and slays the monster with an old sword. King Hrothgar rewards him handsomely. The warrior returns home and recounts his brave exploit to the king of the Geats. Beowulf succeeds to the kingship and rules the country in peace for 50 years, becoming the darling of his people. A hostile, malicious dragon, enraged by a small theft of its hoard, invades the country. Beowulf, who has grown old, wishing to defend his people, arms himself with a dozen followers, confronts the dragon in its lair. He succeeds in slaying the dragon though mortally wounded himself. Beowulf is cremated with all the attendant ceremony and honours due to a great warrior-king. A memorial is built in memory of the majestic hero.

All available Old English poetry runs to some 30,000 lines. Heaney's rendering of Beowulf in modern vernacular English runs to 3182 lines with some 100 proper names. Reader-responses to works of literature have a great bearing on their reception. There are countless instances of works getting a new lease of life even as there are instances of works losing their value and importance in course of time. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien's Oxford lecture in 1933, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" (published in 1936) injected fresh life into the poem which had lain too long as a sheer museum piece and inaugurated a new era of enthusiastic literary appreciation. Tolkien interpreted the poem - as Thomas Grey would say in his justly admired poem - that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave". Tolkien's Beowulf is a tragic hero whose challenging experiences and quests, "seeking the bubble reputation" is a grim reminder of the evanescence of human life. The hero is, at once, the agent and the victim of providential design. The theme of mortality is handled on an Arnoldian note of "high seriousness". Treating it as a poem, Tolkien righted the wrongs done by the earlier scholars who looked upon it as a primitive, antiquarian historical piece, not worth serious scholarly attention apart from the philological interests it aroused. He certified that "there is not much poetry in the world like this".

The time of composition of the poem and the culture of the period is Christian but the action and belief represented is pagan. Many translators and critics coming after have been influenced by him though there have also been a few who are sceptical of Tolkien's view. Kingsley Amis, for instance, holds the other view that the poem enjoys an ill-founded and overblown reputation among readers and academic scholar-critics. The poem has nothing beyond drinking, dragon slaying (repeated thrice over), and ranting. Terry Eagleton charges Tolkien (and C. S. Lewis) of manipulating the early literature for contemporary ideological ends that the Oxford tradition has its roots in the Anglo-Saxon based liberal civilisation.

Among the translations of "Beowulf", some are dull and prosaic, pedantic and absurd and some are anything but an exercise in servile literal word for word verbal versions, clinging to the original, as it were, in superstitious dread. Heaney considers Beowulf "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language" possessing a "mythic potency". "It is a poem of high order, in which passages of great lyric intensity rise like emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure." As a translator, he felt he was in the presence of a great work and the attempt to turn it into Modern English seemed to him "like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy hammer". But his Hopkinsian literary background and Ulster linguistic origins had their taproots in the Anglo-Saxon tradition and so he felt he had a right to translate the Old English native epic. Thus Heaney of his translation in his illuminating "Introduction".

It is one thing to find lexical meanings for words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the turning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator's right of way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father, people whom I had once described as "big-voiced scullions".

What Heaney was in pursuit of was the directness of utterance (the forthright delivery) and to recapture this direct narrative line - the "foursquareness of the utterance" - he confesses he was willing to sacrifice many other things, resorting to distortions, syncopations, deviation, etc. More than 80 per cent of English poetry is in blank verse, in iambic pentametre, customarily termed "the mighty line of Marlowe". Heaney did not find much use for this since, for one thing, rendering the eighth century poem in blank verse would be an act of anachronism unworthy of the effort and, for another, Old English, by its nature, is pretty direct and forthright in utterance, conspicuous for its omission of caesura and enjambement and, even more so, for its use of alliterative riffs, plentiful compound words and repetitions. Fortunately this was close to his own training as a poet. His inner ear had caught this resonance early in life. His aim was to catch the tone and tenor of the medieval poem and make his version flow naturally in the modern idiom, unencumbered with archaisms. In other words, to find an appropriate language with the right diction and poetic rhythms that would retain the quintessential spirit of the "work of the greatest imaginative vitality" with its sweep and narrative control unharmed and unforfeited.

Heaney's version opens with the indicative particle "So". The Old English word hwoet can be rendered in ever so many ways, such as "right", "behold", "hark", "listen", "attend", etc. For Heaney this particle comes in most handy because (as he observes in his introduction) "'So' operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention". This is how the translation begins:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

They said that of all the kings upon the earth
He was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

....Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
But it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
Illness or the sword to lay you low,
Or a sudden fire or a surge of water
Or Jabbing blade or javelin from the air
Or repellent age. Your piercing eye
Will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
Dear warrior, to sweep you away.

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