Forget the Pedantry. Read Heaney's Beowulf
Translators should have more artistic freedom, not less.
I’m often asked whether or not I would recommend a particular translation from German. And it often comes as a disappointment when I don’t have a strong preference one way or another. In most cases, I’m a pluralist. If I do have advice to give, it’s usually just to sample what’s available and pick whatever appeals to you. The translation you like best is the best translation for you. Simple. But this principle runs counter to the tendency for certain readers of “translated literature”—an already fraught concept—to defer to authority, especially the authority of scholars, when making that choice.
This deference comes from a reasonable place. Readers want expertise with a language and its wider culture that’s vouched for by academic credentials. They want fidelity; they want to avoid error, misrepresentation, and loss of context. But the act of translation itself necessarily forces compromise in that regard—it cannot be the original—and so what counts as misrepresentation and loss of context—even what counts as error—is largely defined by the aims of the translator and the aims of the reader in turn. We’ve already stepped away from the fire, the choice is how we make our way in the dark.
There are too many qualities within a translation—each working tension with the others, each having different saliences according to different readerly purposes—to reduce its appraisal into a simplistic command: read this, don’t read that. I’m not a scholar, but I share with many academic critics a disinclination towards normative judgements. But this normativity can only be repressed or channeled elsewhere.
For my part, if I see a failing in some translation of Kleist or Jean Paul, then it provides an object lesson in how I can translate that author better. I don’t want to belabor a particular detail of the language any more than I need to, at least for the purposes of composition, and it’s composition, the production of a literary text, that concerns me above all else. There are other ways of approaching a translation, and I’m happy to coexist with them so long as there is respect for those differences.
That was the main reason why I was so irritated by a recent essay from a scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Colin Gorrie, who advises his readers to avoid Seamus Heaney’s 1999 landmark translation of Beowulf. Heaney’s translation, with its conversational register and borrowings from Ulster dialect, is too idiosyncratic and informal to capture the grandeur of the poem in the original. A more neutral tone is needed.
As I understand it, this is not a rare opinion among specialists, and not especially objectionable on its own. If you spend your life building up a particular reading of literary work, then you will naturally prefer translations that support that reading. My special objection comes from Gorrie’s philistinism and from the childish language of junk food and junk culture he uses to make his argument.
Most people who read Beowulf will only ever read one translation. And if you only read one, it should be what I call a vanilla translation: one whose mild flavour allows the taste of the original to be enjoyed. Reading Heaney’s Beowulf is like pairing a delicate fruit with double chocolate fudge ice cream. It will be delicious, but you won’t taste the fruit.
Plain language does help students find correspondences between the translation and the original. Students might also be confused between the idiosyncratic choices of the translator and the consensus view of scholars on the meaning of a term or a phrase. This is all relevant—to students of Anglo-Saxon, but reading for study is only one of many reasons to read a translation. Reading because the translation is an original work of literature is another, no more or less valid than scholarship.
To Gorrie’s credit, he does not attack Heaney as a poet, not directly, and is at pains to declare Heaney’s version of Beowulf a superior standalone work compared to the alternatives he offers, those by Chickering (1977) and Luizza (1999). I haven’t read either, but judging from the first eleven lines of the poem, which Gorrie helpfully provides, they seem serviceable enough:
Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes, how those noble lords did lofty deeds. Often Scyld Scefing seized the mead-benches from many tribes, troops of enemies, struck fear into earls. Though he first was found a waif, he awaited solace for that — he grew under heaven and prospered in honor until every one of the encircling nations over the whale's-riding had to obey him, grant him tribute. That was a good king! (Liuzza, 1–11)
And
Listen! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes in the old days, the kings of tribes— how noble princes showed great courage! Often Scyld Scefing seized mead-benches from enemy troops, from many a clan; he terrified warriors, even though first he was found a waif, helpless. For that came a remedy, he grew under heaven, prospered in honors until every last one of the bordering nations beyond the whale-road had to heed him, pay him tribute. He was a good king! (Chickering, 1–11)
Compared with Heaney:
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. There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes. This terror of the hall-troops had come far. A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on as his powers waxed and his worth was proved. In the end each clan on the outlying coasts beyond the whale-road had to yield to him and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. (Heaney, 1–11)
None of the competitors Gorrie offers need feel ashamed by the comparison, but all things being equal, I would prefer Heaney over the other two. As companions for the study of Anglo-Saxon, Gorrie makes a good case for Chickering and Luizza. If I ever give the language a try, I’ll make sure and consult them. But—and this really does bear repeating—study is not the only reason why someone would want to read Beowulf. Gorrie concedes that there are others, but they’re marginal compared to his own scholarly agenda. There are courses and textbooks to sell.
It’s not good enough that a translation stands on its own, equal to the English poetry of its contemporaries, but it has to pander for relevance. “It comes as a surprise to new readers,” Gorrie writes, “that, apart from the action of the three monster fights, large swaths of the poem consist of stories within stories, referring to characters and events in what I call the Germanic Expanded Universe…That is why we read Beowulf.” Speak for yourself.
Cute pop culture references aside, this argument wouldn’t be so remarkable if it were not for Gorrie’s dismissive attitude towards difficult literature, a strange position for a scholar of Anglo-Saxon to hold. Not only does he consider Heaney’s use of Ulster vernacular a dubious transplantation from one culture to another, but also an unacceptable burden on the reader.
The example that sticks out the most is Heaney’s use of the word bawn to refer to Heorot (literally ‘Hart’ or ‘Deer’), the mead-hall of the Danish king, which the monster Grendel assaults. For example,
Spurned and joyless, [Grendel] journeyed on ahead and arrived at the bawn. (720–721a)“In Elizabethan English, bawn… referred specifically to the fortified dwellings which the English planters built in Ireland to keep the dispossessed natives at bay, so it seemed the proper term to apply to the embattled keep where Hrothgar waits and watches.”
There is nothing wrong with this: calling Heorot a bawn is interesting. But if you only ever read about Heorot as a bawn, you’re not going to understand what the Modern English word means without a dictionary. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but a translation should not itself require translation.
This last sentence is quite telling. It’s perfectly acceptable, encouraged even, for a reader to seek out the meaning of “Heorot”—under the guidance of a professional scholar, of course—but with “bawn” this is too much of an ask. A translator can be a humanities adjunct, pandering to students raised on franchise media, but not an original poet, connecting one bardic tradition, equally as ancient, to another.
Aside from the dismissive attitude towards the Irish, there is nothing “old-fashioned” about this position at all. With his discomfort at literary difficulty and his pop culture references, Gorrie comfortably inhabits the contemporary world, much more so than Heaney, who translates using words and phrases that are hundreds of years older than any 21st-century pop culture reference. So it’s rich to fault the poet, as Gorrie does, for not using sufficiently elevated language to describe the rituals of hospitality and diplomacy within Beowulf. Vernacular can’t illuminate “something about history and human nature” but metaphors about dessert food and superhero movies can. Got it.
Gorrie’s essay has received a wildly positive reception, among both casual readers and scholars. This is unfortunate. As much as I dislike the critic’s tendency to view everything as a cultural diagnostic, I do see something more pernicious in the essay than the usual twee Substack prose. When the very concept of reading literature is under attack, when regional languages are dying away, being quickly replaced by a simplified global English readymade for commerce and media consumption, I don’t think we should be demanding a flat, simple style from our translators, not for all occasions at any rate. We already have enough of that as it is.
