BEOWULF: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION [Signed]
Heany, Seamus [Translator]
From Second Story Books, ABAA, Rockville, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since May 29, 1997
From Second Story Books, ABAA, Rockville, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
AbeBooks Seller since May 29, 1997
About this Item
Octavo, 213, [18] pages. In Very Good condition with a Very Good condition dust jacket. Black and silver chainmail design spine with silver gilt lettering. Dust jacket is wrapped in a mylar covering, price is uncut "U.S.A. $25.00 -- Canada $39.95", has mild wear along the spine head edge, and a silver gilt "Winner of the Whitbread Award". Boards have mild wear along the spine head and tail edges. Textblock has mild wear along the edges and stains along the edges. Signed flat by Seamus Heaney on the title page. DL consignment. Shelved in Case 0. Seamus Heany was born April 13, 1939 Castledawson, North Ireland, the eldest of nine children born to parents who exemplified to him the dichotomy of a Gaelic past and industrialized present and future, ideas which would influence Heany's own life. Having a long and successful career as a poet and professor, Heany would eventually take on the task of writing a translation of "Beowulf" which would come to be "Beowulf: A New Verse Translation" in 1999. "Beowulf: A New Verse Translation" would release to mixed, though almost entirely positive reviews, many hailing its beautiful prose and critics mostly critiquing his use of a Northern Irish dialect as detracting from the original poem. The work would earn the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, repeating Heany's win in 1996 with "The Spirit Level" 1390087. Shelved Dupont Bookstore. Seller Inventory # 1390087
Bibliographic Details
Title: BEOWULF: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION [Signed]
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First Bilingual Edition, First Printing.
About this title
A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
There are endless pleasures in Heaney's analysis, but readers should head straight for the poem and then to the prose. (Some will also take advantage of the dual-language edition and do some linguistic teasing out of their own.) The epic's outlines seem simple, depicting Beowulf's three key battles with the scaliest brutes in all of art: Grendel, Grendel's mother (who's in a suitably monstrous snit after her son's dismemberment and death), and then, 50 years later, a gold-hoarding dragon "threatening the night sky / with streamers of fire." Along the way, however, we are treated to flashes back and forward and to a world view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to God is absolute. In the first fight, the man from Geatland must travel to Denmark to take on the "shadow-stalker" terrorizing Heorot Hall. Here Beowulf and company set sail:
Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank,After a fearsome night victory over march-haunting and heath-marauding Grendel, our high-born hero is suitably strewn with gold and praise, the queen declaring: "Your sway is wide as the wind's home, / as the sea around cliffs." Few will disagree. And remember, Beowulf has two more trials to undergo.
sand churned in the surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird...
Heaney claims that when he began his translation it all too often seemed "like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy hammer." The poem's challenges are many: its strong four-stress line, heavy alliteration, and profusion of kennings could have been daunting. (The sea is, among other things, "the whale-road," the sun is "the world's candle," and Beowulf's third opponent is a "vile sky-winger." When it came to over-the-top compound phrases, the temptations must have been endless, but for the most part, Heaney smiles, he "called a sword a sword.") Yet there are few signs of effort in the poet's Englishing. Heaney varies his lines with ease, offering up stirring dialogue, action, and description while not stinting on the epic's mix of fate and fear. After Grendel's misbegotten mother comes to call, the king's evocation of her haunted home may strike dread into the hearts of men and beasts, but it's a gift to the reader:
A few miles from hereIn Heaney's hands, the poem's apparent archaisms and Anglo-Saxon attitudes--its formality, blood-feuds, and insane courage--turn the art of an ancient island nation into world literature. --Kerry Fried
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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