- Category: Books » Poetry » Ancient, Classical & Medieval
- Format: Paperback Learn more about the Paperback format using Tower WIKI.
- Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
- ISBN: 0393320979
- WAPI (Tower ID): 101789556
- Release Date: February 1, 2001
- Average Customer Review: There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!
- Tower.com Sales Rank: #33723 in Books (See Top 100 Books Bestsellers)
- #103 in Poetry (See Top 100 Poetry Bestsellers)
- #8 in Ancient, Classical & Medieval (See Top 100 Ancient, Classical & Medieval Bestsellers)
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Product DescriptionRun a Quick Search on "Beowulf" by Seamus Heaney to Browse Related Products:Browse more products related to "Beowulf"Browse more products related to "Seamus Heaney"Review"[At the task of] bringing the personality of the BEOWULF-poet up from the ocean bottom...Heaney is inspired. His inspiration arises, as he explains in his introduction (itself a profound essay on the poem, and an immediate classic), from a kind of miraculous chiasmus, where the extreme of the known met and crossed the extreme of the unknown....[C]ertain poems create a kind of acoustics within which their translator can better hear his own language, the language for him most saturated with tragedy. Heaney has done just that in this brilliant millennial BEOWULF, just in time for the next century's atrocities." "This translation does something other than bring [Beowulf] up into our time. It transports us to his and lets us wander there;after which home will never seem entirely the same....Mr. Heaney's translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again." "Within Heaney's writing, the civic and the chthonic have always slogged it out, and this magnificent translation is no exception....[This translation] is a marvelously sturdy, intricate reinvention, which betrays its author's poetic dabs less in its earthiness than in its airiness. It is the canny colloquialisms ('in fine fettle,' 'under a cloud,' 'blather,' 'big talk,' 'gave as good as I got') which are most Heaneyesque, not the smell of the soil....This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day.' He has a casual way with the alliterative patters of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly....Heaney [is] an artist so exquisitely gifted and imaginatively capacious that only a work of such mighty scale would answer to his abilities." "There is one thing that Heaney's BEOWULF does better than any translation of the poem that I know....[T]he voice of the old Beowulf seems not so much translated by Heaney into Modern English as ventriloquized into it....In [the book's] thrilling passages, it reads better than any other translation that we have; and in its dullest passages, it is no worse than many others." Publisher's noteComposed 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 five 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. AnnotationWinner of England's 1999 Whitbread prize, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's translation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon epic is meant to retrieve the poem from its schoolbook purgatory and establish it as a living, powerful poem for contemporary readers. More than the story of a hero's battle with a gruesome monster, BEOWULF is a story of loyalty, nationalism, and--some say--the dawn of Christianity on what had previously been a violently pagan land. If You Enjoy "Beowulf (Paperback)", May We Also Recommend:Customer Reviews for "Beowulf (Paperback)" by Seamus Heaney (Editor)There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review! Ancient, Classical & Medieval BestsellersPoetry Bestselling Books
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