BEOWULF 0393320979

在线阅读本书 Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero's triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating. In his new translation, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is both true, line by line, to the original poem and a fundamental expression of his own creative gift. A New York Times bestseller, winner of the Whitbread Award. .com Review In Beowulf warriors must back up their mead-hall boasts withinstantaction, monsters abound, and fights are always to the death. TheAnglo-Saxon epic, composed between the 7th and 10th centuries, has longbeen accorded its place in literature, though its hold on our imaginationhas been less secure. In the introduction to his translation, Seamus Heaneyargues that Beowulf's role as a required text for many Englishstudents obscured its mysteries and "mythic potency." Now, thanks to theIrish poet's marvelous recreation (in both senses of the word) under AlfredDavid's watch, this dark, doom-ridden work gets its day in the sun.

There are endless pleasures in Heaney's analysis, but readers should headstraight for the poem and then to the prose. (Some will also takeadvantage of the dual-language edition and do some linguistic teasing outof their own.) The epic's outlines seem simple, depictingBeowulf's three key battles with the scaliest brutes in all of art:Grendel, Grendel's mother (who's in a suitably monstrous snit after herson's dismemberment and death), and then, 50 years later, agold-hoarding dragon "threatening the night sky / with streamers of fire."Along the way, however, we are treated to flashes back and forward and to aworld view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to God isabsolute. In the first fight, the man from Geatland must travel to Denmarkto take on the "shadow-stalker" terrorizing Heorot Hall. HereBeowulf and company set sail:

Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank, 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...

After a fearsome night victory over march-haunting and heath-maraudingGrendel, our high-born hero is suitably strewn with gold and praise, thequeen declaring: "Your sway is wide as the wind's home, / as the seaaround cliffs." Few will disagree. And remember, Beowulf has two moretrials to undergo.

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'schallenges are many: its strong four-stress line, heavy alliteration, andprofusion of kennings could have been daunting. (The sea is, among otherthings, "the whale-road," the sun is "the world's candle," and Beowulf's thirdopponent is a "vile sky-winger." When it came to over-the-top compoundphrases, the temptations must have been endless, but for the most part,Heaney smiles, he "called a sword a sword.") Yet there are few signs ofeffort in the poet's Englishing. Heaney

出版社	W. W. Norton & Company
作者	Seamus Heaney