Anil's Ghost (review)

was mostly beer/that was doing the talking," and Hygelac, Beowulf's king, "hankers" to know the SeaGeats ' stories. Heaney's famiUar diction springs from his wish to change the average reader's impression that the poem is "written on official paper," i.e., a dusty literary relic. He conjures the speech ofhis Ulster kinsmen to provide him a "voice-right" to the poem's original language. In his preface Heaney declares his priorities. Naturalness and the "forthright deUvery" he finds in the original have been put before strict fideUty to meter, sentence structure, apposition, kennings, etc. From the outset his refusal to translate safely (and slavishly) is clear. OccasionaUy, however, his adjustments result in a disappointing loss of poetic effect. Heaney's best and most clairvoyant moments as a translator involve an intense identification with a character's condition. One warrior's long wael-fagne (UteraUy, "slaughterstained ") winter with his enemy is rendered as "resentful, blood-suUen." This kind of psychological apprehension springs in turn from an abiUty to bring to life the physical dimension first: Ongentheow's hand is imagined as "feud-caUoused," and Beowulf 's pain from the heated metal of his cheekguard is powerfully felt. Similarly, poetically rich kennings such as "wave-vat" for "sea" and "heather-stepper" for "deer" remain as is. Rarely does Heaney miss the mark in regard to word choice, but when he does, the culprit is often a Latinate construction that lacks the immediacy of the Anglo-Saxon word. To use one of Heaney's own distinctions , such choices merely "mean" and unlike so many more successful moments in the translation, fail to "be." This edition is designed for readers intimidated by the "shield-waU" of the poem's obscurities, providing them with a troop of aids. The glosses prove helpful, particularly those that introduce longer narrative digressions with succinct character identification and historical context. Purposeful stanza breaks clarify extended meta-phors or make introductions more apparent. Heaney even domesticates the few lacunae that appear, representing the gaps visuaUy but carrying a complete sentence through the breaks. The cover features an imposing warrior, clad in chain mail, seen from behind. Perhaps Heaney can be viewed ultimately as a devoted thane to this faceless warrior—a Wiglaf figure attempting to aid a faUen hero. For aU the abundant poetic talents Heaney has brought to Beowulf, the one essential quaUty he possesses is a deep sense of its "melancholy and fortitude ." (BF) Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje Knopf, 2000, 311 pp., $25 The heroine of Anil's Ghost is an expatriate of Sri Lanka who, like author Michael Ondaatje, left the island at a young age and pursued an education and a career in North America. The beginning of the book finds AnU Tissera back in Sri Lanka, lending her skills as a forensic anthropologist to help a human rights organization unravel a series of murders and cover-ups that have plagued the island since the mid-1980s. A hellish, The Missouri Review · 199 multifactioned civil war is raging, and in the midst of it, AnU discovers a skeleton that might be the key to exposing the government's compUcity in the killings. Her efforts to prove the identity of the corpse provide the impetus for the action of the novel. AnU's story is in part the tale of the prodigal, a common theme in postcolonial Uterature and a role Ondaatje has played himseU. During the late '70s, the author, best known for his 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, left his home in Canada to revisit Sri Lanka, recording his experiences in Running in the Family. In that book Ondaatje paints a vastly different picture of the land once known as Ceylon. Writing about his parents' heyday in the '20s and '30s, Ondaatje describes a countrywracked by social excess, not violence, a place where upper-class sociaUtes traipse drunkenly, if elegantly—and ultimately tragically—across a lush, vibrantly exotic landscape. In his new book Ondaatje stares at his country's current problems with an unblinking eye, and he has clearly been stricken by what he sees. But although he writes about his country's social unrest, he remains...