Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (review)

In Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse, Hugh Magennis transports and regales detailed accounts of segments of the poem instead of a comprehensive review which gathers materials out of numerous works, with four major verse translations while comparing the critical parts of the work. This archetypal Anglo-Saxon literary work is customarily considered the keystone of modern literature, which partakes in a unique history, therefore complicating both its historical and its canonical position in English literature. This book begins with the Introduction/Chapter 1, explaining why these four authors and their translations were chosen, breaking each down with the difference as to why each did either a domesticating or foreignizing translation, grammar, meter, syllabic meter, and irregular syntax with various translators' arguments about each of these. He also goes so far as to explain the different thoughts behind the various prose translations, those of Tolkien, William Morris (1895), Tennyson, Longfellow, and A. Diedrich Wackerbarth (1849), and a few others.

In Chapter 2—Approaching the Poetry of Beowulf—Magennis provides his bibliophile with the poem, and points out key aspects of it and its poetic historical context and language. Magennis flows through the history and significance by breaking it down for all levels of Beowulf lovers. He focuses on two specific sections, lines 1-11 and 867B-74, and these are the lines used from the other translators in Chapters 4 through 7. Chapter 3—Reception, Perceptions, and a Survey of Earlier Verse Translations of Beowulf—explains the history of the Beowulf manuscript. Magennis details how the poem has been acknowledged and observed from the sixteenth century to modern times, and why it was translated into verse for the first hundred years. Magennis does a wonderful job of balancing all the elements of this fragile piece of work while giving appropriate justice to translations that have breathed life into it for the modern reader. He writes one of the finest short, universal introductions to the artistry of the Beowulf poem.

Chapters 4 through 7 analyze four verse translations of the poem published since 1950: those by Edwin Morgan (1952), Burton Raffel (1963), Michael Alexander (1973), and Seamus Heaney (1999). These are the most legendary and historically important of that era. Essentially Magennis walks us through the thinking of each of these translators. Chapter 8 addresses all the other verse translations from after 1950 and includes films. The over twenty verse translations come mostly from the United States; a few are British. Each translation in this chapter is given equal time and critiqued fairly, in the same fashion as the previous four major works and translators in this particularly rich period. Magennis offers a serious account of translations in English verse, setting them in the frameworks both of the larger story of the retrieval and treatment of the poem and of insights into it over the past two hundred years. He also makes us aware of key issues in translation theory. Consideration is given to the prose translations and to the artistic versions of the poem that have been produced in a variety of media, including film.

Magennis' conclusion reiterates how the American versions were produced for the layman with more access in different forms and for others working on translations of this piece or other works written in Old English. His book is meticulous and at the same time broad ranged for everyone interested in this magnificent piece of literature. The final section of the book is a three-page Epilogue giving a brief description of films, television productions, computer games, novels, one-man performances, musicals, and an opera based on the Beowulf poem. The bibliography is an impressive nineteen pages and immeasurably useful. The information presented in this book functions to contextualize the translations and interpretations of the Beowulf poem and enables readers to decide for themselves if they feel the best way to translate this poem is word-for-word, or based on conveying an interpretation of the meaning, or maybe both.