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can only be used sparingly and by a master-hand), and in addition he may be giving the reader an unfairly heightened or ‘fancy’ impression of the main body of the narrative, which is sometimes quite direct and businesslike. Variety of texture, seldom attained by the existing versions, is precisely what a reader cries out for when he has ventured into the wood of a long translation. Attention, in all epic, will certainly flag, and if the style used is not capable of rousing it up forcefully or by some wile of wit or allusion or figure-of-speech or word-play winkling it out of the retreat it is sure to occupy at the first signs of grandiosity or dullness, the reader will soon lay Beowulf aside, while continuing to admire it for duty’s sake; and under such conditions of admiration the poem will never properly enter into literary criticism and be valued at its just rate by non-specialists, as every poem must. The Beowulf translator, therefore, who should be so very familiar with the work that he is (speaking at least for himself) in no doubt as to its value and as to the distribution and voltage of that value, should be ready and able to indicate in a flux of textures something of the movement of feeling he finds in the original. The present version attempts to suggest to the reader the interest or importance various passages of the poem were felt by the translator to have. If I say that such passages are more highly wrought, I may be misunderstood, as this hints at a more conscious process than actually occurs. Greater conscious attention, to all possibilities of alliteration, rhythm, assonance, rhyme, and word-echo and wordlinkage of various kinds, is certainly directed on the translation at these moments, with the desire not to let down the relative artistic intensity of the original; but I found the giving of such attention an unplanned need: to bring across anything particularly memorable, I was impelled towards the music of language, ‘whithersoever the heart’, as Puttenham says, ‘by impression of the ear shall be most affectionately bent and directed.’ This applies most obviously of course to passages that are vivid because they are onomatopoeic: like lines 320–4, with their realistic ring and clang of armour and stone – Straet wæs stanfah, stig wisode gumum ætgædere. Guthbyrne scan heard hondlocen, hringiren scir song in searwum, tha hie to sele furthum in hyra gryregeatwum gangan cwomon . . . xxx
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– or the picture of the sailing-ship sweeping through the seas from Denmark to Geatland in lines 1905–10 – tha waes be mæste merehrægla sum, segl sale fæst; sundwudu thunede; no thær wegflotan wind ofer ythum sithes getwæfde; saegenga for, fleat famigheals forth ofer ythe, bundenstefna ofer brimstreamas . . . – or the fine resounding shout of Beowulf as he calls into the dragon’s cave (lines 2552–3): stefn in becom heathotorht hlynnan under harne stan. Sometimes one wants to draw attention, by whatever means can be found without distortion, to a very brief but striking phrase: as, in the Finn episode, when the poet ends his account of the great funeral-fire of the dead warriors with his comment (for both sides), wæs hira blæd scacen (l. 1124), literally ‘their glory was gone’ – gone like the smoke of the pyre, bravery, flos ac robur, youth; or when Wiglaf the eager young warrior goes alone to help the aged Beowulf in his fight with the dragon, wod tha thurh thone wælrec (l. 2661), ‘he went then through the deadly smoke’, as if entering some hell in the proof of fidelity. It may be a particular atmosphere the translator has to convey, as in the famous description by Hrothgar of the ‘Grendel country’ (lines 1357–76) with its monstrous Patinir-cum-Böcklin desolation and strangeness; or in lines like 3021–7, descriptive of the chilling forethought of an early morning encounter, battle, and death: Forthon sceall gar wesan monig morgenceald mundum bewunden, hæfen on handa, nalles hearpan sweg wigend weccean, ac se wonna hrefn fus ofer fægum fela reordian, earne secgan, hu him æt æte speow, thenden he with wulf wæl reafode. xxxi

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can only be used sparingly and by a master-hand), and in addition he may be giving the reader an unfairly heightened or ‘fancy’ impression of the main body of the narrative, which is sometimes quite direct and businesslike. Variety of texture, seldom attained by the existing versions, is precisely what a reader cries out for when he has ventured into the wood of a long translation. Attention, in all epic, will certainly flag, and if the style used is not capable of rousing it up forcefully or by some wile of wit or allusion or figure-of-speech or word-play winkling it out of the retreat it is sure to occupy at the first signs of grandiosity or dullness, the reader will soon lay Beowulf aside, while continuing to admire it for duty’s sake; and under such conditions of admiration the poem will never properly enter into literary criticism and be valued at its just rate by non-specialists, as every poem must. The Beowulf translator, therefore, who should be so very familiar with the work that he is (speaking at least for himself) in no doubt as to its value and as to the distribution and voltage of that value, should be ready and able to indicate in a flux of textures something of the movement of feeling he finds in the original.

The present version attempts to suggest to the reader the interest or importance various passages of the poem were felt by the translator to have. If I say that such passages are more highly wrought, I may be misunderstood, as this hints at a more conscious process than actually occurs. Greater conscious attention, to all possibilities of alliteration, rhythm, assonance, rhyme, and word-echo and wordlinkage of various kinds, is certainly directed on the translation at these moments, with the desire not to let down the relative artistic intensity of the original; but I found the giving of such attention an unplanned need: to bring across anything particularly memorable, I was impelled towards the music of language, ‘whithersoever the heart’, as Puttenham says, ‘by impression of the ear shall be most affectionately bent and directed.’

This applies most obviously of course to passages that are vivid because they are onomatopoeic: like lines 320–4, with their realistic ring and clang of armour and stone –

Straet wæs stanfah, stig wisode gumum ætgædere. Guthbyrne scan heard hondlocen, hringiren scir song in searwum, tha hie to sele furthum in hyra gryregeatwum gangan cwomon . . .

xxx

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