Translating Beowulf

Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship. It was composed sometime between the 8th[1] and the 11th century; the only surviving manuscript was written in around the year 1010.[2] At 3182 lines, it is exceptional for its length. It has risen to national epic status in England.[3]

Beowulf has been translated many times in verse and in prose, and adapted for stage and screen. By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem, in languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, French, Ganda, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Uighur, and Urdu.[4]

From the start, translators had reasons to put their versions of Beowulf into prose. John Mitchell Kemble's "literal" 1837 prose, forming the first complete version in modern English, was, like many that followed it, meant to assist readers in interpreting the Old English text that it accompanied. The scholar of Old English literature Hugh Magennis notes that Kemble stressed the "differentness" of Beowulf as a reason for not attempting to make his translation "smoother".[6][7]

Beowulf sails for Heorot. Illustration by J. R. Skelton

Old English verse has rules very unlike those of modern verse. Its pattern is made up of half-lines, each of which contains two stresses, but not a fixed number of syllables, with a caesura between the halves; a sentence may end mid-line. Lines do not rhyme; internal rhyme is a rare device for special effect. The stressed words alliterated, but not in the modern sense – 'old' would alliterate with 'eager', while the whole sound of the world should join in the alliteration, not just the first letter, so in Oft Scyld Scefing || sceaþena þreatum, the "she..." sounds echo each other across the central caesura. There had to be at least one alliterating stress in each half-line.[8] The compact half-line phrases are often made indirect with kennings like banhus, "bone-house", meaning "body", but also implying the brief span of life while the soul is housed in the body.[9] These can be mapped on to modern kennings, preserving the Beowulf poet's indirectness, or translated to unpack the kenning and render the meaning more or less directly:[10]

Evidently, imitating all these features at once, and the aesthetically desired and intentional compactness of Old English verse, in any modern language, is problematic. On the other hand, abandoning the attempt and translating into prose at once loses much of the appeal of the original, though this has not deterred many authors from using the approach.[9] J. R. Clark Hall produced first a translations in prose, in 1901, and then one in verse, in 1914.[11]

Here, Beowulf sets sail for Heorot in the poet David Wright's popular and frequently reprinted Penguin Classics prose version,[12] and in Seamus Heaney's prize-winning[13] verse rendering, with word-counts to indicate relative compactness:

Beowulf sails for Heorot, in verse and prose

Beowulf folio 137r	Beowulf lines 210–216	David Wright's 1957 prose[14]	Seamus Heaney's 1999 verse[15]
	Fyrst forð gewāt; | flota wæs on ȳðum, bāt under beorge. | Beornas gearwe on stefn stigon, — | strēamas wundon, sund wið sande; | secgas bǣron on bearm nacan | beorhte frætwe, gūðsearo geatolīc; | guman ūt scufon, weras on wilsīð | wudu bundenne. (37 words)	Soon the boat was launched and afloat below the headland. The soldiers, in full harness, came aboard by the prow and stowed a cargo of polished armour and magnificent war‑equipment amidships, while the sea churned and surf beat against the beach. Then the adventurers, bound on the voyage they had eagerly desired, pushed off their well-braced vessel. (57 words)	Time went by, the boat was on water, in close under the cliffs. Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank, sand churned in 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. (46 words)

Magennis writes that Wright's justification for prose, that the essence of Beowulf was its story and that the job of a translation was to put this across plainly, was soon agreed by critics to be incorrect, and his version was superseded by translations such as Alexander's that captured more of the poem's feeling and style.[16]

Alexander observed that the question of whether to translate into prose or verse is intertwined with that of freedom versus closeness to the original, writing that "Scholars who find [my verse] version too free have to consider whether literal prose does not too freely discard the potential advantages of verse."[17] He remarked that whereas he once thought prose renderings of poetry "useless", and most prose translations "drab", experience with several verse translations, and especially George N. Garmonsway's[lower-alpha 1] prose[19] with its "dignity and rhythmical shape", changed his mind; and in any case in his view a poetic translation "is an equivalent, not a substitute".[17] Noting that the Old English was chanted to a string accompaniment, Alexander concluded by hoping that his readers would read his verse aloud.[17]

In 1680, the poet John Dryden proposed that translations could be classified according to how faithful or free they set out to be:[20]

metaphrase [...] or turning an author word for word, and line by line, from one language into another; paraphrase [...] or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that, too, is admitted to be amplified but not altered; and imitation [...] where the translator – if he has not lost that name – assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases.[20]

Dryden's metaphrase, "word for word" translation, has long been a contentious issue in the case of Beowulf. In the 19th century, William Morris attempted to render each word of the original with a word or phrase, even if this was archaic or unfamiliar. For instance, he translates sceaþena as "scathers":[21][22]

J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1940 essay "On Translating Beowulf", stated that it was not possible to translate each Old English word by a single word and create a readable modern English text. He gave the example of eacen, which might mean 'stalwart', 'broad', 'huge', or 'mighty' according to the context, whereas the word's connotations are of superhuman power, having the strength of 30 men: "not 'large' but 'enlarged'".[23]

Burton Raffel writes in his essay "On Translating Beowulf" that the poet-translator "needs to master the original in order to leave it", meaning that the text must be thoroughly understood, and then boldly departed from. His own effort to do this created what Marijane Osborn calls "the liveliest translation of Beowulf".[24][25] Magennis writes that this produces "an extremely free imitative verse", at the cost of often misrepresenting the poem, in Raffel's 1963 translation.[24] Magennis describes the version as highly accessible and readable, using alliteration lightly, and creating a "vivid and exciting narrative concerned with heroic exploits ... in a way that [the modern reader] can understand and appreciate. Clarity, logic and progression are hallmarks of this treatment of narrative in Raffel's translation, producing a satisfying impression of narrative connectedness".[26] In contrast, John Porter's 1991 translation is avowedly "literal", published by Anglo-Saxon Books in a parallel text to facilitate the study of the original.[27]

Several 19th century translations into English used deliberately archaic diction, in line with the then popular standard approach to medieval literature. William Morris's 1910 The tale of Beowulf[28] is described by Magennis as "a striking experiment in literary medievalism" even by Morris's standards. In Magennis's view, even if this is considered unsuccessful, it "must be seen as a major artistic engagement with the Old English poem".[29] A. Diedrich Wackerbarth's 1849 version followed the familiar Victorian era convention of Walter Scott-like romance language with "Liegeman true" and "princely Wight", and using rhyme and modern metre (iambic tetrameters) in place of any attempt to imitate the Old English alliterative metre.[22] Here, the Danish watchman challenges Beowulf and his men as they arrive at Heorot:

Updated monsters: Edwin Morgan translated nicera not as "necks" or "nixies" but as "krakens". 1870 illustration for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The poet and Beowulf translator Edwin Morgan stated that he was seeking to create a rendering in modern English that worked as poetry for his own age, while accurately reflecting the original. He used inventive compounds to represent Old English kennings, and sometimes incorporated alliteration. Magennis described Morgan's 1952 version "as being on a different level poetically from any translation of the poem that had been produced up until that time and a very significant piece of work in its own right",[31] and "varied, graceful, intelligent and at times exciting".[31] Morgan defined poetry as "the manifestation of energy in order"; in Magennis's view, this can best be seen in Morgan's "scenes of lively action and description", such as when Beowulf tracks the bleeding and mortally-wounded Grendel to his lair. In the passage, Morgan translated nicera not as the cognate "necks" or "nixies" but as "krakens". Magennis describes the rendering of the passage as "sweeping steadily onwards", but "complicated by intricate grammatical development and abrupt oppositions, dense imagery and varied rhythmical effects and ... an insistently mannered diction", reflecting the original:[31]

Tolkien noted that whatever a translator's preferences might be, the ancients such as the Beowulf poet had chosen to write of times already long gone by, using language that was intentionally archaic and sounding poetic to their audiences. Thus, Tolkien explains, the poet uses beorn and freca to mean "warrior" or "man", this last a usage already then restricted to heroic poetry; at the time, beorn was a variant of the word for bear, just as freca was another word for wolf, and the audience expected and enjoyed hearing such words in the special circumstance of a performance by a scop. The poet used high-sounding language to represent the heroic in the distant past. Tolkien therefore advised the translator to do the same, choosing verbs like "strike" and "smite" rather than "hit" or "whack", nouns like "guest" rather than "visitor", adjectives like "courteous" instead of "polite".[33] His versions of Beowulf's voyage to Heorot in prose and verse, the latter in strictest Anglo-Saxon alliteration and metre[lower-alpha 2] (with Tolkien's markup of metrical stresses), are:

The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti has emphasised the question of domesticating or foreignizing translations. Venuti explains domesticating as "suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, assimilating it to dominant values in the target-language culture, making it recognizable and therefore seemingly untranslated".[36] In his view, any domesticating translation is "scandalous".[22] The distinction follows the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1813 analysis of whether a translation is bringing the reader to the original, i.e. foreignizing the text, or bringing the text to the reader, i.e. domesticating it.[37][22] Like Venuti, he favoured foreignizing, but English translators have for over a century preferred domesticating.[22] The poet Matthew Arnold wrote in 1861 that the reader "should be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work".[38]

Morris's Beowulf is one of the few distinctively foreignizing translations. It has been poorly received by critics including Morgan, who called it "disastrously bad" and "often more obscure than the original", but later scholars such as Roy Liuzza, author of an admired Beowulf, are more accepting; Liuzza writes that Morris was "trying to recreate the experience of reading Beowulf in the depth of its history".[29]

Wright's 1957 prose translation is somewhat modernising, aiming for a plain "middle style" between archaism and colloquialism under the banner "better no colours than faked ones", but striving to be as faithful as possible.[39][40] The novelist Maria Dahvana Headley's 2020 translation is relatively free, domesticating and modernising, though able to play with Anglo-Saxon-style kennings, such as rendering aglæca-wif as "warrior-woman", meaning Grendel's mother. Her feminism is visible in her rendering of the lament of the Geatish woman at the end of the poem:[41]

The author of a popular[42] and widely-used[42] 1973 translation, Michael J. Alexander, writes that since the story was familiar to its Anglo-Saxon audience, the telling was all-important. The audience liked "the elaborate unstraightforwardness with which the expected is disguised", accompanied by "laconic understatement" and negative constructions.[43] Thus, after Wiglaf has had to kill the dragon to enter its mound, he narrates that his reptilian host showed him "little courtesy" for his visit.[43]

Alexander comments that such "grim humour" lives on in the northeastern parts of England where the Vikings settled.[43]

Further, the Old English text is full of embellishments, especially verbal parallels, opposites and variations, so that as the scholar Frederick Klaeber stated, there is a "lack of steady advance"; the narrative takes a step forwards, then a step sideways with "traditional near-synonyms".[43] Alexander gives as example lines 405–407, telling that Beowulf speaks to Hrothgar – but before he opens his mouth, there are three half-lines describing and admiring his shining mail-shirt in different ways:[43]

Magennis comments of Heaney's version of these lines that he greatly develops the Old English image with his vigorous description, noting that he "is particularly attracted to the net and sewing/weaving metaphors" that the Beowulf poet used of chain mail, and that Heaney consistently associates armour with "webbing".[47]