Beowulf

Product Description


A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year. Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. While an abridgment of Heaney's full translation of Beowulf, Heaney prepared this abridgment himself to read for the BBC program from which this recording is taken.


Review


"[A] translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right...Generations of readers will be grateful."-- "New York Times Book Review"


"[Heaney's] translation of the poem was commissioned for and is going straight into The Norton Anthology of English Literature; set for virtually every introductory course in English on the North American continent...Heaney's Beowulf Is the poem now."-- "Times Literary Supplement"


"[Heaney] has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece."-- "Financial Times"


"Seamus Heaney's stunning new translation gives the epic a much-needed dusting-off, so much so that this version is certain to become a standard classroom text. But that sells it short: The translation makes this northern Gilgamesh gripping and racy, startingly contemporary."-- "San Francisco Chronicle"


About the Author


Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, and lecturer. He won numerous awards, including the PEN Translation Prize and two Whitbread Prizes. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published many collections of poetry and prose, as well as numerous translations, the best known of which was his translation of Beowulf, which became a New York Times bestseller in 1999.