I picked up the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf in the bookstore. Wow. This was just recently completed, and has been highly-praised. I think I see why.

In high school we read it in the original Anglo-Saxon, with a bevy of footnotes. This is a bilingual edition, laid out beautifully with the Anglo-Saxon on the left and a flowing, interesting translation on the right. Breaks are inserted. Weird changes in the text, where there are unlabeled poems-within-poems in the original, are now in italics and set off and written in a somewhat different meter to reflect the aside. There are tiny notes in the right margin to give quick passing reference or explanation to what’s going on in each stanza or section. The introduction is extremely deep, helpful, and interesting.

And the cover’s really neat.

Also, now that I can actually read the fool thing, I can see a lot of from whence Tolkien reaped his ideas. I knew he taught himself Anglo-Saxon when he was in grade school or something of the silly sort and became quickly fluent in it, and it was obvious that Beowulf was one of his influences for his work. But yikes. Actually, he was one of the most vital scholars of the work, ever. He singlehandedly changed the way it was viewed, skewing it as an artistic work of an individual rather than some kind of chronicle of accumulated and traditional information.

Reading the translation discourages and inspires me, just from how well it flows and how verbose and eloquent it manages to be. Elegant, in the sense that it is wordy with few words.

Something about which I wonder, however: the semi-line break I have oft seen in Shakespeare and the like. For instance:

Enraptured by neutrons, he wept;
                                                  and yet forever it fell
upon the wayside of his daughter’s carpet; she never cared
for the pumpernickel sample encroached in her slumber that eve.

(Heaney, 1441)

In some cases it’s obvious and makes sense — such as when a long quote ends partway through a line. This line of verse must be completed, and yet the remainder is set off to make the end of the quote and the beginning of the next thought more obvious. Maybe that’s really what it is. A sort of a stanza/paragraph break where it seems one is needed but where doing so would sever a line. Interesting.