| Product Summary | | Format: CD | | ISBN: 9781565114272 | | Publisher: Highbridge Audio | | Publish Date: 6/1/2000 | | Buy.com Sku: 30620048 | | Item#: RLSDLN | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 65831 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 5H x 5.75L x 0.5T |
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| | | Nobel Laureate Seamus HeaneyUs translation of "Beowulf" comes to life in this gripping rendition that reminds listeners that the work was truly meant to be heard not read. Heaney "captures the sense of Old English poetry without adhering slavishly to its roots.IThe result is a "Beowulf" of rough elegance and emotional directness rendered in a voice both ancient and familiar" ("The Onion").
Annotation:
Winner of England's 1999 Whitbread prize, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's translation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon epic is meant to retrieve the poem from its schoolbook purgatory and establish it as a living, powerful poem for contemporary readers. More than the story of a hero's battle with a gruesome monster, BEOWULF is a story of loyalty, nationalism, and--some say--the dawn of Christianity on what had previously been a violently pagan land.
| PraiseBoston Book Review
"[At the task of] bringing the personality of the BEOWULF-poet up from the ocean bottom...Heaney is inspired. His inspiration arises, as he explains in his introduction (itself a profound essay on the poem, and an immediate classic), from a kind of miraculous chiasmus, where the extreme of the known met and crossed the extreme of the unknown....[C]ertain poems create a kind of acoustics within which their translator can better hear his own language, the language for him most saturated with tragedy. Heaney has done just that in this brilliant millennial BEOWULF, just in time for the next century's atrocities." - Dan Chiasson March 2000New Republic
"There is one thing that Heaney's BEOWULF does better than any translation of the poem that I know....[T]he voice of the old Beowulf seems not so much translated by Heaney into Modern English as ventriloquized into it....In [the book's] thrilling passages, it reads better than any other translation that we have; and in its dullest passages, it is no worse than many others." - Nicholas Howe 02/28/2000 New York Times
"This translation does something other than bring [Beowulf] up into our time. It transports us to his and lets us wander there;after which home will never seem entirely the same....Mr. Heaney's translation beats with a recurring pulse, from homely and concrete to elevated and back again." - Richard Eder 02/22/2000 London Review of Books
"Within Heaney's writing, the civic and the chthonic have always slogged it out, and this magnificent translation is no exception....[This translation] is a marvelously sturdy, intricate reinvention, which betrays its author's poetic dabs less in its earthiness than in its airiness. It is the canny colloquialisms ('in fine fettle,' 'under a cloud,' 'blather,' 'big talk,' 'gave as good as I got') which are most Heaneyesque, not the smell of the soil....This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day.' He has a casual way with the alliterative patters of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly....Heaney [is] an artist so exquisitely gifted and imaginatively capacious that only a work of such mighty scale would answer to his abilities." - Terry Eagleton 11/11/1999 |
| Author Bio| Seamus Heaney | | Seamus Heaney (born 1939) was the eldest child in a family of nine children, the son of a small farmer in Northern Ireland. Many of his relatives worked in the local linen mill, so that, as Heaney says, his background encompasses both the traditional pastoral Irish past and the Industrial Revolution. He attended the local schools until he was 12, when he won a scholarship to a Catholic boarding school in the city of Derry, forty miles away. He studied Latin and Irish, and then went to Belfast to study literature (including Anglo-Saxon) at Queen's University. He lived there until 1972, writing and teaching (he held a lectureship at Queen's from 1966 to 1972), but eventually left Belfast for Dublin. He also began to teach in America for portions of each year. Heaney began to be recognized as a poet during the 1960s, as part of the "Northern School" of Irish writers. NORTH, one of his first important collections of poems, was published in 1975. He has done a large amount of translating, including his version of the Middle Irish story of Suibhne Gealt (SWEENEY ASTRAY, 1982). He has also written extensively on the subject of poetry and its importance to him both as an Irishman from the north and as a citizen of the larger world. With the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rea, Heaney founded Field Day, a theater company, in 1980, seeking to present Irish political concerns to the public by means of poetry and drama. His wife, Marie Devlin, is also a writer. They have three children. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, one of the university's most prestigious positions, and in 1989 he was also appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post which requires him to deliver three public lectures every year. Heaney is also a judge and lecturer for the annual Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and has been made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. |
| | Read A Chapter |
Chapter One
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns. There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they'd come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.< Click to read more...
Chapter One
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns. There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king. Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they'd come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow's name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere. Shield was still thriving when his time came
and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes:
they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. Then it fell to Beow to keep the forts.
He was well regarded and ruled the Danes
for a long time after his father took leave
of his life on earth. And then his heir,
the great Halfdane, held sway
for as long as he lived, their elder and warlord.
He was four times a father, this fighter prince:
one by one they entered the world,
Heorogar, Hrothgar, the good Halga
and a daughter, I have heard, who was Onela's queen,
a balm in bed to the battle-scarred Swede. The fortunes of war favoured Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—but
not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table. The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.
Continues...
Excerpted from Beowulfby Seamus Heaney Copyright © 2000 by Seamus Heaney. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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