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Translating Beowulf Into Enjoyment, Euripides Into Autobiography REVIEWED BY Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, March 5, 2000
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BEOWULFA New Verse Translation By Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 213 pages; $25
ALCESTISBy Euripides Translated and adapted by Ted Hughes Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 103 pages; $20
A massacre. The enemy attacks the fortress at night, taking the sentry by surprise. Thirty butchered bodies are found at sunrise. The nation ``mourned under morning.'' Its leader ``sat stricken and helpless, humiliated by the loss of his guard, bewildered and stunned.'' CNN coverage of the latest international conflict? Hardly. It's the attack of the monstrous Grendel, which forms one of the early episodes in the ancient classic ``Beowulf,'' the bane of English students everywhere. 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, startlingly contemporary. The tale, in brief, describes the adventures of the warrior Beowulf, nephew of the king of the Geats (a people somewhere in southern Sweden), who arrives at the court of the Danes to free them from the bloodthirsty Grendel. He does so, only to face a terrifying underwater ordeal when Grendel's mother seeks revenge. Beowulf returns home in triumph to rule the Geats for 50 years before he faces a final trial with a ``vile sky-winger'' --a murderous, 50-foot, gold-hoarding dragon -- in which both are mortally wounded. What makes this translation work is the steady pulse of the Anglo-Saxon prosody, with its four-stress line, heavy with alliteration and caesurae. Auden and others have experimented with this form, but in this long (3,200 lines) piece, we see it put to the use it was made for: propelling an extended narrative forward, making each line throb with motion. Nobel laureate Heaney has long been attracted to Beowulf for its ``foursquareness about the utterance'' and its ``undeluded'' world view. He began the translation 15 years ago, partly to ensure that his ``linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea- floor,'' and gave it his easy sense of Northern Irish vernacular. The resulting translation may have far-reaching effects. It may even alter popular conceptions of the English language, in which ``Beowulf'' has been marginalized somewhere at the predawn of our mother tongue. It's always been considered a classic, but hardly a beloved or accessible one. Our linguistic sense of ``we English speakers'' begins with Chaucer and Shakespeare. This ``Beowulf'' changes the picture and moves that sense of ``we'' back several centuries, to the two 11th century scribes who first recorded this tale in an Anglian dialect of Old English. (The original Beowulf tale may have been written any time in the second half of the first millennium, and debate about its dating has been fierce.) This revised sensibility would encompass the Beowulf world, enveloped in melancholy, fortitude and presentiment (``His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain''), broken by fierce and gory battles in which ``honor'' is the risk and reward. The frequent reference to gold rings, gold torques and ``hoards'' provides color against the coldness of the sea and the fire- lit gloom of the halls. What sings, relentlessly, is the language of this anonymous Christian poet, recalling the pagan past when ``pillage and slaughter/ have emptied the earth of entire peoples.'' Sound familiar? It gets more so: It is not the monsters that ultimately unravel Beowulf's world, but the treachery of man. Over a thousand years later, the sea is as forbidding, the monsters as grim, the need for courage and will as unremitting. Beowulf's burial overlooking an icy, gray sea seems oddly modern as the Geats, without a leader, come to grips with imminent doom at the hands of the vengeful Swedes: A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke. Sunny Greece and the petty bickering of Euripidean characters seem light years from the grand gloom and epic canvas of ``Beowulf.'' What Ted Hughes' translation and adaptation of Euripides' ``Alcestis,'' finished in the last few months of the poet's life, shares with ``Beowulf,'' which is dedicated to Hughes, is preoccupation with death and unequivocal celebrations of life: Life is what we can snatch From the smiles of Necessity . . . (The dead) have only one regret: The days they wasted multiplying laments Over what could not be helped. The choice of story may have been a telling one for Hughes: Death calls at Thessaly for King Admetos. Alcestis, his queen, agrees to take his place. The palace is in mourning when Admetos' drinking pal Herakles arrives between his labors and, in contrition for his rowdiness, rescues Alcestis from the Underworld. Telling, because the curse of Hughes' career has been the reading of his famously tragic life into his work, and accusations that he, too, drew life from the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Inevitably -- unfairly, perhaps -- this translation will be seen in the context of his life, which ended with the publication of the sometimes self-justifying ``Birthday Letters.'' Certainly Admetus -- the god-favored, much-praised, indulged, half- willing survivor -- provides a more rending self-portrait, if indeed the poet's life has wound its way into this characterization. More certainly, and certainly autobiographical, it is Hughes' final meditation on death. Hughes' provocative adaptation finds Alcestis' death prolonged, the lamentation less restrained, Herakles wilder and more drunken. And Hughes gives Admetus a mitigating reason for his uncomfortable choice: He is favored of Apollo, and through him blessings have been heaped upon Thessaly, blessings that will cease with his death. It's a good idea, because the play sits oddly with a modern audience, to whom Admetus's actions are never anything but reprehensible. But the mostly masculine Greek audience of 438 B.C. would have agreed entirely with the legitimacy of the death-swap. Those are precisely the social assumptions Euripides called into question with the transcendent sacrifice of Alcestis, and the sublime grace of her story's resolution.
Stanford writer Cynthia L. Haven has published two books on education. |
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