Word: heaney
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Nobel Laureate Seamus J. Heaney recited his own poetry and read excerpts from his new best-selling translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf yesterday evening in Lowell Lecture Hall...
Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler introduced Heaney with high praise...
Much that seemed off-putting about Beowulf to modern readers becomes, in Heaney's retelling, eerily intriguing instead. Yes, the Scandinavian hero kills three monsters: a scaly maneater called Grendel (Beowulf rips off the creature's right arm at the shoulder); Grendel's aggrieved mother; and, 50 years later, a fire-breathing dragon that mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. But these bloody deeds actually occupy fairly few of the epic's 3,182 lines. The Beowulf poet, who is recounting legends that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier, is interested less in violence, which appears to be inescapable...
Beowulf may, by modern standards, seem bloodthirsty and deluded, but Heaney's poetry makes eloquently persuasive the hero's tragic stature. And when he dies, his people mourn not just in sorrow but in fear of the enemies who will surely descend on them...
...preface, Heaney acknowledges the irony of a Celtic poet's attempting to revivify an Anglo-Saxon poem. When younger, he notes, "I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands." But this notion faded the deeper he got into his translation. Digging, delving into the loam of language, has been a central metaphor throughout his poetic career. (His most recent selection is titled Opened Ground.) What Heaney has brought to the surface with his Beowulf is an old and newly burnished treasure...