Word: heaneys
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...course, did not suddenly come to their senses about the merits of a manuscript composed sometime late in the first millennium. They gave their prize--and an instant spot at the top of British best-seller lists--to a new verse translation of Beowulf by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature...
...Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well...
Credit for this surge of interest should rest squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows...
...episode of Touched by an Angel, which focuses on the relations of Irish Catholic and Protestant teens. The capstone to this vocal odyssey comes in March, when Neeson's taped voice will be heard reading the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Seamus Heaney while Irish legs are flailing in Riverdance--On Broadway. There's nothing like legitimate theater to recharge an actor's batteries...
Gordimer appropriates for the title of Living, a compilation of some of her non-fiction essays and speeches, the corniest line in fellow Nobel-laureate's Seamus Heaney's corniest poem: Once in a lifetime/...hope and history rhyme...