Penguin Classics Beowulf [Paperback]

Michael Alexander's translation of Beowulf is among the best available today. While neither as readable nor as poetic as the more famous Heaney translation, Alexander's is exciting, close to the original, and tells the story in such a way that it never fails to grip and thrill.

There is so very little wrong with this translation that I'll get it out of the way. While the poem is generally very readable and smooth, there are a few places that read clumsily or just sound strange. Alexander also chooses to alter the spelling of some names for the sake of understanding or pronunciation. I generally dislike this in a translation, but it's a matter of preference and doesn't detract from the enjoyability of this epic.

That said, this is still one of the best editions of Beowulf available today, and makes an excellent companion piece to a bilingual edition of the Heaney translation or a student edition of the original text itself. Great reading for anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon, epic literature, or good stories in general.

Highly recommended.

Look, I am not going to dispute the greatness of Seamus Heaney, or his awesome, magical rendering of Beowulf. Part of its magic lies in how modern he made the poem. The thing is though that it is translation or a paraphrase. Alexander's poem is more of a modernization, rather than a translation. You are basically reading the original Beowulf, with the words updated in their spelling, or replaced when necessary with more modern words where the old ones are no longer comprehensible. He of course preserves the alliteration as much as possible, and the lines remain short. To me this method leaves the poem as it was, and merely transforms its dialect from that of 11th Century Wessex to modern international English. To be sure, this method demands more of the reader than a paraphrase does, since you have to figure out what the swan's road or the whale's way, and kennings (riddle-names) like these are. So, if you are really intrigued by this poem, which must have been intended to be the monument of its civilization, especially when you think of the number of sheep they had to kill and the expenses involved in preparing their skins, and the fact this story concerns what was supposed to be the greatest hero in the most heroic age of man, then you will want to read Alexander's rendition.
As for why you would want to read Beowulf in whatever edition, the main thing is that it is the great poem of the English language. No one will dispute that Shakespeare is our language's greatest playwright, and few would dispute that the prosody of the King James Bible overwhelms that of any other prose work, or maybe even that the Lord of the Rings may be our greatest novel, but for epic poetry, ORIGINAL epic poetry, is there anything like Beowulf in English? It must have stood out in its day as the greatest poem ever, considering like I mention above, the expense involved in its production, and no one has ever since, in English, written a poem so great in scope, and so representative of the experience of English-speaking civilization. Spencer tried, but his allegorical figures hold no mystery - they beat you over the head with their meanings and the moral lessons you, a corrupt creature, are supposed to learn from them. Chaucer, though great too, bundles a collection of tales together about a trip to a church. Milton, who seems to have based his greatest poem on another Anglo-Saxon poem in his friend's collection, is retelling something we can find in Genesis. Beowulf treats the Danish ancestors of the English before they crossed the sea to England. It's a lovely reminder that we in North America are no more separated from the homeland of our language than they of our language's supposed homeland from their own. Beowulf has achieved national epic status in England for good reason, and more than this, it has achieved pan-national epic status for the entire English-speaking world. This is quite the triumph for the resident poet of some Anglo-Saxon king and his many sheep, so long ago. They put in their great effort, the sheep sacrificing their very lives even, to preserve and propagate this awesome work. The poem fought the ravages of time and fire, and is now preserved and sprung anew from the ashes, like the phoenix, to provide great solace and sustenance for us, the Anglo-Saxons' linguistic inheritors, today, in our brief flit though this lighted mead-hall of life.

Beowulf is the most important traditional epic in the Old English language and, I would argue, the most important piece of ancient literature to read in English. It preserves the rich oral traditions from which it arose in all of its glory and is more accessible in this regard than the Homeric epics (to which it would be most closely compared) because the languages are more closely related and thus the forms are easier to keep intact (though this is still by no means easy).

In general, I found Alexander's translation of this poem to be good. He obviously tries to keep close to the original and this is appreciated. However, since this is the apparent aim, the lack of a facing page translation format hurts this goal somewhat.

All in all, this is a good translation of an important work.

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