Book description
Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon
poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of
European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has
produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original
poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something
fundamental to his own creative gift. The poem is about encountering
the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically
and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. It is not hard
to draw parallels between this story and the history of the twentieth
century, nor can Heaney's Beowulf fail to be read partly in the light
of his Northern Irish upbringing. But it also transcends such
considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are
permanent and liberating.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of
a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he
has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established
him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the
Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf
(1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District
and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and
was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize.
