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This is a list of translations of Beowulf, one of the best-known Old English heroic epic poems. Beowulf has been translated many times in verse and in prose. By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem, from Thorkelin's 1787 transcription of the text, and in at least 38 languages.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (also known as Heaneywulf [1]) is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into modern English by the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Faber and Faber , and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award .
Burton Raffel writes in his essay "On Translating Beowulf " that the poet-translator "needs to master the original in order to leave it", meaning that the text must be thoroughly understood, and then boldly departed from. His own effort to do this created what Marijane Osborn calls "the liveliest translation of Beowulf".
In 2000, Seamus Heaney published his translation of Beowulf. Heaney uses Irish diction across Beowulf to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem, putting forward his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render [the poem] ever more 'willable forward/again and again and again.'" [92]
A Beowulf Handbook (University of Nebraska Press, 1997) - with Robert E. Bjork. [4] [5] ISBN 0-8032-1237-2. Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (University Press of Florida, 1997) - with Allen J. Frantzen. ISBN 0-8130-1532-4. Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, featuring Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem (W.W. Norton, 2007).
Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation of the poem (Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, called "Heaneywulf" by the Beowulf translator Howell Chickering and many others [102]) was both praised and criticised. The US publication was commissioned by W. W. Norton & Company , and was included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature .
He has published a translation of Beowulf which was well-received [1] and praised for its readability and correspondence with the original, [2] besides scholarly monographs and articles, including many on translating and dating Beowulf. [3] [4]
Michael Joseph Alexander (21 May 1941 – 5 November 2023) was a British translator, poet, academic and broadcaster. He held the Berry Chair of English Literature at the University of St Andrews until his retirement in 2003.