Beowulf: A New Translation into Modern English Verse

Gildas Roberts’ translation of Beowulf is an admirably successful middle-of-the-road version of the poem. It is a verse translation, but in a free rhythm that is not overly restrictive. The rhythm is considerably freer than that of the Old English original, though this is (I suspect) unavoidable. Beowulf is a poem and a highly rhythmic one at that, and a verse translation conveys its sense in ways a prose version, however skillful, cannot. Roberts’ translation is somewhat more literal than the well-known versions of Burton Raffel (New American Library, 1963) and Edwin Morgan (University of California Press, 1952), and gains over them in this respect.

The translation itself is fairly conservative and sticks closely to Klaeber’s edition of the poem. I do not much like Roberts’ translation of the opening word of the poem, “Hwaet!” The word is in many ways an acoustic device, a method of grasping the attention of the audience; if the old standard translation (“Lo!”) is no longer of much use, Roberts’ “Yes!” is weak where strength is needed. Better possibilities are William Alfred’s “Listen!,” or perhaps Raffel’s “Hear me!”

The apparatus, though meagre, is sensible, with a good bibliography, a map, genealogical information, and a reasonable, if brief, introduction. I would disagree that the later dating of the poem at about A.D. 1000 (as opposed to the late eighth century) has yet the status of a “new orthodoxy”; it is certainly a position much discussed, but hardly accepted to the degree Roberts suggests. The Glossary of Names (as it is called elsewhere in the book) is simply labelled “Glossary,” and is therefore rather misleading.

The level of book production is only middling; the proofreading has not been entirely successful, and there are far too many variations in line spacing. On the other hand, these small points do not detract from the general success of the translation itself. In Roberts’ hands, many of the great passages of the poems retain their eloquence. The description of Scyld’s ship-burial, with which the poem opens, is a case in point. I far prefer Roberts’ simple, rather stark, phrasing to the complexity of Raffel’s version, with its unnecessary adjective:

…neither rulers

Nor heroes nor anyone can say whose hands

Opened to take that motionless cargo. (Raffel)

Men do not know

To tell for a truth — not councillors in the hall,

Nor warriors under the heavens — who received that cargo. (Roberts)