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Why read this translation of Beowulf? Because there isn’t a better one to be found. Here are the reasons I say this:

It reads so well aloud. The text did so in its oldest form, and it must do so in any translation worth reading. This translation from Old English is oral composition, first heard, and then written down to be heard again. Nothing gets in the way of oral performance of an account of heroic actions, in heroic times, shaped and tempered by wisdom of the world and reflections upon the upshot of human endeavors. It is that performance that is the poem, and it is that which the translation manages so well to give us anew, in Modern English verse.

Nothing gets in the way. The commonest impediments to successful translation have been theories of this and that, High Principles to be upheld, or just romantic notions about “olde tyme” English poetry. Sometimes it is a choice to imitate the general sound of the original text—two half-lines separated by syntax but linked by alliteration. The one successful instance came many, many years ago from Charles W. Kennedy, but even this text tends to accelerate unfittingly as the rhythm continues unrelenting. Sometimes it is a decision to imitate the blank verse of the Renaissance. Sometimes it may be choice of a verse-form such as nine-syllable lines defended by reasoning rather than readability. Sung-Il Lee’s translation is not trammeled in any ways like these. The syllable-count is unpredictable: it is instead the phrasings that embody the verse rhythms.

It is not merely the metrical basis of the translation that has to be right. The syntax must be right at the same time. This means simply: the flow of phrase by phrase within the clauses and sentences must move steadily and never stumble, never create a tangle that a reader has to pause and undo. Such is hard enough to manage under any circumstances, but it is often neglected—or despaired of—in translating Old English verse, chiefly because of the prominence of “variation,” “the very soul of the Old English poetical style,” as Frederick Klaeber expressed it. When a sentence-part gets re-expressed, and sometimes re-expressed again, and sometimes yet again, a sentence may move haltingly once it leaves the metrics of Old English style: “I wish to announce to the son of Halfdane, the glorious prince, my business here, to thy lord” (344−46a) is a piecemeal translation patterned on the original text. Translating verse-by-verse, half-line-by-half-line when possible, can’t keep the sentences going aright in Modern English. Sung-Il Lee’s resolution of these problems is successful consistently: the variations are not discarded, but re-folded into patterns that keep the text moving forward. Typically at least one of them is delayed—just as the Beowulf-poet always does—so that with its occurrence the syntax requires a hearer to loop back (mentally) to the syntactic slot of a prior variant, to a tacit experience yet again of the accumulated syntactic structure. It’s a marvelous device for regulating the pace of the narrative, the reading, the telling, to keep it ruminative rather than fit only for a pell-mell tale of adventure and monster bashing.

There is something similar, though it is actually an innovation, in the repetition of a small sentence part, after a delay, which triggers reflective replay of the related portion of a sentence. It, too, controls the pace of the poem. In 930−31 it is simply “may,” or in 2158−59 “had”; in 2124−25 it is merely “could not.”

Also regarding pace and continuity—cohesion, in fact—of the mix of a “main” narrative, reflections, “episodes,” and “digressions”: in reading this translation I had a sense of the sweep and cohesion of the source text that I have not found in other translations. The way in which the section divisions come and go is also impressive (and incidentally highlights the independence of section divisions from “natural” divisions of the poem). Similarly, in local passages, say, 1292−1311, the pace is never compromised as the topics shift here and there within the large memory that the whole poem embodies.

The meter and the syntax—the flow of sounds and the flow of sentence-parts—can be right, and there is still the matter of the words we hear, in the translation. Imitation of the original text by trying to mimic it is a temptation to many, but always leads to inferior translations. Without an exception a compound noun or adjective in the original text is right and powerful, but enigmatic or awkward if rendered piecemeal in the lexicon of Modern English. Here is where a translator’s tact—not theory—has to be active, and his word-sense entirely in tune with the poetic texture. Unferth is going to challenge the hero in front of everyone; he onband beadu-rūne (501), which says he “unbound” his “battle-rune,” according to glossing conventions, obscure enough that Klaeber paraphrases it as “commenced fight.” Lee’s rendering: he spoke, “Revealing his revulsion.” A group of warriors who hrēa-wīc hēoldon (1214), “held a place of corpses” in the basic glossary reading, reads “Kept the place filled with bodies,” conveying the sense exactly without the opacity of glossary-transplants. At 2999−3000 there is a stack of compounds in variation which would be grotesque in word-by-word translation; so we get “That is the malevolence and the mutual malice, /The deadly hate between men . . . .” The most affective word choice perhaps is one of the simplest and most obvious: “the old (one)”—for þām gomelan (2817) and se gomela (2851)—is accurate, but empty of both force and feeling. When it is read out as “the old man” (and not just once) for Beowulf in his defeat and death from his fight with and defeat of the fire-dragon, it is evocative of the grief of Beowulf’s lifelong companions, and of the listeners to this poem: “The old man.”

These right renderings of the text are found at every turn: heortan wylmas (2507) becomes “his pulsating heart”; līce gelenge (2732) makes good sense as “with fleshly legacy”; mæl-gesceafta (2737) is caught just right with “the dictum of destiny.” A notoriously dense and complex passage of kennings and variations describing the funeral-fire for the hero is rendered faithfully and most effectively this way:

Wood-smoke arose,

Black over the fire; the roaring flame bellowed,

Mingling with the weeping—the twirling wind died out—

Till it had burnt down the bone-wrapping body-flesh,

Hot in its heart. With their souls soaked in sadness,

They mourned the death of their lord, deep in their hearts.

(3144b−3149)

The choice of words is always true to the text being translated, and always belongs to the active literary language of Modern English. There just aren’t any convenient calques, bland approximations, or mere glossary insertions. From the past four-hundred years of language of literature in English it draws extensively, but without any sign (or smell) of “olde tyme” diction. The words are chosen from a heritage of current English. And each one seems (and smells) like a careful choice by a connoisseur of English literary composition. Any number of times I reached for my Modern English dictionaries, both British and American, to check on the semantic range and the etymology of various words in the translation, and never found a flaw with an unexpected choice: “turbid” for gedrēfed (1417), for example, or “woven link by link by hand” for hondum gebrōden (1443), or “palanquin” for bær (3105).

Having said these things about the ways of translating, a brief observation should be made about the competence of the translator. Any translator must face choices among the possible meanings of any part of the source text, in light of the debates and arguments among scholars and, ultimately, his own sense of the text itself. (Never mind that two of the very popular “translations” in the past forty-some years were versifications of translations done initially by others.) It is clear that Dr. Lee has read extensively in the editorial discussions, and his text shows a successful series of choices among the ambiguities and cruces, let alone the obscurities of the original text of Beowulf—the blow-by-blow action of the Beowulf-Grendel wrestling match (745−61), for example; or the theft from the dragon’s hoard (2216−31).

Forty-five years since I began leading others through the labyrinth of diction, variation, narrative embellishments of Beowulf, and reading their translation examinations, and reading most of the published translations; and forty years since I began scrutiny of the spellings and graphotactics system of the sole manuscript text. When I carefully read this new translation line by line, making notes on the many surprising but always interesting locutions, the movement forward was felt all the way through, with even the episodes and digressions (as they are usually regarded) seeming to be at first unproblematic, and then appearing, as they should, as beautiful assets to the action-narrative and its affectivity. In brief, the translation by Dr. Sung-Il Lee succeeded better for an old reader (that I am) than earlier ones have done, and my sense is that it will succeed very well for readers with any degree of less familiarity with the earliest known text. If we still offered seminars on The Art of Translation, this would be a good centerpiece. An old poem here, unimpaired in translation. It is the best we have among the remnants of Anglo-Saxon culture, and in its newer voice.

Robert D. Stevick

University of Washington