(or "Scarfed in Sun-Dazzle"): Beowulf and Translation Theory

It’s difficult to read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf without thinking about translation theory. In particular, the way translation must honor both the source text and the target language, despite Vladimir Nabokov’s insistence that the source alone is sacred. Translation should welcome readers into the ethos and music of the original text (the “spirit” as it were), even if it comes at the cost of the letter. Nabokov hated the idea: The job of the translator is an ethical one, he insisted, and its tenets require faithful replication with a minimum of “betrayal” to the original. I place the word “betrayal” in scare quotes as it evokes to me the Medieval Italian insistence that “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”) a doctrine that Nabokov would likely applaud. In “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Nabokov insists that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase” (71). But this begs the question: How does one measure the utility of literature? “Useful” as it might be, Nabokov’s own translation of Onegin remains unreadable, and is perhaps better used as an object lesson against this “faith doctrine.”

Depending on context—students of Old English, for instance, might prefer translations that hew closer to the original—current translation theory sides more with Petrarch, who believed we should translate “as the bees make honey, not keeping the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own” (Petrarca 291). Heaney’s translation has all the sweetness of his Nobel-awarded poetry, thank God (or the gods, as the case may be). Though his detractors call his text “Heaneywulf” in disapproval, Heaney’s translation honors the inscrutable sounds and conventions of the original without sacrificing his poet’s sensibilities, producing a text that balances the letter of the original’s cocksure oratory with the spirit of its more existential aftertaste.

In his review “Beowulf and Heaneywulf,” fellow Beowulf translator Howell Chickering commends Heaney’s labor of love. He calls previous 20th and 21st Century efforts, including his own, “honorable failures, since Modern English poetry simply cannot match the clangorous magnificence of the Old English” (162). He does not think all of Heaney’s choices are perfect, but all in all he calls it “one of the better poetic paraphrases of the original” (Chickering 177). Especially successful, in Chickering’s view, are the speeches, which he calls “freshly faithful to the point of ventriloquism” (162). I would like to zoom in on one of Beowulf’s speeches, largely because I am equally enamored of the poetry in it and the way it leans into the source material’s enigmatic foreignness. Beowulf’s speech reinforces and complicates his rhetoric. Soon after his arrival in Hrothgar’s beleaguered kingdom, our hero delivers a stinging retort to Hrothgar’s retainer, Unferth, who has sourly called him out for losing a race. Unferth remarks that if he could not outswim his friend, then neither can he survive Grendel. Beowulf responds:

[Grendel] knows he can trample down you Danes
to his heart’s content, humiliate and murder
without fear of reprisal. But he will find me different.
I will show him how Geats shape to kill
in the heat of battle. Then whoever wants to
may go bravely to mead, when morning light,
scarfed in sun-dazzle, shines forth from the south
and brings another daybreak to the world (599-606).

There is both music and layers of sense-making in this passage. Beowulf threatens those who cross him (Unferth wouldn’t want to set himself against this Geat “heat”); his sentences about Danes are rife with cliché (“heart’s content,” “fear of reprisal”); he sneers that for the Danes going to mead is a “brave act”; and he concludes with a gorgeous kenning in the final lines, “sun-dazzle,” a light which will be draped over the Danes like a womanly garment, a scarf. We can read Beowulf himself as the daybreak returning victorious from the south so the Danes can get back to the hard drinking and revelry that Grendel interrupted. Beowulf speaks with such muscular rhetoric, but pairs it with imagery so delicate it borders on fussy. The speech has the desired effect: The king is pleased, and the party starts. Heaney’s choices here capture, to my mind, some of the poem’s contradictions. These boasts sound profoundly undiplomatic to modern ears, but they have the desired effect. Heaney threads a needle here between mystery and clarity, poetry and meaning, grace and bombast.

Our tastes in translation come down to what we accept as collateral damage: The spirit or the letter of the original. To my mind, Petrarch was right, that the translator takes the flowers and makes honey. Or perhaps I’ll draw from Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights,” when he advocates for translation with “happy and creative infidelity” to the original (45). Too faithful and we are the staid, spineless Danes in the quotation above. But if we apply our own “sun-dazzle” to the act of translation, our creative faithlessness moves translation from a flat transfer between semiotic systems to a dynamic medium of exchange that shines daylight on the past while enriching the present.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights.” Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, Routledge 1999, pp. 34-48.

Chickering, Howell. “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf.’” The Kenyon Review, Winter, 2002, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 160-178.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English.” Translation Studies Reader. Edited by L. Venuti, Routledge, 1999. 71-83.

Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters. Edited and translated by James Harvey Robinson, G.P. Putnam, 1898.

Heaney, Seamus. “Beowulf.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 1: Tenth Edition, edited by Steven Greenblatt, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 42-109.