An epic poem is a performance. The telling of Beowulf carries
something of the days of its pre-literary composition, as it
evolved as something memorised, half spoken and half sung, over
many generations. The single manuscript we have, from about 1000
AD, is the end result of a great chain of poetic adaptation. Of all
new versions Seamus Heaneys (1999) has made the most striking
impact, in part for his willingness to experiment, to be a new scop
or oral poet, to depart at times from the exact text and join the
tradition when there was no such thing. The licence such an
approach adopts can make for a riveting poem in itself, a work of
wonder. But there is a different route to the flame of the
original. J.D. Winters rendering of the Beowulf song accepts the
text as historical fact, and by a gradual revelation of its deeper
music, discovers an illumination from within. The voice is less his
and more nearly of the time and world of the poem itself. But this
is without recourse to an archaic register. It is the modern
language and yet not the modern man speaking. The phrases of the
text, like phrases of music with their crescendos and diminuendos,
steadily and unhurriedly move towards the culmination of a
powerfully fulfilling symphony. It is the expression of a simpler
time than ours, and perhaps a more plain-speaking one. Yet its art
was at least as sophisticated as the modern worlds. The clarity and
concentration of meaning in the brilliantly alliterated half-lines
can never be properly reconstructed. But a suggestion of that force
and beauty, together with an underlying sense of the inexorable,
may always be rediscovered. In the knock and flow of the lines,
too, one can sense the poetry of a sea-faring nation. The nation is
not England or Sweden or Denmark. It is an intermingled part of
Northern Europe using the West Saxon dialect of the language in
England to convey a mix of Scandinavian history and Teutonic
legend. In this evocative transcreation the reader may come, no
doubt as did the early listeners, to a simple truth behind the
medley of international borders: the inevitable journey of the
universal human.
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