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Beowulf is an anonymous heroic epic poem written in Anglo-Saxon around the year 1000. Much translated in the 19th and 20th centuries, Edwin Morgan was highly critical of earlier verse translations, describing them in his 'Introduction' as "assaults" on the original. He goes on to set out his aspirations as a translator:

"… what translator has not sometimes felt, with Ezra Pound, that 'all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking'? – thankless, because his audience in the first place almost disbelieves in the translation of poetry even as a possibility; desolate, because of the disproportion between his own convictlike labour and the infinitesimal influence on men's minds of the completed product. (…) [Yet] when the translator unites with this purposefulness something that was pre-existent in his mind, a secret and passionate sympathy with the alien poet… then we may have something memorable, some justification of the activity."

Edwin Morgan, 'Introduction'

The translation has stood the text of time, having been reprinted by the University of California Press, Officina Pluralo (Sydney), and most recently (2002) by Carcanet Press.

Morgan translated other, shorter Anglo-Saxon poems, including 'The Seafarer' and 'The Wanderer'.

Beowulf: A verse translation into modern English

1950s

Beowulf is an anonymous heroic epic poem written in Anglo-Saxon around the year 1000. Much translated in the 19th and 20th centuries, Edwin Morgan was highly critical of earlier verse translations, describing them in his 'Introduction' as "assaults" on the original.

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