Election Section

Deep in the recesses of LaVal’s Subterranean, Philip Wharton is about to unlock his word-hoard. Dressed simply as a scop or scald, ancient bard and reciter, he begins alliteratively in Anglo-Saxon, then switches seamlessly into Modern English, his translation of Beowulf, heroes and monsters sketched in with graceful gestures and quick grimaces. 

From above, the Sunday night noise of LaVal’s becomes that of a rude mead-hall in the tale spun out before us. 

Beowulf, the story of the hero of the Geats (seafaring people of southeastern Sweden) on a mission of monster-abatement to the Danes, long a staple of English Lit surveys, has garnered new interest by the translation of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. 

In sinewy, rhythmic verse, the hero-tale tells of Beowulf’s triumph over the anthropomorphous yet man-devouring Grendel (“the master-butcher”) and his even more ferocious mother, bent on revenge (“She took her son’s bloody arm away, and sorrow returned to the house”), and of his Pyrrhic victory over the more conventional treasure-guarding dragon (a.k.a. worm, firedrake) in old age (“So must every man give up his borrowed days.”) 

Replete with epithets—“whale road” or “swan’s road” for sea, “sea-treader” for ship—that remind one of Homer’s “wine-dark sea” and “rosy fingers of dawn,” Beowulf alternates between extremes: of a rough existence on the edge of brutality with bright moments of celebration (“the hearth rang out and the poet sang”), of chivalric boasts and bloody street-fighting tactics, of appeals to Christian belief (“Now his soul awaits the terrible brightness of God’s judgment”) with pagan tribal customs (the hero’s cremated and interred in a barrow he commissioned). 

Indeed, the turnaround is swift—“The world’s candle was shining, the mighty sun from the south—until in the dark night something else began to wield power ...” 

Besides the alliterative rolling of the verse, and the stark portrayal of a remote time and way of life, Beowulf’s attraction comes from the clarity of that picture, of the little vignettes and details of that life. In Philip Wharton’s telling, there’s not a slack moment nor hazy word. His smooth transitions (assisted by light changes and blackouts, his daughter at the board) and movements syncopate the rippling verbal flow, and set up the cameo portrayals of men and monsters, a flicker of the eye or swift gesture. 

Wharton’s an exponent of the acting technique of Michael Chekhov (nephew of the great playwright) , and its subtlety shows in the breadth and range of expression, all modulated to a storyteller’s presence, one the audience immediately responds to and follows throughout. The only scenic element, besides what the teller provides, is a stool—appropriately, Danish Modern.  

Commenting on his translation—“no pretensions at scholarship, but with hope that it has some value as poetry and theatre”—Wharton noted he began with Heaney’s translation, but was unable to get permission to perform it. He wondered whether he should follow the text from Julian Glover’s Beowulf , which took off in part from Edwin Morgan’s translation. 

(In the thick of the praise over Heaney’s, Edwin Morgan’s version stands out as supple and clear, tinged with the grimness of struggle in WW II Britain. Morgan, now 80, is being hailed as the greatest living Scots poet; his translation was published by UC Press, and is now available through Carcanet). 

Finally deciding to do his own, Wharton originally wrote in prose, but “I couldn’t get away from the rhythms of the alliteration.” 

There have been fine translations made for telling orally before. The fluidity of Wharton’s translation and delivery just accent the quaintness of the strange Classical echoes (and Scriptural confusions) in a Nordic landscape—Grendel, reminiscent of Polyphemus the Cyclops in The Odyssey, is of the race of Cain, from which also sprang giants who did battle with God. (An Old English poet once referred to “Christ, the gentle shepherd of Greece.”) 

And, like the Homeric epics, it seems Beowulf was told a thousand years ago about a time long before its telling, even then a quaint, twilit antiquity for the time of Charlemagne. Hearing Philip Wharton bring it—and the storyteller’s art—to life again makes it plain why Ezra Pound began his Cantos with Odysseus’ voyage to the underworld in a style drawn from his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer.” Both are our heritage, completely different and irretrievably mixed together in our speech.