SOURCE: Pratt, William. Review of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. World Literature Today 75, no. 1 (winter 2001): 119-20.

In the following review, Pratt champions Heaney's fresh approach to the language of Beowulf.

The oldest epic in English comes to us anew, like a voice out of the cave of our ancestors. It greets us in the original Anglo-Saxon with Hwaet, usually translated as “Lo!” or “Behold!” but liberally transformed by Seamus Heaney into “So,” which he says he heard when he was a boy on a farm in Ulster, when his family and their friends wanted to start a conversation. “So. We Spear-Danes in days gone by,” his translation begins, and the reader knows immediately that for Heaney this Old English epic is not distant but familiar. Personal intimacy with the past is Seamus Heaney's trademark as a poet, and it gives his translation of Beowulf authenticity, making it an...