Heaney's answer to your problem is perhaps in his introduction
(pp.xxvi-xxvii in Faber ed.).  He wanted the verse 'to be speakable by one
of those [big-voiced]relatives' of  his father, to be in 'Hiberno-English
Scullion-speak'.  Many of us would need to hear it read in that voice before
we could hear it for ourselves.  I could not hear Lowell's verse until I
heard his reading of it.  To hear Bunting read was also an ear-opener.
 
On another tack: to so Irish the Anglo-Saxon is, I suppose, an act of
conscious cultural appropriation?
 
David Moody
----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Bray <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2000 3:29 PM
Subject: Only slightly off-topic
 
 
> I just bought & read the much-ballyhooed new Seamus Heany translation of
> Beowulf.  Anybody else, like me, find it kind of flat & uninspiring?  EP
> every have anything to say about Beowulf? -T.
>