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. >