Jake, I'd second Richard's remark that the discussion of Heaney's Beowulf, and of Beowulf, and of Pound's attitudes towards Old English poetry, haven't degenerated into a "squabble" (your term). Whether it's "meaningingless" (again, your term) is a subjective thing. One could find meaning where another finds .... something unsustaining. Pound writes about the three ways in which poetry means: melopeia, phanopeia, and logopoeia. Sound, image, sense. The third category, logopoeia, is meant to encompass a very wide range of ideas about how language and metaphor work. A translation, which also tries to be a poem in its own right, will address the sounds, images, and sense of the original. Different translators will address these interdependent modes of meaning in different ways at different times. A translator's agenda (and it may not be always a conscious agenda) may shift throughout the course of a translation of a long poem.And one translator may try to emphasis sound over sense, another sense over sound. Over on the Anglo-Saxonists list, another translator of Beowulf is arguing with me that a translation of an original which comes from an "aural tradition" (his phrase) must "sing". My reply was to say that the literary milieu of Beowulf was not purely and simply an oral tradition, but a tradition marked by the interplay or orality and literacy. Thus, in my own translation, I tend to emphasize the logopoeia of the poetic narrative, using a rather un-songlike diction. Not devoid of sound-sense by any means, but emphasizing the beautifully "carved" syntactic structures of the original over the sound. If I have to sacrifice something, sense or alliteration or rhythm, I will cut myself some slack on the alliterative requirements or on the rhythmic requirements. Others no doubt would prefer to sacrifice sense but not sound. We should all question our agendas from time to time. Choices are usually tradeoffs. That's true with translation too, in spades. Pound was in part responsible for establishing the widespread view that Old English poetry was a very blustery affair. In his translation of The Seafarer, he goes overboard, I think, in his exaggeration of the sound. Germanic languages (Old English was a Germanic language) were not his forte; his translation was passed through the filter of an English-speaking poet who was really in love with the romance languages. Old English poetry is actually much quieter and more contemplative than many people allow. Tim Romano