Nothing promotes a classic like a celebrity translator.
Now two more famous poets have entered the lists. W.S. Merwin's gorgeous, accurate rendering is worthy of its great original. The Swedish dimension gradually becomes an important element in the poem's emotional and imaginative geography, a geography which details, it should be said, no very clear map-sense of the world, more an apprehension of menaced borders, of danger gathering beyond the mere and the marshes. . . . Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord's hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Weaving text with subtext, Heaney portrays Beowulf as all mettle and mystery.