Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English

In Edwin Morgan's critical review of the fifteen verse translations of Beowulf which, within the past hundred years, have preceded his own, he writes: "The reaction against ‘rhetoric’ has been so strong that present-day readers of poetry will not now readily accept as 'poetic' anything that is 'archaic', as 'literary' anything that is 'obsolete'... There is no use being faithful to the poetic archaisms of the original if the result cannot be couched in terms acceptable to one's poetic co-readers and co-writers. If it is a case of losing an archaism or losing the poetry, the archaism must go. Whatever the tradition of the original poetry may have been, the translator's duty is as much to speak to his own age as it is to represent the voice of a past age..." With these two criteria clearly before him, Morgan has in his own translation sought a modern idiom that is free of archaism, a verse form that is accentual and unrhymed and only occasionally alliterative.