List $18.95

Translated & performed by Seamus Heaney - 2 CASSETTES - 2.5 hours

Publisher, HighBridge Audio (May 2000)

Publisher's Weekly says "Truly outstanding." Received their 'Listen Up Award 2000'

"A translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right….Generations of readers will be grateful." --The New York Times Book Review

"Seamus Heaney's stunning new translation gives the epic a much-needed dusting-off, so much so that this version is certain to become a standard classroom text. But that sells it short: The translation makes this northern 'Gilgamesh' gripping and racy, startlingly contemporary." --The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A work of great grace, Heaney's translation captures the sense of Old English poetry without adhering slavishly to its roots…The result is a Beowulf of rough elegance and emotional directness rendered in a voice both ancient and familiar." --The Onion

'New York Times' and 'Whitbread Book of the Year,' Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf comes to life in this gripping new audio from HighBridge. Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard, not read.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of the story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

About the Author: Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. A resident of Dublin since 1976, he teaches regularly at Harvard University. His most recent collection of poems is Opened Ground (FSG, 1998).