«He knew what they have tholed»: lo stile di Seamus Heaney traduttore del Beowulf

Published in 1999, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is a significant example of how a subjective, personal approach to literary translation allows the restitution of the original text in a form which can strongly reduce chronological and linguistic distance from the Anglo-Saxon age. In the introduction to his work, Heaney explains how his style tries to express his own «voice-right», an inner voice which makes him able to overcome the difficulties of the prosodic trend of the original text and the dangers hidden in the rendering of the Old English poetic vocabulary, that word-hoard «that is old and strange», extraordinarily rich in formulas, compounds,kenningar, surprising synonymic variations. Thus, he really manages to find its most intimate and true soul. In this perspective, this essay aims at offering an analysis of the opening lines of the poem, where the stylistic choices made by the Nobel Prize writer can be seized in all their powerful immediacy: he made his “Irishness” one of the tools to grasp with authoritative awareness the enormous «imaginative vitality» of Beowulf as well as its authentic Anglo-Saxon essence.