Seamus Heaney and his translation of Beowulf: strategies to simultaneously make visible the culture of the source text and that of the translator
Abstract
This article consists of a comparative analysis between the original Old English manuscript of Beowulf and its standard English translation by Irish author Seamus Heaney. The objective is to demonstrate that, through the inclusion of dialectal terms of Hiberno-English, Heaney's translation manages to 1) make visible the cultural and linguistic differences between the culture of the source text and that of the target text; and 2) challenge the dominance of Standard English as a form of protest against Britain's cultural and linguistic colonizing role over Ireland.
The analysis focuses on identifying the translation strategies used according to the classifications provided by Aixelá (1996) and Bastin (1998) and on determining how they fit the objectives of Heaney's task as a translator.