Seamus Heaney's translation has been staring over me from the bookshelf aside too many unread comrades, and I finally took it down and read it. Glad that I did, as it brought me to a world and story that lies at the root of contemporary fantasies by Tolkien and his successors, and dusted lightly with emergent Christianity. This translation is easily read and enjoyed. The NYT review captures it well:

At last count some 65 English translations of ''Beowulf'' have been published. The poem's many translators seem to have followed the same logic that drives people to open new restaurants: they're disappointed with what's out there and convinced that they can do better. Only in retrospect do they realize why they were doomed to fail. As generations of students can testify, a phrase-by-phrase rendering of ''Beowulf'' into modern English isn't that hard to manage; in the process, however, the poem's lifeblood is drained, and along with it the qualities that make ''Beowulf'' so remarkable. Paradoxically, the seeming familiarity of the language is part of the problem: you don't need to know a lot of Anglo-Saxon to guess that when the narrator exclaims ''bæt wæs god cyning,'' he is saying ''that was a good king.''

This sense of familiarity, however, is for the most part an illusion, since only the slenderest of threads binds us to the Old English ''word-hoard'' and vision of the ''Beowulf'' poet. Translators (usually scholars) faithful to the poem's complex style — one that is highly formulaic, rich in compounds, apposition, repetition and parallelism, conveyed in a resounding alliterative line — end up producing jog-trot verse, of which the following is a painful and typical example: ''What ho! We've heard the glory / of Spear-Danes, clansmen-kings, / Their deeds of olden story, — – / how fought the aethelings!''

On the other hand, those (usually established poets) who take considerable license may succeed in capturing the spirit of the poem but lose touch with its intricate diction and verse rhythms: ''Listen! / The fame of Danish kings / in days gone by, the daring feats / worked by those heroes are well known to us.'' The Norton editors were so worried that Heaney would fall into the latter camp that they assigned to him an Anglo-Saxon scholar ''who was a kind of minder.'' Heaney seems to have profited from their exchanges and to have been good-humored about the arrangement. You can see the effect in his revision of an early set piece from the poem, which he titled ''A Ship of Death'' and published in ''The Haw Lantern'' (1987): the lines ''A ring-necked prow rode in the harbour, / clad with ice, its cables tightening'' are replaced 13 years later by: ''A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour, / ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.'' The Anglo-Saxon original on the facing page enables readers to appreciate why Heaney here rejects the vivid ''its cables tightening'' in favor of the more literal ''outbound,'' thereby more closely approximating the diction, compounded style and falling rhythm of the original half-line, ''isig ond ut-fus,'' that is, icy and out-ready. Countless small examples like this add up to 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.

via www.nytimes.com