I started reading Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf on the way to my first cross-country meet in 8th grade. I didn’t know anything about the story—I didn’t even know that the language printed on the other side ...

It's strange and unexpected, but also appropriate and heartening, that Beowulf—ground zero for literature in English—would become a bestseller at the dawn of the 21st century. Why becomes less of a ...

Seamus Heaney died today at age 74. He was considered Ireland’s foremost poet since William Butler Yeats and he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. His translation of “Beowulf” made the Old ...

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times. As seen in a new collection, “The Translations of Seamus Heaney,” the Nobel laureate was a prolific and skilled interpreter of other ...

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, just out in paperback, has become one of poetry’s rare success stories, selling 200,000 copies in hardcover in the United States and reaching its 18 th printing ...

Johnny Lee Davenport (rear), Rachel Wiese, Rebecca Lehrhoff, Jesse Garlick and Amanda Gann in "Beowulf" at the Poets' Theatre. (Courtesy Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures/Poets' Theatre) You have to ...

Harry Potter, it turns out, is not invincible after all, although it did take a 1,300-year-old Scandinavian legend tag-teaming with a Nobel Prize-winning poet to deal the fictional wizard his ...

Seamus Heaney was real. Were he a fictional character, however, we likely would call him unrealistic, his life story and his career too good to be true. Like Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, but perhaps ...