Beowulf
Translated by Seamus Heaney.
Directed by Linda Murray. Featuring Carter Jahncke.
Music by Matt Aquiline and Belén Pifel.
Tuesday,
January 24th, 2006
The University
Club, 1135 16th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036.
6:30pm Cocktails
7.30pm Dinner and Programme.
Tickets: $45 for members/ $55 for non-members.
Solas Nua will perform a section of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf as part of an evening celebrating Irish culture at the University Club on January 24th, following remarks by his Excellency Noel Fahey, The Ambassador of Ireland to the U.S.
Beowulf: 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 beginning of the twenty-first 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 mmense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for a contemporary audience.
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.