Heaney on Anglo-Saxon

He's talking about the difficulties of translating Beowulf, from the Introduction to his translation of the poem:

"An understanding I had worked out for myself concerning my own linguistic and literary origins made me reluctant to abandon the task. I had noticed, for example, that without any conscious intent on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics. These lines were made up of two balancing halves, each half containing two stressed syllables-- 'the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father, digging. I look down'--and in the case of the second line, there was alliteration linking "digging" and "down" across the caesura. Part of me, in other words, had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start" (xxiii).

Then he goes onto talk about the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on his work, and the Anglo-Saxon elements of Hopkins' verse.

Really amazing that alliterative verse is subconsciously present in his poem, "Digging."

Heaney's translation of "Deor" is one of my favourites. You can listen to him reading it here:

http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/heaney_reads_deor/