“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices, and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then. One of the great things that strikes me with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels—or rather, to put it a different way, how timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be. Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way, as they did this sailor.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. Into the conversation the episode weaves audio samples from different translations and different recordings, including one made by Lewis Lapham, another by Ezra Pound, and a third by Matthew Hollis himself.

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

“Drama Queens with Daniel Mendelsohn.” A New York Review Seminar, beginning September 10, 2025.

 

“The Political Novel with Edwin Frank.” A New York Review Seminar, beginning September 8, 2025.

 

The Seafarer. Translated by Matthew Hollis. Original photographs by Norman McBeath. Hatley: Hazel Press, 2024.

 

Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2013: The Sea.

 

“The Seafarer.” In The Anglo-Saxon World, An Anthology. Translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

 

Matthew Hollis. The Seafarer (audio recording). Soundcloud, 2024.

 

Matthew Hollis. Earth House. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2024.

 

Matthew Hollis. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. New York: W.W. Norton, 2024.

 

Seamus Heaney. The Poems of Seamus Heaney. Edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Matthew Hollis. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2025.

 

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated and introduced by Daniel Mendelsohn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

 

Plato. The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo. Translated by Hugh Tredennick and edited by Harold Tarrant. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

 

“The Seafarer.” In The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Translated by Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1982.

 

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. New York: Penguin Classics, 2013.

 

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Translated by Nevill Coghill. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

 

Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass. Introduced by John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 2011.

 

“The Seafarer.” In The Seafarer: A Hypertext Edition. Translated by Benjamin Thorpe. Edited by Corey Owen. The University of Saskatchewan Digital Resource Centre, 1999.

 

“The Seafarer.” In Nothing by Design. Translated by Mary Jo Salter. New York: Knopf, 2013.