I confess that it's been years since I thought about rereading ''Beowulf'' or ''The Inferno,'' but now I have new translations of each before me so it seems the moment to re-examine them, both as a reader and as a columnist. I remember them from high school as rousing tales in their own ways, with blood and guts and dragons, beasts and passion and lust. Both very different from ''Silas Marner,'' for instance, which was the literary castor oil that generations of high school students were also forced to choke down.

Now it may be a bit of a puzzlement: do we really need new translations of these canonical works? Well, why do we need another recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? There are endless recordings of the classics, and to people who have the occasion to buy one for a gift the choices are sometimes bewildering. The same can be said for classical literature. Is there an academic or a commercial need for new translations? It would seem that each generation views and interprets classical works in the light of its own experience -- a justification for updating them -- except perhaps for Shakespeare, who confronts us all the time in movies and the theater and who is very much alive and with us.

There's nothing trendy or audacious about commissioning these new translations. They take years of development. Yes, publishers feel good and even worthy about reissuing the classics. But they are even happier with the knowledge that each classic title reissued becomes part of its publisher's all important backlist, to be sold to about 40 years' worth of students. A comforting annuity for the translators, who mostly receive modest advances but nifty royalties over the years, and a cash coup for the publisher. For instance, Penguin sells nearly 70,000 copies of ''Beowulf'' annually.

The most successful recent translation of a classic, both commercially and perhaps artistically as well, is Seamus Heaney's ''Beowulf'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Irish Nobel laureate's verse translation (bilingual edition: English and Anglo-Saxon) was on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for 10 weeks last year and has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardback. These sales seem truly aberrational. Classics generally sell in the small thousands. Whatever the case, all those involved ''are hugging themselves with delight,'' is the way one publishing executive put it. Mr. Heaney's ''Beowulf'' can also be bought in trade paperback for $13.95 from that edition's publisher, W. W. Norton, which expects to at least equal those sales -- top them, in fact, over the years. It has a first printing of 100,000 copies. (Norton commissioned the poet to do this translation years ago for its own anthology of English literature but sold the hardcover rights to the house that had always published his poetry, Farrar, Strauss.)