Beowulf

I always enjoy the translator's notes in these, what makes you go and be the umpteenth person to translate a classic, what makes you think you can bring something new to the party? I think this works and the translator does bring something different to this work.
I didn't get Beowulf forced on me at school - I didn't go to that sort of school. I came to Beowulf as an adult, by choice and through the Seamus Heaney translation. I loved it from the first word, as I, too, have a habit of starting a conversation with "So". More at work than at home, but I recognised something in it. It opened up the world of alliterative poetry, which I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring with the likes of Simon Armitage. In this, the translator starts with show more "Bro". I get what she is trying to do, this is a bar room and the story teller is trying to quieten the room, to take the floor, to grab the attention. I reckon someone, somewhere could write an essay on the choice of translation for "Hwaet".
This feels to be a more robust translation than the Heaney (which I am going to have to read again very soon). It uses modern language, there's a couple of gimme and gonna in here as well as shit and fuck used more than I would, but I'm not the subject of this. This is all about a male environment and the men in it. And they almost certainly would use that language. That's not to say that it is dumbed down, or simplified, there are plenty of allusions and illusions at work in here. The whale road being the Old English equivalent of the wine dark sea. It feels immediate and earthy, it doesn't feel distant and ethereal in the way that the tranbslation of an ancient classic could do. There is relevance in here and the language used is of its time. That may mean it will date, but that doesn;t make it any less good in the here and now.
I liked the way that the voice changed as the different people take up the tale, there is a change in language and word usage here that is sophisticated without feeling to be artificial.
The story hasn't changed, it remains the same 3 act play with 50 years vanishing in the middle. And yet it isn't tired and predictable, I still felt the tears pricking as Wiglaf berates his fellow warriors for not coming to Beowulf's aid. If there's any lesson in here that the modern world need to hear it is that doing the right thing is always worth it, no matter how hard or painful. He's the hero for the modern age.
This is well worth adding to your reading list, regardless of if you're familiar with the work or not. show less

Beowulf pales somewhat in comparison to the Iliad or the Aeneid. These earlier epics achieve greater psychological complexity and narrative effects. What Beowulf boasts is an incredible linguistic vitality. The poet’s Old English verse throbs with a melody and meaning you don’t have to understand to feel. Seamus Heaney’s rugged rendering imparts the original’s linguistic intensity, the word-life that still vibrates in this Anglo-Saxon epic, a thousand years after its writing.

I was first exposed to Beowulf: A New Translation via someone quoting a part that contained the phrase, "hashtag: blessed." It's hard to imagine a worse first impression.

But I love Beowulf, and there's a somewhat common phrase about not judging books by your surface level knowledge of them. So I grabbed a copy from the library, and I'm really glad I did.

This is a superb translation. Headley's poetry is wonderfully playful, weaving together the epic with delightful verse, sublime alliteration, clever compound expressions, and sudden hard turns into modernity. Swearing, contemporary phrasing and dialogue, and even memes are peppered throughout the book.

Thankfully, it avoids overcommitting to the bit - if that's the right word - of being show more a story for and by 20XX dudebros. It is far too beautiful and inventive for anyone to make that mistake. The anachronisms are rarer than you'd expect (or fear); they punctuate the poem with precision timing for moments of humor or metaphor. When it's ridiculous, it's clearly with a purpose.

It's a very quotable book, which is not something that can be said of most Beowulf translations.

It has a few clunkers here and there, moments where the swerve to modern temperament ends up crashing into a brick wall. Hashtag: Blessed did not land any better in context. Some repeated words throughout the book - bro, daddy, bling - never felt right no matter how many times I read them. At times the more modern phrases ("Meanwhile, Beowulf gave zero shits.") felt too cute, too distracting.

But these blemishes were rare, leaving a book that felt fresh and clever and brilliant. show less

Wow. This is one delightful bit of writing! The language is playful and welcoming. Cleaver and compassionate, the emphasis is on human qualities, good and bad, in all the actors. Grendel and his mother are in some ways less monstrous than Beowulf, whose outrageous strength proves a match and more to theirs, but he is kept from monstrosity because he makes support of his lord and land his limits, his strongest desire being the lasting fame of a good name.

Yes, I know, it's taken me a shamefully long time to get around to something that every medievalist should know by heart, etc. In my defense, I'm not an Anglo-Saxonist—I'm a common-or-garden High Medievalist. Anyway! I've worked my way through it, and pretty much the only observation I have on it is that it was a good reminder as to why I'm not so enthralled with the 'blah blah, son of blah blah' school of history.

Not only does the whole swords and testosterone thing get old, but the realisation that Grendel's Mother (who never gets her own name, of course) is never actually described as a monster in the original Old English makes me shake my fist at misogynistic modern translations. Grendel's Mother and Beowulf are both actually show more described with the same word, but where the translation tradition renders that as 'warrior hero' for him, it becomes 'monstrous wretch' for her. Sigh. show less

I've read Beowulf twice before: once in high school (no idea what translation) and once in grad school (Seamus Heaney). Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation (in?)famously updates the language, using constructions like "Hashtag: blessed" (l. 622) and "Previously prone to calling bullshit" (l. 980) and rendering the opening hwæt as "Bro!" (l. 1) It's that latter choice that I think is the most interesting; Headley plays up the boasting. This is a story of men telling stories about the prowess of men, both their own and that of others. I read a review by a medievalist that said Headley "insists on its emptiness and bullying element" but though that might be true in the paratext, I don't think it comes across in the actual text. Beowulf show more is a braggart, but Beowulf can do what he says he can do-- and more!

Here's a sample passage of bragging (I basically opened the book at random and hit one), from when Beowulf is introducing himself to King Hrothgar:

"Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best
Yes: I mean—I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.
They're asking for it, and I deal them death." (ll. 414-22)

These were the passages that sung the most for me, and are incredibly fun to read aloud. I'm no poet or even an analyst of poetry, so I can't tell you much about why it works for me, but I think Headley captures the way men talk about their accomplishments. There's some excellent alliteration, and also I like the way the register changes. Lines 417-20 may use some modern language, but they have a poetic, slightly archaic feeling (it's the long sentence, I think), and then you're suddenly thrown into the very unpoetic boast of line 421, which could come straight out of, I dunno, hip-hop lyrics.

Another review I read talks about how the last third of the poem (where Beowulf fights the dragon) has much less modernized language. I don't know if that's right per se, but it does have a lot less boasting. But I think that's on purpose: Beowulf is an old man now, and an old king. All his friends and enemies are dead; his renown was such that there hasn't even been a war for him to fight because everyone is afraid to attack the Geats while he rules. So who does he have left to boast to or boast of? He goes out killing a dragon, but it's almost tragic, in the sense that one feels like Beowulf deserved better! He comes across as a tired old man grateful for a fight that will kill him, so he doesn't have to die in his sleep, but it's not a fight that would have rated had it happened when he was in the prime of life. As he embarks to kill the dragon, the narrator portrays him as missing old friends and enemies:

The old king fell to his knees on the cliff point
[...].
Stricken, suddenly unsteady, he foresaw his fate
in the fog, shrouded but certain. For a moment,
he felt for his old foes, fen-bound, embarking alone.
Soon, soon, his own lease would expire,
evicting him from hall, hearth, and home. (ll. 2418, 2421-25)

That said, I agree, it's much less fun to read that part of the poem, even if there's good reason for the shift in tone.

There's a lot you can talk about here; (as the review I quoted above says) Headley's lasting influence will probably be her insistence that most of the language that is usually translated as indicating Grendel's mother is a monster is, when used to describe men, not translated in such a way; the phrase others have translated as "inhuman troll-wife" or "monstrous hell-bride," she renders as "formidable noblewoman"! (pp. xxiii-xxv) I really enjoyed reading it, and it makes me want to dig into Beowulf again, and makes me miss hanging out with medievalists as I did in grad school.

Speaking of which, I read this because it is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and this is surely the first Hugo finalist to thank someone I went to grad school with in the Acknowledgements! show less

I read this as part of a three-night read-aloud activity at a cabin-camping event.

Friday night, we read and heard the tale of Beowulf vs. Grendel (Spoiler Alert (SA): Countless sleeping spearmen and Grendal die). The reading lasted about an hour and a half.

Saturday night we read and heard the tale of Beowulf vs. Grendel's mother (SA: Grendel's mother dies). That reading lasted about an hour.

Sunday night concluded the poetry reading with the fight between Beowulf and the Dragon. (SA - Beowulf and the dragon both die). It also took about an hour. During the height of the key battle scene, roars from the far end of the hall (gamers celebrating good fortune) added to, rather than detracted from, the drama of the scene.
The group reading show more experience was pure delight.

Translation Notes: The original tale would have been told aloud in a manner that spoke to the Saxons in their own story-telling tradition. It would feel modern to the original audience, but feels more ancient and rather foreign to an audience of the 21st century, speaking a different language. Most translations, like Burton Raffel's (the version I first read and still love) try to stay true to the style of language and word choice in the single surviving copy of the poem. So the translation feels wondrous, archaic, and a bit foreign.

This translator aimed their work for a different feel. This translator wanted the audience to understand and feel an immediacy, in a very contemporarily modern use of language that brings the reader into the story. It is as if someone in their circle of friends was passing on what just happened, not some musty old-fashioned geek using arcane ways of speaking to convey what some other ancient geezers had said and done.

Thus, the famous first word of the original, "Hwæt!", traditionally rendered variously as "Listen!" or "What!" or "Lo!" , in this translation is "Bro!"

Results:
1-Conversations sparked by this adventure tended to include the observation that "The original author kept throwing in digressions. He couldn't seem to tell the story without interrupting himself with a tangential story."

2- I reveal myself as a bit of a musty old-fashioned geek here, because this very modern retelling was more au courant in language usage than I am. If the slang had echoed the 1970s or 80s, I'd have understood immediately. But young people these days have their own way of talking....

Conclusion: This was an absolutely amazing way to read a book jointly with a dozen other people, as both reader and listener. It provoked fascinating conversations and provided insights into an impromptu storytelling tale.

At only three and a half hours, this was also way shorter than the modern current-events-audio book I'm in the midst of. show less