Author of beowulf
No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before. The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. "I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's new book, Beowulf. the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry." Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes. From the very opening of the poem-'Bro!' in the place of the sturdy Saxon exhortation 'Hwaet'-you know this isn't your grandpappy's version of Beowulf. "An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment. Other translations may be more scholarly, literal, or true to the poetic form of the original, but it’s been a thousand years since Beowulf was this accessible or exciting." This is what it must have felt like to sit in a mead hall and listen to a scop tell the tale. "Headley brings a directness, intensity, and rhythm to her translation that I haven’t seen before. Not least what you might fear when you get there, Mere mixes with mist, geysers up, and Heaven moans.Įverything depends on a boy who knows nothing of this terror, Winds gust, clouds spit and spark, and when it storms,
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Than step upon that stinking sod and dive into the dark. On hooves and fight, lower horns, and ready itself for death Held to mere’s edge by hounds, would sooner spin Like tangled teeth, a gaping maw that, at night, Into the fen and through it, down into theĭarkest places underwater and underground,Ĭliff-bound. They denned with wolvesĪnd dove in windy rivers, slipped like mist-fish Those who’ve talked to me of these things. One is, as far as they can tell, a woman,Īnd the other, misshapen, formed like a man,īut larger than any man has a right to be. Wading the mere, heath-rambling and of a height.
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Who live out in the muddy country, say they’ve seen I’ve heard my people, those simple citizens While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history- Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story.
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A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A monster seeks silence in his territory. Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf-and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world-there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.Ī man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife