I know this is a classic but ( )

paperback

I don't think I have read Beowulf since high school so this was a real treat - I LOVED this translation. Bro, fuck this shit, #blessed, you had me at the start. Minus the few words I just said - it doesn't read too modern - it's certainly no longer in Old English, but it doesn't feel "too" modern - just a touch. I also loved the introduction, Maria Dahvana Headley seems like one cool motherf-er and I would love to hang out with her. I mean, hell, she named her kid Grimoire! I am not a scholar - but I appreciated learning more about the history behind different translations and it was nice to re-visit this classic. ( )

Do dragons sit on piles of gold prior to Beowulf? (Gilgamash, perhaps.)

What's daunting about Beowulf is not the length (it could be read in two or three hours out loud), but rather the age. Beowulf is one of the earliest Old English works surviving to the modern day, and reading it means reading the echoes of hundreds of other humans, albeit translated.

Many know the basic story of Beowulf—a warrior seeking a name and glory for himself fights the monster Grendel, rips his arm off in battle, then fights Grendel's mother who seeks revenge. Beowulf wins both handily. The third part of the story, often forgotten, is Beowulf's fight with a dragon, happening many years later at the end of his life. Beowulf is a kind now, a ruler of men, and even across translations, we can see his maturity grow from warrior to ruler.

I read the translation by Burton Raffel and found it fantastic. Raffel, as much as possible, retains a musicality to his phrasing. I'll hazard a young man's guess that I'll return to this book over many years. ( )

Bro, this is not the Beowulf we all expected. But we can, in fact, still speak of Germanic kings and make it fun at the same time. I first came across Maria Dahvana Headley when I randomly spotted her novel The Mere Wife at the public library, and was instantly intrigued by the gorgeous cover design and the intro that promised a reworked story of Grendel’s mother for the new age. After devouring the book in a day I was soon asking “where is her translation of Beowulf?!” - the novel was excellent, but I wanted to see if she would bring the same irreverent feminist tone to the source material. Well, years later the book finally was released and even more years later I managed to read it (yes, we’re admittedly slackers with the TBR) and the epic cycle is finally concluded. From the outset Headley makes it clear that while she was undoubtedly influenced by the many translations of Beowulf in the past (Tolkien’s linguistic turns and Heaney’s colloquial tones are instantly recognizable) this is a tale that emphasises the bro-culture of the mead hall. Some of her narrative absolutely makes quiet fun of the ridiculousness of the patriarchal macho-ism (how can we not find the scattered “bros” amusing), but the brutalism of the warrior-centric time period still reigns supreme. Suffused with abundant descriptive elements that harken to the bardic tradition she brings the darkness of the tale to light, striking a careful balance between the glorifying tones of the telling (it is after all a brag story of a warrior) and the realism of the events. Missing is the Old English mirror on the opposite page (as with Heaney’s 1999 translation), so without adding in another book as reference I was left wondering a few times how literal her translation is (yes, I am a nerd and I love spotting word shifts), but being able to read the story straight through with no distractions was a boon. I may not have gotten quite the same completely infused epic adventure story vibe as Heaney’s translation, but Headley’s shift in tone provides us with some unexpected moments that are purely her own. Whether the moments emphasise the female perspective in the story as was her goal is debatable - I personally don’t quite see it, except with the unexpected feminising of the dragon - but this is definitely a translation worth checking out, if only for its stark differences from the volumes we’ve seen before. ( )