29 August 2020
Headley, Maria Dahvana. Beowulf: A New Translation. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020.
Joy.
That is the primary emotion I felt as I was reading Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf. That’s not an emotion I normally associate with Beowulf, a 1,000+year-old, brooding, elegiac poem, written in a language that can barely be recognized as English, about men and monsters that is obsessed with how one should be remembered after one’s death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Beowulf. It is perhaps my favorite work of literature, but it is not a poem that tends to bring a smile to one’s face. Yet, Headley’s translation did that all the while I was reading it.
The most obvious feature about Headley’s translation is her use of present-day slang and idiom. She translates the first word of the poem, the famous Hwæt!, as Bro! The monster Grendel is fucked by fate. And Beowulf himself is Hygelac’s hit man, who at one point gives zero shits. In the hands of less-skilled writer this approach would be laughably silly, but Headley’s translation manages to simultaneously position the poem in a time long past while making it relevant to the current now. For instance, in the passage about the bad king Heremod, lines 1718–20, Headley writes:
Somehow, though, his heart
was not a hawk but a drone. He bombed his own bases,
denied his Danes damages, kept entrenched in combat.
Is it anachronistic? Of course it is, but compare it to R.D. Fulk’s more “faithful” translation (which is also excellent, but in a very different way) of the same lines:
His breasthoard nonetheless grew bloodthirsty in spirit, by no means gave rings to the Danes for their glory.
By comparing Heremod’s failures of leadership to those of recent U.S. presidents, Headley makes the poem instantly accessible to the present-day reader, more than any ring-giving or breasthoards can do.
But this is not say the Headley’s translation isn’t faithful to the original. She translates line by line, never diverging from the story or pace of the original. Using the line numbers as reference, one can move almost effortlessly from her translation to the original. I found myself reading it with a copy of the Old English at hand, at first to check how accurate a translation it was, but soon because her translation kept bringing out details and nuances in the original that I had never noticed before. Her translation has made me appreciate the original all the more.
Her prosody is also evocative. It is virtually impossible to write good present-day English in the alliterative meter of the Old English original. Not only are the stresses and cadences of today’s language different, but we no longer have the reservoir of synonyms that make it possible to successfully alliterate over a 3,182-line poem. But Headley, using irregular meter, captures the rhythm and flow of the text. For instance, here is a passage I translated into prose the other day, before reading her book. Hrothgar is speaking to Beowulf at the feast after the warrior has killed Grendel’s mother, lines 1761–68:
Nu is þines mægnes blæd
ane hwile; eft sona bið
þæt þec adl oððe ecg eafoþes getwæfeð,
oððe fyres feng, oððe flodes wylm,
oððe gripe meces, oððe gares fliht,
oððe atol yldo; oððe eagena bearhtm
forsiteð ond forsworceð; semninga bið
þæt ðec, dryht-guma, deað oferswyðeð.
(Now, for a time, is the glory of your might: soon disease or blade will separate you from your strength, or the fire’s embrace, or the flood’s welling, or the sword’s grasp, or the spear’s flight, or the horrors of age; or the brightness of your eyes will fail and dim; at last it will be death that overcomes you, warrior.)
Now Headley’s translation of the same lines:
It’s only a season
that a young soldier’s strength stays stalwart—
before plague or blade bring obsolescence. A crackling
blaze, a rush of waves, a slippery sword-grip,
a spear soaring silently through the air,
or even the ague of age. Your gaze will darken, too, boy.
Your world will dim. Death will kneel over you eventually.
and solicit your surrender.
As with any translation, Headley is forced to make choices. Translation is a form of interpretation, especially from Old English where we often know the denotation of the words but not their connotations. It is clear that she had a vision of what she wanted to accomplish, and her choices are consistent, creating a coherent whole. And in some places, her interventions are inspired. For instance, in the manuscript at line 62 the scribe has omited the name of Hrothgar’s sister, and to mark this lacuna, Headley writes the parenthetical (her name’s a blur). Toward the end of the poem, as Wiglaf is facing the dragon, lines 2673–74 read:
Byrne ne meahte / geongum garwigan
(The mail-shirt was of no use to the young warrior)
Which Headley translates as:
His mail-shirt was like linen to her
turning a declarative statement into a simile that makes the encounter seem more tangible and desperate.
And throughout the episode with the dragon Headley uses female pronouns for the dragon instead of the male ones in the Old English, creating implications for the text that I’m still processing.
Another significant change is in how Headley casts the narrator. The Old English text has a Christian narrator telling a story of a pagan past and making moral and theological judgments in the process. For a reader today, this creates a further separation that did not exist for those early medieval folks reading or listening to the poem; the narrator is contemporaneous with them. But today, that framing distances the reader from both the narrator as well as from the story. Headley downplays or omits the theological commentary, while leaving the biblical references in place. This, coupled with the fact that both narrator and characters are speaking in the present-day vernacular, lessens the chronological distances and brings the story into today. Reading it, one gets the sense that narrator is telling us of events that happened only a short while ago.
In other places, Headley emphasizes details that are easy to miss or makes the implicit explicit, and sometimes she supplies a useful corrective to past translations. This is most easily seen in the passages with female characters, and nowhere clearer than with Grendel’s Mother. For example, line 1259 of the poem describes her as an ides aglæca. The word ides means woman and is almost always applied to queens and biblical matriarchs. And aglæca means opponent or warrior, applied to Beowulf himself, Grendel, and the dragon. Yet past male translators have rendered the line as ogress (Tolkien), monstrous hell-bride (Heaney), monster-woman (Liuzza), and lady, female-troublemaker (Fulk). Headley gives us the literal, straightforward translation of warrior-woman, providing a very different perspective on both her and on Beowulf, the man who kills her. Headley is not the first woman to translate Beowulf, but most of the translators have been men, and as with Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, it’s useful to be shaken out of the masculine perspective, especially with a poem like Beowulf, which drips testosterone.
I cannot recommend this translation more highly. It is accessible to the reader who has never encountered Beowulf before, yet it intrigues and challenges those who study the poem professionally. Nothing in it lessens the beauty or power of the original Old English, which is still there, along with the other more “faithful” translations, for those who want to tackle it. I can only hope that this translation not only attracts a new cohort of readers to one of the gems of English literature, but allows those already familiar with the poem to see new ways that it connects to the twenty-first century.
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