Beowulf: A New Translation

Beowulf: A New Translation

Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by The Guardian Longlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Picked for Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction in Translation of 2020. Named a Book of the Year by NPR, Vox, and The New Statesman . Picked for Loyalty Books’ Holiday List. A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife " Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." ― Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker "The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale." ― Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today 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. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. 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. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf , Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. "Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light." ― Andrea Kannapell, The New York Times " Beowulf is an ancient tale of men battling monsters, but Headley has made it wholly modern, with language as piercing and relevant as Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize-winning album 'DAMN.' With scintillating inversions and her use of au courant idiom--the poem begins with the word 'Bro!' and Queen Wealhtheow is 'hashtag: blessed'--Headley asks one to consider not only present conflicts in light of those of the past, but also the line between human and inhuman, power and powerlessness, and the very nature of moral transformation, the 'suspicion that at any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch.'" ― Danielle Trussoni, The New York Times Book Review "[Headley's] narrator's tone is light and suspenseful, resembling nothing so much as a man telling a long but compelling story in a bar. That comparison isn't accidental . . . [Headley's] Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the things men do to impress one another. It's as fierce an examination of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine strength."― Jo Livingstone, The Poetry Foundation "[ The Mere Wife ] includes some tantalizing snippets of Beowulf as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying . . . It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." ― Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker "I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's new book, Beowulf . . . The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before . . . I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this ― this ― version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing." ― Jason Sheehan, NPR Books "The new Beowulf is incredibly exciting from beginning to end!" ― Jason Furman, Harvard University "The new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahavana Headley is the best thing I've read all fucking year" - Mike Drucker, TV Writer and Comedian "Enthralling, scalding . . . Headley combines newly-wrought ancient kennings with US street slang and lights up the women in the poem with unusual sympathy (including Grendel's mother and the dragon). The thousand years and more since these ferocious hatreds and battles were recorded dissolve: the griefs and the rage are still all too present." - Marina Warner, The New Statesman, Best Books of 2020 "Bold . . . Electrifying."― Ron Ch arles, The Washington Post "Finally, a Beowulf translation that leaves us feeling 'hashtag: blessed.'" - Alena Smith, SLATE/Future Tense virtual event "Maria Dahavana Headley's breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich Beowulf:A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh air blowing through the old tale's stuffy mead-hall atmosphere." - Mike Scroggins, Hyperaller