Headley’s Beowulf

I have just finished reading Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley.  Not without some trepidation, because the reviews in the mass media and on Twitter all advertised it as a translation into current Internet idioms.  That could have been awful, but I’m here to tell you it was all just clickbait. This is a “new translation” in the sense that the English used here is from the last half century.  Sure, the pull quotes that they quoted are in there, but they’re not important to the text.  One of the most popular lines to quote looks frankly spliced in to attract attention.

This is what I was afraid of

The words in the book are much better than the ones in the reviews. MDH uses the difference in language between the current world and standard modern English as a tool. The narrator, as I hear him[1], is the same guy who narrated the original. He’s old and getting a bit cranky. He puts in some contemporary locutions to attract the kids’ attention, but the moment he’s got it, he slides back into an archaic mode. That contrasts with the more colloquial sound of the direct quotations, forming dissonances that are sometimes brilliant:

Only then did Hygelac begin to question his comrade, calmly, commandingly, to glean the story of the war-Geats, and take the tale for his own hall-history.

“Holy hell, Beowulf, how’d it go out there?”             (1988)

One question I always have to get out of the way in an adaptation of Beowulf is, “Did the translator do her homework?” Not even a question here. In the introduction, she deftly gets Tolkien out of the way, in accordance with Terry Pratchett’s dictum.

So I definitely liked this book. It is the fastest to read of all the versions I’ve read.  A backhanded shot at Princess Diana was completely unexpected, but worked well, too.

[1] I’m sure “him” is still the right pronoun. That’s not the case for all the characters in this book — MDH is good at making little gender-bends that stay within the original text.