Ruth Franklin Rejoices in Maria Dahvana Headley's Feminist Beowulf

Maria Dahvana Headley's new, "revisionist" translation of Beowulf (FSG 2020), says Ruth Franklin at the New Yorker, comes from "a feminist perspective, [but] her primary purpose is not polemical or political." More on this Old English text made anew:

…It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand—Grendel is “fucked by fate,” Wealhtheow, “hashtag: blessed.” Not everyone will admire all the linguistic and stylistic choices she has made; that crunching noise in the background is the sound of her predecessors rolling in their burial ships. Hrothgar’s thanes are his “fight-family,” Wealhtheow admires Beowulf’s “brass balls,” treasure is “bling.” But the over-all effect is as if Headley, like the warrior queen she admired as a child, were storming the dusty halls of the library, upending the crowded shelf of “Beowulf” translations to make room for something completely new.

“Hwæt,” the first word of “Beowulf,” has no direct equivalent in modern English. Tolkien described it as “a note ‘striking up’ at the beginning of a poem,” calling the listener or reader to attention. In his translation, he rendered it as “Lo!,” following John Mitchell Kemble, whose influential 1837 translation was one of the earliest in modern English. Stephen Mitchell avoided picking any single word, apparently in response to new linguistic research arguing that “hwæt” was not an interjection but, rather, imparted an exclamatory tone to the entire sentence. Heaney went for “So,” explaining that he wanted his version of the poem to sound as if one of his Irish relatives were telling the story: “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” Other translators have opted for “Attend,” “Listen,” “Behold,” “Yes!” and—unfortunately—“What ho!”

Headley’s version opens:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times.

Bro? [...]

Read on at the New Yorker.