Hyperallergic Reviews New, Feminist Beowulf Translation

At Hyperallergic, Mark Scroggins reviews Beowulf: A New Translation, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley (2020, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "For all of these intricacies," Scroggins writes, "Beowulf is at heart an adventure story, and Headley’s is a decidedly feminist interpretation of this most testosterone-drenched narrative." Further: 

This is evident at the poem’s iconic first word. “Hwæt!” is usually taken as an interjection, and rendered with an anodyne “Lo!,” “Hark!,” or “Listen!” Seamus Heaney, connecting the word to the speech habits of his own Irish relations, translates it as “So.” An out-of-date hipster might have it as “Yo!” For Headley, “Hwæt!” is “Bro!,” both a call to attention and a signal that these verses are a man speaking to other men.

Headley’s Dark Age society is structured on male power, male violence, and male privilege. The songs of the poets — “howling of harps, squawking of scops” — are, in her words, really just “Men recounting the history of men like them.” Commenting on how Scyld Scefing’s heir secures his succession, Headley writes:

A smart son gives

gifts to his father’s friends in peacetime.

When war woos him, as war will,

he’ll need those troops to follow the leader.

Privilege is the way men prime power,

the world over.

Headley pays especial attention to the poem’s female characters: the queens giving brief speeches, the women bartered off into dynastic marriages in the subsidiary stories. Grendel’s mother, in most translations a monster little different from Grendel himself, here becomes a female warrior fighting a legally sanctioned “blood feud” — as Hrothgar says, “a woman / seeking vengeance for her son.”

Most strikingly, Headley has decided to make the dragon — “he” or “it” for most translators — female, so that Beowulf’s final battle becomes not merely a test of human bravery against chthonic forces, but the elimination of an unpredictable and awesome feminine force, one described in terms of striking grace: “Never again / would she soar through a starry / sky, revel in rising rhapsody, rolling in and out / of clouds and mist, a raging rainbow, glinting golden.”

Read on at Hyperallergic, and be sure to check out Jo Livingston's recent essay on this new translation of Beowulf for the Poetry Foundation here.