A Fan's Playground

I never would have thought to nominate a translation of Beowulf for the Best Related Work hugo award, so to all the galaxy-brained folks out there who did: THANK YOU. It means I actually got around to prioritizing reading this book, which I might not otherwise have done for years! And it's SO GOOD.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the translator of this latest version, and as she says in her introduction, it's not meant to be the One True Translation, it's one among MANY; and that perspective, I think, gives a translator more freedom to do interesting things with a translation, because you don't have the burden of trying to capture e v e r y t h i n g about the original work in your translation (which is impossible). And Headley is definitely doing interesting things with it it!!

My immediate and overwhelming reaction to reading the poem as translated by Headley is that it is delicious. It's satisfying! Delightful! Fun to say! Feels good in the mouth! It is a GOOD POEM. I love the wild swings between archaic and modern, formal and informal, all in the same line, the same phrase. And the way the words fit together, with random pieces of alliteration or internal rhyme or just words that work with each other, and all with a great sense of timing, it's just great. Delicious!

Here's an example from within the opening section:

The war-band flew a golden flag over their main man;
the salt sea saluted him, so too the storms,
and Scyld’s soldiers got drunk instead of crying.
They mourned the way men do. No man knows,
not me, not you, who hauled Scyld’s hoard to shore,
but the poor are plentiful, and somebody got lucky.

Are there occasional word/phrase choices that threw me a bit? Yeah, sure, not every single thing worked perfectly for me, but when you're deliberately aiming at audacious, you're going to have some occasional misses.

The last time I read Beowulf was at least a dozen years ago, the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, and I remember being fascinated and amazed by it at the time, and even memorized the first few pages of it with the intention of eventually memorizing the whole thing (....I know!).

But mostly I was fascinated by looking through the poem to see the worldview of a very different culture than mine, rather than fascinated by the poem/translation as a quality work of art worth appreciating for itself. And that fascinatingly different worldview is still present no matter the translation.

Heaney's poetry was perfectly good. But Headley's speaks to me far more!!

If you want a bigger taste of what this translation's like, you can read an excerpt on tor dot com. The whole thing's like that!