Beowulf: A New Translation
By Maria Dahvana Headley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020 

Given that Maria Dahvana Headley’s overhyped and underwhelming 2018 novel The Mere Wife is a modern retelling of Beowulf that recasts both the monster Grendel and particularly his avenging mother as sympathetic protagonists, it was perhaps to be expected that the same author would subsequently produce a full translation of the poem; as Headley herself rightly comments in the Introduction to her new version of Beowulf (out in a paperback original from FSG with a striking cover design by Keith Hayes), the poem tends to obsess the people who study it.

So the question shifts from “will she translate it?” to “will she adapt it to conform to the revisionist feminist politics of The Mere Wife?” And no matter how you answer that question once you’re finished reading, one thing is certain: if brainy college students were still allowed to congregate in dormitory lounges, Headley’s Beowulf would certainly start some heated arguments.

There are two reasons for this, one good and one bad. 

The bad reason is simple: this is very often and at almost all key points a noticeably inaccurate translation of what the surviving manuscript of Beowulf actually says, and the inaccuracies are all intentional and all tending toward the author’s preferred interpretation of the poem. That interpretation is shaped in explicitly and sometimes absurdly 2020 political terms, as Headley herself makes clear:

The kings and dragons of the poem possess hoards akin to those of basic American households: iPhone idols, nonstick cookware, unused goblets counted by the dozen. Queen- and king-size beds for queens and kings of small halls in the suburbs, fake feathers and swansdown like the reclaimed wings of minor monsters, bought and shipped overnight by Amazon Prime - itself a corporation named for a legendary tribe of female warriors, though in this case the title of warrior stands in for consumer convenience, sorcerous shipping speeds, access to the great, luxuriant, on-sale everything.

The jacket copy of the book tells prospective readers that Beowulf “has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment,” and since this is ridiculous nonsense, it serves as an accurate warning of what those readers will be encountering in these pages. For Headley, Grendel and especially Grendel’s mother are not accursed monsters but rather victimized underdogs, exploited and colonized indigenous people. When translating the passage where the poem’s original readers are told of Grendel’s descent from blood-stained Cain, Headley invents a line about how “none of that was Grendel’s doing.” Here the monster is just a misunderstood dork being tormented by the captain of the Geatish football team. 

But in addition to this kind of ideological inaccuracy, there are also plenty of instances of just-plain inaccuracies, things that Headley has wholesale invented and then inserted into her version of the poem, like this chicken-business in the scene where Grendel, unaware that Beowulf lays in wait for him, returns to Heorot:

… This was not 

The first time he’d hunted in Hrothgar’s hall,

But never before nor later had he such hard luck.

No one worthy had historically lain in wait.

The warrior worked his way toward the war,

His head and heart hurting, and arrived

At the iron-crossed door. Its hinges howled a welcome,

And his rage ratcheted up. He flung the hatch 

Wide and leapt into the mead-room, over 

Decorated floors, into the hold, fury frothing. 

His heart crowed as he counted them, man by man,

Nested together, roosting like roasting chickens.

He’d been the sort of fox that stalks all night.

Eat his fill, no coo remaining, no bill - only feathers,

Loose on the floor. Before sunrise, he planned to prise souls

From skeletons. His wyrd, though, would no longer be writ

In others’ blood, red footprints to the door and out,

The moors, the mere. No. Tonight was the night

Grendel’s goose would be cooked, his funeral

Banquet bruised and blue.

One of the tenets of translation in the modern era, particularly for the notoriously monoglot audience that must be assumed to be Headley’s target readership, is fairly straightforward: you can fiddle around all you want with nuance and shading, but you can’t just make stuff up. 

Headley’s own analogies make it clear that this kind of storytelling elaboration is part of her plan. “I come from the land of cowboy poets,” she writes, “and while theirs is not the style I used for this translation, I did spend a lot of time imagining the narrator as an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another.” 

Needless to say, such old-timers don’t translate thousand-year-old poems, but more importantly, it’s obviously not anything like such an old-timer who’s narrating the action of the poem. 

But the fact that Headley’s book is useless as a translation of Beowulf (once you whole-cloth make things up, you guarantee that) doesn’t in any way undercut the main reason for reading it: as a poetic meditation on the poem, it’s full of startlingly powerful and often raucously lovely language. The original Beowulf poet would have bridled at the enormous liberties taken with the basics of his work, but he would have stood and cheered at the way Headley’s verse never slows down, never assumes it has your attention, and never takes the easy or predictable path. The phrasing and imagery consistently amaze, as often disconcerting as pleasing. Headley has saturated herself in the various rhymes and rhythms of the original, and although she often disregards those conventions when they get in the way of her agenda, she plays her own games with all such elements, and the results are always interesting:

So it went for years, the Hell-sent raider harrowing

The Halfdane’s son, who sat in silence, brooding

Over unhatched hopes, while in the dark his

People shuddered, salt-scourged by weeping,

By nights spent waking instead of sleeping.

The various things going on even in such a quick passage - the comma-prompted mid-line breaks, the ominous march of the action, “Brooding/Over unhatched hopes,” “salt-scourged by weeping” … all breathe their own weird atmosphere, at times somewhat similar to the dank airs in Beowulf but at plenty of other times moving in its own mists and swirls. 

This Headley Beowulf is therefore one of the strangest literary treatments to appear in a year surfeited with works in translation. It’s not really a Beowulf translation, but it may just be required reading anyway.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.