This new uber-modern translation of the epic poem throws down the gauntlet from the first word: "Bro!" With that (there's a great story here, Headley is saying, listen up!), you'll plunge without regrets into the tale of the warrior Beowulf and his conquests of two monsters and a dragon, and understand at last why it is a classic. You'll see connections with our own modern epics (think of superhero movies and Hamilton). This is why we read works written so long ago. We are different from our ancient ancestors, and yet we are the same. I also appreciated how Headley's translation spotlights the women of the story, notably Grendel's vengeful mother. After Beowulf kills her son, Grendel's mother is "carried on a wave of wrath, crazed with sorrow,/ looking for someone to slay, someone to pay in pain/ for her heart's loss." She is just as violent as portrayed in the other two translations I read, but also relatable, especially to anyone who is a mother. More subtly, Headley also gives a feminist voice to the various queens pouring mead in the warriors' halls, and the princesses married off for political reasons, and, at the end, to a Geatish woman singing a lament, after the dragon (also, in Headley's version, female) is slain but so is a king. Times weren't easy for women then, and they knew it: "She tore her hair and screamed her horror/ at the hell that was to come: more of the same./ Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes/ marching across her country, claiming her body." But most of all, reading this was absorbing. Grab some mead or strong red wine, sit by the fire, and take this one in on a dark winter night.

 

Publisher description: 

A man seeks to prove himself a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf―and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world―there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.