I never intended to read yet another epic poem immediately after finishing The Iliad. But I subscribe to the Poetry Unbound podcast and in February one of the episodes featured a few verses from the Maria Dahvana Headley translation of Beowulf. I had read excerpts of Beowulf way back when I was in school. I also read the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf. I didn't think I needed anymore Beowulf in my life. But this transaction intrigued me.
This one begins:
Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of 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.
As Headley explains in her forward: early English verse is distinguished by both alliteration and stress patterns over a caesura (a pause, a gap between the two halves of a line). Rhyming isn't as important.
Headley's alliteration is wonderful and modern.
They stacked shields, wood-weathered, against the walls, then sat down on benches, their metal making music. Their spears, they stood like sleeping soldiers, tall but tilting, gray ash, a death-grove.
Beowulf boasts: I put that monster down, I made it a sleeper as it leapt, severed its spine, spiked its skull, and split it into smithereens.
And later he says: At down, I surfaced in a slurry of scales, floating flotsam where formerly there'd been fangs.
This was almost as if Lin Manuel Miranda decided to do Beowulf, ignoring internal rhymes and just focusing on alliteration. I loved it.
This translation came out in 2020 and somehow I missed it despite it being picked as a Book of the Year by NPR (go figure, there was just a worldwide pandemic to distract me). But I'm glad I eventually heard of it and read it.
