It was still hot — I say that, but it was still arguably hot last week, so it doesn’t say much — when I first heard about Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation, by means of Jason Sheehan’s NPR review. The reviewer’s breathless tone, the delicious excerpts, and, of course, being a fucking nerd meant that all my coworkers had to hear about it too. They were treated to my delighted, cackling readings of the excerpts, and they weren’t the first: by the time I finally got my greasy little hands on it, courtesy of my local fave, I’m fairly certain that I had told everyone I talk to on a regular basis about it multiple, multiple times.

What can I say? I got hype.

And hype I remained, as we returned home from midtown. I began reading the introduction in the car on the way back, and by the time I’d finished it, I’d almost cried twice. Cameron and I parked ourselves on the couch and, taking turns, read it aloud to each other over the course of maybe a couple hours, and by the time we had finished it, I was practically incandescent.

So if you’re reading this piece seeking coherent thoughts on Headley’s Beowulf specifically, there they are: it’s fucking good and you should fucking read it.

But Headley’s Beowulf is one Beowulf among many, and in many ways, it’s a translator’s translation, a translation not only of the Old English text but of many other English-language translations. And that makes it not only good, but interesting.

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I’ve talked about translation elsewhere a time or two, of course; it’s something I’m deeply personally interested in. Probably not as surprisingly as I think it is, I was first alerted to translation as a thing when I started reading Dostoevsky. Having made it through David Magarshack’s Crime and Punishment with relative ease, I was almost completely stymied by Constance Garnett’s The Idiot, and while I did eventually make it through, it wasn’t until I got the Pevear and Volokhonsky version that I realized how much I loved it. A similar thing happened with The Possessed, also known as Demons, though in that case I absolutely could not finish Garnett’s version and didn’t realize how fantastic it actually was until I got the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. Andrew MacAndrew’s The Adolescent ruined The Catcher in the Rye for me for several years, too — which is nothing compared to how absolutely insufferable I, a young teen, was and remain after reading all that Dostoevsky.

The version in question; image from Open Library.

But in comparing all these translations, in learning even a little bit about how and why they came to be, I experienced the first, fading scent of a powerful perfume, best exemplified by my best-beloved version of The Insulted and Injured (a.k.a The Humiliated and Wronged, or, as it reads on my shelf, The Insulted and Humiliated). This version, published brought to English-language readers by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, seemed to me, a child, to have appeared, the work of some anonymous struggler — the job-work of someone very like Razhumikhin in Crime and Punishment, say. On closer examination, now, I see that Olga Shartse, noted elsewhere as a translator, is credited here as the editor, but I was young and foolish and didn’t put it to together that she might have, in fact, been the translator. Apparently, her translation work as translation work is not much discussed, though WorldCat suggests she had a fairly robust career.

It’s printed in letterpress type, and features a reproduction of Felix Vallotton’s beautiful portrait of Dostoevsky as the frontispiece. The pages are slick but pitted with the type. This book — the translator made invisible by my inexperience, the object itself seeming to come from another time entirely — awakened something in me.

What power, to change how people read things without anyone knowing who you are!

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Needless to say, the effacement of the translator in English-language translation is something of a problem, and unsurprisingly, people have written on it. I’m thinking here specifically of Lawrence Venuti, who got an entire book out of the topic. It’s called The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, and initially appeared in the 1990s. In it, Venuti discusses the ways translation into English is rendered invisible, and how, when we speak of a “good” translation, we speak of a translation that does not challenge that assumption. Venuti, in curmudgeonly and not at all uncertain terms, decries this.

This is not quite as true now as it was when The Translator’s Invisibility first appeared — see, as an example, Netflix’s new translation and dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the attendant backlash, or just run something you like through Google Translate a few times and see what pops out. There is, I think, a broader cultural awareness of what translation is and how it works.

Of course, in my specific niche (“This hole was made for me!”), some of these conversations recently have been lead by Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey sparked a great deal of attention to how ancient Greek and Roman literature have been translated heretofore. Whether it’s her absolute tour de force of a Twitter thread about what, precisely, the sirens speak from, or her review of three different versions of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, she does not hesitate to show how translation works in painting very specific pictures, very specifically palatable to very specific people (i.e. white cisgender heterosexual men).

She has also been very open about her translation process — compare an interview with Wilson to, for example, one of the very few with Anne Carson — and that openness brings us to some uncomfortable questions, as noted in Eidolon by Bess Myers. In discussing Robert Fagles’ and Emily Wilson’s descriptions of their processes, she writes:

I’m also not suggesting that Fagles worked any less hard on his translations than Wilson has on hers. What is significant here is the way these two translators have talked about the labor of translating. Fagles crafted a narrative of his process that sounds like divine inspiration, as though both he and Homer channeled the same muse and spoke in the same voice. Wilson’s account highlights the fact that the work of translation is just that — work.

That we expect this joyless emphasis on the mundane qualities of translation from women translators especially is an unkindness of the highest order.

If you ask me — and no one did — this shit is supposed to be fun.

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Part of what makes Headley’s Beowulf so delightful is how deftly she straddles these expectations, specifically in her introduction and acknowledgements. In the latter section, Headley is asked when her translation would be out, following the publication of her 2018 novel, The Mere Wife, itself a retelling of Beowulf.

I laughed and said there wouldn’t be one — I wasn’t qualified — and both jurors [for the World Fantasy Award] laughed back and said it sounded like I was as qualified as as many of the other people who’d translated it over the years. “Qualified,” to my mind, meant I’d certainly need a Ph.D., perhaps a Nobel Prize. This perception, obviously, didn’t come from nowhere.

Indeed not.

The Kodansha International cover of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, from Publisher’s Weekly. — The Kodansha International cover of *Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World*, from Publisher’s Weekly.

Personally, I hope that that perception may change as translation as a practice, trade, and art becomes more visible. I am thinking here specifically of the portraits of Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Ruden, two of Haruki Murakami’s most consistent English translators in Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami by David Karashima, published earlier this year by Soft Skull. Karashima’s portrait of the business of translation balances the commercial concerns of Kodansha International and then Vintage in bringing Murakami to English-language readers whiles still, you know, making money, against the weird joys of translation almost as conspiracy. Karashima details what is changed and what is left and how and why in the calculus of what, ultimately, will sell in the English-language market, focusing especially on the US, but also gives us tender illustrations of things like Elmer Luke, Murakami’s editor at Kodansha International, and Alfred Birnbaum working feverishly and almost symbiotically to complete the translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:

Sometimes they would translate and edit by hand onto a paper copy, but more often than not they would work straight onto the screen of the computer Birnbaum had carried to Luke’s home in Kamakura. At one point, they were working together five to six hours a day, five days a week, sitting side by side, reading passages out loud.

Headley, too, approaches this feverishness, albeit in a more solitary way — closer, as Headley tells it, to Fagles’ description of his technique than Wilson’s. “I regularly found myself muttering speeches written a thousand years ago as I watched their contemporary equivalents unfold on the news,” she writes in the introduction. Earlier in the introduction, she says, “In contrast to the methods of some previous translators, I let the poem’s story lead me to its style.”

But key, I think, to understanding Headley’s translation is this passage, also from the introduction:

It is both pleasurable and desirable to read more than one translation of this poem, because when it comes to translating Beowulf, there is not sacred clarity. What the translated text says is a matter of study, interpretation, and poetic leaps of faith. Every translator translates this poem differently. That’s part of its glory.

This is true, not only of Beowulf, but of multiply-translated works generally. John Ciardi’s Inferno is different from Dorothy Sayer’s Inferno is different from Robert Pinsky’s Inferno; Richmond Lattimore’s Homer is a different animal from Chapman’s, Wilson’s, Fagles’ and Lobardo’s. In writing my undergrad thesis — a literary translation of three Tibullus poems — I surveyed several twentieth-century translations of the poet, and all were profoundly different.

The identity of the work is displayed through the identity of the translator, or at least the translator’s interpretation of the speaker of the work. And that interpretation, the translator’s read on the voice of the piece, is always at least bivocal — if not, at Karashima shows, in displaying how many hands touch the translated text of any given Murakami novel, astonishingly polyvocal.

The first page of Beowulf, from this lovely piece on the survival of the manuscript. — The first page of *Beowulf*, from this lovely piece on the survival of the manuscript.

And this is what I mean when I characterize Headley’s Beowulf, in part, as a translator’s translation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s fun as hell even if you haven’t read another version of Beowulf, and supports itself beautifully as an idiosyncratic and delightfully weird rendition of the work. But Headley positions her translation as one of many, another approach to the text, and in this having at least passing knowledge of other translations and Beowulf criticism makes her work even more rewarding.

Of course, I’m talking a little out of my ass here: my other encounters with Beowulf are Seamus Heaney’s classic rendition with the Old English on the verso pages, and a prose retelling for children from, I think, the early twentieth century (H.E. Marshall’s, maybe?), and my now-dim memory of reading Tolkien’s classic essay, “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.” But I do know — and know well — the joys of reading several translations, of seeing how other people can read the same damn words and still find other ways to read them.

As Symmachus wrote, in a plea for respect for the remaining pagans in fourth-century Rome: “We gaze up at the same stars; the sky covers us all; the same universe encompasses us…. The heart of so great a mystery cannot be reached by following one road only.” (Not my translation, though, and not how I’d have rendered the Latin — which sort of proves my point.)

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Headley’s amazing author photo for the translation, via MacMillan.

But Headley. I’ve talked a lot about translation generally, and my relationship to it, and a bunch of other translations, but I have not really addressed the sheer, visceral delight that is Headley’s rendition of the text. From that absolute smack in the face of a first line — “Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings!” — to the bloody-minded horror story of Grendel’s repeated assaults on Heorot to the actually tear-jerking closing lines spoken over the titular hero’s grave, Headley maintains a headlong momentum, dancing brashly through the story with a delicious blend of archaic and hypercontemporary language.

She addresses her decision to use “bro” in place of the now-difficult-to-render “hwaet” (Heaney used “so,” and “lo” is unfortunately too common), as well as her life-long fascination with Grendel’s mother, which grew into a broader appreciation of the epic’s often-overlooked female characters. It is clear that she relishes these passages — even without the introduction, her delight in Grendel’s mother as a character would be obvious. Just flipping through the book again now, it’s hard for me not to get completely drawn in and drawn back. Her rhythm and pacing are irresistible.

But what sticks with me the most from it are the lines, later in the book, which describe the nameless man who buried the dragon’s hoard. Foreshadowing Beowulf’s own eventual fate, Headley renders these with a melancholy that still grips my heart:

“…Now there are no heroes, no soothing music,
no harp, no hawk soaring through hall,
no swift horses trampling green grass.
We existed; now we’re extinct.”
And so the last survivor mourned, making his way
from emptiness to emptiness, listing his sins one by one,
wandering the world woefully, until death came
welling in, to wash him from the rocks.

A relatively unadorned passage, in comparison to some of Headley’s pyrotechnics elsewhere. But it encapsulates much of what makes her translation a joy and a masterwork on its own: strong rhythm and alliteration; a novelist’s eye for character and image, coupled with a poet’s instinct for just enough brevity. It is also one of the sadder passages in what is already, on a fundamental level, a sad story, and Headley does not shy from this: her deployment of the phrase, “That was a good king,” throughout the translation only lends it greater weight when it arrives — the last stone on the grave — in the last line of the poem.

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So Headley, so translation, so what? Well, the fact that Headley’s Beowulf sold out its initial print run fucking something: it’s clearly striking some kind of nerve. I hesitate to speculate on the why this, why now? of it, but it is an unusual example of a work that is good and experimental and accessible — a rarity among great artworks in general. Another possibility does occur, however.

Translation, at its heart, is an act of rendering over and bearing across. Headley is aware of this: to once more quote the introduction, she writes, “In the end, Beowulf depicts edge-times and border wars, and we’re in them still.” In many, many ways, the concerns of Beowulf are the concerns of the present day. What makes “a good king”? Who is right, who is wronged? What is it all for?

Neither Headley, nor Beowulf, nor any other writer nor translator nor classic text has the answer. But this Beowulf, in this moment, at least offers a sense of belonging to a continuum. To quote Headley’s introduction one final time: “We might, if we analyzed our own long-standing stories, use them to translate ourselves into a society in which bhero making doesn’t require monster killing, border closing, and hoard clinging, but instead requires a more challenging task: taking responsibility for one another.”

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"Edge-Times and Border Wars": on Headley's Beowulf