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1. • value: dragon
2. • value: Myth
3. • value: Mythology
4. • value: creature
5. • value: womens studies
6. • value: Adaptation
7. • value: Epic poetry
8. • value: Middle Ages
9. • value: poem
10. • value: Mythical
11. • value: Folklore
12. • value: British
13. • value: drunken
14. • value: people
15. • value: supernatural
16. • value: anthology
17. • value: dragons
18. • value: Poetry
19. • value: Beowulf
20. • value: gender roles
21. • value: feminism
22. • value: medieval
23. • value: ancient
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25. • value: kindle
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27. • value: high fantasy
28. • value: Zeus
29. • value: sea stories
30. • value: heroes
31. • value: monsters
32. • value: Warriors
33. • value: fantasy poetry
34. • value: British Literature
35. • value: folklore and mythology
36. • value: Medieval literature
37. • value: mythical creatures
38. • value: translated literature
39. • value: faerie folk
40. • value: epic fantasy novel
41. • value: monster fantasy
42. • value: classic myth
43. • value: fantasy kindle books
44. • value: feminists retelling
45. • value: Maria Dahvana Headley
46. • value: best translated books of 2020
47. • value: kirkus reviews npr best books of the year
48. • value: ancient scholars
49. • value: hugo award winners 2021
50. • value: song-poems
51. • value: poetry female authors
52. • value: human roles

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Headley, Maria Dahvana
   • bioText: Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn.
   • name: Maria Dahvana Headley

imprint

MCD x FSG Originals

publishDate

2020-08-25T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Beowulf: A New Translation

fullDescription

Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by The Guardian

Longlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Picked for Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction in Translation of 2020. Named a Book of the Year by NPR, Vox, and The New Statesman. Picked for Loyalty Books' Holiday List.
A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife
"Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." —Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker
"The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale." —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
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.
A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history—Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Andrea Kannapell, The New York Times
   • content:

     "Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Danielle Trussoni, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Beowulf is an ancient tale of men battling monsters, but Headley has made it wholly modern, with language as piercing and relevant as Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize-winning album 'DAMN.' With scintillating inversions and her use of au courant idiom--the poem begins with the word 'Bro!' and Queen Wealhtheow is 'hashtag: blessed'--Headley asks one to consider not only present conflicts in light of those of the past, but also the line between human and inhuman, power and powerlessness, and the very nature of moral transformation, the 'suspicion that at any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch.'"
3. • premium: False
   • source: Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
   • content: "I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's new book, Beowulf . . . The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before . . . I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this -- this -- version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 15, 2020
     An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment. In her novel The Mere Wife (2018), Headley imagined Grendel's mother as a PTSD-haunted Iraq War veteran guarding her son from the encroachment of suburban civilization on their wilderness home. Telling that tale, she recounts in the introduction here, put her closely in touch with the original and with a woman who "had a ferocious look and seemed to give precisely zero fucks." From the very opening of the poem--"Bro!" in the place of the sturdy Saxon exhortation "Hwaet"--you know this isn't your grandpappy's version of Beowulf. Headley continues, putting her own spin on the hemistiches and internal rhymes of the original: "Tell me we still know how to talk about 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." Grendel, she has it, was a "woe-walker, / unlucky, fucked by Fate." The language may keep Headley's version from high school curricula, but the sentiment is exactly right: Grendel is an outcast and monster through no fault of his own while the men who array themselves against him are concerned with attaining fame and keeping the reputation of being good for eternity while having a nice flagon of mead at the end of a day of hacking away. Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes, as when a fire-breathing dragon visits the warriors' hall: "Soon Beowulf received a blistering missive. / His own hall, his heart-home, had combusted. / He'd been ghost-throned by the skyborn gold-holder." "Ghost-throned" is a wonderful neologism, and if phrases like "Everybody's gotta learn sometime" and "His guys tried" seem a touch too contemporary, they give the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry. Some purists may object to the small liberties Headley has taken with the text, but her version is altogether brilliant.

     COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

961

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languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Mythology
3. • value: Poetry
4. • value: Historical Fiction

publishDateText

08/25/2020

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shortDescription

Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by The Guardian

Longlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Picked for Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction in Translation of 2020. Named a Book of the Year by NPR, Vox, and The New Statesman. Picked for Loyalty Books' Holiday List.
A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife
"Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." —Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker
"The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale." —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf—and fifty years...

sortTitle

Beowulf A New Translation

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awards

1. • source: World Science Fiction Society
   • value: Hugo Award

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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   • description: Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
2. • code: FIC014000
   • description: FICTION / Historical / General
3. • code: POE014000
   • description: Poetry / Epic