Thanks a fool in paradise.
Posted on 08/30/2020 9:46:16 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Beowulf: A New Translation
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. No, I don't care if you loved it/hated it, if it traumatized you, if it ruined and/or energized the English language for you, or ruined you for translations or whatever. 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. A remarkable thing that probably shouldn't even exist, except that it does.
It is Beowulf, mostly. Beowulf, kinda. It is Beowulf down to the line numbers, and tells the story of Beowulf and Hrothgar and Grendel and Grendel's mom and the dragon and Wiglaf and everything.
Except ...
Except that Headley has made it modern, not in form or style or content, but in temperament. In language. "Language is a living thing," she writes in her introduction. "And when it dies, it leaves bones. I dropped some fossils here, next to some newborns. I'm as interested in contemporary idiom and slang as I am in the archaic. There are other translations if you're looking for the courtly romance and knights."
Truth: Beowulf would've been a vanity project if it wasn't written by Headley, and if Headley hadn't made a splash back in 2018 with The Mere Wife which was, in itself, a retelling of Beowulf set in 21st century suburbia and focusing (largely, but not exclusively) on Grendel's mother. It would've been a thesis. An academic passion project read by no one but Beowulf nerds, loved or hated almost in a vacuum.
Instead, Headley's Beowulf is a big release — discussed, debated, talked about (as it should be) because it has everything: Love, sex, murder, magic, dungeons, dragons, giants, monsters. It spills blood by the bucket and gore by the gallon, makes heroes, slays villains and serves as an instruction manual for toxic masculinity, circa 700 AD.
Bro! 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.
Yeah, she starts it all with "Bro."
Bro.
Bro!
I mean, that's ridiculous. And brilliant. And genius-level washed-up barstool-hero trolling all at the same time. "Bro" to take the place of Behold! and Lo! and What ho! because Behold! and Lo! and (especially) What ho! are all silly and stilted and stupid and do not — not a single one of them — have the social heft and emotional dwarfism and Bud Light swagger of "Bro," because "Bro" is the braggart's call, the throat-clearing of someone who wasn't, you know, there, but heard about it from some dude who totally was.
It is thousand-year-old slam poetry, 'Hamilton' for the Geats and Skyldings — full of blood and honor, inside jokes and historical digressions.
And THAT is the emotional level at which Beowulf works. Has always worked, really, but absolutely works in Headley's newest version. It is bragging. It is urban legend. It is that guy who once threw three touchdowns against State telling the story again — five beers deep on a Tuesday night — before hey-buddy-ing the bartender for his sixth.
That's what Beowulf always was. An epic poem made to be shouted over the howls of mead-drunk Spear-Danes as they toast the fallen and lovingly punch each other to sleep. It is thousand-year-old slam poetry, Hamilton for the Geats and Skyldings — full of blood and honor, inside jokes and historical digressions.
Headley takes liberties. She has reasons (and explains them in an extensive intro) and she has the right (having studied Beowulf as closely as anyone), and so she tinkers with focus and with the weight given to smaller characters (Unferth going toe-to-toe with Beowulf, trying to put the lie to the tales already told of him, becomes one of the poem's most memorable scenes — an epic mead-hall rap battle), and re-humanizes Grendel's mother into a grief-stricken mom demanding a blood-debt for her murdered son. Monstrous, yes. But no longer a monster.
It rolls. It demands to be spoken, to be shouted and spat. To be taught as the thing that it is — the Marvel movie of its time.
Which is all fine. Which is all as it should be. Because there is no real Beowulf. Not anymore. It has been translated and re-translated. Academics have tussled with the language for ages. Even the original (not the original-original, but the original document upon which all other translations are based) was a group project. Two scribes, working through the 3,182 lines together, fighting each other in the margins, crossing out each other's words and replacing them.
So Headley's version (translation? transcription?) is just as real and twice as vital right now as any other. It sings straight through, the alliteration and temper of it invigorating (as it should be) and roaring (as it should be), like Beowulf, introducing himself to Hrothgar:
I'm the strongest and the boldest,
and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean — I may have bathed in
the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once,
smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone
skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who f***s with the Geats? Bro,
they have to f*** with me.
It rolls. It demands to be spoken, to be shouted and spat. To be taught as the thing that it is — the Marvel movie of its time.
I always liked Beowulf a little for what it was: history, foundational myth, epic poem of swords and dragons, source material for paintings on the sides of vans. But Maria Headley's Beowulf I love for exactly what it is: a psychotic song of gold and blood, stylish as hell, nasty and brutish and funny all at once, mad and bad and sad and alive now in a way that these words simply haven't been for more than a thousand years.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Sadly, it is happening. When the portrait of Wiliam Shakespeare is removed from the main office of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, the study of “English” as a discipline ceases to exist. If war chants around a campfire are some how equivalent to King Lear, then there is no need for an Engish Department anywhere.
The irony of convincing people that liberal arts have no value, is that they soon reralize they have no jobs. Tey blowing up their own livlihoods. Liberal arts colleges are dying all across the country. So much for the Woke Wookies.
Micheal Crichton did this in med school - he re-wrote Beowulf and named Eaters of The Dead. That was made into the movie: The 13th Warrior. Crichton did a great job.
Starting Beowulf with “Bro” May be a mocking of Seamus Heaney’s popular translation which started with “So”.
Thanks a fool in paradise.
>yawn<.........wake me when they make Canterbury Tales into a movie.............
The connection is sloppy use of language. John Dewey and Martin Heidegger used the same or similar terms and ideas but with different definitions. Researchers in Education, primarily people like Nell Nodding, have used Dewey’s terms with the early Heidegger’s definition. It should be noted that later in life, Heidegger repudiated his own position and replaced it with a more mystic or spiritualist concept akin to listening to your inner voice. So when I write about the influence of Heidegger I am doing doing so based upon the concepts in his early work, Being and Time.
This is problematic because Dewey was many things but he wasn’t a subjectivist. John Dewey believed that if you let children learn in a “naturalistic setting” that they would find an absolute truth. For Dewey, 2+2 always equaled 4. It didn’t matter how you reached 4, it was the answer was the important thing. (His idea of truth being an New England -upper middle class-white-lapsed Protestant-World view) At no point did Dewey claim that truth is a narrative, or a construct. This, as far as it goes is not a bad concept and there is some value in using it to help children see how what they learn applies to real world settings.
Heidegger, on the other hand, was a near complete subjectivist who thought that absolutes were a linguistic creation. In his work, Being and Time, Heidegger writes about the concept of “A thing in the world” or an object that becomes what it is through the process of definition or naming of that thing. This is a useful concept in some ways and can be explained as an extension of Plato’s theory of forms. We call those “Chairs” Chairs because they all have the qualities of “chairness” even though they might have have as many differences as similarities. But, when we, through a process of examination and discovery name something a “chair” in a known language, it is absolutely a chair, not a sofa, nor a stool, not a bench. But, for Heidegger, there was no form or absolute chair, only attributes that we attribute to a thing. Thus, in early Heidegggerian thinking, all truth is a process and truth merely a label.
For Heidegger discovering truth was a process, and it was the process, not the outcome that was important. Thus, 2+2=4 is not as important as how you arrive at 4. The answer is less important than the process. The end result can be anything we choose to name it.
In this way, US educational philosophy has been subverted by Post Modernism from a loosely Christian world view espoused by Dewey, Mann and Montessori into a system lacking absolute value or meaning. The focus has changed, without educators realizing it, from child centered, to process centered. Only the process is important there is little or no value in the end result.
This is why I state from time to time that the public education system is child abuse. It is a system that, at its core, espouses meaninglessness as truth. Which, is another way of saying, there is no truth. If there is no truth, there is possibility of education. If there is no possibility of education there is no purpose in school.
Or at least that is my contention.
Agreed.
Seamus Heaney’s translation is the best I’ve ever read. On a cross country trip with my wife, we took turns reading to each other as we switched drivers. It was a very memorable trip. We both really enjoyed it. She read better than I did, sadly.
And she must be white. Because it should be “BRUH” not “Bro”.
And what did you think of it?
Sounds like fun. Beowolf was BEOWOLF when it was made. We have this tendency to automatically elevate something after a couple hundred years. But a lot of that stuff wasn’t high art then, it was passing the time entertainment. I don’t have a problem getting it back to that.
Unlike his amazing, "fairy tale" settings, yet powerful HENRY V, his HAMLET is far too "pruned" and flat for me.
Hadn't thought about it before, but yes, it is stuck in Freudian and Oedipal land; sadly.
People have called the scenes between Hamlet and Gertrude love scenes.
Here you go. Clear out your earholes with this:
Beowulf, read in Anglo-Saxon, Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz_kMwW3Rw&list=PLaN2-enaIS4Q_CAYyqOyQlTcakKOgqBJN
11 parts, each no longer than 15 minutes.
I'll watch it again and see if I agree.
Frankly, when it comes to Shakespeare plays on the screen, I prefer the ones done by Orson Wells.
The most modern ones are the worst, with Kenneth Branagh's being THE WORST EVER; except for his HENRY V!
I’ve never seen his Hamlet, but it is complete and unedited.
His HAMLET isn’t bad; his version of the comedies are all AWFUL and the uber PC/DIVERSITY cast destroys the films for me.
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