Picked for Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction in Translation of 2020. Named a Book of the Year by NPR 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 envigorating, 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.