A wonderful and fresh translation. It takes some getting used to, but it is full of wit, and especially with the skill of Jd Jackson reading it, it really comes alive. Above all, it accomplishes its goal: it tells the story of Beowulf as though a bro is sitting next to you at the bar, with a knack for poetry and word-weaving, bending your ear about a cools story.
With such an apt translation into the vernacular of our particular moment, I suspect this translation may age particularly quickly, and become itself and artifact of our own time. I don't think that's a mark against it, though.
The "Bro!" translation, less rudely modernizing than you'd think, a joyous and hilarious full sweep of English language in all its boastful vigilant possibilities.
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in …
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in just 2 sittings).
But even in this best translation yet, the story frustrates me. However much Headley tries to open it up, and pushes back on this reading in the translator's introduction, it's still a story of macho men bragging and proving themselves with violence, in which womens' main role is to be prizes and servers. And Grendel's mother still gets short shrift. She's the character whose violence is the easiest to justify, but her role in the story is still to be an enemy whose defeat we cheer for.
It's amazing to be able to read this snapshot from so long ago, and this translation is now the one that I'd recommend to people. But I'm still so ambivalent about the actual content.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Even if you don't this one is worth trying. It's an epic poem that was certainly passed down orally for generations before it was ever written down. Imagining the changes it would have gone through during that process makes me enjoy this modern-language translation even more. It might not be a translation that hold up forever, but it fits here and now.
