On Neowulf—that 'Beowulf' translation with the #hashtags—and what translations are "for"

This ain't your DADDY'S 'Beowulf'! But is it anyone else's?

Bro! Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf—what my wife has taken to calling “Neowulf”—received a lot of fanfare upon its release. It was published via the FSG Originals imprint, which is sometimes good, sometimes annoying, and has included the terribly-named series “FSG Originals x Logic” (try saying that ten times fast) which put out the book Blockchain Chicken Farm, a surreal read (albeit also obvious China Bad propagandizing) that introduced me to the nauseating implications of China needing to crack down on soy sauce made out of human hair. Being so “forward-thinking” and invested in envisioning the future it’s sort of funny to see the imprint put out a translation of Beowulf, which is one-thousand-years-old, but the marketing gimmick here was obvious, and it worked—this ain't your DADDY’S Beowulf! It’s new, it’s edgy, it’s feminist, it’s a contemporary take, it’s imbued with internet babble, it begins sections by translating what most versions translate to be “Hark!” or “Lo!” as “Bro!,” it’s (debatably) more readable, etc. NPR and Kirkus named it a best book of the year, and it even won a Hugo Award in the extremely chaotic “Best Related Work” category.¹ I’m sure it sold like hotcakes.

I initially dreaded reading it, because the final product sounded so much like Penguin’s OMG Shakespeare series or something of its ilk, or at least that’s how the gushing articles written about it made it sound. In short—it’s fine. Maybe even quite good, or maybe a mixed bag. Lines like “hashtag blessed” are certainly irritating if not outright cursed, and featured prominently in all the aforementioned reporting about the translation for whatever reason, but instances like it were not all that common in the book overall. I read it alongside a re-read of Tolkien’s translation—Tolkien’s is obviously the more consistent of the two (nobody in Tolkien's ever “Stans” anyone or anything, for instance), though I appreciated Headley’s insistence on emphasizing the alliterative qualities of the original, even as it pushed her toward some of her most oft-kilter word choices and homemade kennings, but many of these choices were legitimately fun.

Perhaps more than anything, Headley winds up taking Walter Benjamin’s conception of what a translator should “be”—when he described the need for a translator not to capture a text “as it is” but to capture a sense of its “afterlife”—extremely literally.² The translation becomes a deliberate reminder of the English language as a Palimpsest, a reminder of language’s continual death and rebirth, as the act of translating English out of its own ancestor then itself begs the question: into what other epoch of English are we to enter this version? Look at Tolkien’s translation for a minute:

Lo! the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes
in days of old we have heard tell, how those princes did deeds of valour.
Oft Scyld Scefing robbed the hosts of foemen, many peoples,
of the seats where they drank their mead,
laid fear upon men, he who first was found forlorn;
comfort for that he lived to know, mighty grew under heaven,
throve in honour, until all that dwelt nigh about,
over the sea where the whale rides,
must hearken to him and yield him tribute
—a good king was he!

We have to ask: why has, in translating Old English into Modern English, Tolkien opted to write in this affected archaic style? Several times throughout the text Tolkien opts to use the words “thy”—“thy master,” “thy father,” “thy heart,” etc.—and “thou”—“thou knowest,” “thou prayest,” also note the “-est” suffix usage—but why? The word “thy” was first recorded centuries later than Beowulf was written, and it had been out of popular usage since centuries earlier than the time of Tolkien’s writing, so why exactly is Tolkien opting to translate an Old English text into an Early Modern English text when it’s not even the language of the Modern English audience he’s writing for?³ He has adopted a “ye olde” aesthetic because it fits a popular idea of what Beowulf “should” sound like. But it’s just as anachronistic as using words like “hashtag” and “Stan.”

There’s another thing I saw a lot in discourse around this book when it came out, which is its “feminist” content, a line of discussion which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Much like the focusing on the use of words like “bro” and “hashtag” (often ignoring their deliberate contrast with more archaic words like “slain” or “kin” or Headley’s usage of kennings, and therefore missing the whole point of this mish-mash and reducing the exercise to shallow translation into meme-speak), this obscures more than it enlightens. It reminds me a lot of the discourse surrounding the Emily Wilson translations of Homer—they cannot. fucking. stop. harking. on. about how she’s the first woman to translate Homer into English,⁴ which sort of sidesteps the fact that her translations are also just really fucking good, perhaps now my preferred versions of those texts. It also sidesteps that she’s not actually the first woman to translate Homer into English. And while I’ve heard Wilson say some interesting things about how translators have dealt with women in Homer, she also often (like in the podcast I just linked) begins in her responses to questions like “did you set out to forge a particularly feminist version of The Odyssey?” by saying things like:

it— it actually wasn’t my primary thought early on… one of the big things I felt I wanted to do differently was about style, that I wanted to use iambic pentameter and I wanted to draw on my both deep knowledge of and deep love of the English poetic tradition, and that I felt I wanted to create an English Homer that would be genuinely sort of immersed in that verse tradition and come across as… real poetry, but have some weirdness or magical-ness about it.

I’ve listened to a number of interviews with Wilson, and I can’t help but detect a slight bit of bitterness that nobody seems to want to talk about the fact that it’s also just a good translation—take note of Wilson in the aforementioned quote using the phrase “my deep knowledge” as if almost to say “I’m a fucking professional, asshole”—and I wouldn’t blame her if that was the case. Who would want something they worked so hard on reduced to “a woman did it”? But I guess it can’t be fucking helped. It gets the clicks.

As I’ve said, in accordance with the instruction of Benjamin (and then some), Headley’s “Neowulf” is even more adaptation than strictly translation, and should probably not be used as a “stand-in” for the original for modern readers, but rather a supplement, a derivative work. “Bro!” you might think to yourself, “this is starting to sound very wannabe Kathy Acker.” Well, hey, maybe you’re right, and maybe that’s helped along by the fact that Headley actually kinda looks like and presents herself like Kathy Acker as well.

But hey, there’s worse things to be.

1. To demonstrate what I mean by chaotic, also nominated in this category that year was a YouTube video about Bronies, a Black speculative fiction magazine series, a science fiction convention in New Zealand, a biography of Octavia Butler, and a fucking blog post about the previous year’s Hugo Awards.

2. This conception of what a translator “should” be is of course really just to an extent what a translator already “is” by no fault of their own—Borges demonstrated as much in his “Pierre Menard.” But it is the consciousness of that fact that may separate the petty translator (Constance Garnett, let’s say, who Hemingway describes as merely typing her literal translations of Dostoevsky page-by-page as fast as possible, producing work that Nabokov derided as—and I agree—“dry shit”) from a truly great one (such as Gregory Rabassa, whom Marquez once went so far as to say made his work better in English than it even was in Spanish).

3. Venuti, however, might defend this practice (as illustrated in his thoughts in The Translator’s Invisibility) as the necessary “foreignization” of the text, reminding us of its otherness from us in language or in time. The “ye olde” affect replete with archaic word choices (though nonetheless word choices a modern reader would still “understand”), while anachronistic, is at least a consistent reminder that “this text is different from the language I speak” and “this text is old.”

4. Fun fact: the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler (a Homer translator himself) believed Homer actually was a woman.