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.
