Throughout the year and across the world, people have reluctantly adopted and updated a medieval custom: quarantine in times of plague. Other remnants of the era, however, have been much more readily embraced. The Middle Ages continue to capture our fancy (sometimes even frenzy), and the latest version of a classic tale is a perfect case in point. By keenly zooming in on some of the boldest, most innovative aspects of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s recent translation of Beowulf, our very own Kwan Ann Tan (editor-at-large for Malaysia and medievalist-in-training) reflects on the value of bringing the past into the present.
The modern fascination with medieval language and culture is not particularly new—from the pre-Raphaelites to Hollywood blockbuster depictions of the medieval era, it’s clear that something about the Middle Ages still captivates us. In January 2020, for instance, the Facebook group ‘We Pretend It’s 1453 Internet’ was created, and it has since amassed close to 200,000 members; it’s filled with humorous posts imitating medieval speech and pretending to ask for advice on ‘medieval’ subjects (they’re not always period-accurate, but it’s the spirit that counts). Likewise, a subgenre of ‘medieval TikTok’ is gaining speed, with some genuinely funny skits reimagining what it would be like if knights were Twitch streamers—again, reformulating medieval staples to suit the modern imagination. On a more academic note, the Global Medieval Sourcebook project at Stanford University collects rare, previously untranslated medieval texts in modern English for the adventurous reader. In fact, new translations of medieval writings are being released every day, be they for academic or creative purposes.
As a child, I had vaguely heard of the story of Beowulf, but I always assumed that Beowulf himself was the monster, the antagonist—not the hero. After I memorised huge swathes of the text in the original Old English, the line between monster and hero only became more blurred; in fact, the poem’s elusive complexity has fuelled debate on this dichotomy for decades, if not centuries. There is something about Beowulf that keeps us coming back, and this lasting interest is reflected in the number of translations of the epic published over the past few decades.
When news of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) first broke on Twitter earlier this year, my timeline was quickly filled with messages from disgruntled medievalists complaining that yet another Beowulf translation had been unleashed upon the world. I myself approached it skeptically, but was quite literally hooked from the first word. For those who haven’t had the agonising pleasure of trying to decipher Old English for a year, it’ll teach you one word for sure: ‘Hwæt,’ the famous opening of Beowulf. It has been historically translated to varying degrees of formality, but Headley knocks conservatism aside to give us the earth-shattering ‘Bro.’ This brilliantly sets the tone for the rest of the text, and one thing is clear: it definitely isn’t your grandma’s Beowulf.
Translating certain texts into the vernacular has been crucial throughout history. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century renditions of Latin and French works, such as Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy or Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose, mattered not just because they made the source material accessible to a greater number of readers, but because they vindicated late medieval English as a literary language. Similarly, Headley’s addition to the canon of Beowulf translations legitimises contemporary English and makes the text approachable for readers with little knowledge of medieval Britain. Chris Jones comments on this phenomenon in his essay on twenty-first-century translations of Old English. He claims that we have ‘entered a new phase of assimilation which is less fixated with the Old English line as understood by modern editors, and less concerned with learning modes of sound patterning from Old English.’
This approach is reflected in Headley’s unconventional kennings, compounds that rely on figurative language—modern phrases like ‘barstool-brother’ and ‘swole as a troll fed on travellers’ capture our attention as we attempt to imagine these beefy, chain-mail-wearing warriors bumping fists and spotting each other while lifting weights. Moreover, her loose assimilation of the alliterative meter makes it roll off the tongue like the catchiest of rap songs (a review by the New Yorker even compares it to the worldwide sensation Hamilton). In the lines ‘Now, my main man, let me get back to Grendel, / the story of our clash and crash,’ Headley’s combination of alliteration, assonance, and consonance makes for verse that we can’t help but tap our feet and bob our heads to.
Crucially, in her introduction, Headley explains that ‘the lines in this translation were structured for speaking, and for speaking in contemporary rhythms.’ This harks back to the oral tradition in which Beowulf was composed, laying waste to the assumption that translations of medieval works must hold on to some remnant of archaism (we’re looking at you, Tolkien). As a result, Headley’s rendition is striking, fresh, and unique. She is not the first to use modern poetics as its foundation: in his 1999 translation, Seamus Heaney closely adheres to oral codes as well, and gives the text some Irish flavour by translating ‘Hwaet’ as ‘So.’ However, Headley’s Beowulf is the first to radically bring the epic into the modern age, going so far as to incorporate current slang and syntactic structures. As opposed to your more typical Old English verse, which relies heavily on a system of alliterative patterns and stressed syllables, Headley abandons strict norms to weave a new tapestry of her own, with modern interjections.
It’s particularly interesting to note that she still sometimes retains the Old English for certain ‘untranslatable’ words like ‘wyrd,’ loosely rendered as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ in most other texts. The word reminds us that this is a tale beyond our time, holding an entire culture and history that we can only grasp at feebly in translation. Headley uses it on two separate occasions to create what I think is a particularly effective link to the original, preserving some of its archaism to enhance the overall text.
And yet, certain things are inevitably lost in translation. Take, for example, Grendel’s famous entrance on his way to his bloodthirsty, fatal encounter with Beowulf. The Old English description of his approach is transcribed as ‘godes yrre bær,’ loosely translated to ‘God’s wrath he bore.’ This half-line has always intrigued me because of the multitude of readings others have presented—does it imply the more obvious one, that God’s wrath is on Grendel’s head as he is an unnatural monster, or is Grendel quite literally the ‘bearer of God’s wrath,’ a weapon of God that exists to punish the Danes? Headley appears to erase all ambiguity by translating the line as ‘God-cursed,’ somewhat simplifying Grendel’s role to a purely antagonistic one. Yet just a few lines later, she retains the translation of ‘rinc’ as ‘warrior,’ aligning Grendel with the other warriors within the hall and reasserting a more ambiguous reading of his fundamental character. At that point we are unsure if Grendel is man or monster, but we are certain of his intent to harm and his status as the enemy.
One could argue that making medieval content more accessible to contemporary audiences is not only inevitable but necessary. Modern translations of medieval writings are not only a link to the past, but also a reflection of what our current culture finds important, as illustrated by our re-interpretation of certain passages and our focus on new angles within the texts. As Jeannette Beer argues in A Companion to Medieval Translation (2019), these translations have been crucial in transmitting knowledge as well as bridging the gap between past and present. We see this clearly in the pre-Raphaelite movement of the nineteenth century, when the turn to medievalism as a ‘fresh’ concept defied modern industrial aesthetics and society. Similarly, twentieth-century interpretations of medieval tales have given us much more space and freedom to play with ancient ambiguities. Headley’s own The Mere Wife, published in 2015, is a free adaptation of the epic of Beowulf, and a clear predecessor to her latest work; set in present-day New York, it centers on Grendel’s mother, as well as on discussions of police brutality and class. Modern creative retellings of this kind should, I think, be considered translations in their own right.
To return to Headley’s Beowulf proper, there is a particularly chilling scene at the hero’s funeral:
Then another dirge rose, woven uninvited
by a Geatish woman, louder than the rest.
She tore her hair and screamed her horror
at the hell that was to come: more of the same.
Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes
marching across her country, claiming her body.
We might be tempted to say that these lines are a product of some arbitrary impression of medieval brutality, but they’re once again fittingly modern: it’s unmistakeable that we are living in ‘þæt hío hyre hearmdagas hearde ondréde’ / ‘all the hell that was to come’: days of plague, days of harm, days of injustice and instability. These concepts, ‘country’ and ‘body,’ still echo within our lives, societies, and cultures—just two among many that still tie us to our history.
Kwan Ann Tan is a Malaysian writer, a medievalist-in-training, and an occasional quartet player. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Offing, Joyland Magazine, and The Mays Anthology, amongst others. You can find her at kwananntan.carrd.co or on Twitter: @KwanAnnTan.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: