Beowulf A new translation

An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment. In her novel The Mere Wife (2018), Headley imagined Grendel's mother as a PTSD--haunted Iraq War veteran guarding her son from the encroachment of suburban civilization on their wilderness home. Telling that tale, she recounts in the introduction here, put her closely in touch with the original and with a woman who "had a ferocious look and seemed to give precisely zero fucks." From the very opening of the poem--"Bro!" in the place of the sturdy Saxon exhortation "Hwaet"--you know this isn't your grandpappy's version of Beowulf. Headley continues, putting her own spin on the hemistiches and internal rhymes of the original: "Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days, / everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only / stories now, but I'll sound the Spear-Danes' song, hoarded for hungry times." Grendel, she has it, was a "woe-walker, / unlucky, fucked by Fate." The language may keep Headley's version from high school curricula, but the sentiment is exactly right: Grendel is an outcast and monster through no fault of his own while the men who array themselves against him are concerned with attaining fame and keeping the reputation of being good for eternity while having a nice flagon of mead at the end of a day of hacking away. Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes, as when a fire-breathing dragon visits the warriors' hall: "Soon Beowulf received a blistering missive. / His own hall, his heart-home, had combusted. / He'd been ghost-throned by the skyborn gold-holder." "Ghost-throned" is a wonderful neologism, and if phrases like "Everybody's gotta learn sometime" and "His guys tried" seem a touch too contemporary, they give the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry. Some purists may object to the small liberties Headley has taken with the text, but her version is altogether brilliant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.