Maria Dahvana Headley

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Massachusetts

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.

Beowulf: a New Translation

6a67ce51-16ce-4339-9229-81ce17fb654f-1

Seamus Heaney

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Maryland

A New Verse Translation

A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Beowulf

R.M. Liuzza's translation of Beowulf, first published by Broadview in 1999, has been widely praised for its accuracy and beauty. The translation is accompanied in this edition by genealogical charts, historical summaries, and a glossary of proper names. Historical appendices include related legends, stories, and religious writings from both Christian and Anglo-Saxon traditions. These texts help readers to see Beowulf as an exploration of the politics of kingship and the psychology of heroism, and as an early English meditation on the bridges and chasms between the pagan past and the Christian present.

Appendices also include a generous sample of other modern translations of Beowulf, shedding light on the process of translating the poem. This new edition features an updated introduction and an expanded section of material on Christianity and paganism.

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Category - Fiction / POETRY

Format - Paperback

Condition - New

Listed - 2 months ago

Views - 12

Wishes - 4

Ships From - Massachusetts

Est. Publication Date - Aug 2020

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Beowulf: a New Translation

ISBN: 9780374110031

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More copies of this book

This copy is sold, but you can find more here!

Category - Fiction / POETRY

Format - Paperback

Condition - New

Listed - 2 months ago

Views - 12

Wishes - 4

Ships From - Massachusetts

Est. Publication Date - Aug 2020

Additional Information

Beowulf: a New Translation

ISBN: 9780374110031

Publisher Description

Tags

Beowulf: a New Translation

By:

$5.00

Meet the seller

Discover more

Beowulf

By: Seamus Heaney

More from this seller

Additional titles by Seamus Heaney

'Beowulf' readers also enjoyed:

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