Maria Dahvana Headley on Beowulf: a New Translation.

On Wednesday at noon Eastern, join Future Tense for a conversation with Maria Dahvana Headley; Alena Smith, creator of Dickinson; and Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist. Maria Dahvana Headley’s decision to begin her translation of Beowulf with “Bro” has gotten a lot of attention. Though the 3,182 lines that make up the Old English poem have been translated many times, Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation is decidedly new, blending traditional language with modern slang to present the iconic story through a new, feminist lens. Historically, a lot of people have thought that the lens was a very specific colonialist lens, colonialist as in a “we don’t need to analyze it” lens, as opposed to, we do need to analyze those impulses throughout the history of translation of a text like this. People feel nervous when they read this translation, because they’re like, it’s going to be obscure really quickly.