Beowulf as Bro
Good morning. Irina Dumitrescu reviews Maria Headley new translation of Beowulf. Headley has turned Beowulf into a bro, and it is mostly terrible: “Translations of Beowulf are often judged by their first word. ‘Hwæt,’ that enigmatic monosyllable, became a stately ‘behold’ or ‘lo’ in older versions of the epic. Modern poets have used their choice here as a calling card, announcing their intentions with more or less boldness. They have transformed ‘hwæt’ into a firm ‘listen,’ a laid-back ‘hey,’ or a cheery ‘right!’ A little over twenty years ago, Seamus Heaney gave the Old English tale an Irish lilt by beginning it with ‘so.’ In her new rendering of the poem, Maria Dahvana Headley goes him one better and lobs the poem into contemporary slang like a ping pong ball into a red Solo cup: ‘Bro.’”
More: “Headley treats American vernaculars like an all-you-can-eat buffet. At times, her Beowulf croons like a country song, as when the men in Hrothgar’s hall sing of their boyhoods, ‘silvered heart aching/for the good old golden days.’ Elsewhere, manhood comes across as curt and colloquial: while preparing to fight Grendel’s mother, ‘Beowulf gave zero shits.’ For a moment, Beowulf even sounds like Barack Obama, the medieval hero’s ‘lemme be clear’ borrowing the rhythm of a modern stump speech while maintaining the resonant terseness of Old English heroic verse . . . Headley fills the poem with deliberate anachronisms, few of which do more than give the poem a modern finish. After Grendel devastates Hrothgar’s hall, we learn that the ‘news went global.’ Beowulf at his best is praised for ‘never punching down,’ which must be why Hrothgar’s man ‘unexpectedly stanned’ for him. A dragon ‘tagging the sky with flaming sigils’ is sublime. But it is unsettling to move from a gorgeous Homeric simile in which Grendel hunts men like ‘an owl/mist-diving for mice, grist-grinding their tails/in his teeth’ to Internet lingo like ‘sidebar’ and ‘Hashtag: blessed.’ This is a translation of its moment, and will age accordingly.”
In other news: Michael Dirda reviews Anthony Horowitz’s latest mystery: “A few years ago, Anthony Horowitz brought out a superb Sherlock Holmes pastiche called The House of Silk. That phrase could easily serve as the design label for anything written by Horowitz himself. His recent books — especially the metafictional mysteries The Word Is Murder and Magpie Murders — are as elegant and richly patterned as a Hermès scarf. Certainly, anyone seeking a few evenings’ respite from the emotional roller-coaster of last week’s election need look no further than his latest, Moonflower Murders. To begin with, you’ll get two books for the price of one. Quite literally. In what one might call the frame novel, Susan Ryeland — the now-retired book editor who first appeared in “Magpie Murders”— has been living for two years in Crete with her lover-fiance, Andreas, where they manage the family-run, slightly down-at-the-heels Polydorus Hotel. While Susan frequently refers back to her earlier career in publishing, Horowitz carefully avoids having her reveal too much about the circumstances surrounding the death of her best-selling author, the difficult and unlikable Alan Conway, creator of the Hercule Poirot-like, German Jewish detective Atticus Pünd.”
In The Christian Century, Marilynne Robinson writes about changing her mind, memory, and her first novel: “That phrase, ‘it occurred to me,’ is interesting for purposes of this discussion. It describes the feeling that the mind has presented something to conscious awareness, putting together facts or impressions that have been known but not thought of as related. Things “happen” in the mind, events of consciousness that are not only unsought or unwilled but surprising. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before? In these moments it feels as though the mind is autonomously active, making sense over time of whatever is provided to it—although not because the realization it yields has any immediate value beyond the pleasure of the surprise. It is like the recalling of a word, a name, or a telephone number that seems lost to memory until it emerges, sometimes long after there was any reason to try to remember it . . . I discovered all of this, or became aware of it, while I was writing my first novel, Housekeeping. I was living in France, there to teach at a university that had gone on strike. I had a lot of time to myself, a spiral notebook, and the beginnings of a novel—fragments based on memories of Idaho, where I grew up. To avoid distraction, I closed the shutters, darkened the room, and worked by the light of a little bedside lamp. And there I was, trying to remember Idaho, where I had not lived for almost 20 years. was startled by the dreamlike particularity of my memories and at the same time by the rightness of them, as if they arose from a very lucid attention.”
J.M.W. Turner’s modern world: “Some kind of spectacular apocalypse—natural, human-induced, or a mix of both—is never far away. It flares in lurid sunsets above corpse-strewn battlefields. It hangs in toxic fogs over factories and forges. It rips through cloudbursts and seascapes where many-masted ships burn, splinter, and sink.”
Yet another art restoration project goes wrong in Spain, but is something else is going here? “The latest Spanish restoration effort to provoke anguished headlines and much social media snarking is, or rather, was, a carved figure adorning an ornate, early 20th-century building in the north-western city of Palencia. What was once the smiling face of a woman next to some livestock has been replaced with a crude countenance that bears a passing resemblance to the incumbent US president, Donald Trump.”
What’s going on inside The Strand? “Despite its status as one of the most famous independent bookstores in the world, even the Strand in New York City is barely making it through the COVID-19 pandemic. After a temporary shutdown, mass layoffs and a limited-capacity reopening, sales at the 93-year-old New York City fixture were down 70 percent, leading third-generation owner Nancy Bass Wyden to issue a public plea for help from customers. Strand supporters turned out in droves, driving record sales in the ensuing days, but still questions about the store’s future remain, as do tensions between Bass Wyden and her unionized employees. The rescue of a beloved independent business should be one of the few heartwarming stories of 2020’s incessant ravages. But the Strand is a singular entity in this retail niche for reasons that go beyond its fame and fortune. What also makes the shop unique is Bass Wyden’s marriage to a Senator, which makes her financial transactions — including millions spent in stock purchases, with well over $100,000 going to ostensible competitor Amazon — a matter of public record.”
The eerie sounds of deepfake music: “‘It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!’ sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as ‘all legato and regrets’ – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by ‘research and deployment company’ OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as ‘deepfakes’ of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more.”
Elizabethans still: “It still comes as a shock to hear oneself—ourselves—described as ‘Elizabethans’. But that, of course, is the correct name for the four out of five UK citizens who have been born since Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952. It was then that the 25-year-old girl queen—‘just a child’, sniffed the prime minister Winston Churchill dismissively—inherited a country that was still picking bits of shrapnel out of its hair and dealing with the rationing of such treasured staples as sugar, eggs and tea. As for how she will leave it—that chapter has still to be written. But in a rousing finale to this terrific book Andrew Marr suggests that, as we look forward to the reigns of King Charles and King William, there is much we can learn from the early Elizabethans.”
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