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Teaching a summer class on fixing everything that's wrong....in your first five pages. I know. I wish I could teach you how to fix everything that's wrong in the damn universe. But I can definitely help your manuscript kick some serious ass. www.theshipmanagency.com/classes/firs...

Yeah, there's not a lot of sedate epic out there. But there are "sedate" and status quo translations, even of things like Gilgamesh.

It was Grendel's mother in that version, her highheeled golden Barbie feet, her super sexy naked body, well, everything about the way they did her wrong.

Wouldn't it be FUN?!

I mean, I want this. And I have a bunch of opinions about Beowulfs past.

GIVE US BIG-SCREEN BEOWULF AS TRANSLATED BY @mariadahvana.bsky.social, YOU COWARDS

larger implications aside it’s always funny when an LRB piece breaks containment because it’s like a crowd shows up with machetes on your porch and you are. an old Man whittling whistles or making cups out of willow bark

the ideal academic life is being an eccentric Victorian lord. Invent a stamp licking machine at 22. Get elected to the Royal Academy for counting the beetles on your estate. Die in an arsenic explosion. The perfect life.

Yeah, it's all translation in one way or another. And there are so many ways to convey meaning and nuance.

Yep, exactly.

It's in there

Final word for now is really, why should anyone expect epic translators to be polite & soft spoken? Politeness has little place here. This is a career in which you hold hands with the dead, share a mouth with ghosts, & try to imagine the impossible, all day long. It's messy work, folks.

And also, it's an awesome thing about texts like these, that even when a person has many year expertise, we can still learn new things and form new opinions! It's allowed! We're allowed to shout and sing about these things, just as you are. We love them too. And hate them. And love them.

All this is to say: any translator's translation of a text, however formal, is itself a strong, long opinion. To imagine that a translator should have no opinions on the text & on the work of other translators and adaptors is pretty silly given the many year labors we all spend on our translations.

💯 And I’d add that the opinions of academics/translators, while obviously valid and important, are just inevitably going to be skewed in a certain direction. If you’ve spent your whole professional life studying a specific text, you will be attached to it in a way no adaptation can likely satisfy.

I have lots and lots to say about Homer too, and about the places Christopher Nolan shopped for other bits of his Odyssey - I did a musical version of the Aeneid a few years ago, based on Vergil's life and creative battles! It wasn't everyone's Aeneid. It was my weird one.

A lot of people have hollered about my Beowulf, & that's cool with me. I like shouts of joy, but what I really like are opinions! I like people getting up in the history of poetry, arguing & rapturing. I like to help people think about what we can learn from the long dead, & from the imaginary.

If we were not passionate about the history of the world's myths and stories, if we did not see our own lives entwined and tangled with them, if we did not have strong opinions...it would be a lot of dry and crumbling work. No one would know these stories for what they are. Big entertainment.

So anyone who feels it's out of line for people who've spent their lives obsessed with Homer to have opinions about Homer, or for people who've spent years digging around in crumbling texts to have passionate feelings about said texts...well, we all want to stamp our feet. We all love & rage madly.

That's how epics survive. Shouting! Disagreeing! Obsessing, full stop. I would never have translated Beowulf had I not been totally obsessed with and personally invested in Beowulf. I wanted the Beowulf I wanted, and because I couldn't find the one I wanted, I did the translation I wanted to read.