BEOWULF! A Reading & Conversation with Translator Maria Dahvana Headley
About this Event
Join us for Women in Translation month for a very special event featuring the acclaimed author and translator, Maria Dahvana Headley in conversation with friend of the Lit Room, Alanna Love. Join us in the mead hall at Oldspeak and find out what all the hwæt is about.
About BEOWULF: A New Translation
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.
Featured Author and Translator
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Mere Wife (FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her full cast musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: a Mythological Musical, came out from Audible in 2023. She delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, among many others. Headley grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.
Host
Alanna Love is an editor, writer, and graduate student in Language and Literature at Signum University, where she specializes in medieval studies. Her research explores the intersections of philology, mythology, and literary history, with particular interests in Old Norse literature, translation, and the enduring influence of medieval texts on contemporary culture. She is a voracious reader and leads The Lit Room's fantasy and science fiction book club, Otherworldly Adventurers.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 7.18 to USD 14.64
