Beowulf

Just to be clear: Beowulf is not a 'I like to read it for the story' kind of book. It is an 'I appreciate its translation and the historical and literary implications of this' kind of book though. And I did appreciate the translation and the choices the translator made a lot. Including the foreword where some of those choices are explained.

I have always been interested in Germanic languages (Frisian and Dutch are my mother tongues, also fluent in German); - I learned about Beowulf in school and via my admiration for Tolkien.
A renewed acquaintance with Beowulf followed at uni - ;
I have several translations in different languages, so when this translation came up, I became curious and simply had to read it.

This translation is easy to read, even for an audience unfamiliar with the original text. (Beowulf is a dirge about savage, and tragic things, utterly shot through with dead, sorrow and tragedy.)
With an introduction explaining why he chose this approach, - Carnabuci does not want to overthrow the well-known Heaney and Tolkien translations - , ‘they are hard to overstate’ - , comes with a refreshing view and translation instead.

Debating whether his translation is the right one, he merely hopes the reader will appreciate Beowulf, ‘the only one of its kind, written by a nameless man long ago.’

And I did :)
5 stars

Beowulf and I have what I would call a... unique relationship. I like the story overall and appreciate it's place in history, but in truth, I cannot stand it. There is no reason that reading such an awesome tale should feel like a chore, but sometimes I feel like I'd rather be fighting Grendel myself than drag my eyes across one more line.

However, I think Mr. Carnabuci might have changed that.

Alright, the nitpicking first:
I don't think anyone has, or will manage to make the opening lines of Beowulf sound immediately compelling to the average reader; I know, its a very biased opinion coming from someone who only engages in classics casually, but I'm sticking to my guns here. Mr. A. B. F. C's version isn't an exception. It starts off a bit clunky (i.e., academic), for a layman, but given my long-held belief about the first line being impossible, it would be unfair to count that as a mark against the text.

Now the positives:
Despite the somewhat stilted first page, I genuinely like this translation. By the second page I fell into the cadence of the lines and easily got caught up in the momentum of the story. The alliteration is SO vivid and punchy; a few times I caught myself silently mouthing the words because it felt so natural to wrap my teeth around "strife-strong nations" and "The Wyrd did work a wickedness".

Aw man. Now I want an audiobook.

Also the art is nice and moody. I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.

Overall, I've enjoyed it more than I expected and I hope to see this version picked up by educators. As far as accessibility goes, its leagues ahead of what's typically used to introduce high school students to Beowulf. It manages to be comprehensible without falling into the vernacular of "no-fear Shakespeare". Don't get me wrong, I love, love, LOVE informal translations, however, I personally believe that to truly engage with literature (at a critical level) we should be challenged to meet the text halfway. This translation puts the reader within reach of that goal without totally usurping the ivory-tower tradition of placing aesthetics over accessibility .

Still not convinced? Here, I found the translator's preface so lovely, that I'm willing to take my lunch break to type it out so you don't miss it.

"Beowulf is a savage, brutal, sad, tragic thing, reeking of a characteristically Anglo-Saxon obsession with sorrow... However, if you can stand to dig in the darkness long enough, beneath it you will find a truth so elemental it can exist only in myth. It cannot be quantified by science, nor vivisected by sociologists, nor co-opted by politicians, nor deconstructed by postmodernists, because it is transcendent, ageless, immutable, and absolute... Please enjoy-- or perhaps that is not quite the correct word-- please *appreciate* this poem, the only one of its kind, written by a nameless man long ago, that honeys with poetry the cup containing a bitter draught of sorrow and death."

Don't you just adore that? I do.

This is a new translation of Beowulf - arguably the most translated Old English work out there. Dating - possibly - to around 1000AD, the time of Ethelred the Unreedy, and Cnut, this was ancient even in Shakespeare's time, and it tells a poetic (in what served for poetry at the time - not like modern stuff) tale of Beowulf (whose name gave the untitled work a title) and his three great battles against Grendel, Grendel's mom, and against the dragon.

It's really the story of a curse brought upon warriors for their philandering, because it turns out that Grendel is the child of King Hrothgar, and the dragon is the child of Beowulf himself, both of them the offspring of their dalliance with Grendel's mom, whose real name is Lulabelle. Just kidding. She goes unnamed. In fact, as a female, she's lucky to get a mention since this is all about manly men, sterling feats, and lusty living.

You may be familiar with the story from that execrable 2007 CGI movie starring Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright-Penn, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, and a gratuitous John Malkovich, which while loosely following the story, was so wrong on so many levels. Grendel's mom wears high heels? Really? I know it's a macho tale of not backing down, but literally nobody blinks? Really?

The real story does often meander away from the main action into tales of Beowulf's achievements, but this is how it was back then, a sort of merrily plodding, repetitive, alliterative story-telling which got there eventually by hitting all the career high-spots of this legendary warrior and his cadre of steely warriors. It also uses the phrase, 'lord of the rings'! I guess that's where Tolkien got it from.

The only issue I had with this was that the embedded links from the text to the glossary/reference section were a bit flaky in that if they were close to the edge of the screen a reader risked swiping the screen to the next or the previous one when tapping on the link, rather than going to the actual reference. The reference section and bibliography is extensive though, running to 25 screens on my iPad.

Also, I read my books on a black screen with white text to save on battery power and the dark-blue reference numbers were hard to read against the black screen. This wouldn't have mattered except that the reference you jump to is part of a list of them; it's not to a single reference, so I couldn't tell for sure which particular reference in the list I had jumped to, and therefore couldn't be sure, when I tapped back, that I'd end up exactly where I left! That made for a fun read. The content list was likewise hard to read for the same reason - and it had, as usual, the listed items too close together to tap confidently to jump to a particular chapter. Double spacing between lines would have helped considerably.

That aside though, I liked this translation and I commend it for anyone interested in this ancient tale, for all are punishéd, and never was a story of more dolor than this of Grendel and his Modor....

This lovely self-published Beowulf is the fourth translation I've read in the last few years (the others are translations by Chickering, Heaney, and bro-loving Maria Dahvana Headley) and wow, I loved it. The author is unabashedly, unapologetically erudite in his preface, quoting Aristotle in the original Greek and introducing me to a lovely new word, "sphalm," which I've since learned "is an archaic and largely obsolete word that refers to a 'bad idea', most often a misinterpretation of a religious text." Yeah. What a great word. So let me get to the poem itself and why I loved this translation. It's completely clear. It follows the story and yet it somehow keeps a great deal of the art of the original poem, with its kennings and its alliterative flourishes. It gripped me and reminded me that this is a great story. It's not as fussily self-important as Heaney or as flashy as Headley or as stodgily precise as Chickering and as far as I'm concerned that's all to the good. I enjoyed reading this version a great deal--it was like visiting with an old friend and seeing new qualities I hadn't seen before.

It's clear on every page that Carnabuci loves the language of the poem, and loves the story of the poem, in a way that I'll never have access to, unless I spend the next many years of my life learning old English. I'm grateful to feel the translator's enthusiasm for the poem through these pages. The preface alone is worth reading a few times.

Having studied Beowulf and Medieval writings in University, I was interested in this interpretation of the piece. I enjoyed this book and found the translation to be highly accurate and an excellent example of this period . It is very accessible to anyone and I recommend it for the lay reader as well as the student. My thanks go to Netgalley, the publishers and the Author for the privilege of an ARC.

My thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book to review. Surprisingly for an English major, I had never read Beowulf before but I actually really enjoyed it - perhaps because I actually haven't ever been forced to read it. I really liked this translation, although I don't have much to compare it to.

An enjoyable translation of a classic work. While it is hard to topple the standard translation by Heaney, this translation provides a rich and readable experience that is sure to delight fans of the Beowulf poem.