I was on a translation-reading roll during the weekend and even though it took me a little longer than expected, I did finally get to Andrew B.F. Carnabuci's translation of Beowulf. It is drastically different in tone and approach from the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translation I also read during the same weekend and as such the two contrasted rather nicely for me. Thanks to BooksGoSocial and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I probably need to include a not-so-small disclaimer at the beginning here. As some of you may know, I am a literary Medievalist by trade. I have been studying medieval literature, and specifically Old English literature, for years and am currently writing my PhD on texts including Beowulf. As such, it shouldn't be surprising that I have a strong love for the poem and am also rather defensive of it. The presumptions that the poem is boring, its writing too difficult, and its existence generally uninteresting hurt me on an almost physical level. Beowulf is singular and the fact that we have it and can study it is stunning. So, some background, to make sure we're all on the same page. The Old English poem Beowulf can be found in a manuscript called Cotton Vitellius A. xv (or the Beowulf-manuscript for ease), commonly dated to between 975 and 1025 CE. Yes, it is a 1000 years old! The story of Beowulf most likely before it was written down, but this manuscript is the only version we have and it was almost lost in a fire in 1731. Beowulf as a poem is also special because it is the only really lengthy poem in Old English that remains and as such scholars have been obsessed with it for a while. Admittedly, the first scholars were only really interested in it so they could unravel the Old English language and thereby expand their understanding of the history of the English language and other Germanic languages. It wasn't really until J.R.R. Tolkien's lecture 'The Monsters and the Critics' in 1936 which encourages academia to look at the poem as a poem, as a literary text that had beauty and a story to tell. Since then, generations of scholars have poured over it and have discussed a whole variety of its elements. Plenty of things still remain to be discussed, however, and each new translation adds something new to our understanding of it. It was with this outlook that I went into Andrew Carnabuci's translation.

The Beowulf poem can technically be summarised rather quickly: a young hero, Beowulf, travels to Denmark to help the Danish king Hrothgar rid his hall from a monster called Grendel. Once he defeats him, Grendel's Mother is out for revenge. once she has been confronted, Beowulf returns home to the Geats and eventually becomes king. In his old age, he faces a dragon. While successful in defeating it, Beowulf also dies a heroic death. This summary technically tells you the main story. It also cuts out all the little asides, the beautiful imagery, the play of language, and the characterisation we get. What can I say, you simply have to read it for yourself. This has been made a lot easier by the various translations which have popped up the last few decades. The most famous, perhaps, is Seamus Heaney's translation, while the latest to make waves is Maria Dahvana Headley's irreverent modernisation. Then there is also Tolkien's own translation, frequently used in university courses. Each of these translators has brought his own flavour to the poem, either by bringing in an Irish orality like Heaney or modern slang like Headley. Carnabuci prefers to follow Tolkien's intentions in his translation. In his Preface, Carnabuci explains his approach, which follows that laid out by Tolkien in his essay 'On Translating Beowulf', published in 1940. Tolkien, as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, strongly emphasised the Germanic origin of the poem and argued that it should be translated along this line. This includes using language that sounds archaic or traditional and avoiding any words that have a Latin etymology. He also emphasised the alliterative rhyme scheme of the Old English, which he believed should be followed in the translation.

Carnabuci remains loyal to those three rules and as such his translation is indeed one which reads as archaic. It feels like an old text, one with age-old gravitas, something which I do enjoy. He also chooses to keep the dialogue in what he calls the "King James' Bible English", i.e. verbs ending in '-th' and using 'ye' instead of 'you'. He does have linguistic reasons for this as well, such as the verb endings in Old English for example. He also follows, I believe, Tolkien in disregarding Grendel's Mother as a character. Tolkien, whom I adore, did not know what to do with this female character and therefore glossed over her in all his scholarship. Someone else who didn't like her was Seamus Heaney, who referred to her as a sea hag consistently. Carnabuci similarly uses 'hag' as a translation for most of her descriptions. Scholarship has moved well beyond considering Grendel's Mother this way and so I was a little surprised by Carnabuci's translations of her passages. And, as I have worked with Beowulf extensively, I did of course encounter a few translation choices I either disagreed with or felt were incorrect. In part this is the above mentioned issue around Grendel's Mother. From these passages, which I know quite intimately, the more literal translation issues also stemmed. For example, there was the instance where Carnabuci translated hond missera (Beowulf, l. 1498b) as "a hundred years". Missera, from missere, means 'a period of half a year' (B&T). A hond (or 'hundred') of those therefore means 50 years instead of a 100 years. The reason this is important is that this is in reference to how long Grendel's Mother has reigned over her own hall. Her 50 years of rulership link her directly to King Hrothgar and Beowulf, both of whom also rule their kingdoms for 50 years. This is technically a small thing, but it is relevant nonetheless. In general I enjoyed Carnabuci's translation of Beowulf, but as I have read Tolkien's rather extensively, I didnt discover many new aspects to Carnabuci's, since he follows Tolkien so closely in style and attitude.

The translation's archaic nature definitely has its advantages, because it makes the poem feel weighty and old. It also has its downsides, however, one of which being that the archaic tone can be off-putting to those readers who aren't used to medieval literature. In the end, each translation is an adaptation, a new take on an age-old story. While I didn't love every choice made here, I do love that we continue to engage with this poem.

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.

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.

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.

I've read a lot of translations of Beowulf, but I've never read one with such a pompous, condescending, and elitist introduction as this one. And the translation itself is dull and overly wordy, with an emphasis on finding more obscure words as part of the alliteration. Unless you're a Beowulf completist, you can give this one a pass and go read Heaney or Hadley again.

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.

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.

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

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.