RaveHyperallergicMaria Dahvana Headley’s breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich Beowulf: A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh air blowing through the old tale’s stuffy mead-hall atmosphere ... Headley doesn’t attempt to reproduce the verse form. She makes ample use of alliteration (without necessarily tying it to stressed syllables, as the original does), and she sprinkles her verses with rhyme, knitting them together like a freestyle rapper ... Headley is as much in love with language as was the poet she translates — or \'adapts,\' some would say, though aside from matters of diction (and occasional judgmental interpolations) her version stays remarkably close to the details of the original text ... Headley studs her version with slang, with obscenities, with the most up-to-date argot ... Headley has quite deliberately recast her distant and alien original to reflect contemporary concerns, taking license in the fact that she is neither an academic medievalist nor an \'accredited\' poet; she’s an author of fantasy fiction.
Geoffrey Hill
PositiveHyperallergicThere’s no plan to the book. Just as Hill doesn’t really know when he’s going to end, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s going to write about next. Memories of trips—to Cornwall, the United States, India—pop up. Books fall randomly into his hands, and prompt long sections ... More interesting are the moments when The Book of Baruch tries to define precisely what poetry is, which makes a riveting little catalogue in itself ... Despite Hill’s flagellatory self-recrimination...at times there’s a sense that he’s delivering his final testament as standup comedy ... The jokes, however, don’t mask the underlying melancholy, familiar to those who’ve followed Hill’s work over the years. The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin isn’t easy going for the casual reader, peppered as it is with unfamiliar proper names and allusions ... one detects a trace of self-doubt in this protestations, a fear that his allusiveness may be no more than an armor against oblivion[.]
