{"id":124,"date":"2017-05-21T17:21:30","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T21:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2019-01-21T17:36:46","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T22:36:46","slug":"from-my-archive-review-of-thomas-meyers-beowulf-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/2017\/05\/from-my-archive-review-of-thomas-meyers-beowulf-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"From my Archive: Review of Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Quick Note: This review was originally published on the now archived blog, The Cohort@Marco<\/a>. Along with Thomas Lecaque and Melissa Rack, I edited this academic blog for graduate students at UTK and elsewhere. We had a good run for a couple of years before folks started graduating and the blog stopped receiving regular updates. This review was one of my favorite pieces from the site, so I thought I’d archive it here as well. Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Meyer\u2019s Beowulf, like the eponymous hero (and the monstrous villain too, I suppose), is an unrelenting force of nature. The deceptively casual choice of \u201cHEY now hear\u201d in place of the ever-puzzling Hw\u00e6t grabbed my attention and didn\u2019t ease up until \u201csong \/ sung \/ sing\/er\u2019s\/ saga \/ ended\u201d nearly eighty pages later. By then, Grendel\u2019s arm had been hung from the rafters of heorot<\/g> (a \u201cvisible token \/ inside gablehorn\u2019s<\/g> curve\u201d), Beowulf had been rewarded for his bravery (\u201c4 gold treasures\u201d), Sigemund<\/g> praised and Finn memorialized, and the warriors found sleep where they could. The poem and the plot take a brief rest before the horror of Grendel\u2019s mother returns \u201calong\u2019s death\u2019s road.\u201d By then an already late night reading had become early morning and I had to give up my reading for the night. Still, like Grendel\u2019s mother the next morning, I had to return to Heorot. It didn\u2019t take me long to realize that there is something dangerously attractive about this Beowulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part Ezra Pound, part vorticist dream, part performance piece, and part bardic showcase, Meyer\u2019s translation constantly pushes the boundaries of  both<\/g> verse and page and incessantly calls out to the reader for intense attention. Realizing that the oral arts of the scop and harp were the lifeblood of Beowulf\u2019s<\/em> original incarnation, Meyer takes the opposite approach, attempting to do for the reader with typesetting and mise-en-page what the sonorous bard could do for the listener. The moment of Grendel\u2019s fateful encounter with Beowulf showcases Meyer\u2019s approach. I include here the two-page spread from the ebook version of the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Thomas Meyer, Beowulf,<\/em> 88-89<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Meyer, through line breaks and justifications, enforces a kind of Wachowskian bullet-time effect on Grendel\u2019s first attack. Each brutal step of Grendel\u2019s assault is felt by the reader\u2013\u201dchunk by chuck,\u201d bite by bite\u2013until the pain hits and the pace becomes frenetic. A colleague of mine noticed an echo of John Gardner here and our disjointed glimpse into Grendel\u2019s mind and his internal narration certainly recalls Gardner\u2019s roughly contemporaneous exploration of the poem (Meyer first completed this translation in 1972, while Grendel was released in 1971). It\u2019s the glimpse into the fractured mind of the monster that transforms an already unsettling battle-scene into something else: an actual nightmare come to life and violently overthrown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Thomas Meyer, Beowulf,<\/em> 124<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Yet Meyer\u2019s translation is not entirely dependent on visceral impact, there is singular beauty here too. Hrothgar\u2019s description of the fiery mere where Grendel\u2019s mother makes her home is rightfully considered to be one of the more poetic moments within the entire epic. Meyer goes minimalist here, allowing each of these short descriptive phrases the space to create vivid word-pictures of the haunted mere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite Meyer\u2019s claims in the backmatter interview that he is not a real translator, he offers an approach to the poem that successfully recreates the impact and overall experience of the poem. As Roy Liuzza argues in his back-cover review, \u201cevery line feels honestly rooted in the original text, the echo of a generous, open-hearted, and lovingly close reading of the poem.\u201d Meyer\u2019s transformation of Beowulf<\/em> finds the soul of each caesura\u2019d<\/g> line in the original and distills it into an uncanny reading experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a lot to like in both this poem and the impressive editorial work by David Hadbawnik, whose preface to the poem and interview with the poet are both fantastic reads.The fantastic introduction by Daniel C. Remein also adds so much to the edition. I\u2019ve been hooked on this book since it\u2019s release near the end of August, and I can\u2019t recommend it enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I go, however, I have to say a few things about the amazing work by Eileen Joy (a UT PhD<\/g>!) and punctum Books in publishing this edition. Punctum, an open-access publisher focused on bizzarro<\/g>-awesome bits of scholarship like this, gives away a free ebook with each of their publications, allows for print-on-demand, and generally goes out of their way to make book-buying and reading a fantastic experience. Everything about this edition from the cover and internal artwork to the all-important type-setting is beautifully and professionally done, and they deserve some serious accolades for re-inventing the way scholarly presses should work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quick Note: This review was originally published on the now archived blog, The Cohort@Marco. Along with Thomas Lecaque and Melissa Rack, I edited this academic blog for graduate students at UTK and elsewhere. We had a good run for a couple of years before folks started graduating and the blog stopped receiving regular updates. This review was one of my favorite pieces from the site, so I thought I’d archive it … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,28,7,29,30,27],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-beowulf","tag-cohortmarco","tag-old-english","tag-oldwriting","tag-poetry","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scottbevill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}