19 November 2021. Beowulf | Futures
Beowulf isn’t just a story about male violence. Stepping towards the future at the Smithsonian.
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#1: Beowulf isn’t just a story about male violence
I learned a few months ago that one of the markers of a translation of Beowulf is how it handles the very first word in the original: Hwaet. Hwaet is a kind of throat-clearing noise, one of those expressions which doesn’t mean much of itself but indicates to the company that they need to shut up and listen.
Seamus Heaney’s highly regarded translation, for example, starts: ‘So.’
I learned this, by the way, from an edition of the Backlisted podcast on Beowulf, which was a pleasure throughout.
They must have recorded it just after Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation appeared, at least in the US, because they also referenced her version of Hwaet. She translates it as ‘Bro.’
Headley is signalling that she has a different view of Beowulf from the many male translators who have preceded her. In this feminist reading, she wants to rescue the reputation of Grendel’s mother, the sea monster, from a series of misogynist translations, as she argues persuasively in the introduction to her translation. I’ll come back to this later.
Anyway, this is by way of a lead-in to a review of the book in the New Statesman (metered paywall) by Erica Wagner, who argues that Headley’s translation brings the text right into the present moment.
Beowulf runs to 3,000 lines, and was written down in Old English at some time in the 10th or 11th century. Astonishingly fragments of the manuscript have survived, and are in the British Library. But the story it tells is much older, and is set in Scandinavia:
Beowulf survives in our collective imagination because it is the monster-movie ur-text, in which societies are haunted by demons that might well be of their own making. As Seamus Heaney wrote in his landmark translation, first published in 1999, the story possesses “a mythic potency… it arrives from somewhere beyond the known bourne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose… it passes once more into the beyond”.
In using the word ‘Bro!’ to start the poem, she deals straight away with the fact that it is a story about men and male violence. The first few lines spell it out:
Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings! In the old days,/everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only/stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for/hungry times.
'Everyone knew what men were...” As Wagner says, it’s not a literal translation. And just to give a sense of this, contrast it to Heaney’s opening lines:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by/ And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness./ We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
All that testosterone is contrasted with Grendel’s mother, who has been the victim of some misogyny down the years:
In her introduction Headley delves into her translation of the descriptor for Grendel’s mother, which is “aglæcwif”. Heaney gives us “monstrous hell-bride”; Headley points out that this word is the feminine form of “aglaeca”, which can mean a hero... As Headley dryly observes: “My own experiences as a woman tell me it’s very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself.”
Of course, all this calls up the usual questions about what a text is. The text we have of Beowulf is a version in a moment when someone unknown tried to capture what they knew of a poem that had come down through an oral tradition, perhaps through centuries. In other words, it was designed to withstand some interpretative flourishes.
As Wagner concludes:
For if a reader asks what right Headley has to play fast and loose with a canonical work of literature, better to recall Bringhurst, and be reminded that there is no need to consider it a “text” at all. It is a record of what was, once, an oral performance, a mutable composition, altering at every telling, its storyteller adapting himself – perhaps herself – to audience, circumstance and mood. To politics, to the arguments of each new day. Who gets to tell the story? We must never stop asking ourselves this question; it is an especially urgent one now.
#2: Stepping towards the future at the Smithsonian
This weekend sees the opening of ‘Futures’ at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries building on the Mall in Washington DC. It marks the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary.
Judging from the website and some of the previews, it’s a big deal. I’m going to give a flavour of it from some of the Washington Post coverage.
Artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain and her installers removed a large glass aquarium from its crate and gingerly placed it on the sun-dappled floor of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. They then placed it on the metal unit that already held two white washing machines. It was “plumbing day” for the project. Brain and her team connected the washers to the containers — including the large one for the plants that will purify the water used to do a few loads of laundry each day.
(There’s more on Tega Brain’s Coin Operated Wetland project in a piece by Peter Curry on Just Two Things back in June).
But it’s not all about sustainable futures—this is America, after all. There’s a hyperloop installation nearby.
All the same, the idea is to provoke:
“It’s not going to feel like a traditional Smithsonian exhibition,” said Rachel Goslins, director of the Arts and Industries Building and the creative force behind the show. “Normally you go to a museum, and they take an idea and then they really explore it. This is sort of a jumble of ideas and values and provocations. Everything is the tip of the iceberg of an idea.”
The building itself, which has been part of the Smithsonian portfolio since 1881, sounds like a curator’s nightmare. “Exhibits cannot be attached to the walls, floors or ceiling”, and data and power systems had to built specially for the exhibition. There’s no loading dock. Hence the approach of a series of installations.
In doing so the curators seem to have been influenced by the idea that we can’t know the future, but we can all have images of it. At least, that’s what I detect in this quote in the Washington Post article from Brad MacDonald, the director of creative media at the Arts and Industries Building:
“The challenge and beauty of it is there are answers we can’t provide, and curatorially that’s a relief. We can’t tell you what the future will be, so we don’t have to,” he said. “All of the objects are opportunities for people to reflect on what is important to them. I see it as a mirror. The most valuable object is the visitor.”
“Cosmic Listening” by artist Stacey Robinson presents an Afrofuturist vision for the future. The young woman’s technology is focused on flight, leaving a place of unrest to journey to a future world. From the Smithsonian exhibition website.
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