Translating for a World on Fire

Welcome everybody. Um, I'm Susan Bernofsky. I'm the director of Literary Translation at Columbia in the Columbia University School of the Arts, and we're very delighted to be presenting one of the finale events for the Translating the Future conference, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Penn's path-breaking World of Translation conference, the first international conference of literary translation held in the U.S. So, we're marking a big milestone here.

This conference was organized by Esther Allen and Allison Mark and Powell. The conference is a co-production with the Penn Translation Committee, the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. There'll be two more finale finale events coming up tomorrow and Friday. One featuring Natalie Diaz, Marilyn Nelson, and Ken Liu. That'll be 7 p.m. on Thursday. And one featuring a dozen translators into various languages of Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk. And that will be Friday at 10 a.m. in the morning time because they're scattered all over the world. Check the CUNY Center for the Humanities website if you'd like information on logging on to those other events. Columbia folks, you can get there easily from the webpage where you registered for tonight's event. There's a link that will take you to the conference website. I'd also like to give special thanks to John McShane, Ali Jahangir, and Karis Wilson at the School of the Arts Writing Program Office at Columbia, as well as the communication staff who are helping make this event possible.

Now, I'm going to introduce our two very, very exciting guests that I am thrilled to have the chance to talk to live here. This is an event that I first started dreaming about getting to do a year ago, and then it seemed like it wasn't going to happen, and now here we are. Um, so first, Maria Dahvana Headley. She's a number one New York Times best-selling author of the novels *Magonia*, *Aerie*, *Queen of Kings*, and most recently, *The Mere Wife*, a retelling of *Beowulf* set in the suburbs and featuring a military veteran as Grendel's mother. She's also the author of the memoir *The Year of Yes*. And you should most definitely be following her on Instagram and Twitter.

Our second guest is Emily Wilson. A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, she's the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Classics and Literature. She's published translations of Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer, and has written a biography of Seneca and other scholarly works. Her translation of *The Odyssey* is rightly quite celebrated, and she's at work on an *Iliad* to follow it up with, which I think we'll be hearing something about tonight. And I think she has an *Oedipus Tyrannos* forthcoming as well, if I'm not mistaken. You should definitely also be following her on Twitter at @emilyr.c.wilson.

So, I asked each of our guests to start off, in good Translating the Future conference tradition, by briefly telling us the story of how they came to translation. Then, they've each brought a brief passage from their work to share with us. Um, and they've each brought a passage that they will talk about the details of the translation that we can ask them questions about. I will have a whole bunch more questions, um, probably more than than I will get to ask. Um, but I understand that this is a public event, and it's nice to share. Um, so I will also save time for others to ask questions as well. You'll notice in the bottom of the Zoom window here, I said envelope almost, um, but window, you have an option to submit questions through the Q&A function, and those questions will be, at least some of them, I hope all of them, who knows, will be read out and responded to. You can submit questions at any time. So, let's get started. Um, Maria, would you start us off telling us about your translation trajectory and then reading a bit for us?

Yeah. Um, I, I have done all kinds of work in my writing career. I've been a playwright. I was a poet at the very beginning, and then I became a novelist. And about, probably about 10 years ago, I started getting an idea about *Beowulf*, which was had to do with the fact that I didn't like *Beowulf*. It came from feeling like I didn't understand why it was a canonical text, and I didn't, I was having a problem, which I consistently have had throughout my life and continue to have, about why canonical texts are are the ones that are chosen. I always think the canon should be vigorously broadened. And, um, I got interested in *Beowulf*. I was thinking, I'll set it in suburbia. I'll write a novel about suburban walls and the way we create boundaries. Um, and so I did. I wrote *The Mere Wife*. And and thought I was done with *Beowulf*. And then I was doing a reading from it, and someone came in and, uh, into my Q&A and asked me when my translation was coming out. And I was like, I'm not going to translate it. I don't have the chops to do that. I'm a novelist. And they said, well, it sounds like I've been listening to you talk about *Beowulf* obsessively for an hour or more, and you sound like you do. And I thought about it for a little while. And I've had this idea about *Beowulf* as kind of a bro story, as has been talked about quite a bit since it came out. I, I thought of that as as a sort of bragging contest between men, um, and a tale-telling in in that kind of mode that we still have today, and I think we've always had it, a kind of form of masculine storytelling. And so I just asked my editor what he saw, and he said, okay, you try it. Okay. And I sold it to him, which is, I know, like a fairy godmother kind of experience. That's not how it usually goes. But I got, it was because I'd already written it as a novel, and I sort of went in the back door of turning it up, ending up translating the text after I had already adapted it into something completely quite different from the translation that I ended up doing. It's a very happy story. It's it's like it's a blessed story. And I, I know it is like it's a story of like, oh, I'll just play with that toy, and that toy, look at all the toys that I get to play with. And it's, uh, I feel really grateful. I mean, I know a lot of, a lot of people have done had very different paths towards translating something like this and done a lot of scholarly work and done a lot of of work that is in a different category than my work. My work is mostly research and imagination and frenzy and kind of never sleeping. But it's a different, it's a different kind of thing. And, uh, I, I got lucky to have have people who believe that I could bring something to this long-standing, this old text that many, many people have done beautiful work on over the years, both scholarly and translation work. So, it's, I, I, yeah, I feel really lucky. It's a, it's a happy, lucky story to end up with this book in my hands. And I should read a little bit from the book. Is that what we're going to do? Please. That's the part. Okay. I'm just going to read you the tiniest little piece, and I just picked it so hopefully I can get it out of my mouth. It's, I, I screwed myself completely. I felt this thing with tongue twisters, and it's all alliteration and it rhymes. And I, I did all of the most difficult things if one wants to be able to read this aloud. And here they are in front of me now. I'm paying the price. So this is a little chunk right before Beowulf goes in to fight Grendel's mother.

The company stared as water boiled with blood and bones. A war horn sounded over and over, but the soldiers sagged and sat down. The mere was full of monsters, too many to mention: serpentine salt dragons, lizards in lethargy lying on stones, the kind of creatures that surfaced, seething in ships' wakes to bear teeth and twist about an oar foil fissures and bring bad omens to sailors. The beasts dove, furious and frightened at the noise, the bugle and battler shouts, the shrillness of seekers in their secret space. Oh, freezing moment.

I should find the same passage and continue the same. Maybe while we wait for Maria to unfreeze, Emily, do you want to, um, tell your translation my translation journey?

Um, so I didn't think I was going to be a translator when I grew up. Um, and, uh, so I came to it. I was, I was interested in translation as a form of reception. I mean, I've been interested in, um, what happens to ancient Greek and Roman texts in later cultures, when later writers read them, reread them, receive them, reinvent them. How do these texts, which are products of a very particular culture, then turn out to mean something very different? If so, Bluetack as read in the 17th century is totally different from Utah writing for Pluto's contemporaries. That kind of thing really interested me as a sort of scholarly question about what happened in the history of translation. How did translation also impact English literature? Um, so that, that question of translation as part of reception was central to my sort of thinking about the classical tradition for years and years and years before I sort of thought I could do, I could actually be part of this. I could be an active part of the tradition. So, um, I first got into it when somebody asked me to do it. So, in a way, this is similar to Maria. Um, I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been asked. I think, um, my first book, um, had two chapters about Seneca, which included some translations and little bits of Seneca's tragedies. I spent a huge amount of time doing those because I thought translation matters. I'm going to try and do my best, even if it's only five lines. And then somebody asked me to, um, try have a go at doing some new translations because one of those series, the Oxford World Classics, was looking for a re-translation of these kind of Michael plays. And I did it, and I thought, this is super fun. It means that you get to let your inner writer out in a way that you don't when you're being the academic. I mean, it's a very different kind of writing from literary criticism or scholarly prose. And I just really love that it gives you this different way of thinking about, um, writing and about texts and different ways of engaging. And a different kind of pedagogy too. I mean, there's a kind of pedagogy that comes with telling students in a classroom or inviting students to think about texts. And the different kind of pedagogy that comes with translating it and voicing it for them. Um, so then, um, I've done a bunch of other translations. The Odyssey came about specifically because I was working on the Norton Anthologies of World Literature and Western Literature, and they were looking for a new translation of the Odyssey. And I thought, and I didn't think that should be me. Um, but then the editor really wanted me to have a go at it. And I thought, well, I'm not even sure if this is even needed. And then I spent some time just thinking about my own classroom experience teaching the Odyssey and looking at other translations. And that made me realize, actually, I should do this because I don't think the ones that are out there didn't seem to me to, um, to tell a version of the Odyssey that was what I wanted to be able to teach to students or to the general public either. But I was thinking a lot about the classroom experience. So maybe that's enough for now.

That's great. You read us a bit. And Maria, we'll come back to you too. Okay. I'm glad to see you talking. We're tag-teaming here. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I was gonna, um, I, this is sort of last minute. I'm gonna read the first video that I did from the Odyssey, which was from, I started not at the beginning, but with book nine, because I think book nine, where Odysseus encounters the Cyclops, seemed to me a place where the Zorba's sense of Odysseus as unreliable narrator, there are multiple different perspectives in the text, which can get oversimplified in both, um, teaching and in translation. So I want to make sure that there's more than one voice. It's not just Odysseus's voice. And so this is Odysseus, um, getting the Cyclops Polyphemus drunk so that he can take advantage of him.

He took and drunk for sweet delicious wine. He loved it and demanded more. "Another now, now tell me your name so I can give you a present as my guest, one you will like. My people do have wine. Great clusters grow from our rich earth, fed well by rain from Zeus. But this is nectar, god food." So I gave him another cup of wine, and then two more. He drank them all unwisely. With the wine gone to his head, I told him, "Or politeness, Cyclops, you asked my name. I will reveal it. Then you must give the gift you promised me of hospitality. My name is No Man. My family and friends all call me No Man." He answered with no pity in his heart, "I will eat No Man last. First, I will eat the other men. That is my gift to you." Then he collapsed, fell on his back, and lay there, his massive neck askew. All-conquering sleep took him in drunken heaviness. He spewed wine from his throat and chunks of human flesh. And then I drove the spear into the embers to heat it up. And told my men, "Be brave. I wanted none of them to shrink in fear." The fire soon seized the olive spear, green though it was, and terribly it glowed. I quickly snatched it from the fire. My crew stood firm. Some god was breathing courage in us. They took the coat, the olive spirits tipped all sharp, and shoved it in his eye. I leaned on top and twisted it. As when a man drills wood for shipbuilding, below the workers spin the drilled straps stretched out from either end, so round and round it goes. And so we whirled the fire-sharp weapon in his eye. His blood poured out around the stake, and blazing fire sizzled his lids and brows and fried the roots. As when a blacksmith dips an axe or adds to temperate ice-cold water, loudly it shrieks. From this the iron takes its power. So did his eyeball crackle on the spear. Horribly, then he howled. The rocks resounded, and we shrunk back in fear. He took the spear out of his eye, all soaked with flushing blood. Desperately, with both hands, he held it from him and shouted to the Cyclopes who lived in caves high up on windy cliffs. Around they heard and came from every side and stood near the cave and called out, "Polyphemus, what is the matter? Are you badly hurt? Why are you screaming through the holy night and keeping us awake? Is someone stealing your herds or trying to kill you by some trick of force?" Strong Polyphemus from inside replied, "My friends, No Man is killing me by tricks, not force." Their words flew back to him, "No one hurts you. You're all alone. Great Zeus has made you sick. No help for that. Pray to your father, mighty Lord Poseidon." Then off they went, and I laughed to myself, and how my name, the No Man maneuver, tripped him.

That's very gory. [Laughter] Oh, you know, I translated a horror story once and discovered how much fun it could be to just to to translate gore. And I'm not proud of enjoying that, exactly. But yes, you seem to. Do you want to come back and and and and read us something? Perhaps not gory? I don't know. It's available. Oh, no, wrong book. [Laughter] But because that inspired me, now I'm switching to a different passage entirely because I, uh, you know, I was already getting tongue-twisted there. I might as well go to this one, which is, um, Beowulf and Unferth. I'll just read a little, like, sequence in which they have a battle. Unferth is like, who are you, warrior, who's come to the court of Hrothgar? Screw you, you don't know anything, and you're bad. And, um, and Beowulf battles with him.

So Unferth says, "Bro, do you happen to be the Beowulf who challenged Breca in the open ocean, insisting you should swim in shark seas for no reason but to prove your petty prowess, boasting that no boat should guard your lives but you should risk them recklessly? I heard no one could convince you to have clarity, that you dove overboard, surfing on stupidity, swearing you knew the currents better than any other, and that you, swoll as the trolls fed on travelers, were superior to any swell. You lolled for seven nights in wintry waters, and in the end, you outswam your full self, skipped to shore unscathed, built though uncertain, and rolled on to stand safely in the land of the Eothenings. From there, he went to his home country where the Brandings adored him, a calm and pleasant place, and returned to his hall, his host, his boyish post was proven. Yes, he bested Beowulf. No matter your other battles, the tales you told, the lines you sold, buddy, at least you lived this time, bro."

Know it. No one's ever lasted a night clasped in Grendel's arms. Beowulf, Hrothgar's son, wasn't phased. Well, actually, buddy, sit down. You're drunk, Unferth. You've run your mouth about Breca and me and our swagger, but let me drop some truth into your tangent. I've been better on the water, deeper in the drink, and stronger in the swim than any man alive. Breca and I were boys together. Our desires were only dares, one upon the other, brother to brother. Maybe you know this story, but hold up. I forgot you've got no brothers left. We declared ourselves adventurers, and so we swam. Swords and hands for safety unsheathed. Father forged. We knew there were sharks. No one here is stupid. He couldn't float freer or swim straighter than I, and I had no urge to leave him or lose the lesser swimmer. I was Breca's lifeguard. I knew my duty. The rains rocked us and storms shook us, and for five nights we floated, warring against winds from the north. The waves like blades, bone cold, until at last we were blown apart. The biting beasts of the bottom, roiling up to ring me, wrestling me to the sea floor. All that held me was my armor, clasped hands made of gold chainmail, game saying waves and wet, the work of ancestors forging my ferocity. It kept me bold enough to fight when a monster dragged me down and gripped me, ripping at my skin. I was pinned, swaddled and swaddled in squalor. Last chance, I took it. I put that monster down. I made it a sleeper, as it left, severed its spine, spiked its skull, and split it into smithereens. My own strength sank that sea monster, and soon I was fighting again, lower than any human sight, outside even the edges of God's light. Dark deeps, hell's creatures in them, swinging my swords beneath the eyes of the world. I would not be eaten nor beaten, no skewered swimmer, eye no drowned dinner for a circle of cold companions gobbling my guts, flooded on my gold. At dawn, I surfaced in a slurry of scales, floating flat, somewhere formerly that there'd been fangs. I'd sacrificed myself to save every subsequent seafarer from deep despair, and the monsters of the dark were gone. The east was gilded with God, and the sea was smooth. I could see the shore, the strong cliffs rising, built of their own bruises. If a man's brave enough, fate when on the fence will often spare him. I'd never brag, but the truth is, my sword slew nine singular scavengers that night. There are no ocean-going stories more awful than mine, no tales of greater terror, no other man so sea-stalked, but I survived. My salvation in my own hands. The waves for me shoreward, attending me, and left me at long last in the land of the Fins. To the end, I wrapped my brain, bro. But Unferth, I can't unpack any similar stories of heroics from you. Let me say it straight: you don't rate, and neither did Breca when it came to battle. The gulf your cattle, and I'm a wolf. [Laughter]

I think those two passages align together in terms of bragging, bragging, and uncertainty. It's like, half this book is trash-talking. Yeah. Which must, you know, you clearly also have had fun with this. And, you know, it's it's fabulous when when the work that you're translating gives you the occasion to, you know, get writerly and in this sort of way, you know, becomes a canvas that you can, you know, trash talk on or paint some gore on or or something like that. Let's look at some some specific passages from from from your work. Emily, do you, do you want to go first? I bring up. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about, I'm doing a like work in progress. So I, um, I'm working on the *Iliad*, and I'm really nowhere near finished because it takes, it takes me a really long time. I go through many, many, um, many, many revisions. No, so I, I just wanted to talk about a couple of passages. These are a couple of passages from book three, um, of the *Iliad*, and just flag a couple of, um, moments of things that I've both been interested by the translation challenge and they've been challenges. And I'm, I'm not, not in every case, sure that I've come up with my final solution to what I'm going to do. Um, so the first passage that you have up on the screen is from the start, from right, right from the start of *Iliad* book three, and this fabulous simile which compares the two armies, the Trojan army and the allied allies, and the, um, Greeks. Are you seeing the right, are you seeing the right page, Emily?

I'm seeing, yes, *Iliad* three at the top with a chunk of Greek and then "when all the men." Is that right? I'm the only one who can't see it, apparently. But it is the one you wanted to show. Yes, it's fine. I mean, if everyone else can see it, then it's just fine. Yes. Oh, yes. Okay. Here we go. And here's that, here's that one. Yes. So one of the issues in this, I'm not going to go through every word because of course, one could go through every word. And I know that we don't have five hours to get to do it. Um, but I swear to flag one of the big questions in this passage for me was what to do about the noise the Trojans are making. They're making a noise which in Greek is a *klangē*, which is a word that's applied to, um, sharp, shrill sounds. It's applied to, um, inanimate objects like a bow can can make this loud noise, um, or a snake could make it, or a pig, or other animals can make it. These, so, but these warriors are making this shrill, sharp noise, and the birds are also making the same shrill, sharp noise. So I, I really wrestle that, I'm still wrestling with what word is there in English that applies both to a shrill, sharp noise that queens could make and that warriors could make. Um, and also what kind of noise is it? There's an ambiguity in the simile. The cranes are both running away, they're running away from the terrible storms, and they're also bringing, they're also aggressive, they're bringing damage to a human population. So it's both a cry of terror and a cry of aggression, or it could, it could go either way. And if, initially, I had shouts, because I wanted to make, make it clear that the Trojans, um, that they're not weak, and they, the birds are also not weak, and that there's something loud and scary about them. But then I also feel that's not high enough. It's not high-pitched enough, and not screechy enough. And I wanted also just to be able to be thinking about inhabiting an English where men can scream, and it would be good if the English reader might have some surprise about, are these brave warriors screeching and screaming all the time? Yes, they are. And they can be, um, using language that we might think of as gendered as female, hysterical, and that might be okay. So right now, I have screaming, um, which I think doesn't get you all the way there about how high-pitched does it have to be? Could it be an animate? I think a bow can scream, but it's a little odd. So I'm working on just thinking about, are there any other possibilities with that? I'm still thinking about this passage. And then the other, other thing I want to want to flag, just in this passage, before talking about the other one, is, um, the word aggression. It seems to me that one of the big problems that I'm having about, um, translating the *Iliad* is thinking about the language of motivation and psychology. And then specifically, if it's related to the theme that we have of radical and feminist translation, how explicit can I be that this is about, um, male aggression? And aggression, I think, is very coded as male. And what's happening in this war is these guys are way too aggressive. Um, and in the Greek, there are these terms which I think are very hard to translate because they're, they're from a culture where there isn't the same history of psychoanalysis that we have. We've, there's no sort of science, science language of how do you think about, um, toxic impulses, or how do you think about the aggressive drive? I'm using aggression, and I actually kind of like it. I like that there's not a, I don't necessarily want to hold back from thinking the narrator can recognize these guys are being borderline too aggressive most of the time. But I'm also conscious that it's a mock choice to use a word like aggression when you're translating a poem from a period as old as this, where there isn't the same understanding of, um, what drives people to slaughter each other. So maybe I'll talk just a tiny bit about the next passage, and then I'm looking forward to hearing Maria talk about her passage too.

This is the same passage again, Susan. Um, I don't, I don't have another one. Too much time with going through everything. I don't have, I don't have another one. Oh, okay. So I, I had had sent another one. The other one, maybe I was without it. Let's see if it, that's good. It's all good. Let's move on to Maria's passage. Okay. So, sorry. Okay. I'll do one of mine too. That's good. Okay. What do we have? Okay. So this passage is, um, also has choices about gender behavior. It's, um, it's Wealhtheow. She is Hrothgar's wife. She is sort of welcoming Beowulf into the hall, and she is supposed to do the sort of ritual, offering him the cup, and telling him, welcome to this kingdom. You have, um, just killed Grendel, is what I think has happened, or maybe how far it is. This, I'm not even sure I, yeah, I think that Grendel has just been killed. Yeah. So, um, so Hrothgar has basically adopted Beowulf. He loves him. He has not asked permission. His wife has too. They have children together, and he's like, just put Beowulf on top. So this is a passage that usually is translated. Since you have it on your screen, I won't read you what I did with it, but I'll read you what a little bit of what Sheamus Heaney did with this passage. And this is, uh, the Wealhtheow character. I think is always, is frequently a character who is just kind of shuffled aside. She's, she's kind of like the boring wife, which is to me impossible. That's just not a boring character. I mean, *The Mere Wife* is all about that. Um, but this is what he says with this passage. He says, "Applause filled the hall. Then Wealhtheow pronounced in the presence of the company: 'Take delight in this torque, dear Beowulf, wear it for luck, and wear also this mail from our people's armory. May you prosper in them, be acclaimed for strength, for kindly guidance to these two boys, and your bounty will be sure. You have won renown. You are known to all men, far and near, now and forever.'" And that's the beginning of how he does it, um, which is pretty straightforward. It's like, you're a good boy, which I think is how Beowulf feels about himself through most of the poem. But when I read this passage, I thought that there is so much subtext possible here in a woman saying, come on, welcome in. I have power here. You don't understand the entirety of what I could do to you if you [expletive] me over. So she is essentially massively passive-aggressive. In my translation, she is threatening him. She's saying, every man in this, in this hall is mine. And if you don't do what I say, you know, if you do, you're going to get treats, you're going to get gold, you'll get, you'll get need, you'll have fun. If you don't, you're going to be murdered in your sleep. And I think I've never seen another translation where that's the case. But I feel like it's very appropriate with what the poem is about. The poem is about how do you get power? You get it however you can get it. And the men often get it by doing the kind of good kingly deeds. The women have to get it by going around through the back door. With the exception of Grendel's mother, who actually does go around through the back door in the next passage after this. She comes in and takes a man and yanks it out and runs. And, uh, so I think all of the women are so entwined with each other that in this translation, I viewed them as almost a progression. We get stories about women losing everything. We get, we get like an interstitial story that's the Finnsburg battle, in which we, we are seeing from the point of view of, um, Hildeburh, who is loses her son and her brother in the battle, and doesn't get vengeance. Like, vengeance happens, but she's part of the cargo. She, she gets taken home on the backs of the guys who get the vengeance. So I was interested here in in watching a woman who is the good girl, and is like in the position of like peace weaver power. But peace weaver is a really powerful position. And I was interested in showing how powerful that position is in the culture that we're in. And also in kind of pointing at, because I'm interested in our time as well, and the things that have endured, in using using choices of words and choices of sort of subtext that we as 2020, um, English speakers know as the subtext of certain kinds of line, um, that we could get a sense of some power under the surface, which I think is again, what this poem is often about. There's a whole kingdom under the water, you know? I mean, it's an interesting, there's so many interesting mirror images throughout the poem, and I think this is one of them. You know, while you have this passage up, um, where you've got the golden collar, which is torque. So you use the word torque sometimes in the translation, and sometimes you use modern equivalents. Yeah. Did you think about using, you know, doing it all the old, you know, way?

I did. I went, when, yeah, it went back and forth throughout. I changed it about a billion times. Torque is, yes, the old word, and not everyone knows what that means, obviously, in our time. But it's from, you just now, okay. Well, I'm interested in the ways in which that word suggests being harnessed. And specifically, in this section, we have a lot of talk about armor, we have a lot of talk about bridles, specifically. And there's ultimately a necklace that is given that Beowulf gets from Wealhtheow, I think, and then gives to, um, Hygelac's queen, is referred to essentially as a harness. So, so I'm interested in that. I mean, when you're, when you're reading Tolkien, is anyone, does, when you're dealing with *Beowulf*, Tolkien has a lot of interest in in rings, obviously. But I was interested in the ways that a ring could be depicted in this culture, which is not necessarily as a ring on your finger, but as a ring around your neck, which is, um, something that happens to a lot of characters in this poem. Suddenly they are owned. And that's, uh, I think that's, yeah, again, I think every bit thing about this poem is interesting. I'm, I'm just a horrible, horrible nerd of this at this point, and so I could talk for nine hours about every instance of being being suddenly someone's part of someone's armory, and yet a person in this poem. And it interests, it's, it's all over it. And, uh, yeah, I like the idea that someone is suddenly a person, suddenly becomes a horse, or becomes a warhorse unexpectedly. Okay. Should I, should I take this down?

Yeah, that's good. And I cannot, I can do just do that one. Is fine. So, so ring-giver is one that comes up a lot. Also, um, ring-giver as a concept, as a, as a king. Another concept that I learned. So, you know, there's a, I think it's really phenomenal how many of the old terms you put in and made comprehensible without glossing them. Nothing is lost. That must have also been a decision to not say, I'm going to explain everything to you. Instead, you know, you use these terms in context, and it's the reader's job to follow, or the reader's read enough toolkit, or whatever, that they're just going to follow. But I think it's also a pleasure of of poetry like this. It's repetitive, so you can use the original term, and then you can use five other terms from throughout the history of the English language to make us understand what that term means, because we, uh, I think there are, Emily and I have even talked about this in terms of of *The Odyssey*. There are call-out words. There are things like, in Emily's work, there's there are things like "wine-dark sea," and you get a sense of, I know what it is, and then you can diverge from it as a translator and give maybe a broader picture than, or not, or just keep going. Here's the chorus, here's the chorus. It's wine-dark sea, or ring-giver, or, and in, in the case of this, I, I often use dream-giver to suggest, um, almost a marital relationship with one's warriors and with one's, one's dudes, because I think that bro culture is all about that. But, but I, I got to use it a lot of different ways. It's a privilege of an epic poem. You get a lot of chances. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, one could talk about compound words also, you know, in both of your, in both of your translations. You know, I mean, I translate from German, so I am confronted with compound nouns that don't sit comfortably in English all the time. Yeah. I mean, do you, do you have strategies? Have you developed strategies that work for you, deciding when to keep them, when to break them? I mean, both of you. Yeah.

I don't feel like I have a thing I do every time, and I actually think that it feels better not to do the same thing every time. Maybe as, as Maria's saying, compound words and formulae come in this opportunity where I want, some of the time, I mean, I want there to be enough repetition and enough compound words to give the reader a feel of this is the kind of text that could have "wine-dark sea" and "horse lords" in it, and those could be spelled as all one word. But I'm not necessarily going to do the exact same number as the original because that might just feel too much within the context. And so sometimes I either use an adjective or I use a relative clause, I mean, the person who blah blah blah, or they, I mean, I guess in the, in the passage I just read, the men who, who, I can't remember what I do, the men who are trained as horsemen. And of course, in the original, that's a single word. But I think the horse-training man, you can't make it all one word in English without making it sound really weird. And if you just have hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, that also doesn't necessarily have the same oomph that the original has. So if you want to both translate the oomph and translate the, um, this is about these people are particularly skilled in the realm of horse training, then you might need sometimes to break it down and to use more words, but to make sure that it's clear that you actually have an image in your mind when you read the words.

Yeah. Do you have strategies, Maria? Similar?

Actually, I, I love the kennings that are in the Old English. It's there's so much cool [expletive] that you would cut, you know, like descriptions of sunrises and teeth of dawn and, I mean, all kinds of beautiful things that are so really so precise to the moment in which this text was written, but also, um, suggest the entirety of mythology and folklore. Like we always have a sort of sense of lush, strange, just shorthand for lush description is throughout everything. So, so I invented a lot of kennings because I couldn't get whatever the original kenning was. And often there are many repetitions. There are things that you, you see over and over again, and they're not that thrilling if you see them too many times. So I, so I played with them. I, I worked them into the into the meter of whatever I was doing, or, um, changed them to suggest, depending on the moment in the poem we were in, I changed them completely sometimes. Um, but I love them. I love that they give you that sense. And, and when you're translating something like this into contemporary English, into colloquial English, you still want to have the sense that it existed in the time it came from. And so I think the kennings really give you that sense, as does, in my case, the alliteration, which I used a lot of. Yeah. Um, but, but I wanted that juicy sense of this is a poem. This is not actually going to be the kind of thing that you would just, you know, like, put your phone up and record. Like, you're not, you're not hearing someone just talking. You're hearing someone talking poetically. And the kennings are part of that, and compound words are part of that. So I wanted to use them, and, and I pretty much used something like it whenever, whenever it showed up, because I just think they're fun.

Yeah. In a sense, if you, if you did that every single one the same way, you'd wind up translating the language rather than the work. I mean, not the, the language as in German as a language, in French as a language, which you know, right. Yes. I mean, another one that I'm thinking about a lot right now is, um, in the various different ways that people die in the *Iliad*. I mean, I played around a lot with the rosy-fingered Dawn, and the artist, which of course, and the metaphor is so great, and I love it so much, and I want the reader to notice it every time, and not just think that's just part of the background. But that you can actually see the dawn, and just the way that, um, people's lives always escape the barrier of their teeth, which is such a fantastic image. And then the imagery of, um, the limbs are released, as if this is still not tying the body together, and then once you're dead, the knot is released. And so I'm playing around with how do I get those images to feel like they hit you every time, that you actually care about each death, which I think it comes with there has to be a sense that, yes, death is formulaic because it keeps on happening, and there are these phrases or images that keep coming up, but they might feel then, they might be phrased in a powerful enough way, in a different enough way, that you care about everyone. When I was reading *Beowulf* just now, I noticed the word "imposing" used for the king, and that word stuck out to me because I had just had used that word myself to translate from the German, something that in the original was, which, you know, literally means sublime, but it was being used to describe some, you know, sort of tall, intelligent young men who, you know, were striking in their height and intelligence. And sublime isn't isn't quite right. And I used the word imposing. But thinking about, you know, is it my imagination, or is English weak in synonyms for this? Because, you know, words like awesome and sublime have been trivialized in English, and so we don't, you know, it's hard to use words like that unironically. I find. And yet, you know, I think these are the kinds of words that, you know, you both of you also need for these works. Do you, do you run into that problem with English having cheapened certain words through overuse?

I definitely do. I feel like I'm both dreadful and terrible. I mean, that I have a dreadful day very often. All right, I had, and that's not how I want terrible to be used. But then I also, I might need the word terrible multiple times because maybe some warrior is terrible and is coming out another warrior with a terrible spear. But then what else do I use? There's just a very limited number of, um, sort of superlative, superlative big, or superlative, um, super scary, that doesn't sound in a way, um, ironic, or potentially could be used for a cup of coffee as well as something that's genuinely scary. Um, so I definitely struggle with that a lot.

Yeah, the word the word terror seems to have vanished from terrible and awesome too. I mean, I wish there was a way to use awesome, but you can't actually use. You can use it if you translate *Beowulf* like I did. I, part of the reason I did it this way was that I wanted to be able to use some of those words in both their original sense and in their colloquial sense, which was, and because of it being, because of framing it the way I framed it, is kind of a, a story of superlatives, of like hyperbole, and people consistently going, oh, it was so amazing, it was so awesome. Um, I got to, I got to use them that way in some cases, which was pleasing. But I, but I agree, there, like, I, I had to go through and do a purge of things like glittering, because the whole poem is about gold, and all it wants to do is glitter, and I had to be, I had to unglitter my glitter. And yes, I've done that too. Yeah, still have a bunch of glitter. Or you could land in a tube. Yeah. And a lot of the words are competitive rather than superlative. At this point in our history, we have words like, instead of awesome, it's intimidating. We, we have, we have feelings of like capitalist difficulty and like workplace trouble that have kind of the meanings have displaced, um, holiness and god-like behavior. And now we have like, my boss. Which also, I used, I, when we're talking about God, sometimes I refer to him in this version as the Big Boss. And, and that's why, because I thought, well, if I'm gonna go here, I might as well just go all the way there and, and, and try to use as much of the, uh, slang of centuries as I could, as I could, and to to describe the same feeling of like being cowed by somebody who's far superior to you, and then trying to prove, as often happens in *Beowulf*, to prove your status to somebody who is way above you, and you have to prove to them that you're good enough to save them, which is such a weird thing to have to prove. Yeah.

Yeah. We were talking, speaking of, speaking of, you know, terror and the words for them, we were talking before about, you know, this before I, before the event went live, I mean, um, you know, this being a frightening time and a lot to be scared about. The news came in today that the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor will not be charged in her killing. One of them may be charged for something else, we'll see. Um, and both of these works that that we're talking about, the *Iliad* and *Beowulf*, have a lot of violence in them, and have a lot of, you know, male violence, as, as, as you, I think both of you mentioned in passing when you were reading. And, you know, you get a lot of questions about translating as women, this kind of work. One of the questions that that didn't get to be asked.

At your excellent center for fiction event last night, uh, last week, that I, that I looked at, was: "How do feminism and anti-racism intersect in your work?" And given this time, you know, where do you see your works on these, on these very old stories fitting in, fitting into our trying to make sense of our world now?

Well, I wanted to talk about last week. We had this great conversation, and we got a question about a similar thing. It was a question about, "How do I inspire my students to feel like they can take ownership of these texts, these classic texts that are so masculine, mostly?" And, uh, "How can I make them feel like they can, those texts belong to them?" And I think this, this relates to it. What I regretted, and I didn't say it, I thought about it. I thought, "They belong to us." Look at us. We're all here. But the three of us talking last week, we're all white women in our 40s who, and, and clearly we look like a uniform group of people who now are the translators. And, and to me, like, the idea of broadening the field is, is a much wider notion, bringing people from all kinds of backgrounds, from, from the entirety of the world, rather than just whiteness.

Um, and these texts often deal, in their pre-race, usually, they're not, they don't have the same concept of race that we have at this moment in 2020. But they do have violence against the other throughout them. And, and, you know, heroic men who, almost, almost always heroic men who don't have to do so much good to be heroic. And I think that we, we still continue to deal with the same things. There's so much room for people who have been at all ends in that spectrum to talk about these texts, and to analyze these texts, and to translate these texts, and adapt them. And that's, that's why they're still around. We, I mean, people have been thinking about these stories for a thousand years in my case, and I'm longer in Emily's case. And these are, these are stories that, that we're constantly grappling with from one, one way or another. We're like underneath the story sometimes. We're, we're the main character of the story. In neither of our cases are we the main character of our stories, or women like us. But like, I think it's so valuable to, to come in from the outside and look at a story like this and say, "What is getting left out? Which, which part of the story?" Because we're still here, looking at the news, like, "Who is getting left out? People of color, women of color, men of color, trans women." And who is getting fridged on the edge? Often those same people.

So the stories of heroes have not only need to be the classic stories of heroics need to be analyzed and considered pretty deeply in terms of the way we built our societies on them. But I think we also need to think a lot about creating new variant, new ways of acknowledging goodness and acknowledging courage that we have really over the centuries, over the millennia, really failed, that we've really failed to give credit and failed to, fail to acknowledge ferocity and bravery in every way we can think of failing to acknowledge it. So, yeah, I don't know if that answered that question, but that's, that's all my thoughts. Those are some of my thoughts.

That was a brilliant answer. I mean, I think that the last few years have made me so much more aware than I used to be, just of the way that, um, I think I, as a classicist, and I think people who engage with medieval and early modern stuff as well, need to be much more explicit about sort of taking on their whole alt-right, um, white supremacist narrative about the canon and sort of being explicit about the Greeks weren't white, and this doesn't belong to us, meaning white people. That it's all so bogus, both ethically and historically. And there needs to be, um, this critical angle about these texts and about, um, who owns them and what do they even mean? And are they actually about how white men were always the best forever? Which I think is actually a really dominant way of reading both Old English texts and ancient Greek texts. And it's really problematic, both just as a way of reading these texts, it's not historically accurate, and it's also horrible as a sort of pedagogy and a politics within today's society. And it just reinforces all these terrible things.

And, and I also, um, I think you're absolutely right, Maria, that, you know, change, revolution doesn't just mean, "Here are some white women going on like, taking up some airwaves." I mean, there really needs to be an expansion of, um, who gets to be authoritative voices within this, this conversation. I mean, I wish that it weren't in another white panel, even though I love you guys. But I think it would be great if there would be a lot more openness and with, and less exclusivity within canonical leadership.

Absolutely, absolutely. I absolutely agree. Thank you. Thank you, um, Maria. And, you know, you have so many different styles going on, and that's part of, you know, this, the style you developed for, for your Beowulf, lots of voices. Um, Ruth Franklin wrote about hip-hop influence clearly in, in the text. You know, did you think about using that language as part of this project of recouping Beowulf for our age?

Yeah, I mean, I thought about specifically again, it's because of it's actually because of the cooperation of, uh, sort of bro culture kind of grabbing up African-American culture ongoingly, ongoingly, ongoingly. I, I decided to use some language like that in the voice of someone who's a bro, um, in the voice of Beowulf, and also in the voice of the narrator who's using that persona to tell the story. I, I wanted to, um, I wanted to use it that way. But I also wanted to go into sort of different forms of poetry that, that have often canonically not been considered poetic, which is of course, [ __ ] um. There are so many, there are so many art forms that, that use poetic language really skillfully and often have been looked down on by the establishment. So I was interested in using rhyme in a way that is, uh, has become, has been less popular. People are fearful of like using end rhyme, sounding like Poe, or sounding like being bad. They're fearful of being bad. And hip-hop uses, uses rhyme in ways like, you know, rhymes that are embedded throughout, and, and alliteration that's embedded throughout, which I think is so cool. And, uh, so I wanted to use it. It also echoes the original. I mean, the original uses alliteration that way. It's, it's very, it's very structured in Old English, but it's, um, but it's very structured in hip-hop too. Like, it's not like it's just coming out of nowhere. It's people who are badass and great at rhyme, and great at alliteration, and great at rhythm. Um, so this was my, you know, my attempt as someone who is very much a curious and passionate observer of lots of different forms of poetry and used a lot of different things here to kind of use a compendium of ways that we thought about poetry in the last thousand years as English speakers, which I, I don't know, I used as much as I could because I wanted to play in the whole language.

I think it really works very well. Either when you were working on that, are there passages that you tried in one style and decided, "Oh no, let's do a different kind of style for that?" You know, where were there different layers in the drafts of, you know, how is there a process to deciding how to do the different lines?

Yeah, I, I will tell you that when I published *Mere Wife*, about three days before the final version of *Mere Wife* was due, so I was like, in, in page proofs, and suddenly I thought, "Oh, I should put in front of each section. I should put a little bit of my translation of Beowulf to like, open the sections." But I hadn't done any translation available at all, and I just had an idea that I could do it. So I had to do the most terrible thing, which was translate little bits from like, throughout, like a little bit about the dragon here, and a little bit about Grendel's mother here, and just grab them, orphaned from their context, without any knowledge of how I was going to translate this poem beyond that. I thought I would start it with "bro." So I had to do a lot of drafts after I had done that crazy thing to myself. I had managed to publish my rough baby draft that I had thumb-typed on my phone because I didn't have time. And I, I published my first urge, and then the voice of the poem came. It was a combination of my first urge and the reality, once I realized that I had to translate 3,000 lines of poetry. Um, the reality of how, of the fact that the voice was different from the voice that I thought it was going to be. The deeper I got into it, the voice, the voice changed. And that the digressions within the poem are their own poems that are related to the contents of everything else, but they're bard singing their own thing. Suddenly, in the middle of a party, and in the middle of a celebration, you'll have, you'll have a whole story in a different style. So, I mean, I had the luxury and glory of having lots of styles, lots of storytellers in the poem. So I got to use lots of styles that way. But I, I definitely went through and recalibrated my understanding of the voice the poem was going to be in, because I, I really thought that I only needed to do feminist things to Grendel's mother when I started. I thought, "Feminist things, I'll bring them. I, I can just do that. It will be easy." And then it became, the rest of the poem became so interesting to me. The discussion of masculinity in the poem became so interesting, in the language that men used to talk about their own failures became interesting to me. So that, so the style changed and changed and changed, and I did about a billion drafts of it, um, always in a frenzy, even up till the last, the, the first line of the poem is different in the galley than it is in the published copy. And that, and it's been quoted differently. And like many publications have have like different versions.

Classic, yeah, yeah. How about you, Emily? I think you drop, I think you do a lot of drafts too.

I do a huge amount of drafts. Yeah. I mean, I, I'm constantly rewriting and tinkering. And I do, I do, um, I usually do a draft by hand. I do a lot of like reading out loud. And I read my drafts out loud. And then I do more and more and more different drafts. And I, whenever I can, I like to try and read out loud to somebody when I think I'm almost there. And then I realize, "No, I don't like it." Once I hear it, when I say, "Once you hear it with somebody listening to it," I realize, "No, I don't like that at all." And I just need to fix it. Um, yeah. And amazing, also, I love Maria's translation so much. I just want to say that. And I also, I'm conscious thinking about the way that you, Maria, and the Beowulf, you really play with different styles of language. And I guess like with my Homeric translations, I'm, I'm trying to be restrained. And I'm trying quite hard not to, like, to go full out towards, um, as much alliteration or craziness as I am sometimes tempted to do. And sometimes what I do in the drafts is sort of reel it back a little bit, because that's not quite what I'm going for. Because I want there to be a sense of, um, I mean, a different type, a different type of validity, folk poetry, which comes, I think, with a kind of clarity. And I'm not going to be showing off and having too much of, "Here's some crazy linguistic taster." Even though I actually think for the Bible, it works so well. But it's not quite what I want to do with the Homer. And I think it also, it's different for different projects for me. I mean, with the Seneca, I really wanted to go, go all out towards, "It's going to be show-off rhetoric" because that seemed like it worked for that text. Whereas with Homer, I don't want to show off too much. And I don't want it to be too much that the narrator was showing off too much. Whereas I think Maria's show-off narrator is perfect for that text. Yeah.

Yeah, this is fabulous. Thank you. I'm going to keep my promise now to, um, share, let other people ask questions. So here's, here's a question from, from a student of the, in the School of the Arts. "How do you balance your writing self or ego with the monumentality of the work? How do you balance feeling worthy or comfortable within someone else's work with the writerly desire to basically write and create something of your own within the container of someone else's writing? It seems so difficult to find a middle ground between totally wanting to obscure the fact that you as writer, translator, have a self and a brain, and between allowing that self to totally take over and make something yours." For either one of you, or both?

That's such a great question. I mean, I find that I, um, I find different selves. I mean, that I don't necessarily know, maybe this is just me, but I don't have such a fixed sense of, "This is me, and I'm only this." Um, talking to a laptop, sitting in this kitchen, you know, and that's one of my selves. But then there are all these other selves, and I don't know all of them yet. And that I feel they discover different way, different voices through inhabiting other people's voices. Um, and I guess I also, unconscious that, um, there's a kind of writing that you can do in a translation, which is not the same as every kind of writing I want to do. I mean, I felt really lucky that I was allowed to do the introductions to my translations, as well as the translation itself. You can do in, if you're doing that kind of prose, next, expository, as opposed to, "I'm just going to try and make you get it without a huge amount of footnotes." But it, I find, I find that a struggle because very often I feel like, "Okay, actually, I've got five pages worth of lecture that I want to give you about this line." But I'm not going to do that because that's not what it's supposed to be. Um, yeah, it's tough, but it's also really interesting. And it's interesting just to realize, "I have to pack that five pages worth of lecture into the exact right word choice." And that's gonna make it so it's gotta sing. It's gonna make it's gonna be the right word. And then, then it's worth by whatever else that is being left out.

I agree so much with what Emily is saying. It's, yeah, the, the multiple selves. I personally have wrangled by also writing novel adaptations of the same text that I'm translating, which is insane. Um, but one of the, one of the ways that I have, I can't imagine translating the work of someone who is alive. Like, I, my own work has been translated by amazing translators into languages that I don't speak. So I think that it's, I can, I can imagine it from that perspective. But for me, to, the way that I've done it is completely to translate the work of anonymous and anonymous and very dead, long dead. And it, it does offer liberty, but also the, the liberty of longevity, I guess, is, is part of my wrangling method. Is the idea that this, this text has been around for a long time. It actually gives me lots of room to play and feel, feel worthy. So many people have felt worthy. I've, I'm translating something in this case that, you know, hundreds of people have played with. And, and even more unpublished, like people have translated this as, as students, lots and lots of people, and have thought so much about it. And something about that made me feel less pressured, I guess, when I went in, because I was just a voice in, in a pool of voices. And I think if you can think about it that way, if you're just a voice in a pool of voices, and everybody has a slightly different version of how they think about the world, and the associations they have with words, and with sentences, and with metaphors, then you can feel a certain worthiness. Like, I, I am a human. I have lived in the world. So was the person who wrote this. And maybe is still living, maybe not. But, but the idea that that person had an urge to tell a story, and that you have an urge to interpret and clarify their story for people who speak your language, I think is ultimately worthy. To tell the story, to tell the story, to tell the story. Our whole world has been powered by people telling the story.

New question. Could you, could you both, both of you, either both speak to the experience of translating texts which have their roots in oral storytelling? Did the oral, auditory experience of these texts play into your writing? And do you think we can infuse orality into the process of reading a text meant to be heard? I know both of you talked about reading aloud as part of your process. Is there anything else you would add to that?

I can't, I can't. I think we can probably both talk to that. I think we both care about that a lot. I certainly care about it a lot. Like, I mean, one of the reasons that I wanted to do this project at all is that I think that the dominant way that English readers read contemporary translations of, um, metrical ancient verse, it's very often is translated in a way where it doesn't have a rhythm. And you can't necessarily hear when you read it out loud. It doesn't feel, there's a particular kind of music to it. And I saw, I definitely wanted to use, um, rhythmical language where there would be a beat that would be audible if it was read or performed out loud. And I also thought about, um, clarity and storytelling. That, that I was conscious that, um, the Homeric poems were, um, performed throughout antiquity for, um, audiences many of whom weren't literate. And I wanted there to be a sense that this isn't the kind of text where you necessarily need footnotes to get to get what's going on. So that element of orality too, that is, it's both artful, it's rhythmical, it's musical, it's got some alliteration, it's got some attention to the sound of words. Always matter, um, and the voices always matter. The, the proto-dramatic elements always matter a lot, I think, in Homer. And they always mattered to me in thinking about how do I voice? How do I make sure the character sounds like this person, not that person? That is an element of morality. Um, but then also, not to let the, um, it's not to let sound totally interfere with story. And that's a difficult balance, I think. Because I wanted to be a sense of, "It's storytelling and narrative, as well as rhythm and music."

Yeah, I agree with that completely. And I, I worked on my text in similar, in a similar way. I was looking to have to propel us through the text with the rhyme and with, with the meter that I used, which is not a stable meter, it's a wild meter, I made, um, but I wanted us to feel, to feel that we could stay tuned into this channel, um, because of the way that, that we still had the echo of a rhyme in our, in our head. And so it was this translation, anyway, was entirely about orality. I wanted, I wanted us to really feel like we were in the room with it, and like it was being shouted out over the crowd. I really had that idea about, about the Old English epic stuff. Um, but one of the ways that I infused it was really technical, because you, if you're reading it on the page, you don't necessarily see the rhymes. They're hidden inside of the central syllables of a lot of the words, um, line to line. And they flow over lines in this, in this version that I did. Um, but I wanted to have enough stuff that you could see, like, you can really see the alliteration when you're reading it on the page. So I did both as a way to convey, um, in an attempt to convey a reality in the written, as well, um, so that you could really just kind of see, you could see what you were hearing, I guess.

It's, I, you know, I come from from a theater background. And so I, I've had a lot of experience of of listening to long monologues that didn't work. And often I feel they didn't work because there was no meter in them. They got, you get lost in the story and you start to drift. And I think that the Beowulf part really made it so you didn't drift. There are repeat digressions where he recaps the story for people who are drunk. Um, and I am, in my version of what I, how I think about this, I think this is pretty accurate. Like, suddenly you hear all about Grendel's death again, like three times. Um, and you know, it's, it's such an interesting thing to have a text that is so tender with memory, and to feel the tenderness of memory all the way through a thousand years of it existing. And that's, that's what's pleasurable about working with it, with a text that comes from an oral tradition, I think.

That's great. Here's an interesting question. Um, when translating from ancient languages, there are so many phrases and concepts that rely on cultural shorthand, references, and context that have been lost to time. Is that frustrating or liberating?

We need a compendium word for that. Liberating, I think. It's both, right? I mean, for me, there's that question about, and I think maybe I talked about this a little bit already, about how much do you incorporate the footnote into the translation? So that something which would have been instantly gettable for an ancient audience might not be instantly gettable for a contemporary or 2020 Anglophone audience. And so do you have to translate the comprehensibility? I think that's, that's for me. Or is it a question about, "Should I sort of say, um, this is the god of the sea?" Or how am I, what do I, as, what knowledge do I assume? What knowledge do I give the reader, assuming they won't necessarily have it, but the original audience would have done? Yeah. And I find that a kind of tricky balance because I don't want to be explaining too much. I want it to be a sense of emotion and a sense that you can pick this up as you go along. And if you don't get all the references right away, once you get it again, you're going to get it. Um, so it can be that the text teaches you how to read it. Um, but, but I think that's a definitely a tricky question. And I guess that may be an advantage of, um, Homer, even more than Beowulf, but it's pretty long. So that by the time you've had, um, your fifth scene of hospitality, welcoming the guy's going to get the hot cup of wine, and they're going to get oiled off by the slave women, it's going to be the same way every time. And even if you didn't know to start with, this is how xenia works, by the time you've had it repeated multiple times, you're going to see, "This is a cultural norm within the world of this poem." Um, and maybe in a way, writing sci-fi or fantasy that works the same way, right? You're thrown into a, um, a world where, ideally, you're disoriented to start with. And the ancient world can be like that too, that you don't necessarily get all your bearings right away, but you will, if you can stay with it long enough.

It's an interesting thing. It's like, the, the idea of the sort of grounding traditions, um, often creates a conservative element in the text, which is, which is weird. Like the idea that you have to have the grounding traditions of a culture in order to be a human in the culture is often a strange influence. It's an influence on our culture that's weird. That's like, "You have to, you have to do it the way the guys did it." Um, but in, in this, in something like that, and I was just going to talk about a section like that too, it's, um, the Finnsburg section in Beowulf, which is a digression. It's a, it's a ballad, a song that happens in the middle of a banquet. Um, and it's, it's the song of the Battle of Finnsburg, which presumably to the audience of the poem, we know all about that battle. We know everything about it. But when you're reading this version of it, you're like, "What is even happening here? Like, what kind of miserable bloody season are we talking about?" And so it pains me that I don't know. When I was working on this section, I was like, "Can I just have a graph? Can I just have a chronology that tells me how this battle happened?" That it happened for six months, and everybody's stuck in the same hall, drawing lines down the center, going, "That's your side of the hall, [ __ ] you. I'm gonna kill you if you cross." And, you know, I, I ended up having to load it up because it really isn't very clear. You don't, you can't follow it. And, and nobody really can. It's hard. Like, and there's another, another piece of poetry that's the Finnsburg Fragment itself, that's not part of Beowulf, which is where we're getting some of our understanding of what happens in Beowulf. But, but I tried to load it up with all of the emotion, emotional, um, heft of certain words that I was using to explain the pain of being trapped in a hall full of people who hate each other. And we have a character who happens to be that character, who's that, who's not the narrator of this, of the scrap, but she's a woman who's there, and she's, you know, her husband and her brother are fighting, and her son is dead, and everybody's in the hall together for the whole winter. You know, it's the feeling of being a trapped woman is what I leaned on there. The feeling, but it's not, it gives us a sense over, throughout our, our own history of living humans, of times that things like that have happened, whether they're in battles that we know about, or in, um, our childhood bedrooms when we were trying to share with a sibling and going, "Get to your side of that stripe. Get away from me. I will kill you." And, you know, degree from the dead stuffed animal. Like, you have to draw on all of that stuff, you know, everything we, everything we needed for our translating lives, we learned as four-year-olds, really.

Yeah, a couple of people have been asking, um, your, about your relationship to past translations of the works. I know both of you have have written about this, but maybe you could say briefly something about, do you use them? I mean, I myself am terrified by the past translations. I mean, not terrified, but I'm afraid that if I read them while I'm working on my own, that I won't be, I'll lose my own way. But I, I think both of you use those. I, I don't. I'm the same as you. I, I look at them after, um, so, I mean, after publishing *The Odyssey*, I did a lot of looking back. And I was often kind of surprised to see things that I didn't realize would be different, turned out to have been different. I mean, I've talked a lot in previous things, people, but I think so, one of the questions asked about the, um, the hanging of the slave women. I talk about that quite often because it was so striking to me to realize everyone else seemed to think that the women that are hanging by to learn because were [ __ ] but it didn't occur to me to think of them that way. Um, but I don't do it while I'm working on it, usually. But I would, so part of my process, which I think sort of came up in the screenshot you shared, um, after I've gone through multiple, multiple drafts myself, I share a draft with my essay, Norton, who then looks, he doesn't know Greek, but he looks to my translation next to a couple of others. And he occasionally brings up, "But yours looks different from this, this, or that in some other translation." Um, and I guess an example that he brought up recently that I was going to share with my other, other example, was, um, there's a moment in *Iliad* Book Three where, um, the old guys of Troy are talking about Helen, and how, um, weird, slash, dreadful, slash, terrible, slash, um, unlike other humans, Helen is, um, and how they wish she wasn't there because she's just too, um, strange. Um, and in the Fables translation, I haven't looked and looked because I'm not at that point to be looking at lot, lots of translations, but apparently in the Page translation, it's presented that, um, she's devastatingly beautiful, and that's why they want her out because she's just too sexy. And it's, it's all her fault. Um, and then, and in the Greek, it's, um, that she, the men are saying, "Because she's the way she is, that's why we don't want her here." And it's really resonant, um, absence of telling. So how is she? What is the way she is? What's up with Helen? There's something I think wonderful about the lack of telling. Um, well, what, what is it about her? Maybe this is related to your, your point about how do we use the word sublime? What is it that's sort of beyond what we can describe? There's something beyond about her. And I feel like to, to put in, to plug in, "What's beyond is just she's sexy," that's not actually beyond. That's a fairly comprehensible thing to be. Um, so I mean, I tend to avoid while I'm, while I'm looking, but then retrospectively, I find it's fascinating to see differences. Um, yeah.

I, I'm lost because I'm thinking about sexiness as a supernatural quality, and how that could be like plugged into the gap of, "She's, she's actually formidably kind of like a goddess." But we're gonna just say she's sexy. It's, it's such a gender divide. You know, like when I think of a woman who's like a goddess, I don't really think that it's because she's like, hot, necessarily. Um, yeah, exactly. Like, I, I mean, exactly. I'm sitting here with the goddess, um, and she is hot too, but, but it's not so simple. Like, to be that powerful is a complicated, uh, role for a woman. It's an unusual role. Um, I, I think about other people's translations in this case a lot because I wanted to write about the history of the translation of this texts and have it be as much a translation about itself as about the reception and the way that the text has been used to build our understanding of heroic behavior and our understanding of monstrous behavior as readers and as experiences, experiences, experiencers of a society that's been influenced by a text like this. So I read everyone's translations. I read the, you know, crazy little scraps at the beginning of of the 1800s where people were like, "Whoa, what is this thing? It's about pirates, maybe? I don't know." Um, and on through in, you know, the 20th century, people started thinking, I think, more deeply about about it, but did not think anything about the women. So the women often end up smooshed into the corner, or cut, or not talked about at all in a scholarly way. And in much of the mid-century, uh, texts. And, uh, so I was, I was just really interested. I mean, and I talk a lot of it in the introduction about specifically about exactly what Emily was just talking about, about power. About people translating Grendel's mother in many different ways, "hell-bride," and "hag of the sea," and like, essentially "nasty sea monkey" like things of that kind. And none of which, I think, is suggested in the original at all. It's like, she's powerful. She's ferocious. Um, so I was really interested in seeing what our preconceptions about Grendel's mother were, and about Beowulf, what are preconceptions about what a hero might be, based in the long-standing translation of this text, rather than necessarily what, what the original by itself said. I was, I was interested in thinking about the ways that we had made a trope out of the Beowulf story, or tropes. Um, but did they influence me? Yes, of course. And sometimes I was like, "What, what does this mean? None of us know. We all failed here. We are all just like staring at the same text, screaming." Um, big chunks of it, like certainly the time, first time I encountered Beowulf, much of it made no sense at all to me. And some of the most juicy parts made no sense. And I had to, go and revisit not just what translators thought about them, who are all different kinds of people, but also what a lot, what scholars thought about them, what people who had recovered bits of the missing, blurry, messed up manuscript thought about them, which is really, really interesting. Because in the last, you know, couple of decades, there have been investigations into the scratch-outs in the original Beowulf manuscript, and, you know, like cameras that could look at what was underneath, one scribe going, "Ah, scratch, scratch, scratch." And, and like, that stuff is so interesting to me. And so interesting as a translator to just like, sort of look at the full pile of possibilities, because I, you know, I think it's novelist stuff, though. I'm, it's because I'm, my novelist like self wants to know what to choose from. It's like, I'm making a big crazy quilt or something, and I want to have all the possibilities before I start to eliminate, rather than just the ones that I think might be there. I want to know what everyone else thought might be there too.

Fabulous, fabulous. We've reached the hour where we have to start winding down. When, when, when I push the button that will end this session, I'm going to have to say goodbye to you too, because we're all going to Zoom off into the ether. But I, I wanted to thank you and leave you with a last question. First of all, this has been so interesting. Um, I'm so glad it's being recorded. I think I'm going to have to go back and listen because you both said so many illuminating things that I want to make sure I didn't miss any of them. But a last question that I want to leave you with, that that came through, that perhaps you'll leave us with some answers. Are there words that either of you developed a fierce love of in, in your translation, and or that you found to be ultimately untranslatable? Emily has to go first.

I am now. It's like, as though I never read Beowulf right now. I'm like, [Laughter] Oh gosh. I mean, I find it so hard to pick to pick out particular, this is the top word, because it's like a daily process of, "Today, this word is impossible," and "Today, this word is my favorite." I mean, though, but I feel both, um, I mean, sometimes I sort of get attached to particular English words, as well as to predict, like Greek words, as well, and sort of think, "Actually, I can do, I have a new appreciation of the word 'mortal' because I'm, I'm actually going to use it a lot, and it's going to be very useful because it also, it's gender neutral, which I is very useful because 'brought us' also gender neutral." Um, it's difficult, though. I mean, I, I find it hard just to say there's one word that's the most important word, because there are so many great words. Um, I mean, as I was saying before, the question that I'm grappling with, I think maybe most right now, is about, um, words for emotion and motivation. Um, and it's not like this is, it's not like through translation that's the only time I grapple with this. I mean, I've been, you know, reading, reading, reading Homer for decades, and I've been interested in these words for a long, long time before that. But for a word like *thumos*, which is used in Plato for one of the three parts of your soul, you have, have an intellectual part, you have a desiring part, and you also have a *thumos* part, which is to do with your drive, your self-confidence, your pride, your desire to kill people, or your desire to show off to people. It's a very important word within, you know, ancient, um, Greek cultures. How do I, what do I do with that? I'm struggling with it all the time, every day, and I don't know what to do with it. Um, and I do inadequate things. I do different things every time because I don't think there's a single solution.

I'm thinking about this arrived at one of the concepts that I think we have, we have lost. I mean, you'll see what I'm, what I'm talking about when I, when I talk. It's about, it's a political concept. It's the idea of the respectable enemy. Of like, the person that you, you have to fight them, you're going to have to [ __ ] fight them, you know? But they are good. Like, and this is a thing that that wanders through Beowulf over and over again. It's a thing that many people don't, they don't even go for it because it's hard. It's hard to translate that concept. It's hard to translate that Grendel's mother is referred to with respectable language. Like she's respected. She's described as someone who is not exactly good, but someone who is has dignity. And I think so much of our contemporary culture is about removing dignity from the person that is your foe. Um, and, and in fact, making them into something that, that is an undignified and lesser version. And we could talk for hours about the many ways that this is showing up across the political spectrum. But I was thinking about just in the last week, obviously, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her, the way she used language. She, she always respected her foes. She was, she used that kind of language all the time when she was crafting dissents. And, um, even as she was slaying, you know, she was ferocious, but she was, she was using that. And she was a similar kind of character, I think, in the cultural imagination to what I think Grendel's mother actually is in the original text of the poem, which is an intense and vital older woman who has, who has power, and everyone knows it, even if she's your enemy. You know, she's, you know, she has dignity, which is part of the like, national grief, I think. It, you know, not on both sides as much as I would like it to be. But I think that part of the national grief is of having a woman who occupies that unique space in a society that we don't even have language for anymore. Um, and so, yeah, that was something that concept, a concept, a sort of untranslatable concept that I've been thinking about, contemporary equivalence for, that the concept of a dignified enemy.

There could not be a better note to end this conversation on. Thank you both so much. You're both my favorite translators, and I'm so grateful to you. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you.

Such a pleasure to have this extended conversation over two weeks with you, Emily. Wonderful to talk to you, Maria.

Yes, yes. You know what, before your translation, I think I always sort of assumed Homer's got that ability to see the other side, to see the humanity in the enemy. I didn't realize how, how much Beowulf has it too. It's great. It's really opened my eyes to that text. It's been wonderful.

Good. It's interesting stuff. I mean, same. I feel the same. I want to read yours. You, you're making me want to dive back into all of everything you're working on. And I don't know, is it dangerous to like, suddenly go head over heels into the classics that are before anything I know? Probably. But I would like to. It's so deluxe. Wonderful. It does dive. It's all good. I look forward to your Greek novel, Maria.

Yes. Anyway, thank you so much. And, and to talk to you and see you in person one of these days soon. Be well. And thank you for every, to everybody who joined us here tonight. Thank you for the questions. Good night.

Good night. Thank you.