Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf

Via Eileen Joy and the outstanding number of medievalists I know on Facebook, I see that Thomas Meyer‘s translation of Beowulf is now available. For free. It possesses a striking cover:

And though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet—this translation, I mean, because I’ve obviously read Beowulf before—the excerpt from the publisher accords neatly with my recent obsession on the relation of form to content in film:

The eyes of Hygelac’s kin watched the wicked raider
execute his quick attack:
without delay,
snatching his first chance,
a sleeping warrior,
he tore him in two,
chomped muscle, sucked veins’
gushing blood,
gulped down his morsel, the dead man,
chunk by chunk,
hands, feet & all. &

thenfootstephandclawfiendreachmanbedquicktrick
beastarmpainclampnewnotknownheartrunflesho
feargetawaygonowrunrun

never before had
sinherd feared anything so.

As the publisher notes, “the reader is confronted with the words themselves running together, as if in panic, in much the same way that the original passage seems in such a rush to tell the story of the battle that bodies become confused.” This is a readerly experimental mode, in which the formal experimentation is meant to assist the reader in understanding the content of the poem by replicating the experience being described. The fact that that it’s not easy to parse that second stanza is the point. (I’ve read it about twenty times now I still keep seeing the word “dreach,” if only because it sounds like a word that belongs in Beowulf.) Point being, there are far worse ways to spend your Saturday night than reading a poem in which “hot gore pour[s] upon whirlpools.”

Or with supporting an endeavor which, to quote Eileen,

Every book we make, we will give away for free in electronic form, because we believe in the richest possible artistic-intellectual para-university commons in which everyone has access to whatever they need and want, whenever they need and want it, and so that authors can have the widest possible readership. But we also believe in the printed book: as work of art, as a stylish object for one’s cabinet of curiosities, as a material comfort [or bracing cocktail] to hold in one’s hands, as something that takes up weight and space in the world and adds something of beauty to the thoughts, images, and narratives we hold in common.