\u201cEcholation\u201d by Nova Wang<\/a> making even more monsters in our literary <\/em>Nostromo.<\/p>We begin by pouring one out for Small Press Distribution. I\u2019m traveling this week and haven\u2019t been able to look into what happened, so all I know is this is a huge bummer. My heart goes out to all the presses trying to figure out what to do. <\/p>
What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong>like said, I\u2019m traveling this week, and I think I\u2019m gonna go longer on what it is about these two books on Wednesday. This is myth week, though, and these are two special versions of myths. These books take our most ancient texts and make them feel new and alive and surprising and immediate. Not only that, they\u2019re short<\/em>! Shoutout Statler and Waldorf. I\u2019m talking, of course, about Autobiography of Red<\/em> by Anne Carson and Beowulf<\/em> translated by Maria Dahvana Headley. <\/p>Autobiography of Red <\/strong><\/em>by Anne Carson:<\/strong> 14 years after I first read it, this book remains a North Star for me. If you\u2019re unfamiliar, Stesichoros was a poet \u201cborn after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.\u201d He composed an epic poem about a red winged monster named Geryon who lives on an island with his red cattle and little red dog and one day Herakles comes and kills him. We only have fragments of The Geryoneis <\/em>surviving today, so naturally, Anne Carson wrote a novel in verse around the surviving fragments (which she translated), updating the characters to be gay teenagers in the 90s. <\/p>This book is a master class in smooth, breezy-yet-weighty writing that twists your expectations and takes the top of your head off or whatever Emily Dickinson wanted. Amazingly, Carson makes beautiful a pretty cliched plot: Geryon is an angsty teenager who studies philosophy<\/em> and takes up photography<\/em> after his high school boyfriend dumps him. Embarrassing. This novel\u2019s plot is a mid-2000s Juno<\/em>\/Garden State<\/em> bildungsroman-for-people-who-got-into-The-Shins-before-everyone-else, except it\u2019s steeped in ancient epics and written like Dickinson did mushrooms with Frank O\u2019Hara. In other words, this book rips<\/em>, dudes.<\/p>Beowulf<\/strong><\/em>, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley: <\/strong>I wish I could say what it was that initially drew me to Beowulf<\/em>. Because I\u2019ve always been drawn to it. The name feels great in the mouth when you say it, yes. It is<\/em> objectively hilarious that this vaunted, \u201ccourtly\u201d (Tolkien), important<\/em> poem is just a bunch of dudes talking about cool shit they did until a monster attacks and one of them kills it, repeat three times, guitar solo outro. My homie Devon went to a school where they had to do \u201cdeclamations,\u201d this weirdo private school thing where they had to say passages from books out loud but like, in front of people and from memory. Sounds awful to have to do or sit through, but Devon always did his from Beowulf<\/em>, and would talk about how rad it was, so I was primed. I also read it at a time when I was pretty into Lord of the Rings<\/em>, so. <\/p>By 2020, though, my Beowulf<\/em> fandom, while real, was mostly a bit. My translator-unremembered-six-dollar-Barnes&Noble edition lived at my parents\u2019 house, and who knows when I\u2019d ask them to ship it north? Probably at some point, given my Red<\/em> fandom, but who knows. Then, thank Hwaet (you don\u2019t know whether I\u2019m using that word correctly or not), Maria Dahvana Headley kicked the doors open with combat boots and yelled \u201cbro, you thought Beowulf <\/em>was about bros? Bro, you have no idea, bro.\u201d This translation rules<\/em>. Not to mention the semi-radical politics (of a poem fueled by testosterone and the cultural belief that the Romans smelled too good). Did you know the dragon at the end was cursed to become a dragon because he buried his treasure? Can you, in 2024, even fathom a poem that features so much generosity and sharing is associated with the British<\/em>? And again\u2014the aliveness of this translation, the eminent readability. When my kid was 20 months old (or something), I read this translation to him, and he let me go for like two and a half pages. Massive! Read this book. <\/p>Also I like to watch The Dollop<\/em>\u2019s \u201cbro court\u201d bit and imagine them saying hwaet<\/em>.<\/p>
![\"Autobiography](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/b961de04-0121-47eb-9a9e-3430d79719b6.heic\")
<\/figure>