Hey, hello, welcome everybody. My name's David Cox. It's a huge pleasure to be back to my old college this evening to introduce Maria Giovanna Headley. She's a hugely exciting races to show me what you discovered. Best thing, I think Typekit Anglo-Saxon names and since John Douglas Grendel. And if you haven't yet got a copy of the midwife, there are some available to the bookstore. Monte will. We'll give you some call at bargain price £10.
So buy some food. The family and friends, Christmas is coming up. True story This movie is going to be reading from the midwife, obviously, and it's also exciting for the first time from her forthcoming translation of Beowulf, so it'll be the first people to hear bits of that translation in public. Then Caroline Langston Hughes, the man who was brought here at St. John's, will interview her and there'll be a Q&A and then the book signing.
Marie is a startlingly original and intelligent writer. The writing is by turns, dramatic and reflective, funny and tragic, brutal and tender. I've just been reading her young adult novel is actually going on scary. They're fantastic, but of course it's the mayor, which is the reason we're here today.
It's a novel that demonstrates the stunning command of multiple voices and perspectives, refusing easy binaries and stereotypes as it explores some of the most complex and troubling questions of our time. I think this novel could only have been written by someone deeply versed in Baz and the Scotland debates around it.
But equally, it shows how this ancient poem can speak to the contemporary world of toxic masculinity and competitive motherhood of cultural appropriation, PTSD as gated communities and fear of the other. And as the monstrous hunger beneath veneer of civilisation. The midwife calls us to listen to this and all, and well to others voices and I think assist in the city that if we take the long view, history may be able to change the future.
And as someone or something that we see as a monster may in fact be a miracle meant to change the world. So please join me in giving a warm welcome to Mariette at. That made me blush, that was such a beautiful introduction. I'm so happy to be here in a room full of people who are interested in the same things that I'm interested in, which basically is everything. But this is the depths of the veil of interest is in this book. I'm going to read you a little chunk of three different views.
I think one is the grand mother character who's a war veteran. This is set in contemporary America. The other is the point of view of the mountain and the natural world where she lives. And then the last one is the Rutgers wife character who is who is named Willa in this book. And I'm going to find it. I. I go back to the cave and hold the best friend's skull for a moment. I stroke his forehead. I give him a walnut and he choose it slowly.
I can feel the cold of the cave floor through my jeans and his sleeping bag. There's sweat on the wall wicking upward. There's a sound out there clucking someone on the other side of the mountain has chickens. We got one last year, but I had to be correct because they have dogs too. There's a family inherited hall that has a parrot, and sometimes I hear it telling itself stories. When Scranton, I saw it fly over its wings, bright red and green, talking to itself.
Once upon a time, it screeched. My son was terrified, but dazzled, so it turned out was I. I'd never seen a bird like that out here before and I was worried it to tell the world about us. But it just flew over, looked at us with the black and glittering eye and in the very soft voice, said once upon a time again before it took off into the morning.
Hello. I said to the bird, and then close my mouth. Apparently, parrots grieve for the dead as much as humans do, and they're often a sad speaking creature capable of flying up into the trees to cry for you and all your neighbours for 20 years or more. I wish. I can smell haired house dinner, cooking.
I wish Green didn't hear or smell as well as he does. He talks his head and looks out into the dark laughter carrying out for Parrot the sound of Music louder than it was at singing recorded Ella Fitzgerald. I know this song. It hurts my ears, he says. Grande doesn't know the words yet for how music makes you feel. It makes me want to sing, he says. He looks at me, his eyes darting around, looking first at one side of my face than the other.
You can sing quietly, I say in a whisper. He whispers, I'm singing. He's shaking with excitement. I tried to distract him with this story. You can never go down the mountain. This story begins. A lot of my stories begin this way. Why not? He asks. Every time I tell it down the mountain, there's a town where everyone's a hungry monster. The monsters tear people limb from limb like tree limbs, he asks. Like, I might tear bark. He nods to Chu. He says they tear the skin from your arm.
I say and eat it, which I want to go down the mountain, he says. Want and need aren't the same thing, I say. What if you're sick? I'm not. You've been sick before, he says reproachfully, his fingertips on the scar, on my face that was hurt. I say sick is something different. I don't think they're monsters. I watched them. When you're hunting ground face first, he hesitates a moment, then there's a little boy. He plays outside a little boy. I ask him.
I know the one he means. There's a cold feeling in my stomach. You can't go down there, gran. You know that? Tell me you hear me. He looks at me defiantly and howls in harmony. I tell him, holding his shoulders hard. He keeps howling. Glaring at me. HIGH-PITCHED louder and louder. Do you want the monsters to kill your mama? I don't want to say it, but I said he hesitates. And then the howling turns to whimpering. I stay still checking, hoping there are no sounds that say anyone's heard him.
No sirens. No new lights flicking on where they face the slopes. I point out into the sky, a shooting star streaking across the dark green, sniffling. But he looks. I reach out my arms to my son, and he huddles in the making himself smaller, his hard skull, his eyelashes on my face. Over there, when you saw a star fall, you weren't sure if it was a star at all or something sent from your country to blow up their country.
There were, I was told, monitors showing all the people in every place with names put to the dots. There were, I was told, when I was one of the dots systems for making sure you killed only the monsters, not the good people who are the monsters who deserves killing. I wait for Grant to sleep. He's not a sleeper, and neither am I. But you can sleep in a time like this. We're listening to a little boy at a piano, the key is halting under his fingertips beneath the mountain in the cave.
That song carries on someone's listening there to the people of Harriet Hall, eat dinner, drink wine and more wine and more wine until the entire place is sleepy. Snowfalls, heavy and soft insulating the roads and the rooftops, and a boy emerges from a crack in the mountainside, moving quickly. He runs down snow, kicking up around him. Clouds of cold. He glances back at the place he's come from, dodges out of sight of the cave entrance and down the slope.
The lights blink over him, and then he's at the back of the house full of windows, tapping on the glass. Another boy appears inside the house, smaller than the first eye, as sleepy than like. They look at each other. One inside the other. Outside, they put their hands on the doors and stare. The glass fogs up, and at last, the boy on the inside slides his door open. He puts a finger to his lips. The other boy nods and comes into the house, using the door closed behind him.
They're known to each other, not strangers. Silence here. The brightness of the snow, the shine of it under the moon. Nothing moves, but tree branches weighted with ice. The boys are out again, the smaller one dressed for the cold. Both of them run up the hillside out of sight of the house. The moon silhouettes two shadows as they play in the drifts. The boy from inside teaching the boy from outside how to make a snowball.
The boy from outside. Teaching the boy from inside. How to throw the snowball hard and fast enough to hit the treetops. Your laughter carries up and away, and the birds consider the sound. We dampen the noise to. The laughter is only murmurs whispers to boys at play. They fall on their backs and roll the angel arms and legs flailing, and the snow melts around impressions of wings. After a while, the boys make their way down again and back through the sliding doors and into the house.
The piano plays again, haltingly forehands and set off to. Listening halfway to the late night news well, as sitting in front of the TV in her robe and slippers, thinking about the scratches she's just found on the kitchen door. Long and thin in the glass. The marks of something that scratched it. She tried to do it with her own fingernails and couldn't. The marks were on the inside. The housekeeper must have brought her dog. There'll be discussion. She looks up at the Holly on the mantel.
Holly Holly sold all equal suffering that drifts up from somewhere. Some college intro to Lit Canterbury, something Scrooge is on the screen suddenly. She's always hated tiny Tim. She changes the channel. Now it's a Christmas special with folk singers in Austin, where it's not snowing. It seems disrespectful to Welsh to sing winter songs in a place where the sun is shining. It was probably taped in daylight. The singer has an earnest face. She's playing the piano.
She even alive this Christmas special looks nineteen seventy five chopsticks from the music room, then a tumult of notes hammering on the key. Stop it dilly! She says her voice sharper than it used. Then it should be because in our past, being sent to bed is supposed to be sleeping. She wants to be sleeping, too. The piano stops at the sound of complaint. She hears Delhi scuffling around and she sighs she'll go in in a moment and coax him back to where he belongs.
There's a small yelp she assumes to be Delhi slamming down the piano lid on his own finger is not the first time Rogers sitting at the table reading a medical journal with the eyes him from where she sits. He's rolled up his sleeves and his collars undone. It's Christmas Eve. The packages are already wrapped and she takes her temperature every morning. There was a bad moment two years ago, but she managed to keep it secret.
Well, it wonders if she was like a rabbit who eats its young. What if her womb is a cave full of teeth? She turns off the television and walks towards Roger. Her son is standing suddenly in the door of the living room, staring at her. You're supposed to be in bed, she tells him. I'm not sleepy, he says. His pyjamas look damp. His hair looks damp to a nightmare. His lips are bluish.
Why not? She asks, wary of it, wanting to hold him. But he's getting too big for that, and she doesn't really want to anyway. She wants to want to, but she really feels like doing his drinking in the kitchen with Roger. There he is, just out of reach, his foot in his slipper, tapping on the tile and what my friend says still is still standing there. She's forgotten him. I want grin, but that really says looking down at him carrying grain.
Why would anyone want to look at him? My friend Dylan repeats, he came to play, but he had to go home to his mommy. Roger comes into the room. He tends to look at Dell. Who's he? I showed him my room, Dell says and shrugs. Well, it looks at Roger. Roger lifts his eyebrows. Is this person imaginary? Roger says, and Willa shakes her head knowing the answer. No child thinks his best friends are imaginary. Who Dell says Fred's real and whose grand will asks kneeling to meet those eyes.
You don't know anyone named Graham. That's not even anyone's name. You know it, Benji, Dylan writes with irritation. I'll show you. He runs down the hall and reluctant Willa follows him. Roger Goose's her from behind, but she's in control. She doesn't laugh. The pills she took in the kitchen is working. Jill's got into the music room, and when she arrives there, he's sitting at the open piano. Roger, behind her imaginary Roger whispers and almost laughs.
What delay she says, Roger has no idea what it takes to do this job every day. He's in the city nipping and tucking a gardener, tidying the edges of labial hedges. Well, well, it is fairly busy making Dylan into a miniature man. She glances into the gold framed mirror of the piano and sees a flower surface. She steps forward to brush it away, but it's a scratch like the ones on the kitchen door. And then she looks down at the piano keys and gasps. What happened here?
Roger says. I should get grand piano, Dell says in size. He didn't know how to play it, and then he saw himself in the mirror. Well, it puts her hand on the keys and runs her fingers over the scratches deep and wide. They make a sound as she touches. That may sound wrong for the moment sudden chords and she flinches, who's grabbed, and she asks again what she hopes is a casual tone. My friend says Delon closes the piano lid again, abruptly nearly catching her fingers in it.
My friend who comes to play with me, Can you come again? Can you call his mommy? Can I have hot chocolate? What friend she presses? My friend says, Delegate. Again, he's gone from the room now, leaving Roger and Willis standing in front of the piano, looking at each other. I don't know, Willis says. Maybe he got a knife. How could our son possibly get a knife? Roger's looking at her with more blame than she could ever deserve from the kitchen, she says cautiously.
Roger gives her the look he gives her when she's failed in any small way. The pill overtakes her, now filling her with glue. He is ruining its proper effect, which should be cloudless calls. [INAUDIBLE] have to lock them up from now on our Son Access to Knives novella. That is a no, it wasn't. She looks up and into the mirror again. There's no one reflecting there. No one but herself and Roger. Something tumbles in the kitchen.
They both run in, but it's only duller. The scaling, scaling the cupboard, hunting marshmallows. She sways my friend. My friend came to play in the morning. She'll call her mother. Time for bed, Wallace says. No exceptions. Let me see your teeth deliberative. Brush them again. Yes, the mothers, all of them, Rogers, to one of the housekeepers bringing a dog, maybe it's a pit bull.
The pill is working. She's falling but upright. The window, the dark outside of the light inside there should be curtains. For a moment, she sees something flashing out on the house. Roger has his hand and will side pushing up her white gown. Dylan's back in his bedroom, having drinks, a hot chocolate she doesn't remember making, but there's the dirty pot on the stove. Sometimes she takes her son into bed, and she feels like she's tucking a wild animal beneath the covers.
It's always been that way. Well, the chef, the kitchen door locks it, twisting the little metal clasp that brings the bar across. There are locks on all the interior doors. Here she turns and looks at her husband. Well, they don't know what all that was, Roger, she says. Her voice coveted by the pill using his name. So she knows she knows it just still in inventing something. Roger says he has a big imagination. The knife. So we'll get locks for a cabinet and shut the door inside it.
That can't happen. Well, it looks at the clock and changes change the subject. Merry Christmas, she says. She puts, pushes her hips up over the lip of the countertop. She's tall enough to hop without being awkward. She crosses in and crosses her legs long and pink like frogs. She thinks under the nightgown, which isn't for sleeping in. Everything is cream coloured, lace trimmed in red for the holidays.
The lingerie saleswoman advised her on what men want. It was nice to be naked in that room watched by the sales lady appreciated. That suits you, the lady said, clapping her hands. That's perfect. Rogers Mouse is on her hip bone, and she's arching and pushing herself up. The couches are clean. She sterilised them with a spray bottle. She looks out the windows as Roger pulls her nightgown off her shoulders and she thinks there.
Look at that if you're looking, but she doesn't see them, whoever they might be. All she sees are her breasts and their lacy half cups falling out of the dress hard and pale. And as Roger enters the tiny bows at the sides of her hips, the triangle of red gold hair between her legs. The windows are like a mirror light reflecting her own face, said Rogers.
The two of them in their white kitchen, glowing like their lighthouse, culling whatever ship any ship lighthouses don't speak only to the ships of their own country will have sex and then know it's Christmas. Everything is bright. If anyone's watching from out there, let them watch. Thank you so much for that, Maria. And welcome to St. John's again. I'm particularly happy to be hosting you here because John's has not always been the most friendly place towards enthusiasts for fables.
One of our former most distinguished former alumni was Kingsley Amis, who, according to his friend Billy Lockhart. Hebraic Kingsley is said to describe Beowulf as greeted me to recite this quotation from a cross per blind, infantile, featureless peak of gangrene. Eloquent. That is Kingsley for. And he did then go on to write a poem about Beowulf, which is perhaps not quite so hard to listen to.
But he does describe the poem as both tedious journey to his ancestors, an instance in old English harking back. So that's it's not fact, Kingsley, but there's a lot of exorcism that St John's needs. I think given this kind of cloud of antique thought we have in the past. So Amos and Larkin had to study Beowulf in their first year and probably their second year as well. If the syllabus was as I think it was back in the 40s when they were hit.
But when did you first come across very well from what first drew you to the poem? Well, I think from parsing it backwards, I think that I first encountered Grendel smothering it in an image in illustration without beowulf. No context. She didn't have the rest of the poem around her. She was just coming out of the lake with a sword. And I thought, There's a female monster. I want to know about that monster. Where where did she come from?
What is her story? And I was little and then encountered kind of in the Aether Beowulf, which always is floating around waiting to grab people who are interested in story by the hare. But I encountered Gardner's Grendel really as a reader before I encountered the actual text of Beowulf. OK. What did you make of Gardner's Grendel? Well, I loved it. I was a teenager when I found it first and I thought, Yes, yes, yes.
And then I got to go to those mother again. And she's covered in fur and she has no voice. She's she's even made more more monstrous by by Gardner than she. Well, she's made more monsters for everyone than she has in the original. But she in gardens, Gandalf. She's really she's really awful. She's got that nothing film, isn't she? Yeah, she's one of the 10. Just doesn't give anything. She's a creature. Mm hmm. She's she's a bitey creature. She's a loyal mother, but she's.
But she's got nothing intellectually to say to Grendel, who is brilliant, you know, etc. Yeah, we've heard that story before from the difficult mother. Yes. Who made him a monster? Yes. I think that's familiar. So when you actually when did you first encounter the text itself? I think in high school, in the states, it's taught in high school. I remember reading little bits of it and feeling no particular way about it.
I thought. I think at the time I was, I was a reader, as many of us are of of all of the beat poets and they're all male. And I was accustomed, of course, to inviting stories of men and stories of transgressive men. And so reading beowulf was another story of a transgressive man, and I thought, OK, that's that's just normal reading, but also assigned reading, and I was ultimately looking for something else.
But then as I got older, I started thinking about the ways in which Beowulf has has told us the story of our culture, the way the ways that we learn from it over the years, that it's existed because it's been around. So people have continuously read it, and it's an unusual text in that regard. Yeah. So did you then study it at some point in college? Did you have no lectures?
I did not. I never studied it. It was. I have had a great strange fortune of having never had a formal education in Beowulf and then suddenly writing an adaptation of beowulf and translating. Now it's all of an interest in the cultural phenomenon that is Beowulf. OK, so that must be enormously liberating in the sense not to have to work your way through this edition of Beowulf and the having to note this mendacious versus thatthey mandate and just to encounter it as itself.
I think it has been both liberating and also I have a longing for an alternate version of myself that that could have done those things because it's so much of is it it's wonderful. This the granular beowulf Fiona is really pleasing to look at.
It's interesting for me working on all of this, and this is how I ended up with this text that I have now, and also with the translation going through and thinking about the ways that people have worked with this text over the years has been really fascinating to me and and fun for me as I've been playing with it myself. But I think, yeah, I was never I was never strapped to it.
And force to it was all this is all the self-interested creatures and interested, interested in how we monstera as each other as humans. Right, so free choice. And well, I don't want to give away too many spoilers about what happens in the book. So obviously most of the people in the room know how Beowulf ends. But that may not entirely help, I guess.
But I just wanted to to foreground. And I suppose this sort of stems from what you were just saying about Grindle mother as being the the primary figure that captured your imagination in that first image. The boxes were really interested in motherhood, and the poem is intermittently interested in looks kind of indirectly and and sort of tragically it wealthier.
You are Willa. And what she wants for her children and what she's probably going to get for her children that the audience know that she doesn't know what sells a book that's just wanted for her son. But then she lays on the funeral pyre. And of course, Randall's mother herself said, Did you think that looking at the story as it came to be, did you think that motherhood was going to be absolutely primary and also refracted across different characters because there's not a single mother here?
There are lots of them. It's a book full of mothers. It's I mean, I am myself a mother, I'm a stepmother. So I raised two children from their early childhood, and now they're in their late 20s. So I had some intimate experience with the difficulties of being a mother and the fears that one has as a parent of small children, fearing that something will happen to them at any moment that that someone will snatch them or that they'll be run over by a car,
let go of your hand that that anything could happen to them. And that, for me, was an easy step to the fears of a friendless mother. In this book, which are that her son is going to be, is going to be murdered by any kind, any number of people in the book. And I think that's a pretty easy leap from the notion of what happened in the original poem with two Grendel who is hypersensitive and hears and does not like the sounds that he is hearing coming from the hall.
He hates the noise and hates the noise so much that it drives him berserk. But but all of the notions of motherhood for me, the Frost Guy's wife's negotiation with her husband when he adopts beowulf, suddenly he says, Well, you killed my monster. No, now you're my son. And she comes out into the hall and says, Maybe you forgot about our sons. Surely you would never forget about our sons. I know you wouldn't do that, husband.
But just in case you did remember, we have these sons and. And then she goes to negotiate with Beowulf on behalf of to get him to not kill her sons, which I think is really poignant in the context of a story in which we are about to see creditor's mother come in to get revenge for her murdered son. There are. So there are so many murdered sons in Beowulf, and to me, that's an easy leap from murdered sons to what about their mothers?
And I think that in much of the adaptation of Beowulf, that has not been as much a consideration. The idea of a murdered son is more important to people than the grief and the the difficulties that a mother has gone through in order to raise that person who now is gone and is has been it's like religiously gone is horrifically gone. So I think about, yeah, I think about all those things.
As much as I was writing this, I was thinking about all of the ways that you might lose your work and when it when your child is the only proof of credit that you have done anything as a mother in this poem, that's a lot. That's a loss. It's an enormous loss. And what about the other, the kind of chorus of mothers who moves to hair?
Kind of, to me, very strikingly different from the the normative voices in the poem itself, where you have the poet saying that that was a good king or do they think they're silly but yet to saying that? But these all masculine voices say this is how things should be. This is this is what's appropriate, and you have the women really policing the community of heroine.
I was looking when I when I put those women in, there's a choral point of view that's the sort of women of suburbia that the mothers and the mothers in law. And there's a group of them and they are policing everyone's actions within hair at all. And I had them in my mind. They are really the they're the soldiers of suburbia there. I wrote them as almost as as beowulf soldiers coming in.
But they're also the soldiers that are already there, that the hall, the whole men and they are making sure the structure stays as it is. Because if it doesn't, of course, what's going to happen, it's going to be Flensburg. It's going to be blood wedding. Everybody dies. So I think that the notion of keeping the structure the same is. Something that has always been a thing for us as humans, if you if you flip the patriarchy, a lot of people die.
So these women, the women in this chorus, don't want the patriarchy flip, they don't want to power, they want to run it from behind the scenes. They don't want to be in charge. They want their husbands in charge. But if that occasional suggestion that their work when the husband just is a little bit too troublesome, he might just something might happen to him or something. Yes. Yes. In the book, it's called It's same sort of regular incantation of Oopsy Daisy.
And then there's a dead husband at the bottom of the stairs and oops, there was an accident. Error. But yes, the women have a lot of power. And you know, I think women always actually do have a lot of power, but often have. I've been forced to turn their own strength back on themselves, and that's that's a common theme in the history of the world.
And so that has kind of swallowed up parts of one of my questions, which is about the various Greek chorus of voices that make the the the novel so fascinating. We've seen the mothers of heroine with the gated community that but there's also a counter set of voices in the mayor himself. And I didn't know quite where to place those voices. And for a while, I thought it was the voices of those sea monsters that they will fight his way down amongst them to get to the hall itself.
For the kind of creature that one of the hats just casually shoots because he can sunning itself on the rocks. Mm-Hmm. Well, this thing is a total shame for that. Monster is having a great day, I think, but maybe those voices are a bit more complicated than just the voices of the wildlife. Could you say a bit more about? I think it's all of the above I intended it to be.
I intended it to be an echoing collective point of view so that in part so that Dana, who is grandiose mother and green, who are alone living in this cave on the mountain, are not wholly alone. She also has a sort of imaginary friend that travels with her. That's a saint. But I was interested in in the case of those voices, I was interested in the history of the landscape and in the way, and it's in the original poem as well.
The idea that the Mirror is this very old, very weird, very creepy place that is described with language that is different from anything else in the poem. It's fascinating that landscape description feels very much like that place is a character that that places a ghostly presence in the in the poem. So I was interested in writing a ghostly presence with The Voice.
In this case, the mountain has the mountain is talking the creatures within it, or talking the owl, talking with one voice and there sometimes intervening as I think the natural world does. I mean that the long history of our relationship with the landscape is, you know, every once in a while, there's a landslide. And this is part of part of the nature of this story, as well as is that the water has feelings there and is inhabited with not just living creatures, but with the memory of the place.
Yeah, memory is really important. There isn't the sense that these are not. These are much more ancient voices than even the voices of the humans in the story, and that the human timeline is very short compared to the one that the land has is on. Yes. This is just a moment in that timeline. Yes. For all the horror and the tragedy.
Yeah, this too shall pass in the way that now that brings me on to the question of setting, because when I picked up the book and I thought, Okay, oh, it's a suburban gated community somewhere in America within striking distance of the the city. This is not kind of what I thought this would be like. Well, I was put there and then there's the mountain, there's a lake with hot springs and there's ancestral lands also there.
So it's the edge lands, which have been swallowed up by the ambition of Roger Rogers father. It's it's the the the show, the taking, what is kind of on the edge of their property and appropriate way. And I wondered how you came up with that particular setting rather than just going right out somewhere in the wild, in the woods and saying, here's a strange place. Here's some people in the cabin. Hmm. I was interested in the idea because of it, because of the poem I was interested in.
The idea of the glorious structure that is is also meant to house so many people. That is. And the idea that the glory of it is also kind of how do I say like general like it feels like when people come to Herod Hall, there is. There's a sense of it's the most beautiful, but it's built in like two lives. Like, you know you, Roscoe gets the idea to do it. And then then five months later, the hall is up and it's the most amazing building.
And he constantly has to say how amazing it is, which is how I feel often gated communities or those like those, you know, cookie-cutter castles are this idea that this is it's felt like a real estate brochure, even in the original home. It feels that way to me. So I was interested in writing a place that that felt like it came directly from the catalogue copy.
And here it is now you have a castle now, and the idea of American society is so much that the idea that you can now have your castle, you can be isolated from the horrifying masses that are probably going to come steal your [INAUDIBLE] like they want. There are monsters outside, they want to get to you. So part of the idea of American architecture. Is to build it up, make a wall, make a law, make a wall, and it was pass of the American border in this present moment.
So yeah, so I wanted it to be a place where people certain kind of people could get in, but not everybody could get it. And it was it's closed off to people who are from outside the community. So if it had been a wild wilderness community, a log cabin, for example, or anything of that kind? I feel like that's a more that's a more transgressive idea than the idea of the utopian planned community that has locks and you wouldn't have the same sense of power.
Yeah, I'm hearing I get a status just out in the woods. But yeah, everybody defers to Roger and his family. Yeah. Have remained that once you made it the king and queen and they have, and it's the dream. The dream is to come and have a house like this, to have a beautiful house that is white plaster and that has all windows. You have the luxury of like the view of the mountain, which has already been inhabited and they've built on top of the city that was there.
I think we've got a very strong sense of the the uncanny knows of that landscape that you want to be able to see it outside and admire this picture book view. But the sense that was based on when you were reading of what could be out there looking back in at you. And the the digital presence that the the wild ones has come in the house and left those cruel marks, I think sort of the the most uncanny that's at the heart of the novel for me.
And what about the mountain and the the lake itself and the railway to wait? What field is the railway come from? That was really intriguing. You know, one morning I woke up and I was in the middle of working on this novel. I had been working on it for years. I have been thinking about it for years and suddenly I I knew that I wanted it to be a commuter community within reach of a large city. And so it probably New York City. And that means train.
And then I knew what the train was in it, and I had that feeling, but I didn't know what the train was in to affiliate. The train and the dragon with each other seemed to me suddenly out of nowhere, an obvious idea which then required a lot of back reverse engineering so that I could make that a place where where the dragon could be, the train could be a commuter train as well as watch has a dragon hand on it in person to the dragon moves around the kind of marker time.
But the when I was because I think the dragon is sometimes the most difficult part of retellings of Fable and half the drama of the monster, the monster mother, the fight. And then there has to be the dragon somehow. Where did that come from? Where the [INAUDIBLE] did that dragon come under fire? When I saw the train, I kind of worked and I said, Yes, there it is underground with this, this hoard of of the old forgotten station.
With these grand chandeliers and its mosaics and the splendour, the forgotten splendour, the last survivors hold right? And then the acquisition of a new hoard in the sort of museum when the the line is being reopened. I thought that was that a really astonishing and unexpected move in some way because otherwise dragons can be disappointed. They can be because they're they need to be so wonderful.
And in in the difficulty in beowulf, in translation, I think the difficulty is often that the dragon feels unaffiliated with the rest of the story. The dragon feels like suddenly out of nowhere a dragon is pissed off. His [INAUDIBLE] has been stolen and he wants to come for somebody, anybody it doesn't matter who.
Whereas if you entwined the ethics of Beowulf throughout the story with a certain kind of faded disaster that is coming for him because of theft, because of because of stealing life, because of the cup, because of the cup. Yeah. And you have to you have to entwine it as eventually this is what's going to happen to you too. It's coming. So I think that the dragon and the dragon can easily make sense in that context.
But if the translation is Grendel, smother as a ferocious monster who's who's unhinged and is deserving of death, I think it changes the dynamic of Beowulf and the Dragon ultimately changes its action. It seems justified that he would go and kill her when in fact, it's a pretty mercenary act that he goes to kill her.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's certainly right. And in the it's most of it is also the act of somebody who, unlike the beowulf in the poem, who is the kind of epitome of heroism that the beowulf of the book is as deeply damaged as monstrous a person as they know it's Grendel smother. And it struck me that there's a kind of dialogue about war trauma going on in the book and the fate of veterans.
Not only these two crucial characters, but other veterans who appear on the kind of edges of the story that seem to me to be. I think though, do you think it's? Particularly North American theme. Yeah.
In some ways, because I'm really talking about the way that American masculine status has acquired the that what you need to do, although it's also throughout the history of of literature, the notion that you need to do violence in order to be a man, in order to be seen that way and then to have Dana, who's a woman and she's a female soldier for her. It like to be a woman. You don't need to do violence. Like that's not part of the qualifier.
To be a good woman, to be a strong woman, to be any sort of woman. You don't actually have to kill someone and you don't have to fight a monster that's not part of the lineage of storytelling. So for me, writing about about about war in this book was partially that I wanted to write about the poisonous qualifications that we put ourselves through in regard to gender and proof of heroics.
Proof as proof of my deeds were worthy. My deeds were actually worth doing rather than potentially wrongful deeds, which are some of the deeds that were done by Ben Wolfe Beowulf character in this book, he did some wrong things, but he recategorized himself as a hero throughout the book. Yes. And I think there are institutions in place like having been in the army, having been in the police, having that kind of role, which allows him to do that.
But then I also went and fought and killed in a war. Is circus different? I think that she is as much a victim of the society as she is a participant in it. She's she's a soldier, but she's also and I don't think being a soldier is inherently doing war crimes, obviously. But and nor do I think that commits war crimes. I think that does. I think that Dana is someone who's serving. She thinks it will be OK.
It's not OK, what happens to her as a joke, but she's not prepared for it and ends up with it, which is an extreme story that she did not intend. And in fact, carrying a story inside of her body that she didn't intend. So I don't know. I think they're different characters, but I think they could. They are. They both do good and bad things. He does mostly bad things. Are not pro-bailout. Like, my soul just doesn't live there. But, but I think Dana does. She does best in the course of this story.
She keeps her son very isolated and what ultimately happens as a result of the isolation as much as it is the world? Yeah, I think that that's true, isn't it, that they're both coming from in some ways, kind of similar backgrounds, aren't they? She joins up because her mother's died. She's 17. You to do with herself and the the community has been kind of destroyed and he's an orphan. He's a swimming champion, of course.
And there've been some slightly odd episodes in his life already, I guess, but he looks like he was always meant to join up and go and kill people.
That was his destiny, where she kind of falls into it. Yeah. Well, one of the things that's interesting to me in the original in the poem is the idea of familial bonds between warriors and the idea that if that even more than your family that you might even potentially forget about your family, you might forget you have sons because you've just met a warrior that you quite like and you want to be brothers with him.
You want him to be your child, you want him to be your heir and your bond now as as fellow fighters or as not even fighting in the same battle together. But it's knowing that you have fought is stronger than the bond that you have with your wife, with your so. So the brotherhood of the hall, I think, is that really it's an interesting thing to think about, and it was interesting for me to think about it as I was the brotherhood of not just brotherhood, but sisterhood of suburbia.
And the idea that the emotional bond is stronger than a romantic bond, that it's that it is a blood bond, the bond of defending your home territory, you're very isolated home territory from from wickedness, you know, whatever. And then the need to name it wicked. The need to look out from your high window and say wickedness, it's below. We're all united here, which is, I think, the source of many bad deeds throughout the history of humans.
So the idea that you can only have a sisterhood or only have a brotherhood if you have an opponent? Yes, if that's what you identify yourself against and we've already talked a bit about John thought the scramble and the I think you told me the fact that it has when makes you look at the poem again and think, yes, you can take that story and read vision it in in an interesting way.
Even if the cold had to stay in the cold, is it then that but are there other versions of Beowulf that you've particularly enjoyed and a few years ago? And I think maybe when David was still here. I had a beowulf film day and I showed all the versions of beowulf I could get my hands on, including the amazing animated Grendel, Grendel, Grendel, which has a great. It a kind of pink dinosaur like monster with yellow spots voiced by PETA is still.
And he looks really cuddly, but he still marches into how amazing and eats his way through the assembled words, saying, Oh, not, not so nice. After all, a bunch of other beowulf movies have any particularly caught your eye or to be found interesting. And some kids one, of course, is a kind of case in point.
Well, about earlier as this as this book was beginning to gestate in me, I the Zemeckis movie came out and it was I didn't yet know that basically, I got so aggravated by the Zemeckis movie and by also Revolutionary Road, which is American suburban novel about misery in the suburbs. The two things aggravated me in different directions, but ultimately resulted in this book, and it was. It was because I wanted this reckless movie to be awesome. I wanted the awesomeness that was not in it.
And then there was Randall's mother again painted gold and naked and a seductress with those Intego high heels that just grew out of her feet like a strange golden Barbie. And but I think that that even more and maybe this is just human. But the things that have have really I've been inspired by the things that I hated, as I have been by the things that I've loved in this regard and the things that I did.
I want it to be glorious that we're not as glorious as I want them to be, cause me to do a lot of thinking about the nature of the feminine monstrosity. The Angelina Jolie version in that movie, the grandiose mother played by Angelina Jolie is is a femme fatale and she's a seductress, and she and all kinds of sex happens with Randall's mother in that book with seemingly everyone, she's just banging it out. And I was just like. How did this happen?
But also thinking about that sort of spectrum of monstrosity that has been available for female characters that really led me to a lot of thought on that topic, which has led to my career, which I think has was it was good that I watched that movie that I didn't like in terms of in terms of thinking about the voices that I ultimately and in my work have been wanting to really amplify and to to reveal voices that characters that didn't have voices in these stories,
you know, Grendel as mother has. No, she doesn't say anything. And and that's that's of course, very strange to me that she doesn't say anything that she it doesn't make me think that she doesn't have anything to say. But I think in the in the original version of many of these stories, I just thought, well, in my early career, anyway, I it didn't occur to me that I could just make these women talk that I could shine the light on them and just have it be all about them.
Like to take on beowulf seemed very daunting to me when I first had the fight. I thought, I don't know enough about Beowulf to take this on. People have written about this for hundreds of years. It's really it's it's it's the big thing to take on and then it's watching. Watching things like high heel, integrated feet on those mother started me thinking, Well, why not? Why? Why not take this on? Why not go in?
Because it seems that maybe there has been lots of women have been neglected from the like larger power plays in in the study of beowulf, like they've not gotten the shot shining on their work. And there are so many women who have worked on Beowulf over the years that whose work has not been seen in popular culture. So that aggravates me and I want I want more of that work to show I want. I want a more diverse spotlight on scholarship and in this field.
Fantastic. So talking around Beowulf as well as recasting it, we can see different kinds of people now beginning to engage with it and to to ask the the questions which it provokes. I think in this particular period differently from 12 years ago or 30 years. Mm hmm. Well, I lost you. I think quite enough questions now about what you think of the poem, what you think of the book The Great.
If you would read as some of the translation work in progress since the first time you ever get to hear that. So in progress. I it's like completely. Yeah, it's a newborn baby right now, but. I will read you a little tiny piece of the beginning. I will go to Grendel coming in to the hall right before the battle, which I hear is being read by some people in this room.
So that's the section you're on. So I'm going to read some of it. OK, bro, tell me we still know how to talk about caves in the old days. Everyone knew what men were brave gold and glory about only stories now, but also in the spirit in song hoarded for hungry times. Our first father was a foundling child, she said. He spent his youth fists up browbeating every Barstool Brother and bonfire of his enemies.
The man began in the waves, a baby in a basket, but he bootstrapped his way into a kingdom trading loneliness for luxury. Everyone from end to end of the railroad now to him, whether they thought is necessary or no. They brought a tribute and bowed down. There's a king and there's a crowd that was a good case, God said. Show the Sun a wolf cub, further proof of manhood in God. He knew how the spirit dance had suffered. The misery that mangled through leaderless, long years of loss.
Follow fathered a fierce fame. Bears name kissed legions of lips by the time he was half grown, but his own father was still breathing. And we all know a boy can't take his daddy's throne until his daddy's dead. Privilege is the way men cry and power the world over. Smart son gives gifts to his father's friends. When he takes those trips, [INAUDIBLE] need them to follow. The leader shows was ion until the end, and when he died, his warriors attended to his last orders.
They swaddled their king of rings and brought him into the bosom of an ice ship, anchored and eager to embark. They packed him tight and treasure. Bright swords wore weeds. His shroud showed son stitched. I've never heard of any ship so heavy nor cups so rich. She came into the world and favoured his men, weighted him as well as those strangers. Had he'd first walked him to the waves left.
Even ghosts need to be fitted to fight the war battle flew a golden flag over their main man in the Salt Sea saluted him, and so did the storms and shield soldiers got drunk instead of crying. They mourned the way men do. No man. No, it's not me, not you who hauled his hoard to shore, but the poor are plentiful and somebody got lucky. Onward to the grand old, it's. Which I have found in here somewhere.
OK, here we go. OK, so this is like Beowulf has arrived and everybody is partying and everybody's drunk and going to bed, then Bale will play with his head on a pillow and beside him rested his men warriors of sea and sleep. They were ready for life and didn't expect to see their parents again or their wives. They knew the story of the slaughter and of how many years the Danes had been driven from their home hearth. But the Almighty had other plans a tapestry of terror threaded with triumphs.
The wet weather gives the winners the drive with their one leader, crushed their challengers and cruised on through creation in calm and pleasure. You know how it goes. God is the final decider, and then only the question asker students seeking solace in the dead of night. He emerged a walker without need of light racing along the edge of the hollow shadows. Nearly all the guards were asleep, sat in chains to chests they'd given themselves over to God,
and knew that if the Almighty chose it, they'd be goners. But if not, no enemy could drive them to his hall. One of them waited as the hour got later ready for blood. He alone lay awake eyes opened on the alert. Hidden by fog, Grendel roamed the moors. God cursed grudge worsening. He knew who he hunted the men in the tall hall. Wine drugs need fit. Then he pining for his prey to extinguish them under storm clouds.
He walked in his usual anguish, feeling their hearts and heat the gilded hall atop the hill, gleaming still through years of bloodshed. This was not the first time he'd hunted here, but never before or after had such hard luck. [INAUDIBLE], no one where they had ever lain and wait for him. The warrior walked toward the hall, his head and heart hurting, and arrived at the Iron Cross door. Its hinges hold a welcome for him and his rage ratcheted up.
He flooded the door wide and leapt into the hall of decorated floors and into the hold. His fury crossing. His gaze flamed as he counted that man by man nested together, roosting like roasting chickens. He'd be the sort of fox that stalks tonight. Before sunrise, he prised souls from flesh and eaters filled the crew remaining noble, but only feathers loose on the floor. His destiny, though, was no longer rich in others blood footprints to the door and outdoors the mirror.
Now tonight was the night Randall's goose would be cooked. His funeral banquet bruised and blue from his bench kinsmen watched over the long hunter-paul, waiting for his hot, punted hunter to pout. At last, his enemies struck, leaping to snatch a sleeper and suck him bone dry staining, the Plex read. Grunting, gobbling, draining Harry's throat. Head fingers, feet dead. Grendel dropped his first course and approached the bed, where Beowulf slapped hands outstretched to slaughter a second.
But he gripped and found himself conscripted, his hand grabbed by a commanding gait. The grasp raised Grendel score, rendering him a revenant in a hall he'd always revelled in. His bones cracked, but he could not rest himself free of this class war, wedded to a world greater look slightly like no human had ever come. Keeping him close, though, he tried to flee to divest himself of halls and return to his home.
Dive into the dark and abide with any awful thing there. Stay in a stuffy house the rest of his days. He was an unwilling draftee and had never been bested like this before, nor held hostage. Now he collects men chained, chanting the boasts he'd made his bed red climbed out of the covers to get a better grip. Knuckles buckled in joints and joined. The attacker became the attacked, wracked with pain, attempting to escape to run and raced from hall to fence those hidden highways.
His own grasp unlatched and flesh locks loosened. The hurt holder was full of horror heroes has held while shook benches splintered and danced, dreamt of doom or quivered questioning. The warriors wrestled their bodies, lurching through the halls, smashing and crashing. But the hall still hold its design fit for fighting wooden walls crusted iron bands at forest fettered together.
Though from what I've heard, the meat benches stood on end of shattered cold MoneyGram's no match for battle and the two fighters fought on in the rubble. I mean, damn man. Until this night, no shielding elder would have believed the whole vulnerable to anything but flame its ivory and iron, its careful cantilevered. But now at risk timber by Typekit, a wailing clamour rose again, rocking the room in the north stands. Listen to the sound of doom knocking the whole hall heard the hull.
The whole hill hut heard the hall resonate with the shriek of that almighty abrogate. The loaners lament handcuffed by hopelessness. The warrior holding him was stronger than any monster, more muscular than any man. The stalwarts of soldiers soldiers had no wish to imprison the invader, but only to slay him. Brando's life wasn't worth living in. Dallas had decided that his own men set up a guard as the two enemies spot swinging their little blades willy nilly,
though really their captain needed. Though keeping this one for the Slayer saw that their struggle was for not. They could have stayed sleeping because their swords, sharp as they were, couldn't injure the fiend his spouse had ordered him and kneeling his skin. Still, his death would be agony, and it wouldn't be swift. No existence, nothing instant, but slow suffering is sending spirit sent to sink slowly down to [INAUDIBLE].
He knew it now. He had spent seasons haunting this hall, preying on poets, bringing pain to the privileged. His body was breached and its bones were breaking. He collapsed. Kinsman had him hand welded. Each of them living cancelled out. The other as Cain had Abel, brother and brother. Someone had to give and it was this one. The Unforgiven Grindle shoulder split muscles twisting and arteries on the scroll.
His limb worried from wholeness into a wound. And at last, his arm was bested by a fatal fist. Bell was the winner. Grendel dismissed. He was gone to his grave, still living, running to the water, his wound weeping. His lair, his last long in his hourglass was emptying. Now his day is done and he knew it. Each heartbeat wrote its number in red, and the remains were delivered up to wretch with the reinforced their enemy dead.
Fantastic. Thank you. Well, now it's time for the audience to put any questions they have and they want to change the channel. That's awesome. Thank you. Well, come back here so fast and robust. I have some neighbours also, I'm very curious to something as each person by the translation. And when you're talking about, I'm just stating the North American novel, how do you approach writing this across? Do you have to play rituals go through when you kind of first contact for book?
Like what kind of love goes into these parts? I think always and my work, all of my work has been really each book is really different from the next one. But what always happens is that I get this little kernel of something. In this case, it was it was the idea that the the word for that is usually translated as hero for beowulf and clever and as monster or hag for grandiose mother and monster for Grendel is the same word. So I had that notion and I thought, what? No, I can't.
And that caused me to do it sort of wild, free ranging, deep dive across everything. I could read about that topic and everything I could read about classification of Grendel smother.
So yeah, so that's like, that's kind of typical. Like, I start with the with a question and then and then do as much research down any little paths that I can find and then just start making [INAUDIBLE] up in hopes that it will work and then trying to find research that can support the possibility that I have imagined something might be. So this is why I write fiction. By the way, though, this is why this is why I am not an academic, because the burden of proof is like, it's there.
Like the idea that I would need to like find in writing many of the things that I want to find that aren't in writing. That's it means that I have to write fiction because I want to write the possibility that that has not been in the canonical text. You're welcome. From that. Hi, thanks for that. I talk to them about how they treated us. And I may be missing something. I loved it. All right. But then when you saw the of what you were doing?
So that's what you definitely do in concession, like, hey, I'm going to make everyone happy or genre wise, I don't know. I've written in kind of every show my whole career and I it's a mash up of always a mash up of things. So like, there's definitely some horror in Moerewa. If there's some kind of a little bit of a thriller structure because you're you're hopefully it's a page turner, but it's also a lot of it is written in poetry. I don't know.
I frustrated every publisher deeply that I have ever had. They're all like, Where do we solve your books? We don't know. And so I was like, Well, just wait. Eventually, I write enough books that you can just have a shelf, the headteacher. That's that's the goal. But at the moment, this in the states has been shelved in like literary fiction, which is, you know, a genre unto itself, in my opinion.
And it's certainly not a naturalistic book. There's lots of lots of surreal and poetic supernatural stuff happening throughout it. But, but yeah, I'm also interested in in writing in all kinds of genre tropes. I'm interested in the ways that that we create hunger. And this is a book a lot about the creation of hunger. So I'm interested in the way that we create a hunger for a story and then create a story that continues to be told.
And a lot of those things are genre tropes. They're there like, you know, Oh my god, there's a monster. And in beowulf, in the poem, you know, he keeps like the poet keeps going back and saying, last night on Beowulf, This happens and you get a little recap, a little quirk like emergency recap of of the reasons that people are pestered each other.
So. So it's yeah, I you know, I see myself as as a genre writer in the long tradition of writers that started with, you know, the Odyssey because all of those things are monsters and heroes and gods and quit. And that's that's what I like to write in that in that realm. Still, yeah, yeah. I want it to be epic. I try, I try, I want it. I like to tell the biggest story. I can think of it and see if I can make it happen.
In this case, it's the biggest story I can think of, with also a lot of it taking place in like a suburban kitchen. But it's still like. Right? So yeah, I'm interested in that sort of thing. But like a question and Hitchcock, you know, we would just come off the midterm elections in America. One of the things that everybody is talking about, the fact that 59 percent white women who. Spokesman for the Republican, Ted Cruz. And just a little rattled for sure.
Think this is connexion to the characters in the middle shot? Expand little. Yeah, it's that thing that I that I ranch about, because it's because I'm a white woman. I'm like, What are you [INAUDIBLE] doing that you're voting for? And in the 2016 election, voting for Trump, who made it really clear that he has no respect for women and doesn't think that there are objects. Cruz is very similar.
I I started thinking about it in the context of beowulf and in the context of this sort of storytelling in regard to women's safety in the world and the idea that if you are a person who sort of transforms yourself not into a woman who has equality with men, but into an object, into a beautiful object, into something that can be hoarded, that you actually have greater safety as a part of someone's hoard than you have as his wife or as his as a woman who is his colleague.
In the case of many stories across America in the last year and across the world and in just across the whole history of the world, let's be honest. So thinking about why a woman in this case might vote for Ted Cruz, I was thinking about the ways that those women who would vote for someone like that would think my safety is assured if I side with the man that I've already been siding with.
He will know that he is meant to defend me. He will. If I tell him that I am his possession, he will, of course, take care of me. I will. I will not be attacked. I'll be safe. And I think that that's a big part of the political mess in the US and in the world in general. But the the idea that that one must keep the power where it has been or risk, you know, revolution is scary and dangerous, and lots of loss of life happens in revolution as well.
And I think this is why a lot of women who I think would otherwise, I would have imagined would have raised their fists and charged instead said, No, no, no, but he's a poor little man. Don't attack him. He's he's so he's so good. No, no. Don't come for him. And that's what has happened in the states. It's been it's been people saying, don't be mean to the men. And I'm like, Well, he's a president like he is. He's put himself up there saying, I am.
I am the one in charge. It is only reasonable to say the work you are doing is wrong if you think it's wrong, but instead it's like no one. Don't attack him. He's so delicate. And you know, I mean, that's all just part of this screwy structure of of keeping the power in its place and the way that that has been taught to women to help keep the power in place because women have to women have to help it. If it's going to happen, it can't just be men saying it's a bit it doesn't work like that.
It also works with women telling other women to submit and women saying, Well, you must submit or we all die. The whole system will be broken and we'll all die. And yeah, I don't believe that's true, but I believe that's a powerful, powerful mythology. Hmm. I've always been quite struck by the loud noise from Harriet and how destructive it is symbolic significance.
So I was wondering why Ella Fitzgerald? Oh, well, in this case, it's because they're white people inherit who are like appropriating black culture. And in and in my mind, I was thinking, What would you do to try to be like, I'm so cool with people of colour. Will you play like someone that you've appropriated and made part of? You're like white noise, music, literal white noise. But except that it's a black singer whose career has been appropriated as an acceptable black singer.
Yeah. This is the Christian. And again, I want to ask you that, but you of what at the beginning of the campaign, there's so many ways you can translate that I just wrote, I just wanted to know more about this whole process that arrives at Bro. Yeah. I think that the tone of the wolf I wasn't this didn't happen to me, actually, somewhat ironically, given where we are right now.
This happened to me when I read Tolkien's translation of Beowulf. I was reading the language that he uses in that translation. And it's so had this certain kind of like formal masculinity that to me, is like just another another shade of bro. And so much of the stories like, Oh, let me tell you about love and ended. My man did this. I didn't even know that maybe I was kind of there. The way the P.O.V. works in the poem is that sometimes sometimes the narrator acts like he was in the room,
and other times he's like, I heard it from my friends. I heard it from my brothers that this happened this crazy [INAUDIBLE]. And I just like the I like it. Do I like it. I don't like it in the world. But the notion of inflated actions coming from, you know, just sort of grow tall tales, which is a big part of what Beowulf does in himself. In the poems he himself is like, I did these really heroic, badass things,
but you didn't see them because they were underwater where I killed nine sea monsters. But you weren't there because you're not hardcore enough. I was under the water. And, you know, it's also very familiar to me from that particular kind of culture that says, I did this amazing thing. I am the most heroic, the most hard core, the strongest, the best. And and yet there were no witnesses to this hardcore behaviour. So you have to tell the story in a certain way.
You have to be like and bro, of course, is also a way of stopping traffic. It's a way of saying, no, don't. I'm talking right now, which is also like Seamus Heaney uses stealth for that purpose. It's a way to say I have the floor. And but bro is also a way to say I have the floor, but I am friendly to my audience. We are all brothers together. We're all the same kind of men. We all we all understand I can skip over some part of this story. We know what we know what it's like to be this man.
And so you have that bond with the with the heroic narrative, which I think is, yeah, that's why I did it. And, you know, once I had that idea, then I had to translate that, which is what happened to me. I had an idea for the first word and then I was broken, which is a long tradition. This has happened to others and then it's like, you've got to play, you know, you're like, Oh, no, it's now it's going to be years of my life where I am like, clawing through rhyme.
But yeah, that's where it came from. Thanks very much for sharing your work. It's a really exciting translation. It's great to see you putting your stamp on it. We'll see about The Adventures, Seamus Heaney, because my question is going to be, to what extent do you balance working in your own translation when you are living in his shadow, much in the same way that it like your grandma to live in the shadows told you about?
The traditional Swedish translation does cast a long shadow over the whole translation. So how did you know? Well, it's it's going to be interesting because in the US it's coming out from the same publisher. It's it's also FSG and it's, you know, it's been 20 years. So I I think his translation is really interesting, particularly reading it in comparison with, you know, the nine others that I have surrounding me all the time because that's what I'm interested in.
I mean, I'm not I'm not a scholar. I'm interested in the the ways that people have wanted to look at this narrative contextually in the ways that they have wanted to look at what actually happens in this story. And so his his shadow is long and Nobel prise winning poet like pretty intense and a little and a little scary to look at. So I just don't look at that. I look at his words and think, OK, you made that choice. That's an interesting choice here, someone else making a different choice.
And the choices are a wide spectrum of choices in terms of what people have done as they worked in this material. And you know, of course, there's no shortage and shortage of translations. So I feel like there's always room for another view on something like this text. But yeah, it's interesting. FSG assigned him an English Saxon scholar because they were worried he would get it wrong, and he he did so much work to get it right.
He and still got a lot of critique about the translation itself, I think, whereas right now, because I wrote Mirwais, they did not ask me scholars. I mean, just like a wild creature rushing through the forest with two torches, studying trees on fire. So but I think, you know, there's room for that translation as well. Like I am. I've been lucky enough to have a publisher who's like, OK, we're ready for that.
Let's do that. Let's let's see what happens if you if you come through wildly as a novelist rather than as a poet or, you know, I mean, I've certainly been a poet over the years, but I but I don't consider myself to be formally a poet. So too, to play with language in this way. Is privilege so, so much fun? Yeah. How we doing? I mean, maybe I'll take one final question. I'll go get. Some questions and questions that you could go sulking about when you ask.
Right. And you know, that's one of the I found really interesting and that comes from the same company for a voice that uses the privileged few times. Now this state load, you would ask yourself what kind of position? You're right, sir. In regards to like how what it's going to raise to actually think about story, so that kind of on pretty travel with that kind of.
Yeah, I mean, that, of course, is the topic of many years of scholarship on all sides of that in terms of what I think, what I'm what I'm doing in my version. You know, I've always been interested in the feeling of like the poet slash the people who are copying the text, the monks going, and you know, I think I'm just going to stick a little thing in here that I remember from elsewhere. So I think there's always not exactly a critical eye, although sometimes there's like, wrong god.
Just so you guys know, I here I am working on this story. I'm going to pause for a second and say, Ron God, and I'm putting that it. And I mean, it's part of the it's part of the text and it's an interesting part of the text. The idea of like which is why I think what I was saying about earlier, the idea of we're all in this together, we all have to say.
In fact, knowledge is part of the way the story is being told here because it's sort of like we're all the same kind of God, we're all the same. And here's a little bit of random that I drew in. I read it in together. It's some scholarship from elsewhere, you know, and I'm telling a different weird bit of story. And that's that's part of what's so interesting about the bill of time is it's full of scraps and bits and bobs that you can also entwined working on it with the themes of the poem,
but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're just like things that are treated as fragments like they don't make sense, but they do. They're about they're about lost very frequently. They're about they're about war and grief and loss and what you give up in order to have loyalty to your people.
And I think that's, you know, as far as point of view goes, it's a wild compendium of knowledge that's stuffed into this poem, and it's fun to think of somebody trying to like, go, OK, OK, let me break it down for you. I know you don't have this scholarship. I'm just going to grab it. I'm just going to toss it right here.
Totally different, Peter, and and having someone be able to do that because they have put in a kind of all encompassing voice at the top that says, we all know what the story is, don't we?