Don’t get me wrong: I love a nice (short) nature poem as much as the next girl. But sometimes you want to get stuck deep in an epic, right? Just me? But I don’t read Ancient Greek and – frankly – Ye Olde Englishe is a foreign language, too. Enter some absurdly talented translators who have made it their business to take the greatest epics and update them for the rest of us.

First of all, if you missed Seamus Heaney‘s swashbuckling translation of Beowulf from 1999, what are you waiting for? It has everything you didn’t know you wanted to read about – mead halls, Grendel, Grendel’s totally badass mother, making this a weirdly appropriate Mother’s Day gift too – but it’s legit readable. Will you want to throw a mug of grog at a dragon? Yes, you will, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Emily Wilson is the first woman to translate Homer’s epic The Odyssey, and she does a bang-up job of it. I read it on the heels of an older translation of The Iliad last spring, and this version – which really moves – was a breath of fresh air after that. Pair with A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes, if you want to get the women’s perspective (spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty).

Not sure if this counts, but The Owl and the Nightingale is a honking long poem (1,800 lines) from an indeterminate time in English literary history – there are references to King Henry, but which King Henry, there have been so many? It’s bawdy and a little rude, and kind of ridiculous – an owl and a nightingale endlessly debate which of them is better and which of them is a useless pile of… well, you know. Simon Armitage presents a new translation with sumptuous illustrations and ALL of the Medieval potty jokes.

If you’re looking for something with which to celebrate National Poetry Month, and you’ve had your fill of the Romantics, I do encourage you to delve a little deeper into literary history. With Seamus Heaney, Emily Wilson, and Simon Armitage to guide you, how can you go wrong?

What’s your favorite modern translation of an epic poem?