Many years ago, Donald Mace Williams quit a newspaper job and went back to college to get qualified to teach “Beowulf.” No luck after that was done, but his newspaper experience, plus a totally irrelevant PhD, got him hired to teach journalism. After a few years he went back to newspaper work. What has he done since retiring? He has translated “Beowulf,” though not into journalese. The translation was published in April 2024. If Amazon is a gauge, nobody yet has read it. His translation of Rilke’s “The Grown-Up” won the 2024 Der Hovanessian Prize for poetry in translation, sponsored by the New England Poetry Club. Williams lives in Austin, Texas, and at ninety-four does mostly poetry translations because for those you don’t have to have ideas.