Divine Comedies (1): Trilogies

[Domenico di Michelino: La Divina Commedia di Dante (1465)]

[Milla Jovovich: The Divine Comedy (1994)]

I guess there are two questions, really:

• First, why do so many people insist on translating Dante's Divine Comedy (or separate sections of it) into English verse?
• Second, what is it about that Inferno / Purgatory / Paradise three-part structure that has so appealed to writers and artists - plus whatever exactly the lovely Milla Jovovich might be described as - ever since?

Let's start off with some examples of the latter syndrome:

•


[Wyndham Lewis: The Human Age (1928-1955)]

1/ - Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

1. The Childermass. The Human Age, 1. 1928. Jupiter Books. London: John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1965.
2. Monstre Gai. The Human Age, 2. 1955. Jupiter Books. London: John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1965.
3. Malign Fiesta. The Human Age, 3. 1955. Jupiter Books. London: Calder and Boyars Ltd., 1966.

Horrible old Wyndham Lewis was apparently working on a fourth volume of his interminable "Human Age" when he died, but it's doubtful that any of his characters would ever have got anywhere much anyway.

The whole thing reads more like a vision of hell than of any imaginable Purgatory or Heaven, but then I guess that tends to be the trouble with most of the twentieth-century adaptations of Dante's schema. They start off fine with the Inferno, but then things get increasingly unconvincing the further one moves up the great chain of being.

In this case, the First World War was the initial inspiration (the two main characters have just been killed on the Western front), but as it continued, influences from the Second World War and even the Cold War started to predominate.

•


[Mervyn Peake: The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-1959)]

2/ - Mervyn Peake (1911-1968)

1. Titus Groan. Illustrated by the author. 1946. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
2. Gormenghast. 1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
3. Titus Alone. 1959. Rev. ed. 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
4. The Titus Books: Titus Groan / Gormenghast / Titus Alone. 1946, 1950, 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

Is the Gormenghast trilogy linked to Dante in any clear way? Beyond merely being a trilogy, that is?

I suppose that it depends whether one regards the stultified madness of the ancient castle of the Groans as being heavenly or infernal. It's true that one begins to feel a certain nostalgia for its solid certainties amid the chaos of Titus Alone, but its aspect as a bildungsroman does lead Titus to reject the simple alternative of going home at the end of the series.

In that sense, then, like the protagonist of Dante's poem, Titus has achieved a kind of independence by the end of his journey - and has rejected the Luciferian temptations both of Steerpike's anarchy and his mother's orthodoxy. There's probably as much of Paradise Lost in Peake's long epic poem in prose as there is of the Divine Comedy, but that simply serves to underline the seriousness of his teleological concerns.

•


[Samuel Beckett: The Beckett Trilogy (1950-1953)]

3/ - Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

1. Molloy: Roman. 1950. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967.
2. Malone Meurt: Roman. 1951. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963.
3. L’Innommable: Roman. 1953. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965.
4. Three Novels: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable. 1950, 1951 & 1953. Trans. Samuel Beckett & Patrick Bowles. 1955. An Evergreen Black Cat Book. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965.

The Beckett trilogy seems to approach the problem of progression upwards simply by reversing it. However grovellingly low the abasement of Molloy may seem, it's nothing by comparison with the mollusc-like existence of the Unnamable.

Beckett's work is (of course) a masterpiece, but getting to the end of it requires a kind of courage that not all readers possess. If it weren't for the zany bolts of Hibernian humour that flash out from his prose from time to time (in the English version, at any rate - I'm not so sure about the French), it would be almost literally intolerable. Cheers, Sam!

•


[Phillip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)]

4/ - Phillip Pullman (1946- )

1. Northern Lights. [USA: 'The Golden Compass'] His Dark Materials, 1. 1995. Point. London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 1998.
2. The Subtle Knife. His Dark Materials, 2. 1997. Point. London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 1998.
3. The Amber Spyglass. His Dark Materials, 3. 2000. Point. London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2001.
4. Lyra’s Oxford. Engravings by John Lawrence. 2003. London: Corgi Books, 2007.

Like Peake, Phillip Pullman sets out to rewrite Milton and "justify the ways of God to man" in an entirely new way. Philosophically, he's not really up to the task, but his fictional inventiveness carries one a good deal of the way with him in any case.

There seem to be fragments of a projected fourth volume lurking in the otherwise unremarkable Lyra's Oxford. Whatever it's all really about in the end, though, his work clearly aspires to the status of an secular-eschatological epic.

It's certainly a fine tribute to him that he's managed to achieve second place on the prestigious list of "the top 10 books that people have tried to ban across America" (Guardian Online, 30/9/09) ...

•


[Mike Carey: Lucifer (1999-2007)]

5/ - Mike Carey (1959- )

1. Lucifer 1: Devil in the Gateway. The Sandman Presents – Lucifer 1-3: 1999 & Lucifer 1-4: 2000. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2001.
2. Lucifer 2: Children and Monsters. Lucifer 5-13: 2000. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2001.
3. Lucifer 3: A Dalliance with the Damned. Lucifer 14-20: 2001. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2002.
4. Lucifer 4: The Divine Comedy. Lucifer 21-28: 2002. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2003.
5. Lucifer 5: Inferno. Lucifer 29-35: 2003. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2004.
6. Lucifer 6: Mansions of the Silence. Lucifer 36-41: 2003. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2004.
7. Lucifer 7: Exodus. Lucifer 42-44, 46-49: 2004. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2005.
8. Lucifer 8: The Wolf beneath the Tree. Lucifer 45, 50-54: 2004. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2005.
9. Lucifer 9: Crux. Lucifer 55-61: 2005. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2006.
10. Lucifer 10: Morningstar. Lucifer 62-69: 2006. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2006.
11. Lucifer 11: Evensong. Lucifer – Nirvana: 2002 & Lucifer 70-75: 2006. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2007.

One of my favourite comics ever, Mike Carey's Lucifer series goes way beyond its progenitor, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, to become its own mad series of riffs on life, death, the afterworld, creation, destruction, retribution, and virtually everything in between. The elegance of his writing is only matched by the absurd ambitiousness of his scheme. It's hard to see how anyone could ever go beyond this avatar of Dante's Commedia ...

•


[Jack Ross: The REM [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008)]

6/ - Jack Ross (1962- )

1. Nights with Giordano Bruno. The REM Trilogy, 1. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000.
2. The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. The REM Trilogy, 2. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006.
3. EMO. The REM Trilogy, 3. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008.

What Jack Ross is doing in this prestigious set of listings is anyone's guess. No doubt he conspired to crash the party somehow. His trilogy of novels about contemporary alienation (focussed, respectively, on insomnia, amnesia and blindness as the vehicles of his three plots) does seem to be trying to tread an upwards path from the "urban inferno of Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006) [to] the closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of – let alone aspire to", as the blurb to EMO puts it.

•


[Eileen Myles: Inferno (2010)]

7 (a)/ - Eileen Myles (1949- )

1. Inferno (a poet's novel). New York: OR Books, 2010.

I thought it might be nice to round off the list with some examples of the many, many individual works called "Inferno," "Purgatory," or "Paradise" ...

I have to admit that I haven't read this novel, but it sounds pretty cool: according to the publishers, OR Books, the first sentence reads "“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful,” which sounds like an excellent beginning for any book.

•


[Tomás Eloy Martínez: Purgatorio (2008)]

7 (b)/ - Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934-2010)

1. Purgatory: A Novel. 2008. Trans. John Gaffney (2010)

Author of the classic Santa Evita (1995) and The Perón Novel (1985), this Argentinian journalist and writer died of a brain tumor in January 2010. This was his final novel, published in English shortly after his death. It deals with the dictatorship that afflicted his country between 1976 and 1982, and in particular with the fate of the "disappeared" from those years - territory previously mined by Fernando E. Solanas' beautiful film Sur (1988), as well as Ernesto Sábato's Nunca Más (Never Again): A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People. 1984 (London: Faber / Index on Censorship, 1986).

•


[José Lezama Lima: Paradiso (1966)]

7 (c)/ - José Lezama Lima (1910-1976)

1. Paradiso. 1966. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1970.

The only novel by this Cuban poet to reach print in his lifetime, Paradiso deals with "the childhood and youth of José Cemí, told in a highly baroque experimental style, and depicts many scenes which have remarkable resonances with Lezama's own life as a young poet in Havana," according to Wikipedia.

•


[Judge Dredd (1980)]

And finally, last but not least, I didn't think I could close my account without mentioning this miniseries within the larger plot arcs of Judge Dredd.

"Purgatory" (written by Mark Millar and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra) appeared in British SF magazine 2000 AD between 8 May and 26 June 1993; its sequel "Inferno" (by Grant Morrison and Carlos Ezquerra) appeared between 3 July and 18 September 1993. Judge Grice is a kind of Lucifer figure, crushed finally (surprise! surprise!) by Dredd himself on his lawmaster bike ...

•


[The Divine Comedy (band) (2007)]

The Plot Thickens: Thoughts on Narrative

Gene Wolfe: Latro in the Mist: Omnibus edition

Every morning as I drive to work, I turn on the stereo to listen to the next instalment in whichever epic I’m sampling at present. You have to be quick to get them. They don’t tend to stay in stock for very long, even in the online bookshops.

So far this year it’s been Virgil’s Aeneid, then Dante, and now Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh. After that I think I might go back to Homer, then right through the whole cycle again. Listening to so much epic poetry gets one to thinking about the nature of plots, and of storytelling in general. There’s something, too, in the episodic nature of these twenty-minute trips to the office which encourages a sense of incremental repetition.

Is it the poems themselves, or is it the translations which make them all seem so similar – so preoccupied with big issues: the meaning of life, the tragic inevitability of conflict, the necessity of leaving an enduring name?

It’s a little disturbing that different versions of the same epic can leave one with such different impressions. E. V. Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey (for instance) gave me a powerful sense of the sea: the treacherous complexities of its tides and currents. I felt very strongly that the man who wrote that description of Odysseus swimming along the shore of Phaeacia must have been there himself – must have been a sailor or even an ocean swimmer.

Not so when I heard the same passage in Ian McKellen’s reading of Robert Fagles’ verse translation. The emphasis seemed now (understandably) to be fixed firmly on the beauty of the young Nausicäa.

•



Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun

Gene Wolfe is one of my favourite Science Fiction writers – and that’s saying something. I was an almost obsessive consumer of SF when I was younger: the big three – Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein – were succeeded by the English invasion – John Wyndham, John Christopher, Brian Aldiss – then the Eastern Bloc – Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, the Strugatsky brothers – then the postmoderns – Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin ...

Wolfe has stiff competition, then. But there’s something in him which isn’t in the others. How can I put it? He’s less afraid to fail. His books are wildly uneven: ranging from the barbaric, atmospheric genius of Shadow of the Torturer and its sequels (called collectively The Book of the New Sun) to the jaunty ventriloquism of Pandora, by Holly Hollander.

My favourite series of his (and he specialises in sets of linked novels) is the one comprising Soldier in the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), recently completed by Soldier of Sidon (2006). Is it Science Fiction at all? More like historical fantasy, I suppose. Ostensibly this set of narratives tracks the wanderings of a brain-damaged Roman mercenary at the time of the Persian invasion of Greece.

The nature of Latro, or Lucas, or Lucius’s injury is a partial amnesia which makes him forget the events of the preceding day every time he falls asleep. Each day, then, is a new beginning for him. As in the film Memento, his friends (and enemies) have to reintroduce themselves every time they meet. His views of them shift from day to day.

The conceit of the books is that he is forced to write down as much as possible of each day’s events on a papyrus scroll, which he then reads over next morning. Inevitably, though, he fails to recognise the meaning of much of what he has witnessed – a great deal slips between the gaps. And then there are the periods of weeks or months at a time when he is unable to use the scroll and thus, as it were, awakens in a wholly unfamiliar environment, surrounded by strangers with whom he is, apparently, intimate.

Another peculiarity of Latro’s state is his ability to see gods and spirits and to converse with them. As far as he’s concerned, they’re just people – though sometimes they’re considerate enough to identify themselves as supernatural.

The books are sensual, violent, episodic – by their very nature – but Wolfe uses this basic idea to build up a sense of anticipation and suspense. Will Latro escape? Recover his memory? Return home? In the end, it doesn’t really make any difference. As long as his memory is impaired (and the implication is strong that Latro can never be cured), he can never actually succeed in recovering a sense of individuality or personal space.

•



Aran Ashe: Choosing Lovers for Justine (1993)

My third exhibit is admittedly far less glamorous but (I would argue) no less suggestive.

Aran Ashe is a (pseudonymous) erotic writer published by Nexus Books, published by Nexus, a British imprint of Virgin Books, specialising in sado-masochistic pornography for straight male readers (hence the gender-ambiguity of the author's name?). S/he concocts stories of female submission in a fantasy universe involving spanking, piercing, and erotic lactation, among other things.

Ashe’s books range from pseudo-Edwardian masochistic bisexual erotica (Choosing Lovers for Justine, 1993) to two episodic series (The Chronicles of Lidir, 4 titles: 1991-1992, and The Chronicles of Tormunil, ongoing – 5 volumes to date: 1995-2008) set in a vaguely mythological fantastic Otherwhere.

There’s an awful similarity about pornographic novels. No significant character development is really possible for characters whose principal function is to have sex with one another. The corruption of innocence is therefore the most obvious and predominant theme: there is at least some interest in the concept of an ingénu/e overcoming his or her initial distrust and fear of sensuality.

After that, though, there’s little to be done except introducing new exclamations of rapture or new sets of characters – a process amusingly parodied in Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa (1961).

The supernatural is virtually the only realm of existence which can be conveniently juxtaposed with the pornographic. Humour and satire tend to undercut the action which is its selling point. Politics, history, simply complicate the plotlines without significantly altering them. The presence of ghosts or demons does however at least have the effect of calling into question the eschatological implications of a life of sensual self-indulgence.

And that’s why the works of Aran Ashe stands out from this morass of stale and compulsive repetitive action. His / her interests are (on the strength of her fiction, at any rate) genuinely unusual.

Take, for example, the following fairly characteristic passage from The Handmaidens (1995), the first volume in Ashe’s "Chronicles of Tormunil":

Quislan spoke to Sutrice of a special place inside a man, saying that when the man became sufficiently aroused, without relief, this place would become swollen and distended. Sutrice put her fingers in Josef and found it. ‘I have some metal tongs, she said, ‘that we could use to squeeze it.’

His wrists were fastened to a bar that ran below the ceiling. The jaws of the tongs were shaped. She put them up inside him. When she squeezed gently, he moaned, his penis leaked. She took out the tongs and slipped her fingers in. He felt the inner swelling move under the pressure of her fingers. Between his legs, his balls were bursting. Sutrice rubbed the place inside him and his yield increased to an oily runnel down his stem. And again he felt it move – the living growth inside him, like a slowly squirming creature under his fingers. The gland ached to empty – he felt its first involuntary pulse. Very gently, Sutrice took out her fingers and lapped up his leakage. The tip of her tongue against the base of his penis almost precipitated his climax. Then she applied the firm thumb pressure that took his erection down.

The whole exercise had been one of exquisite agony for Josef. But it was not over. [217]

That’s putting it mildly. It certainly isn't over. The description of Josef's ordeal goes on for pages and pages, until the end of the chapter brings his sufferings to an end.

Ashe’s first series of novels, The Chronicles of Lidir: A Saga of Erotic Domination delineate the kingdom of Lidir, a fantasyland dedicated to bondage, teasing, bodily manipulation and torture.
Then came The Chronicles of Tormunil, beginning in 1995 and still unresolved in the latest volume, Leah’s Punishment (2008). His/her concerns, on display here even more obsessively than in "Lidir", include spanking, piercing and erotic lactation.

Further research reveals the interesting fact that Ashe also writes as "Valentina Cilescu." Cilescu, author of the bestselling "Mara Vampire" series of erotic titles, also has a number of other pseudonyms, including Anastasia Dubois, Sophie Danson, Louise Aragon, Sue Lightfoot, Sue Dyson, Aurelia Clifford and Zoë Barnes.

The Mara Vampire series (so far) comprises Kiss of Death (1992) - listed below - as well as The Phallus of Osiris (1993), Empire of Lust (1994), Masque of Flesh (1995), Vixens of Night (1997) and Lusts of the Forbidden (1999). Great titles, wouldn't you say?

Valentina Cilescu: The Haven

Valentina Cilescu ['Aran Ashe']


1. Ashe, Aran. The Slave of Lidir. The Chronicles of Lidir: A Saga of Erotic Domination, 1. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 1991.


2. Ashe, Aran. The Dungeons of Lidir. The Chronicles of Lidir: A Saga of Erotic Domination, 2. A Nexus Book. 1991. London: W. H. Allen, 1994.


3. Ashe, Aran. The Forest of Bondage. The Chronicles of Lidir: A Saga of Erotic Domination, 3. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 1991.


4. Ashe, Aran. Pleasure Island. The Chronicles of Lidir: A Saga of Erotic Domination, 4. 1992. A Nexus Classic. London: W. H. Allen, 2001.


5. [Ashe, Aran. The Chronicles of Lidir. A Saga of Erotic Domination, 4: Pleasure Island. London: Nexus, 1992.]


6. Ashe, Aran. Choosing Lovers for Justine. A Nexus Book. 1993. London: W. H. Allen, 1995.


7. Ashe, Aran. The Handmaidens. The Chronicles of Tormunil, 1. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 1995.


8. Ashe, Aran. Citadel of Servitude. The Chronicles of Tormunil, 2. 1997. A Nexus Classic. London: W. H. Allen, 1999.


9. Ashe, Aran. Slave-Mines of Tormunil. The Chronicles of Tormunil, 3. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 2002.


10. Ashe, Aran. Love-Chattel of Tormunil. The Chronicles of Tormunil, 4. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 2003.


11. Ashe, Aran. Leah’s Punishment. The Chronicles of Tormunil, 5. A Nexus Book. London: W. H. Allen, 2008.


12. Cilescu, Valentina. Kiss of Death. London: Headline, 1992.

•



Gustave Doré: Dante in the Wood of the Suicides (1857)

So what exact point am I trying to make with this juxtaposition of two writers from two pulp genres (one, admittedly, now admitted to Academic respectability under the rubric SF: Speculative Fiction; the other probably permanently beyond the pale) with those heroes of Western narrative, the great masters of the epic?

Well, I guess on the one hand I want to question the image of a story as necessarily having to gratify our desire for completion or closure. Long-running TV series do that already, of course: both the ones where time never seems to move forward, however many episodes unfold, and those where the characters are permitted to age and evolve.

Freud's idea of repetition-compulsion: the fort-da game he explored in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the obvious precedent to invoke here. What pleasure, exactly, can be expected to reside in the essentially incidentless books of Aran Ashe, where the psychopathology of suspense, of delayed gratification has become a kind of humdrum normality?

Should we regard "Valentina Cilescu" (in any of her avatars) as a satirist of the banality of male passion? Or simply a competent worker-bee, laying out stories at so much the yard (pun intended)? There's something uniquely strange (at least in my experience) in the purity and precision of her prose which seems to make them something more than the usual masturbatory fantasies.

Is it the essential benignity of her vision of a world devoted solely to sensual gratification, both the aggressors' and the victims'? Is it the affectless, almost scientific dispassion of her writing? There are no philosophical profundities to be found in the soliloquies of her various protagonists (one hesitates to call them "characters," exactly). She's no de Sade, no theorist of the consequences of the worship of Nature and "natural" processes, when carried to extremes ...

What her books do (to me) seem to represent is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of storytelling. They're not stories about anything, though they do, admittedly, contain incidents and names of people they happen to. Their popularity, in any case, resides elsewhere - in pure stimulation of recondite, very specific areas of human appetite.

She does it well, in that she writes well, but how could she be said to do it badly? If her books failed to sell, it would be, presumably, because they failed to satisfy this pre-existing need for certain types of fantasy. In that sense, we would have to call them purely atmospheric, more like music than more conventional forms of tale-spinning.

•



The Vampire Lovers (1970)

I hope, by now, that the relation of Aran Ashe's oeuvre to Gene Wolfe is beginning to come more into focus. His character, Latro, is in perpetual doubt as to the nature of the experiences he records. The reader, wiser and more memorious (to use Borges' term) than he can possibly be, is able to piece together a good deal of the picture he doesn't see.

But not all of it. Not nearly all of it. Gene Wolfe's specialty as a writer is to draw you into mazes of complex action which fail ever to resolve. Instead, new complexities, new areas of amnesiac exclusion constantly come into view, until the end of the particular story, or book, or book within a series, or even series itself, is nothing more than an invitation to return to the beginning.

Only to be disappointed again. His stories refuse to regulate themselves into stable plots however many times they are read, though each new experience of them offers new details and new levels of complexity. They defeat any stable sense of causation (presumably - though not certainly - as a side-product of Wolfe's own view of an unstable and perpetually mysterious universe). They're the opposite of metafiction - more like fiction as somnambulism.

Wolfe is, in my opinion, a great writer. Aran Ashe most certainly is not. But in many ways her stories could be said to be even more original, more disconcertingly self-questioning than his. Her style is purer, more concentrated - his (at times) irritatingly offhand and ill-assembled. Both of them, however, share this quality of almost seeming to aspire to automatic writing.

Could either of them be said to hold a candle to Virgil, or Homer, or Dante? Of course not. The interest of those stories demonstrably transcends any shifts in literary fashion (or critical temperature).

Borges had a point, though, when he said that subsequent writers could alter the way we read their predecessors, that influence could work backwards as well as forwards, that parts of Browning did not read the same after one had experienced Kafka, even that Pope's translation could be said to effect the text of Homer.

I don't think I can read those epics the same way now that I've started to question the Aristotelean poetics of narrative they allegedly embody. The unquestioned borrowings of material and incident from epic poet from epic poet, of Virgil from Homer, or Dante from Lucan and Ovid as well as Virgil, have shifted their character for me now that I'm thinking of them in terms of Wolfe and Ashe.

None of these texts, after all, resolve themselves - their choice of an area of time to focus upon looks more and more arbitrary the more one considers it. The Odyssey goes on at least a book further than conventional "retellings" admit, and even then it isn't finished, Virgil himself left his poem unfinished, and begged on his deathbed for its destruction. Dante (allegedly) had to appear in a dream to one of his sons to point out the closet where he'd walled up the last cantos of the Commedia ...

All these examples seem to me to delineate our need for a poetics of repetition-compulsion, a way of accounting for the existence of texts such as Wolfe's dramas of amnesia and post-hypnotic states, or Aran Ashe's version of Nietzsche's eternal return - sleepwalking through stories as we do (at times) through life.

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Gazing into the Abyss

Car Epics

I guess it's been quite a while since I put up a post about the joys of listening to poetry on the car stereo while stuck in Auckland traffic. Since then I've been branching out a bit and checking out the recordings I like the most.

All of which is a preliminary to sharing my own - very subjective - list of best recordings of epics for such purposes (see also the supplementary list above):

1 - Homer: The Iliad (c. 850 BC)

a) translated by William Cowper (1791)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

A bit too stilted and mannered for me - traditional verse translations don't work as well as prose when it comes to audiobooks, I think.

b) translated by Robert Fagles (1990)
read by Derek Jacobi
Penguin Audiobooks, 1993
6 cassettes (abridged)

A brilliantly vivid version in modern verse, read in a rather mannered way by (I, Claudius) Jacobi in every voice he can muster.

c) translated by Ian Johnston (2002)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2006
13 CDs (complete)

Pretty definitive, I should imagine.

2 - Homer: The Odyssey (c. 850 BC)

a) translated by William Cowper (1791)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

As above about his Iliad. Cowper's Miltonic blank verse works fine on the page but not so well on the radio - Anton Lesser gives it a good go, though.

b) translated by E. V. Rieu (1945)
read by Alex Jennings
Penguin Audiobooks, 1995
6 cassettes (abridged)

Alex Jennings may be less adept as a reader than Derek Jacobi, but this is nevertheless an amazingly effective version. It quite transformed my last roadtrip around the South Island.

c) translated by Robert Fagles (1996)
read. by Ian McKellen
Penguin Audiobooks, 1996
12 cassettes (complete)

Translation great, Ian McKellen excellent, but it's surprising just how much of the poem concerns Odysseus wandering around Ithaca. Abridged versions tend to shorten all that return-of-the-native stuff considerably.

d) translated by Ian Johnston (2002)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2007
10 CDs (complete)

Again, pretty definitive.

3 - Virgil: The Aeneid (c. 30-19 BC)

a) translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1983)
read by Christopher Ravenscroft
Highbridge Company, 1995
8 CDs (abridged)

Ravenscroft, who used to be on Ruth Rendell's Wexford series, has a rather nasal voice, but it's fascinating to hear so much of Aeneas's adventures in Italy, normally glossed over in the selected versions. Fitzgerald's translation is fantastic - the only drawback about this version is that it is slightly abridged, otherwise I'd be to look no further.

b) translated by C. Day Lewis (1952)
read by Paul Scofield et al.
Naxos AudioBooks, 2002
4 CDs (abridged)

Partly dramatised and very selective - great for the bits it does do, though. Paul Scofield has the perfect hollow, echoing voice for the narrator of so spooky a poem.

c) translated by Robert Fagles (2006)
read by Simon Callow
Penguin Audiobooks, 2006
10 CDs (complete)

A spirited translation in a rather plummy rendition.

4 - Ovid: Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD)

[a) translated by Charles Boer (1989)
read by Noah Pikes
Spring Publications, 1994
1 cassette (abridged)]

I haven't actually heard this, but it gets a very bad review on the Amazon.com site. Boer's complete translation is great to read in book from, though.

[b)Tales from Ovid
translated & read by Ted Hughes (1995)
Penguin Audiobooks, 2000
1 CD (abridged)]

I haven't heard this, either (out of print), but Ted Hughes is usually a pretty good reader.

c) translated by Frank Justus Miller (1916)
read by Barry Kraft
Blackstone Audiobooks, 2008
12 CDs (complete)

Kraft has the most grating, mid-western voice imaginable, but at least he's audible and pretty consistent in his range of tones. That's a very important consideration when one's trying to listen to something over the roar of traffic. A very bald prose translation (from the Loeb Classics) is actually an excellent choice for reading aloud - and it is complete.

5 - Beowulf (c. 800 AD)

a) translated by Michael Alexander (1972)
read by David Rintoul (2000)
Penguin Audiobooks, 1997
2 cassettes (complete)

Excellent, informative translation in a spirited reading.

b) translated & read by Seamus Heaney (1998)
Penguin Audiobooks, 2000
3 CDs (abridged)

And yet, I have to admit, that - while he doesn't follow the strict rules of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (unlike Michael Alexander above), there's a real difference between a poet's rendering of a great poem, and an academic's. Heaney makes a riveting story out of the ancient epic - the hype that surrounded his translation when it first came out certainly seems justified by this masterly reading.

[c) translated by Benedict Flynn (2006)
read by Crawford Logan
Naxos Audiobooks, 2006
3 CDs (complete)]

I hadn't realised that the Penguin Audiobook recording of Michael Alexander's translation is actually complete, or I don't know that I would have bothered with this one as well ...

6 - Dante: The Divine Comedy (c. 1300-1321)

a) translated by Benedict Flynn (1998)
read by Heathcote Williams
Naxos AudioBooks:

• Inferno (2004)
  4 CDs (complete)


• Purgatory (1998)
  3 CDs (complete)


• Paradise (2004)
  4 CDs (complete)

I have nothing but praise for this. I don't really like Heathcote Williams as a poet, but as a reader he's amazing. The choice of a literal prose version was also very wise - rather than mucking around with all the - essentially futile - attempts to naturalise terza rima into English. It's hard to imagine this being bettered, except (for Italian speakers) for this complete version read in the original.

7 - The Thousand and One Nights (c. 800-900 AD)

a) translated by Sir Richard F. Burton (1885)
read by Philip Madoc
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

A poor selection from Burton's immense masterwork. The reading is okay but it's hard to see the logic behind the audiobook as a whole.

b) translated by N. J. Dawood (1954-57)
read by Souad Faress & Raad Rawi
Penguin Audiobooks, 1995
4 cassettes (abridged)

A witty and musical reading -- the stories are well chosen and the whole makes good sense. More, please!

8 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400)

a) translated by J. R. R. Tolkien (1975)
read by Terry Jones
HarperCollins, 2007
4 CDs (complete)

A sinuous and complex set of poems, in a bluff, hearty reading by Monty Python's Jones. Again, you owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you're unfamiliar with the originals - one of the great, thorny masterpieces of medieval poetry.

9 - Milton: Paradise Lost (1667)

a) read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2005
9 CDs (complete)

Great stuff. Lesser has a slightly whiney voice, which suits the Prince of Darkness very well. What better way to encounter the greatest epic poem in the English language? A complete Faerie Queene would be nice, too - but so far only selections are available.