Penguins on Parade: The Age of Bede!

Some Penguin Classics, as we've noted, are actually Penguin Confections, editorial chimerae cobbled together from fugitive bits and pieces, rather than faithful translations of intact ancient works. This is by no means a criticism: such cobbled-together volumes can be utter delights - depending on the vision and brio of the editors and translators involved. I'll always take almost as sharp a delight in a good well-chosen "Age of Voltaire"-type volume as I will in well-translated single texts from the same period  - there's a lot to be said for the joys of juxtaposition, expected and otherwise.

Such a volume is certainly Penguin's 1965 The Age of Bede, in the revised edition of 1998. Here editor D. H. Farmer assembles five ancient Church texts from England and Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries, when Christianity faced its first major-scale crisis of centralization - Roman episcopal organization against the cellular satellites of the monasteries and monastic orders ... and when that crisis itself was located firmly on the spectrum of larger crises that we used to call the Dark Ages.

In the cold and collapsed West during those ages, monasteries were often islands of learning. They had artwork and libraries, they valued erudition (albeit of the straightened Christian variety), and their emissaries travelled dangerous roads in pursuit of books and educated conversation. No matter what a modern agnostic reader may think of Christianity as a belief system or literary subject, respect must be paid to the quarrelling, striving intellect so often found on these old bound pages. The life of the mind for a time survived in the West mainly in such vessels, pursuing such narratives.

Five such narratives are presented together in The Age of Bede: Eddius Stephanus' Life of Wilfrid, the anonymous History of Abbot Ceolfrith, one chunk of the boisterous, ongoing adventures of St. Brendan, The Voyage of St. Brendan, and two works by Bede himself: The Life of Cuthbert, and an excerpt from The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow. As you can tell from those titles, there's a great deal here of what you might expect: saints' lives, healed children, praise-songs at all hours of the day and night. But there are also innumerable moments of pure reading fun - for those readers patient and open-minded enough to reach them. Take this story from The Life of Wilfrid:

During the construction of the highest parts of the walls of the church, a young man, one of the bishop's masons, lost his footing on a high pinnacle, fell headlong, and dashed himself on the stone pavement below. He broke his arms and legs; every joint was put out. There he lay gasping his last. The masons thought he was dead and at the bishop's command took him outside on a bier. Wilfrid had been praying and weeping but now hastily summoned all the workmen.

'Let us show how great our faith is by praying together with one accord that God may send back the soul into this lad's body and hear our prayers for his life, even as he heard the prayers of St. Paul.'

They knelt down and prayed that he who mocks at every good thing might have no victory to gloat over in this building. The bishop prayed after the manner of Elias an Eliseus and gave his blessing. The breath of life returned to the boy. The doctors bound up his arms and legs and he improved steadily day by day. He is still alive to give thanks to God and his name is Bothelm.

Notice all the interesting stuff that's going on here! Wilfrid is the man in charge of this whole epic undertaking, and as soon as he sees that the masons have given up the fallen boy for dead, he orders the body to be taken outside - away from the other workers, who were no doubt spooked (and perhaps seeing the Devil's hand in the boy's fall). Once outside, Wilfrid obviously sends the workmen away (since he has to call them back again) - he doesn't want a crowd milling around while this poor boy breathes his last. Then something happens - Wilfrid must have examined the boy and detected signs of life despite the grievous injuries. Instantly, he calls everybody back to gather around the body and holds a quick prayer meeting - and notice the angle he works in: that the boy's revival is linked to the pride of their ongoing building. That would be an unthinkable gamble if Wilfrid hadn't already been fairly certain the crowd would soon see the fluttering of eyelids and the gasping for air. And when that happens, the miracle is over - the God of infinite power Wilfrid invokes doesn't see fit to go the extra five feet and actually heal the boy's broken limbs. Poor young Bothelm (a very neat end-twist, revealing that the boy is still alive, a grown man now and still grateful) takes a horrible fall and is both badly stunned and badly injured. Canny Wilfrid uses the temporary nature of the former to distract his workers from the discouraging nature of the latter - a tense moment when a great deal could have gone wrong, saved by nimble thinking and a bit of con artistry!

Or this touching moment from Bede's account of the life of Ceolfrith, who'd been friend and mentor to him for all of Bede's life - Ceolfrith had taught him how to read and write, how to control himself, how to think, and the two had survived plague and plunder together. Now Ceolfrith, sensing that he was dying, organizes one last overland voyage to Rome, where he ostensibly plans to present the Pope with one of his ornate new Bibles. The brothers at Ceolfrith's abbey are not fooled - they know they'll never seen this man, their friend and rock, again in the living world, and they lose all composure. As usual, it's left to Ceolfrith himself to keep things from breaking down:

He bade them his last farewell, urging them to preserve mutual love and to correct offenders, as the Gospel enjoins. He offered his forgiveness and goodwill to any who might have offended and begged any whom he might have rebuked too severely to be reconciled to him and to pray for him. They arrived at the shore; once again he gave them all the kiss of peace amidst their tears. They fell to their knees and, after he had offered a prayer, he and his companions boarded the boat. The deacons of the church embarked with them, carrying the lighted candles and a golden cross. After crossing the river, he venerated the cross, mounted his horse and rode off, leaving behind him in his monasteries brethren to the number of around six hundred.

The Age of Bede offers many dozens of such wonderful moments - some full of life and dialogue and implicit conflict (and, shall we say, questionable veracity, in the case of anything connected with The Life of Brendan), others far more quiet and inward-looking, but all alive with the same narrative energy and drama that would migrate to the secular world in a few centuries, once writing and learning had returned there. There are people in these old Church books, and their stories are every bit as fascinating now as they were when they were the only stories in the world.

Penguins on Parade: Victorian Verse!

Some Penguin Classics aren't really classics, no matter how attractively Penguin packages them. This is true of Western canon works mistakenly venerated (Joseph Conrad springs to mind, but oh, there are others), and it's also true of excellent modern volumes prematurely elevated. One such volume is The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse from 1997, edited and introduced by Daniel Karlin. It's an excellent anthology, perhaps even better than the last Victorian verse anthology we discussed here, but as an anthology, it's virtually newborn - it certainly hasn't withstood the tests of time long enough to claim the 'classic' distinction. Whereas there are plenty of poetry anthologies out there that have proven their 'classic' status but still haven't been given (or bought) a spot in the Penguin Classics lineup.

One of those - the first of those? - would surely be The Oxford Book of English Verse in the original Arthur Quiller-Couch edition, and that's actually relevant to our proceedings today, since the Quiller-Couch has got to rank as one of the all-time best Victorian verse anthologies (even though it was intending to be much more than that). Neither the Quiller-Couch nor the far more magisterial Helen Gardner edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse has been honored with a Penguin Classic (understandably enough, since it's a dog-eat-dog world out there in the land of publishing, and I'm the only one daft enough to think being a Penguin Classic should be a privilege other publishers would surrender copyrights to achieve), but here this Karlin concoction has my second-favorite colophon.

He's certainly done everything he can to earn it. His Introduction is a gem of learning and wit, and the highlight of it is his offer of a mock-amalgam of all Victorian verse and its typical crutches. This is hilarious stuff:

The purple shades of evening

Flit o'er the Angel child

Whose woeful mother's weeping

Resounds across the wild.

He joined the gallant Navy

And found a watery grave.

Ah, better far than being

An orphan factory slave!

Or worse, in evil city

A village lass to sink

And fall a prey to Mammon

And bestial vice, and drink.

She hears the thrush's singing

And cooing of the dove

And blesses the dispenser

Of goodness, peace, and love.

So back she goes contented

Towards her humble home

And curtseys to the Parson

Who's on his way to Rome.

And as the Squire passes

Like Lancelot of yore

She shrieks, swoons and expires

And is never heard of more.

And one of the strangest and most daring noteworthy things about his anthology is how much room he gives not to the expected greats of the period but to much lesser-known (today, anyway) poets who come perilously close to echoing that deadly parody - like Eugene Lee-Hamilton and "A Snail's Derby":

 Once, in this Tuscan garden, Noon's huge ball

So slowly crossed the sky above my head,

As I lay idle on my dull wheeled bed,

That, sick of Day's inexorable crawl,

I set some snails a-racing on the wall -

With their striped shells upon their backs, instead

Of motley jackets - black, white, yellow, red;

And watched them till the twilight's tardy fall.

And such my life, as years go one by one:

A garden where I lie beyond the flowers,

And where the snails outrace the creeping sun.

For me there are no pinions to the hours;

Compared with them, the snails like racers run:

Wait but Death's night; and, lo, the great ball lowers.

Of course, the bulk of the book is indeed commandeered by those great expected names. There's plenty here from Wordsworth, the Brownings, the Brontes, and Christina Rossetti, as well as generous selections from the greatest of all Victorian poets, Lord Tennyson, almost always pitched at his most fervid:

 

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro' the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

'The curse is come upon me,' cried

The Lady of Shalott

Keen-eyed readers will know at once why I chose that particular verse - yes, because "The Lady of Shalott" is the subject of this anthology's opulent cover-illustration, a painting of the same name by the great William Holman Hunt, whose "The Awakening Conscience" may be the single dumbest pre-modern painting ever created (for sheer stupidity, it can't compete with blank white canvases hung in galleries and called art, but then, what can?). "The Lady of Shalott" gives a much more accurate demonstration of this artist's wonderful talent, even if you might not be able to make that out from the battered, much-reinforced cover of my paperback.

If you're at all a fan of poetry, your own copy of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse will quickly become equally dog-eared. It's that good.

 

Penguins on Parade: Livy's First Book!

Some Penguin Classics get overshadowed by others, and that's certainly the case with the Aubrey De Selincourt translation of the first five books of the Roman historian Livy. This volume was done in 1960, but when readers think "DeSelincourt" and "Livy," they think of that translator's fantastic, reads-like-a-novel Penguin Classics volume titled The War with Hannibal, the praises of which we've sung often here at Stevereads. That Hannibal volume is a kind of masterpiece, but even so, The Early History of Rome deserves its day in the sun.

This is the story of Rome's earliest mytho-history, from the foundation of the city and the tale of Romulus and Remus to the Gallic invasion of 386 b.c. Here are the Tarquin kings and the virtuous virgins and the squabbling in-fighting and the oversized characters like Coriolanus who so profitably fed the imagination of Shakespeare that he sometimes doesn't even bother to change Livy's words as he's purloining them.

The reason for this is the superb drama of Livy's prose. He himself concentrates on that drama in an appealingly unashamed way - as R. M. Ogilvie points out in his introduction, Livy had no political occupation or administrative duties; the purpose of his entire life was to write, and despite the stories we read of his public readings at Rome being sparsely attended, he clearly wrote to be enjoyed. He appears to have led no public life other than that of a working historian - he came to Rome from Padua at an early age, and when he was around 30 he began work on the great history that would consume his life: a sprawling, cinematic work of 142 books, of which only 35 survive. He write his prose epic for forty years with the full encouragement of the emperor Augustus (who jokingly accused him of Pompeian loyalties), and when he died in a.d. 17 he was famous throughout the Roman world (there's an anecdote about a man from Cadiz, with which I shall not trouble you, since you've undoubtedly read about it elsewhere).

35 books isn't much. For those of us who've read them over and over for the sheer fun of it, the number is heartbreaking. But there's a consolation to be taken in these first five books of the Ab Urbe Condita. Livy started here, after all, and these five books were meant as a rhetorical unit. They were proofread, indexed, and sold separately from the rest of the work, even when the rest of the work was well advanced and garnering fans of its own. Something about these elemental stories of Rome's chaotic founding (stories Livy transmuted from the mostly Greek originals he came across and denied using) held a narrative appeal that retained its strength for long centuries after their storyteller was gone. In Livy's later sections dealing with Rome's consolidation of power in Italy and the Mediterranean, there are many spots where the master nods - but in The Early History of Rome there's scarcely time to take a breath between one incredibly charged moment and the next.

Take the example of the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, a human drama so stark that even De Selincourt's Edwardian circumlocutions fail to blunt it:

"My body only has been violated. My heart is innocent, and death will be my witness. Give me your solemn promise that the adulterer will be punished - he is Sextus Tarquinius. Hi it is who last night came as my enemy disguised as my guest, and took his pleasure of me. That pleasure will be my death - and his, too, if you are men."

The promise was given. One after another they tried to comfort her. They told her she was helpless, and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind, they said, that sinned, not the body: without intention there could never be guilt.

"What is due to him," Lucretia said, "is for you to decide. As for me I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment. Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent or unchaste women to escape what they deserve." With these words she drew a knife from under her robe, drive it into her heart, and fell forward, dead."

Her father and husband were overwhelmed with grief. While they stood weeping helplessly, Brutus drew the bloody knife from Lucretia's body, and holding it before him cried: "By this girl's blood - none more chaste till a tyrant wronged her - and by the gods, I swear that with sword and fire, and whatever else can lend strength to my arm, I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius the Proud, his wicked wife, and all his children, and ever again will I let them or any other man be King in Rome."

Or the scene from the story of Coriolanus where he confronts his mother before the walls of the city he's intending to sack for its insolence to him - a scene that will be familiar to lovers of Shakespeare but in Livy's hands lacks not one bit of the Bard's pathos:

"I would know," she said, "before I accept your kiss, whether I have come to an enemy or to  son, whether I am here as your mother or as a prisoner of war. Have my long life and unhappy old age brought me to this, that I should see you first an exile, then the enemy of your country? Had you the heart to ravage the earth which bore and bred you? When you set foot upon it, did not your anger fall away, however fierce your hatred and lust for revenge? When Rome was before your eyes, did not the thought come to you, 'within those walls is my home, with the gods to watch over it - and my mother and my wife and my children'? Ah, had I never borne a child, Rome would not now be menaced; if I had no son, I could have died free in a free country! But now there is nothing left for me to endure, nothing which can bring to me more pain, and to you a deeper dishonour, than this. I am indeed an unhappy woman - but it will not be for long; think of these others who, if you cannot relent, must hope for nothing but an untimely death or life-long slavery."

De Selincourt's translations rolls on magnificently from page to page, and the reader is swept along. Penguin Classics has four volumes of Livy (and in my library of dream-volumes from Penguin - a library whose contents we'll get to by-and-by - they come out with one hugely satisfying plump big trade paperback of all four of those volumes together), and as noted, The War With Hannibal is the best of them, the most vivid and exciting and pivotal in terms of real, verifiable history. But The Early History of Rome takes a close second place and is utterly fascinating in its own right - not only for the drama of its stories but for the uncanny window it opens into how one very intelligent man thought the Romans under Augustus might want to see themselves - or their ideal selves.

Penguins on Parade: Ovid's Metamorphoses!

Some Penguin Classics certainly qualify as secular scripture, which we probably need after a dose of the holies. We all have a shelf of such books that qualify as such personal scripture, and my tastes being what they are, many of mine are included in the Penguin Classics line. The foremost of these, my single favorite book, is Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it was curiously ill-treated by Penguin in the 20th century. The Penguin Classics edition, definitely aimed at the same school-textbook niche had had made their prose Iliad such an astonishing success, was a 1955 prose translation by Mary Innes, who "spent over twenty years proving to schoolgirls that the classical languages can and should be enjoyed" (as we're told in a bio-note clearly - and tellingly - dictated by her). Under her careful, accurate, bowdlerizing touch, we get Ovid's fifteen-book epic as a changed thing itself: gone is the glitter, the liquid grace, the jazzy contrapunction. Gone is the wordplay, the teasing irreverence, and all the wit. What's left is a big miscellany of 'tales of gods and goddesses' in the vein of Edith Hamilton, perfect for Scottish schoolgirls, even though its original author, drunk and flushed from some unsuccessful boy-chasing at a party on the Esquiline, would have extemporized the most exquisite execration of the end result.

Mainly because it's lifeless, and Ovid's great poem, more than any other from the ancient world, absolutely teems with life (as a certain wise man once hopefully described the universe). He wrote it in the blinding fullness of his talents, after his journeyman work and the challenges to orthodoxy were out of his system, after he finally began to understand what Virgil, for example, knew right away: that there's nothing inherently wrong (or worse, embarrassing) about working in canonical terms. In this as in all things, the performance is all - Ovid at last saw this and determined to embrace it. Change is the theme of his masterpiece, and not the least among the changes it signaled was his own: "We have laughed and reveled together, you and I," the Metamorphoses told its readers, "now let me sing you a different song." It's in every way a transcendant work, richly meriting the immortality Ovid himself predicts for it, and it deserves better than Miss Innes calling it a "treasure trove" and calling its author "the prince of story-tellers."

It deserves, first, verse. Yes, this is difficult - not only because Ovid's dactylic hexameter fits poorly in mouth-breathing English iambs, but also because Ovid intended it to be difficult; he weaves more complexity into a couple of lines than any poet after him until John Donne (the problem works both ways, incidentally: if you want to ruin a perfectly good hour, try translating one of the Holy Sonnets into Latin) - this is bound to be a translators' graveyard.



Nevertheless, Penguin could have done better than a prose outline, and I kept expecting them to. I wanted to see a Penguin Classic of Arthur Golding's 1567 masterpiece, still possessing all its unmistakeably Elizabethan crashing suavity. Even better, I wanted to see Horace Gregory's fantastic 1958 translation, still, to my mind, the finest English version of Ovid's poem ever made. But I had to wait and look elsewhere during the 20th century, and in 2004 Penguin Classics published a verse translation by David Raeburn, and my wait was over. Raeburn's Metamorphoses doesn't have the power of Golding's nor the assurance of Gregory's, but it does a good job of convincing me that it doesn't aspire to such things. Instead, it's got a supple, conversational charm all its own. Listen to the rhythms he manages in the famous scene where poor Actaeon surprises the goddess Diana while bathing and is instantly changed:

As she splashed his hair with revengeful drops,

she spoke the spine-chilling words which warned of impending disaster:

'Now you may tell the story of seeing Diana naked -

If story-telling is in your power!' No more was needed.

The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;

the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;

she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender

forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;

last, she injected panic. The son of Autonoe bolted,

surprising himself with his speed as he bounded away from the clearing.

But when he came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers,

'Oh, dear god!' he was going to say; but no words followed.

All the sound he produced was a moan, as the tears streamed over

his strange new face.

Right after the publication of the Metamorphoses (while it was itself still changing, in fact, constantly being revised by its fretting author), a horrible transformation came upon Ovid himself: he was banished from Rome, sent into exile at Tomis on the edge of the Roman world (I've written about it here). He begged to be returned (or at least exiled someplace with decent food), but his pleas, like those of his heroes and heroines, his hapless mortals, went unheeded. I myself think he would have found it poor comfort indeed that we're still reading his books two thousand years after his misery dried to dust, but I can hope I'm wrong.

At least his work is now properly enshrined as a Penguin Classic! This volume also sports an Introduction by Denis Feeney that's not to be missed.

Penguins on Parade: the King James Bible!

Some Penguin Classics seem like parts of an exceedingly natural progression, and what could feel more natural than to conclude our little mini-tour of great ancient texts with the King James Bible? And equally natural that Penguin Classics should publish a King James Bible, and yet they took their sweet time doing so, only finally producing one in 2006, this enormous hefty trade paperback edition edited by David Norton.

Before this volume, Penguin's dabblings in Biblical literature had been sporadic and incomplete: segments had been reproduced with no critical apparatus in the mighty Viking Portable World Bible, and the four Gospels of the New Testament had been given four intensely interesting volumes of commentary in the Pelican line, and a volume of Paul's letters had appeared, also laden with commentary, but while publisher after publisher produced a critically annotated Bible, Penguin held back. Until the appearance of this volume, the best such Bibles in the general market were the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 and the Oxford World's Classics Bible of 1997. And that's an apt echo as well, since until the appearance of the King James Bible in 1611, there were also two main contenders for the top spot, the Bishop's Bible of 1568 and the Geneva Bible of 1560. When King James I gave his command that "a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek," forty-four scholars set to work on separate sections and labored both under their own rather remarkable sense of literary perfectionism and also under the goad of the king, who clearly didn't want the whole project mired forever in academic hair-splitting.



The result, of course, was an unparalleled thing, a mightier achievement than a dozen Taj Mahals. The blood and grandeur of the Old Testament comes alive as in no previous English rendition:

Now the Philistines fought against Israel, and the men of Israel fled before the Philistines, and fell down slain in Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines followed hard after Saul, and after his sons, and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul. And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him, and he was wounded by the archers. Then said Saul to his armour-bearer, 'Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith, lest these uncircumscribed come and abuse me.' But his armour-bearer would not, for he was sore afraid. So Saul took a sword, and fell upon it. And when he armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell likewise on the sword, and died. So Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died together. And when all the men of Israel that were in the valley saw that they fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead. Then they forsook their cities, and fled, and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.

And likewise most of the much thinner, nervier beauty of the New Testament is made clear to the common reader:

And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying, 'Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witnesses against thee?' But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, 'Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' And Jesus said, 'I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, 'What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye?' And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

And this Penguin Classic volume itself is also an amazing success, starting with Norton's simple, lucid Introduction, which makes a stirring case for the sheer worth of those forty-four scholars' work:

The King James Bible offers the reader both the meaning of the Bible and a religious or aesthetic experience of language that no modern translation can match. For instance, after Adam and Eve have eaten fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the King James Bible has Adam give this simple reply to God: 'And the man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (Gen. 3:12). The meaning is clear except perhaps for 'she gave me of the tree,' but in context it is obvious that he is saying she gave him fruit from the tree. The language is simple, almost entirely monosyllabic English, without a trace of pretence to grandeur. Only the archaic form, 'thou gavest' markes it out as biblical English.

Modern versions usually stay close to the King James in this verse. Here is the New International Version: 'The man said, "The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." It is still powerful, but not as powerful. There are no uncertainties of meaning, nor any archaism, but the rhythm has almost vanished, and there are several touches, all of them associated with a move from literal translation towards paraphrase, which make it less effective. The dash before 'she gave me' underlines the effect of having the subject stated twice  (as it is in the Hebrew), but it goes along with the changes that make Adam close to vindictive in his attitude to Eve. 'The woman you put here with me' is a bitter statement, as if Eve were inflicted on him. The sense of Eve as a gift is lost - 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me'; lost too is the parallel between Eve being given and Eve giving - 'she gave' (the Hebrew uses the same verb in both places). The change at the end of the verse, 'and I ate it', comes about not just because the New International Version, paraphrasing for clarity, has added 'some fruit' (not in the Hebrew), and so must finish with 'it' (again not in the Hebrew).

There's something refreshingly nuts-and-bolts about such a line of defense, and it's just the beginning of this volume's charms. There are plenty of excellent maps, and the end notes are a triumph, fully the complement of those Pelican commentary volumes of long ago. The stark elegance of the end product is reminiscent of the original appearance of the King James Bible, which was made to be both beautiful and useful, worth every penny of its cover price, as it were, loaded with extras that always take the breath away from museum-goers who view a copy on display.

Penguins on Parade: the Talmud!

Some Penguin Classics stretch the very definition of what a 'book' is. Where do you go if it can be said about your subject text, as Norman Solomon says in his Introduction to the Penguin Classic 2009 The Talmud: A Selection: "The Talmud was not designed as literature for reading"? When Solomon writes further "Talmud is essentially an activity, not a book," surely he's right, and surely that spells doom for Penguin's attempt to add a small selection from the Talmud to its most prestigious imprint of literature? Surely such an attempt is akin to making a Pleiade edition of the Paris phone book?

Which Talmud, for instance? There the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, which overlap significantly but also differ significantly. Both are enormously detailed commentaries on the Mishnah, the vast set of legal and cultural codes of Judaism that were formulated in the second century B.C.; both are multi-voiced speculations, arguments, questionings, and clarifications of how the Mishnah connects with Holy Writ. And the results of all that arguing and clarifying are staggering: hundreds of thousands of pages of detailed, spirited, incredibly convoluted exegesis, a bristling, contradicting, expostulating universe of talk, a body of sheer data so huge as to be practically immeasurable, and all of it without a single coherent narrative or thought of one. In the beginning was the Torah, the divine revelation given to Moses at Sinai. "The text is free from error or inconsistency," Norman Solomon writes. "God does not make mistakes! Apparent contradictions can be resolved by correct interpretation, not we do not always know what that is."

So Moses, all unsuspecting, descends from the mountain, hands over the tablets, enjoys a moment of blessed silence, and then the arguing begins, and it hasn't stopped since. "A sacred text cannot guide on its own," Norman Solomon writes. "It has to be read, and all reading is interpretation." In Jewish lore, the Mishnah began at Sinai too, the oral counterpart to written law, coeval in age but with the added dimension of debatability. And the pervading charm of reading the Talmud (as I've been doing for days now, in this precious Penguin Classic) is now thoroughly for centuries Jewish readers have jumped into that debate. Every pronouncement of their law is first accepted with reverent humility - and then picked at, interpreted, and cross-examined into the ground. And while there are liturgical and legal reasons for all of that interpretation, the overwhelming impression the Talmud gives is that this is a people who so thoroughly enjoy mental and verbal exercise that it's something of a miracle God ever gets a word in edgewise.

(I myself think the whole business started in Genesis 18, when Abraham has the cheek to dicker with God about how many good men Sodom would need to have in it in order to save itself from destruction; Abraham may be thinking about his poor brother Lot, but you can't escape the impression that he's enjoying himself too, seeing how much he can get away with)(Although it may have started even earlier, with Cain sassing back to Gof when He's asking after Abel, "Am I my brother's keeper?" being a human-to-deity response of a type found in absolutely no other religion)



Norman Solomon has created a kind of masterpiece in the selecting and translating of this volume, and he's the first to admit the oddness of the writings he's introducing. But his insistence on a relaxed approach is certainly wise:

There is no need to start on the first page, since the Talmud is not written in a stepwise fashion. Browse, and you will quite soon find something that attracts you, perhaps some amusing anecdote about an incident in the schools (there is far more humour in the Talmud than it is generally credited for), or perhaps some unexpected gem of wisdom. Make that your starting point. Turn over the pages at random to pick up something of the range and rhythm of the Talmud. Wade in, splash about; soon you may discover that you can swim a few strokes.

That 'range and rhythm' is unending, with segments covering thousands of aspects of human communal living and dozens of learned, feisty voices commenting on each segment. Early marriage is praised in almost the same breath as the trademark misogyny of the ancient world:

The rabbis taught: To learn Torah, and to marry - first learn Torah and then marry. But if he cannot 'control his sexual impulse] without a wife, he should first marry and then learn Torah. Rav Yehuda said in the name of Shmuel, The law is, a man should marry first and then learn Torah.l Rabbi Yohanan exclaimed, A millstone around his neck, and [you expect him to] engage in Torah!

Dogs, of course, are disparaged as well (they were ever a cat-loving people):

You should not raise dogs unless they are kept on a chain. The rabbis taught: You may not raise a dog unless it is kept on a chain, but if you live in a border town you may raise one, tie it up by day and release it at night. Rabbi Eliezer the Great says, He who raises dogs is like he who raises pigs. What difference does it make? It is that he is included in the curse.

And every pillar of law or practice is given such a vigorous and multifaceted debate that you can practically hear the voices, even though most of them are centuries or even millennia gone under the ground:

Rabbit Dostai ben Yehuda says, AN EYE FOR AN EYE - [this means] monetary compensation. Do you think it means an actual eye, rather than monetary compensation? Then what would you do if one had a large eye and one had a small eye? How could you call that AN EYE FOR AN EYE, seeing that they are not equal?

If you say that in a case like this [where the eyes are not equal], you should accept compensation, but if the eyes are equal you should apply the verse literally, this cannot be the case, since the Torah says, THERE SHALL BE ONE LAW FOR YOU (Leviticus 24:22) - a law which is the same for all of you.

They said, What is Rabbit Dostai ben Yehuda's problem? Why not say, A has taken the light from B's eye, so the Torah says take the light from A's eye [irrespective of size]? If you don't argue like this, how could we execute a dwarf who killed a giant or a giant who killed a dwarf, seeing that the Torah says, THERE SHALL BE ONE LAW FOR YOU - a law which is the same for all of you? The point is, he has taken a life, and the Torah says his life should be taken ...

And that's just the smallest fraction of the back-and-forth on just that one point - it goes on forever (literally, in fact, since technically Talmud is ongoing), and it effortlessly catches even the least inclined readers up in its net and carries them along. This is the ultimate example of people interacting with texts - this is reading as an Olympic contact-sport. It's mesmerizing, and that's its only potential drawback, because there's several lifetimes worth of mania preserved here. "The Talmud wants your life" was a familiar tag for centuries in medieval Jewish studies, and it's no less true today.

"Above all, enjoy it!" Norman Solomon urges. "The rabbis say that there is no greater joy than that of the day on which the Torah was revealed; whenever the Torah is studied, something of that joy is present."

I can certainly attest to that while reading this amazing volume. It makes me yearn for a Penguin Classic Torah (the version chosen should be Robert Alter's "Five Books of Moses" from 2004, obviously) - and a Penguin Classic Mishnah (the Jacob Neusner from 1991, please) too, while we're at it.

Penguins on Parade: the Book of the Dead!

Some Penguin Classics seem like the most unlikely choices in the world, and this is surely one of them. We might expect Penguin to publish popular-audience studies of the vast funerary literature of the ancient Egyptians, who were, after all, a writing people and who left behind an enormous amount of literature of every type. But "The Book of the Dead"? The ancient Egyptians no more had such a single, unified book than the earliest Christians had a "Bible." It's not the lucky fate of most religions to have a singular, discreet, all-encompassing revelation ( like the Mormons), one incredibly haggled-over central text (like the Jews), or one extremely productive board meeting (like the Unitarians) - most of them are bewilderingly incremental and contradictory things that accumulate over centuries (like Barbara Walters).

And if not "The Book of the Dead," then sure as hell not this "Book of the Dead"! The 1909 'recension' (a vigorous compilation of dozens of sources, conflated and then translated as an organic whole) - updated and expanded from its 1899 debut - of Sir Edward Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge has been mocked and pitied by scholars almost from the moment of its publication. This present volume's editor, John Romer, correctly points out in his Introduction that the mention of Budge's name is met largely with embarrassment in current Egyptological circles, despite the fact that he wrote some 140 books and did more than anybody in the early 20th century to popularize all things ancient Egypt. For the editorial team at Penguin Classics to add this particular title to their lineup at the late date of 2008 must have struck some people as nothing short of lunacy.



If so, it's the inspired kind of lunacy that's pretty much always guided this imprint. As Romer points out in his Introduction (which is slightly breathless and ends with a quote from Michel Foucault that is, as usual, less than enlightening), Budge's Book of the Dead has enjoyed a popularity of such enormous and wide-ranging dimensions that it's entered Western culture as a thing itself, regardless of provenance (although Romer's contention that it's "the bestselling edition of any ancient text" ignores a certain royally-commissioned translation of the Bible). Romer points to the surprising amount of influence Budge's rolling, powerful diction has had on writers as varied as Joyce, Tolkien, and Jim Morrison. And reading through this satisfyingly plump Penguin Classic, I was overjoyed to see that prose come into its own again after all these years. Open the book to any page and you're submerged in the incantatory hallucinations Budge channeled so well. Here's part of the papyrus of Mut-hetep, singing a hymn to the setting sun:

Thou settest as a living being in the hidden place. Thy father Ta-tuten raiseth thee up and he placeth both his hands behind thee; thou becomest endowed with divine attributes in thy members of earth; thou wakest in peace and thou settest in Manu. Grant thou that I may become a being honoured before Osiris, and that I may come to thee, O Ra-tem! I have adored thee, therefore do thou for me that which I wish. Grant thou that I may be victorious in the presence of the company of the gods.

Or this purification prayer from the papyrus of Nabseni:

I sit among the great gods, and I have made a way for myself through the house of the Seheptet boat; and behold, the mantis hath brought me to see the great gods who dwell in the underworld, and I shall be triumphant before them, for I am pure.

Or the text on the fourth doorway-arch of the dead man Ani:

The name of the doorkeeper is Khesef-hra-asht-kheru; the name of the watcher is Seres-Tepu; the name of the herald is Khesef-at. The Osiris Ani, triumphant, shall say: "I am the Bull, son of the ancestress of Osiris. O grant ye that his father, the lord of his godlike companions, may bear witness for him. I have weighed the guilty in judgment. I have brought into his nostrils the life which is everlasting. I am the son of Osiris, I have made the way. I have passed thereover into Neter-khert."

Budge was a professional grave-robber for the British Museum long before he was its Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities for 30 years; whatever he could steal, swindle, or smuggle from Egypt, he did. And like many trailblazers who open a new cultural doorway, he then immediately turned around and planted himself athwart it, trying to prevent anybody else from coming through - he hated the surging growth of Egypt-mania that he did more than anybody to bring about, and he mocked the Egyptology departments that began to spring up at major universities everywhere.



But in this great, weird, manufactured book of his, he found the greatest and highest calling for all his freakish learning, all his partisanship, and all the novelistic dreams he had no novelist's skill to otherwise exploit. Romer and the Penguin Classics team are entirely right: this particular Book of the Dead is a classic in its own right, despite how angry it would make any ancient Egyptian who saw it.

And now that Penguin Classics has demonstrated that it's not above enshrining liturgical works, perhaps we'll finally see a Penguin Classic Book of Common Prayer (the pre-1950s version, of course) ...

Penguins on Parade: A Tale of Two Beowulfs!

Some Penguin Classics in their very natures embody the dichotomy of their colophon. Here indeed we have a creature of opposites - a bird, but fitted out like a seal, feathered, but flightless, comical on land, bullet-sleek in the pitch-black water: two natures, two elements fused into one. This is also Horace's problematic call to all literature, to instruct and delight, to instruct in delighting and delight in instructing.

This has been the dichotomy of Penguin Classics from the very beginning, and that split is perhaps given no starker form than that most dreaded of all concessions: a verse epic rendered in prose. One of Penguin's latest publicity tag-lines for its Classics line is some elegant - "The Best Books Ever Written" - that it can almost mislead you into thinking the company has followed a hard-line purist stance from the start, but such is hardly the case. It was a prose version of the Iliad, after all, that jump-started the whole modern idea of the paperback 'classic' volume.

The temptations are obvious in both directions. Prose versions of epic poems are infinitely more accessible to wee, sleekit, tim'rous cowrin' students, who usually so unreconstructedly stupid and arrogant that literally anything in the whole world not directly connected to themselves frightens and irritates them. The stacked-verse poetry they know comes in Hallmark cards and is nice and short - it doesn't fill whole books, as epic poems have an annoying tendency to do. Give a student the Aeneid and he'll stare at it in slack-jawed horror. Give that same student the Aeneid in nice comfortable paragraphs and chapters and he's a bit more likely to attempt to read it. Books, after all, have nice comfortable paragraphs and chapters - and Penguin Classics, after all, have always been at least partly designed with students in mind.

Take Beowulf. In its original 8th-century Old English form, it's utterly incomprehensible - not just to students, but to most everybody. In a line-by-line word-by-word translation of that Old English (like the magnificent version done by the mighty Howell Chickering in 1977), students can at least recognize the words - but it's still mighty trying to the patience. The old Anglo-Saxon alliterative line - BRAK-BRAK-BRAK-BRAK/BRAK-BRAK-BRAK-BRAK - deeply terrifies beginners accustomed to iambic pentameter, and then there are all the bits where the anonymous author is trying his best to be clever, coming up with fanciful nicknames for everything from ship-prows to shoe-straps without telling anybody what the hell he's doing ... first-year newbies have been known to faint.

Enter David Wright's 1957 Penguin Classic prose translation of Beowulf. Wright's Introduction is crystal-clear and just the slightest bit argumentative, as befits an inherently controversial performance. "Old English prose," he tells us, "is lucid and straightforward; but Old English verse is quite another kettle of fish." He decides that he cannot soar to the heights of the Beowulf poet (he asserts that those heights can't be reached in modern English), but he insists his version is not simply a trot for students - that instead it strikes a middle tone, which he adamantly defends:

The argument against the middle style is that it seems colourless. With this I do not entirely agree; in any case, better no colours than faked ones. When the leaves are off a great oak it is still possible to see the nobility and spread of its branches. It is not necessary to trick them out with imitation foliage.

And his prose Beowulf will certainly keep the reader reading - it almost entirely strips the work of strangeness, allowing the substance of the words and the essence of the story to come through. His version of the famous elegiac "Survivor's Lament" goes like this:

Earth, hold what men could not, the wealth of princes. For heroes won it for you long ago. The holocaust of battle has claimed every mortal soul of my race who shared the delights of the banqueting hall. I have none to wield the sword, none to polish the jewelled cup. Gone are the brave. They sleep who should burnish casques. Armour that stood up to the battering of swords in conflict, among the thunder of shields, moulders away like the soldier. Nor shall the corselet travel hither and yon on the back of a hero by the side of fighting men. There is no sweet sound from the harp. No delights of music, no good hawk swooping through the hall. no swift horse stamping in the castle yard. Death has swept away nearly every thing that lives.

That's straightforward enough, and therein lies perhaps a small problem, since 'straightforward' is something the Beowulf poet virtually never was. "The trouble is that Beowulf is so rich in meaning," the aforementioned Chickering wrote, "that no single translation, however excellent, can make all or even most of its poetry come across." The main strength of the Wright prose version is also its main weakness: it doesn't try to make any of the poetry come across; it concedes the fight from the outset. Naturally, there were bound to be those who found this disappointing.

One such must have been Michael Alexander, whose verse version of the poem joined the Penguin Classics in 1973 and whose Introduction features this little shot across the bow: "Just as some modern readers will find this version too slavish, there will be others more learned than myself who may find it too free. I would ask them, as scholars, to consider whether a literal prose version of a verse epic is, properly, a translation."

Here's his "Survivor's Lament":

Hold ground, the gold of the earls!

Men could not. Cowards they were not

who took it from thee once, but war-death took them,

that stops life, struck them, spared not one

man of my people, passed on now.

They have had their hall-joys. I have not with me

a man able to unsheathe this ...

who shall polish the plated vessel,

this treasured cup? The company is elsewhere.

This hardened helmet healed with gold,

shall lose its shell. They sleep now

whose work was to burnish the battle-masks;

so with the cuirass that in the crash took

bite of iron among breaking shields:

it moulders with the man. This mail-shirt travelled far,

hung from a shoulder that shouldered warriors:

it shall not jingle again.

There's no joy from harp-play,

glee-wood's gladness, no good hawk

swings through the hall now, no swift horse

tramps at the threshold. Terrible slaughter

has carried into darkness many kindreds of mankind.

There will obviously be those among you who prefer any verse to any prose. I'm not one of that number - for a very long time, I've been explaining and defending the often deceptively unassuming poetry that can be woven into prose translations by conscientious, learned craftsmen. I hold those translations no less automatically heartfelt and worthy than their verse counterparts. I think Wright's prose version of Beowulf is very, very strong - but even if I didn't: plated vessel? Healed with gold? The hilarious "it shall not jingle again"? Surely better any kind of prose version to a verse rendition that makes the audience giggle when they should be awestruck?

But whichever your pleasure, prose or verse, the long roll of Penguin Classics has you covered. Both versions come with a treasure from the Sutton Hoo hoard pictured on the cover, and both come with genealogies, maps, glossaries - all the secondary critical apparatus you need to get the gist of Beowulf. And Chickering - and the great, challenging, question-posing Seamus Heaney translation - await those who want to go on from there.