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: King Harald's Saga!

Some Penguin Classics, however great, are mere facets of larger gems, and so it is with the slim 1966 volume titled King Harald's Saga.

The Saga in question is here wonderfully translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, and in its actual setting, it forms part of that vast and endlessly fascinating work, the Heimskringla of the Icelandic historian and mythologist Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). Snorri was a towering figure in his country's literary history, and he gets generous and detailed attention in this volume's superb Introduction:

Snorri Sturluson was essentially an explorer of the past. He did not allow himself to be deterred by the fact that the landmarks in the remotest area of history were so few and far between; where his information failed, he rationalized and deduced. When he emerged into the more familiar landscape of the late ninth century, he could build on the work of earlier historians, he could accept and reject, and add from sources of his own. But his primary purpose was not so much to correct earlier works of history as to cultivate history for its own sake, to improve the writing of history; he wanted to illuminate the past, not merely to record it.

The story he tells in this saga is so remarkable it could only have been based in reality: it's the story of Harald Sigurdsson, who fled his native Norway at age 15 to escape the rampaging enemies of his half-brother King Olaf. Like a real-life Conan the Barbarian, Harald wandered the world, a reaver and freebooter, selling his prodigious physical might and keen tactical mind to the highest bidder everywhere from Kiev to Sicily to the heart of Byzantium. Eventually Harald returned to Norway and reclaimed his half-brother's crown, and in September of 1066 he took a fleet of 300 warships - 9000 fighting men - across the North Sea to attempt an armed conquest of England. At first, his fierce forces swept aside all armed resistance, but at the Battle of Stamford Bridge he lost the initiative, the battle, and his life, the last of the great and terrible Vikings.

Snorri's account of this incredible life makes it even more incredible - timelines are brushed up, gaps in the record are filled with prodigies, and virtually every character is given at least one or two great lines (probably the most delightful hallmark of this author), as when Harald raids his hapless neighbor Denmark:

They burned down the farm of a great chieftain called Thorkel Geysa, and carried off his daughters in chains to the ships because they had made derisory remarks the previous winter about King Harald's plan to invade Denmark; they had carved anchors out of cheese, and said that these could easily hold all the king of Norway's ships. This was what was composed about it:

The mocking Danish maidens

Carved useless anchors

Out of their crumbling cheeses;

Norway's king was angry.

Today these very maidens

Can see the iron anchors

Holding his eager warships;

And none is laughing now.

It is reported that he watchman who first caught sight of King Harald's fleet said to Thorkel Geysa's daughters, 'I thought you said that Harald would never come to Denmark.'

'That was yesterday,' replied Dotta.

Forty years ago, Penguin Classics produced a small shelf's-worth of slivers from Snorri's gigantic masterpiece, each with family trees and glossaries and maps, each tending to its own garden, and that's wonderful: reading all those composite volumes is endlessly entertaining and challenging, like communing with a snowy Homer. King Harald's Saga is one of the best of those volumes, but they're all worth finding and reading in the middle of a winter's week.

Penguins on Parade: The Shorter Pepys!

Some Penguin Classics are necessary compromises, and Robert Latham's fantastic The Shorter Pepys is a perfect case-in-point. The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from 1660 to 1669 is a great unruly sprawl, a mix of purely utilitarian jottings, longer and more personal entries, and set-pieces describing great events, so despite the genial and engaging voice Pepys brings to the written page, the unedited Diary makes for some very uneven reading. Latham's reduced version - comprising about a third of the original - was first published 1985 and first brought out as a Penguin Classic in 1993. With all due respect to my beloved Everybody's Pepys, this is certainly the best one-volume edition of the Diaries - it's only serious competition is in-house: Latham's The Illustrated Pepys from 1978.

Latham loads the volume with Pepys scholarship, of course, so the Introduction and the Notes are both interesting and extremely helpful for newcomers to the period - but as with any edition of the Diaries, it's the man at center stage who'll keep those newcomers reading. Pepys was a rising man in government work when he started his diary - he continuously mentions his net worth, and he's clearly proud of his new connections with powerful men at the court of Charles II. But the Diary's personal sagas upstage its political content every time, as when Pepys discovers a cache of letters in which his brother John uses the most foul and hilarious language to describe him. Pepys broods over his discovery, and when he's next in the same room with John and their peacemaking father, the brooding erupts into a frightful row:

 21 March 1664

Up; and it snowing this morning a little, which from the mildness of the winter and the weather beginning to be hot and the summer to come on apace is a little strange to us - I did not go abroad, because of my tumour, for fear it shall rise again; but stayed within and by and by my father came, poor man, to me, and my brother John; after much talk and taking them up to my chamber, I did there after some discourse bring in my business of anger with John and did before my father read all his roguish letters; which troubled my father mightily, especially to hear me say what I did, against my allowing anything for the time to come to him out of my own purse, and other words very severe - while he, like a simple rogue, made very silly and churlish answers to me, not like a man of any goodness or wit - at which I was as much disturbed as the other.

The unconscious genius of Pepys is that it never occurs to him not to include such scenes - virtually any other diarist would succumb to the urge to censor themselves. Instead of doing that, Pepys always just writes himself, in the round, as the beguiling combination of high-minded motives and trivial daily realities that most brisk, engaged humans are (though they seldom want to admit it). And our author is never aware of the weird dichotomies he's forever preserving on the page, as when he and his colleagues face international threat:

8 June 1667

Up and to the office, where all the news this morning is that the Dutch are come with a fleet of 80 sail to Harwich, and that guns were heard plain by Sir W. Rider's people at Bednall Greene all yesterday noon. So to the office we all, and sat all the morning; and then home to dinner - where our dinner, a ham of French Bacon boiled with pigeons - an excellent dish. Here dined with us only W. Hewers and his mother. After dinner to the office again, where busy till night; and then home to read a little and then to bed.

The threat of invasion, and a delicious dish of French Bacon - and no hint from the entry itself as to which one loomed the larger in the author's recall when he sat down to make this entry. Little details like supper and dinner and road conditions and weather crop up constantly in the Diary - they're a very large part of its charm, even when some of those details foreshadow disappointment for the knowing reader:

24 December 1668

A cold day. Up and to the office, where all the morning alone at the office, nobody meeting, being the Eve of Christmas. At noon home to dinner and then to the office, busy all the afternoon, and at night home to supper; and it being now very cold, and in hopes of a frost, I begin this night to put on a Wastecoate, it being the first winter in my whole memory that I ever stayed till this day before I did so. So to bed, in mighty good humour with my wife, but sad in one thing, and that is for my poor eyes.

That 'my poor eyes would be gloomily prophetic, of course. After a decade of keeping his diary and quite obviously enjoying it, Pepys came to the conclusion that he was in danger of losing his eyesight from constant scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. He decided to dictate all his future writing (a decision immeasurably helped by being able to afford an amanuensis) - which meant, obviously, that his diary, with its brutally honest assessments of some of the most powerful men in the country, and with its sexual irresponsibility and openness, would have to come to an end. Pepys was sad about that - he refers to it almost as seeing his own self laid in the grave - and perhaps wrong as well: I'm thinking he could have kept generating his diary without hurting his eyes at all. If true, that's a bitter thing for any Pepysian to contemplate, since we'd all very much like another decade of entries.

Still, we can be grateful for what we have, and grateful that Penguin Classics corrected as long-standing oversight by introducing Pepys to the Classics line in this nifty abridgement. If you're already a Pepys fan, this will be the volume you end up carrying around with you - and if you're just discovering Pepys, this volume is pretty much the perfect vessel of that discovery - like Pepys himself, The Shorter Pepys is bright, accessible, and fat - but not too fat.

Penguins on Parade: The Secret History!

Some Penguin Classics defy the very dignity of the term, and surely the Anecdota, the so-called "Secret History" of the 6th century Byzantine historian Procopius is the best possible example of that curious phenomenon.

It's a thoroughly scurrilous work, a scandal-sheet of gossip and fabrication, written in haste and in total privacy (public attribution would have resulted in the author being flogged to bloody cat-string in the public square), very likely at the same time that it's thirty-something author was also writing the work for which he was famous in his own day: his multi-volume (and quite excellent) history of the military campaigns of the great general Belisarius. Procopius was a secretary on the General's staff during the epic campaigns that briefly re-conquered large swaths of Persia, Africa, and Italy, and his sober, generally reliable account of those early campaigns stands as one of the last glimmerings of the great historical tradition of the Empire before it sank into darkness.

The Secret History is the under-side of all that imperial glory. In this brief account (this is a Penguin Classic you can read in one sitting - and trust me, you'll want to), Procopius centers on the four people at the head of his world: the Emperor Justinian, who's portrayed as a cold, grasping, semi-human monster, his wife the Empress Theodora, who in P's famous accounting becomes a jade and a wanton of such magnitude that she makes Messalina look like Mary Tyler Moore (although she has more of the latter's sense of humor - "When the fancy took her," P recounts, quivering with outrage, "she amused herself by turning the most serious matters into a subject for laughter, as if she were watching a comedy on the stage"). Rounding out the quartet are Belisarius (some of P's loyalty is showing even here: though vilified in the book, Belisarius isn't painted nearly so harshly as the others) and his wife Antonina, here a scheming, murderous, headstrong witch.

Grasping Palace officials, corrupt administrators, brutish army officers, and even a marauding whale (it was an enormous creature, nicknamed Porphyrion, and it attacked shipping all around the Golden Horn for decades - almost certainly a territory-crazed male sperm whale) - all show up and get tarred and feathered, but our author saves his most bitter words for the Imperial couple. He recounts an endless stream of slanders against Theodora, including some that will strike haters of Nancy Reagan as familiar:

 For from her earliest years she had herself consorted with magicians and sorcerors, as her whole way of life led her in that direction, and to the very end she put her trust in these arts and made them at all times the ground of her confidence.

Of course the end result of all this vituperation is inevitable: the reader comes away entirely rooting for Theodora and intensely saddened by the allusions Procopius makes several times that she's dead in her grave by the time he's writing his character assassination. Procopius retails every single bit of marketplace gossip about the ruling pair, and throughout this book, he then tries to cloak that gossip in a semblance of historical inquiry:

In view of all this, I, like most of my contemporaries, never once felt that these two were human beings; they were a pair of blood-thirsty demons and what the poets call 'plaguers of mortal men'. For they plotted together to find the easiest and swiftest means of destroying all races of men and all their works, assumed human shape, became man-demons, and in this way convulsed the whole world. Proof of this could be found in many things, but especially in the power manifested in their doings. For the actions of demons are unmistakably different from those of human beings.

Most of his contemporaries thought no such thing, of course, and we can legitimately wonder if Procopius himself did either. The Secret History not only outrages: it revels in outrage. You don't have to read many pages of it before you wonder if the author isn't just plain enjoying himself, relaxing after a hard day's work by sitting at his study table and writing the unwritable. I'd wager more than a few writers do the exact same thing today.

This 1966 Penguin Classic is done by Norwich School legend G. A. Williamson, who renders the whole sordid business in the clearest and (mostly) cleanest of prose, guarding himself always with the acerbity of an Oxford don. "I have resolutely refused," he tells us, "to translate barbaroi by 'barbarians', and I trust that I have used no other words or expressions savouring of translationese."

Williamson supplies the translation; Penguin supplies the edition; I supply the recommendation - it's up to you to supply the healthy skepticism. Armed with it, you'll find this an ancient classic you can't put down.

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: Columbus!

Some Penguin Classics, despite everything, just don't feel like classics. A perfect case-in-point is surely the 1969 Christopher Columbus volume The Four Voyages. Of all the Tudor-era voyages of discovery, those made by Columbus are the most emblematic and the most world-changing - you can't read about them without thinking they surely deserve - and must have generated - the discoverer's equivalent of the Principia, or On the Origin of Species. This impression is only strengthened by the knowledge that Columbus held it too: his voyages were the focus of energetic literary attention from the moment they began. The royal historian, Columbus' son Hernando, and the man himself were only the principal note-takers - sometimes it seems like their already-voluminous accounts were augmented by every single literate officer on the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria. Surely the makings of an epic are here?

And yet, the volume Penguin produced half a century ago is unexceptional reading. Not dull - not at all - but somehow lacking the emotional payoff we expect from the European discovery of the New World. This isn't the fault of J. M. Cohen, who did the painstaking job of assembling bits of a dozen sources and forming them into this single narrative; his translation is smooth and readable throughout. And it's certainly not the fault of the various chroniclers, including Columbus' nerdy book-worm of a son, who tries his hardest to invest every moment of his account with drama:

On leaving the island of Jamaica, on Wednesday, 14 May, the Admiral reached a cape on the coast of Cuba which he named Santa Cruz. As he followed the coast he was overtaken by a heavy thunderstorm with terrible lightning which put him in great danger. His difficulties were increased by the many shallows and narrow channels which he found, and he was compelled to seek safety from these two dangers which demanded opposite remedies. To protect himself from the storm he should have lowered the sails; to get out of the shallows he had to keep them spread. Indeed, if his difficulties had continued for eight or ten leagues he would never have escaped.

No, the problem, I suspect, is the star of the show, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Despite the best efforts of translators, commentators, and white-washers, Columbus always comes across as ... well, a bit of a putz. He has none of the dash of a Drake or a Frobisher, nor any of the romance of a Raleigh or a Champlain. And as Cohen remarks in his refreshingly acerbic Introduction, reports of the Admiral's skills have been greatly exaggerated:

But even on his third voyage, Columbus was theorizing wildly about the apparent deviations of the Pole Star, which he could only explain by the crazy supposition that the earth was pear-shaped and he was sailing uphill. Columbus's theoretical knowledge of navigation was clearly not exceptional.

And it's worse than that (crazy ideas about the world's natural ways being no exclusive property of the 15th century, after all). Stories of the man's grandiose assumptions and unbridled greed abound, of course, and are grist for the mill of post-colonial axe-grinding. But whatever the Admiral's role as horizon-broadener or agent of cultural genocide might be, the reader can't escape the feeling that he wouldn't have been pleasant to know. Virtually every passage he wrote of his own travels is a passive aggressive psycho-drama of nightmare proportions. At random:

I have established warm friendship with the king of that land [Hispaniola], so much so, indeed, that he was proud to call me and treat me as a brother. But even should he change his attitude and attack the men of La Navidad, he and his people know nothing about arms and go naked, as I have already said; they are the most timorous people in the world. In fact, the men that I have left there would be enough to destroy the whole land, and the island holds no dangers for them so long as they maintain discipline.

See that? The king is proud to call Columbus his brother - but Columbus isn't proud of the honor, he can scarcely wait a sentence before covering the king and all his people with condescension. And then there's that bit about his men: he no sooner finishes saying the people of the island can't possibly represent any kind of danger to his soldiers than he's pre-condemning those same men, implying with a sly look that if they do get themselves overrun and slaughtered, it was because their discipline was lax. It's the same throughout The Four Voyages: on every page, but especially on the pages written by Columbus himself, you get the impression the thing's real title should be Nothing - and I Mean NOTHING - was My Fault. That can get a bit tiresome, even when decked out in Penguin's customary first-rate scholarly apparatus.

Name recognition sells, so we'll always have some variation of this book with us. But still: Penguin Classics of all the other great exploration texts (especially if handled as lovingly as Cohen handles this stuff) would be a good thing too.

Penguins on Parade: Chaucer Redux!

Some Penguin Classics seem like they must surely be an affront to the very nostrils of the Almighty, and surely if any Penguin Classics bids fair to seem so, it's any Penguin Classic that dares to supplant one of the most beloved Penguin Classics of all time.

Obviously, we're talking about Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' - and that's obvious before we ever get to editions or editors or talk of metrics, because surely there's no English classic so beloved, so central to a national psyche, as this marvellous, unending book? Scholars have been fretting about just how 'English' a book it is, but the picayune particulars of provenance mean comparatively little against the sheer weight of tradition. Breton? Gascony? Who but a bloodless specialist would bother to mention such things when we're talking about the very fons et origo of a country's literature, the unmistakable beginnings of the peculiar British penchant for character-driven organic plotting? Chaucer is the soil for Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, and an entire literary tradition of making us root for characters even while we mock them, the tradition of giving us real life just slightly, just ever so perfectly enhanced. If we're talking about a beloved classic, the starting exemplar of them all would be Chaucer's greatest work.

And if we're talking about beloved Penguin Classics, we could scarcely be talking about anything but Nevill Coghill's best-selling 1952 modernization, one of the very first Penguin Classics in our Parade of Penguins. Coghill's modernization of Chaucer was phenomenally popular as a radio program even before it became a Penguin Classic, and its subsequent sales virtually guaranteed that for thousands of students over the course of five decades, his version of Chaucer would be Chaucer. I've read his version countless times, in countless places across the face of the Earth, and it's always managed to charm me. Any other Penguin Classic version of Chaucer would seem certain, as noted, to give offense.

Any other version of Chaucer ... but not Chaucer himself.

That's always the problem I have with modern-English versions of Chaucer, however inventive or talented they are (it's this problem, I suspect, that's prevented me from giving critical attention to any of the various modernizations that have wafted over the plate since I've been back at bat - I count four of them, all frenziedly ignored by yours truly, despite the fact that one of them was actually very, very good): they aren't Chaucer, and no matter how good they are, they can't ever be as good as Chaucer. I treasured the Coghill all those years by hearing Coghill's clotted, adorable voice in my head when I read it - which was a very different thing from hearing Chaucer's high, nasal, immediately likeable twanging in my head. Modernizations imply by their very existence that the original Chaucer is somehow beyond the reach of most latter day readers, but that actually isn't the case. He's still our most accessible inaccessible writer: a weak of study and practice, and you're suddenly playing with English of an entirely different time.

With the possible exception of the Gawain poet, nobody in Chaucer's day played with that English better than he did. Don't get me wrong: I love the Coghill re-creation and I always will. He, too, has undeniable fun, as in the opening to the Cook's Tale:

 There was a prentice living in our town

Worked in the victualling trade, and he was brown,

Brown as a berry; spruce and short he stood,

As gallant as a goldfinch in the wood.

Black were his locks and combed with fetching skiill;

He danced so merrily, with such a will,

That he was known as Revelling Peterkin.

He was full of love, as full of sin

As hives are full of honey, and as sweet.

Lucky the wench that Peter chanced to meet.

At every wedding he would sing and hop,

And he preferred the tavern to the shop.

But in the fat, beautiful 2005 Penguin Classic update edited by the redoubtable Jill Mann, in addition to a humble Introduction and a whopping 300 pages of invaluable Notes, we get not the stained glass pattern, lovely as it is, but the glory of the merry sun itself:

A prentis whilom dwelled in oure citee,

And of a craft of vitaillers was he.

Gaillard he was a goldfinch in the shawe;

Broun as a berye, a propre short felawe,

With lokkes blake, ykembd ful festisly.

Dauncen he koude so wel and jolily

That he was cleped Perkin Revelour.

He was as ful of love and paramour

As is the hive ful of hony swete;

Wel was the wenche that with him mighte mete.

At every bridale wolde he singe and hoppe.

He loved bet the taverne than the shoppe,

For whan ther any riding was in Chepe,

Out of the shoppe thider wolde he lepe ...

Coghill's lines smile and wink at the reader. But Chaucer himself? He taps his toe, he claps his hands in time, he throws back his head and laughs with the sheer joy of making something so alive. An enterprising reader need only acclimate himself with Mann's Introduction, maybe roll the some lines around the sides of his mouth for practice, and then that living, laughing text, just as the author wrote it, is right there on the page. No matter how good intermediaries are, they could never be as good as this.

And so I am well-pleased. Fancy that.

Penguins on Parade: Wordsworth!

Some Penguin Classics might almost fairly be said to overdo things, and if ever there were such a case, it's the two-volume edition of the poems of William Wordsworth that came out in the Penguin Classics line in 1990. These two volumes, called The Poems: Volume One and The Poems: Volume Two, are edited by John O. Hayden, and each is a brick of over 1000 pages. They run more or less chronologically for the entire ghastly length of time Wordsworth was churning out poetry, and even at their finished length, horrifyingly, they don't represent the whole of the man's catalogue: his epic, "The Prelude," isn't included here, nor are any of the five or six variant editions of that impenetrably dull work. So, believe it or not, the 2045 pages of these two volumes represent only about a working half of the extant verse. It boggles the mind - I don't know of any other Penguin Classic like it. There are many other 'complete poems' volumes, true, but the life's work in those cases is always that of an ordinary poet, not some dodderer caught in the grip of a logorrhoea mania as helpless as it was unsleeping.

In other words, apart from ruefully satisfying that bitter little rump of Wordsworth-fans that has existed in the world since their idol first decided, at age 15, to write a gaseous ode about something that happened to him five minutes ago (and then keep revising it for the next sixty years), there can't really be any good editorial reason for anybody - even Penguin Classics - to publish two volumes containing every single poem Wordsworth ever wrote. It goes beyond being zealous; it's just plain rude.

Nevertheless, here these two fat volumes sit on the shelf, offering the same mildly dyspeptic reprimand they always have to readers who glance at them, consider for half a second finally grappling with all the Wordsworth in the whole world, and then veer off and take a slim volume of Keats to the park. Being Penguin volumes, they're attractively made and beautifully researched. Hayden's end-notes are masterpieces of succinctness, including both his own glosses on Wordsworth's obscurities (a going business, that) and brief relevant extracts from the glosses of those glossers who've glossed before him. Those obscurities most certainly extend to whole poems, as anybody who's ever actually read "The Prelude" can attest. As noted, these two Penguin volumes don't include "The Prelude," but since they include everything else, there are still plenty of examples of poems that might have turned out sharper and more memorable if they'd been in less sententious hands. Think, for instance, how evocative this one might have been if its author hadn't been so hell-bent on thinly-veiled political commentary:

'Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high'

Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high

Travelling where she from time to time enshrouds

Her head, and nothing loth her Majesty

Renounces, till among the scattered clouds

One with its kindling edge declares that soon

Will reappear before the uplifted eye

A Form as bright, as beautiful a moon,

To glide in open prospect through clear sky.

Pity that such a promise e'er should prove

False in the issue, that yon seeming space

Of sky should be in truth the steadfast face

Of a cloud flat and dense, through which must move

(By transit not unlike man's frequent doom)

The Wanderer lost in more determined gloom.

Still, if you write 10,000 verses in your life, you're bound to write some that Steve will like, even if you do so sarcastically or accidentally. No matter how Wordsworth has bored me over the years (ironic, since I worked for a long time in a bookshop bearing his name), there are poems of his I still turn to every National Poetry Month. Two of those poems are intensely predictable of me, but here they are anyway:

'She dwelt among untrodden ways'

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the spring of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

And then there's this one, probably my favorite Wordsworth poem:

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon Solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands

Of travellers in some shady haunt,

Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain

That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending; -

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that those last two poems are frequently anthologized. And come to think of it, they're always included in the various "Selected Poems" Wordsworth volumes Penguin Classics has published over the years. If you take my meaning.

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: Gerald of Wales!

Some Penguin Classics ought to engender only hatred, and surely the 1185 Topographia Hibernia of our old friend Gerald of Wales should be at the top of that infamous list. "Giraldus Cambrensis" was born around 1146, the scion of one of the most influential Norman families of the century. His mother was the celebrated 'Helen of Wales,' a beautiful woman named Angharad who eventually married Gerald de Windsor, the castellan of Pembroke, and started churning out little fitzGeralds, including Maurice, the murderous thug who helped Henry II invade and conquer Ireland.

Gerald was given a more gentle education and fitted out for a career in the Church, although his lifelong quest of appointment to the see of St. David's went unfulfilled. He first went to Ireland in 1183 accompanying Henry II's son Prince John and a large body of armed men, and while his uncle and his brother were busy spiking the locals, he took an interest in indigenous folklore. During that first visit and a subsequent on in 1185, he collected a large amount of, eh, information that the locals were only too happy to foist on an Englishman of apparently bottomless gullibility, and Gerald studiously set all this information down in a book which he called The History and Topography of Ireland, even though it contains virtually no accurate Irish topography and no accurate Irish history at all.



By the modest and admittedly cumbersome standards of the day, the book became a hit. This is understandable: not only was Ireland in 1185 a wild chunk of terra incognita most Normans had never seen, but as such, it presented unbeatable opportunities for the kind of moralizing that was then at the peak of its popularity with the book-buying clergy.

We should hate this book, since it's a picture-perfect illustration of history being written by the victors. Most of it is race propaganda of the vilest kind, like the innumerable tracts about native 'savages' that flooded the East Coast stationery stores in the early 19th century - and with the same purpose: to dehumanize the people you were in the process of dispossessing. It should be cast out, and Penguin Classics should no more print an edition of it than they would of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Except ... time, especially vast expanses of it like the vast expanse that now separates the sun in the sky every day from the 12th century, takes the sting out of things. I'm sure the editors of Penguin Classics didn't think about Irish crofters burned alive in front of their children when they bought John O'Meara's clean, fluid 1951 translation of the Topographia Hibernia and added it to the Classics backlist in 1982.

And perhaps that's OK. Those bishops weren't only enjoying the moralizing, after all; Gerald of Wales was an undeniably catchy storyteller, as his Journey Through Wales amply demonstrates. And O'Meara isn't for a moment blind to the defects of the work he's so skillfully translating:

The reader will be able to judge for himself the amount of credit to be placed in Giraldus' statements, and the motives by which he was actuated. He will see the single-minded vanity of the ambitious flatterer, the haughty contempt for one who came with his family to reform and invade, and the apparent credulity which must have delighted the hearts of the Irish.

And the truth is, aside from this one slim volume, we have very little surviving written records of any aspect of Irish life at the time. Economists, sociologists, climatologists, biologists ... many categories of people aside from military historians have ransacked this book, hungrily looking for the odd fact or tidbit that might be added to the historical picture. Gerald's sermons are mined for factual details:

There are many birds here of twofold nature. They are called ospreys. They are smaller than the eagle, but larger than the hawk. One of their feet is armed with talons, open and ready to snatch; but the other is closed and peaceful and suitable only for swimming. It is a wonderful instance of nature's pranks.

There is a remarkable thing about these birds, and I have often witnessed it for myself. They hover quietly on their wings high up in the air over the waves of the sea. In this way they can more easily see down into the depths below.

(O'Meara and the good folks at the Penguin art department fill this volume with illustrations from a 15th century manuscript of the work)

Likewise his frequent recourse to saints' lives can still yield items of temporal interest, like the pair of interesting assumptions buried in this little tale:

There is a district called Ferneginan in Leinster. It is separated from Wexford by the river Slaney only. From there the larger mice that are commonly called rats were entirely expelled by the curse of the bishop, Saint Yvor, whose books they had happened to eat. They cannot be bred nor can they live there, if brought in.

Of course, studying and sifting through the text like this requires often turn a blind eye to the aforementioned race hatred, which crops up on almost every page in some shape or other - sometimes buried in innuendo, many other times sadly explicit:

They [the Irish, naturally] are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living.

Yes indeed. Whereas the Normans in London at this time were using air-cars.

Gerald visited Ireland a few more times before his death in 1223, and he kept revising and enlarging his book for the rest of his life. O'Meara's slim little Penguin Classic is a rendition of the 'first edition' of the book, before its author started making egregious additions and displaying what O'Meara calls "indiscriminate erudition of all kinds." And the book fascinates in spite of itself, a quick, warped look at a people right on the edge of being inhospitabled out of every hill and valley they'd ever called their own.

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.