What Do I Read Next?
In the 1990s, Robert Fagles produced the most celebrated poetic translations of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. These highly readable translations tell the stories of the Greek victory at Troy and Odysseus's ten-year voyage home. In European literature, these poems started it all.
The Aeneid by Virgil, first century A.D., is Rome' s answer to Homer's epics. A cross between political propaganda and high literature, Virgil's poem tells the story of an escaped Trojan prince and his adventures while searching for a new homeland. The Aeneid is available in multiple prose and poetic translations including editions by John Dryden (1680) and Allen Mandelbaum (1972).
Dante Alighieri's three-part Medieval masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, ranks as one of the most widely read and influential epic poems ever written. Dante has Virgil guide the main character through Hell and Purgatory, while Beatrice (his childhood sweetheart) guides him through Heaven. In each place, Dante describes famous historical and literary characters that spend eternity in the various stages of the afterlife. It, too, exists in numerous translations.
The Tale of Genji, 1100 A.D., by Murasaki Shikibu, tells a story of romance, political intrigue, and court life in Medieval Japan. Written by an aristocratic Japanese woman, the story revolves around Genji's rise to power, fame, and wealth, while detailing a culture that is foreign to most Western readers. A full translation by Edward Seidensticker appeared in 1976, which he later abridged in 1990 for a paperback edition.
Thomas Malory's 1472 Le Morte d'Arthur remains the single best collection of the tales of King Arthur. While not an epic in strict terms, since it is in prose and not poetry, the work combines all of the previous tales, bringing them into a cohesive whole. From the appearance of Merlin to the sword in the stone to the death of Arthur at the hands of his illegitimate son, Mordred, Malory's work is the stuff legends are made of.
Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, 1480, marks the beginning of the Renaissance Art Epic. This tale of chivalric love and romance takes an obscure French hero, Orlando, and makes him travel in endless pursuit of the woman he loves through lands filled with magic, fairies, and monsters. Never fully translated into English until Charles Ross in 1995, the work remains a great, under-read classic.
The most influential Renaissance poem is Ludovic Ariosto's massive Orlando Furioso, written between 1499 and 1525. This huge poem uses Boiardo's character, Orlando, to relate a leisurely tale of sex, chivalry, and love. The poem has been translated numerous times, including the 1591 version by John Harrington and the 1975 translation by Barbara Reynolds.
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1596, is the English answer to the Italian Renaissance epic poem. The scale is vast, the plan simple: Spenser envisioned a tale for each of the virtues and the vices, fourteen in all, as a way to entertain and instruct his readers. He sought to challenge the Italian poets and his work has remained popular for over four hundred years.
John Milton, himself an admirer of Spenser, wrote the "greatest'' religious epic in Paradise Lost, (1664) which chronicles the beginning of the world. Adam and Eve are his heroes, but his creation of Satan is much more interesting and many Romantic poets, including Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, thought Satan was the hero of the poem. Milton's description of Eden as the Bower of Bliss comes directly out of Tasso's poem.
The Voyage to the Isle of Love is generally regarded as the last Renaissance Art Epic written in English. Published in 1684 by Aphra Behn, the poem chronicles the adventures of Lysander as he pursues the love of his life, Aminta. She followed Voyage to the Isle of Love in 1688 with an unfinished epic entitled A Return to the Isle of Love.
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