Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. A Group Translation ed. by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo (review)

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• Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. A Group Translation ed. by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo
• Domenico Accorinti

Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. A Group Translation Edited by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 798. ISBN 978-0-472-03896-1

More than eighty years after the English prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse for the Loeb Classical Library (1940), here is an interesting experiment in translating [End Page 282] the Dionysiaca, the longest known poem surviving from antiquity (about 21,000 lines in forty-eight books) written by the Egyptian Nonnus of Panopolis (fifth century ce), a towering figure of Greek Late Antiquity, also known as the author of a hexameter Paraphrase of St John's Gospel (about 3,600 lines in twenty-one books). Tales of Dionysus, the first English verse translation of Nonnus's epic poem, is the product of a multi-faceted group work that brings together forty-two translators from different and varied backgrounds (classicists, scholars of English literature, academics from other fields, and poets). All of them, starting from their own experiences, have tried to give a manifold voice to the complex polyphony of the Dionysiaca. The Nonnian dedication (Ποικίλον ὕμνον ἀράσσομεν, compare Dion. 1.15 ποικίλον ὕμνον ἀράσσω) to the memory of Douglass Parker (1927–2011) is a fitting tribute to an eccentric classicist who had planned a complete translation of Nonnus's poem, as he stated in an interview (1981–1982) with Laura Drake ("My perpetual, 'I'llnever-finish-it-but' project is a translation of the Dionysiaca of Nonnos", see Didaskalia 9 [2012] 15, https://www.didaskalia.net/issues/9/15/). All that remains of his project is the translation of books 1 and 2 (up to line 162), originally published in Arion (https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2016/09/Nonnos.pdf) and here re-edited (the translation of B. 2 has been completed by William Levitan) in its dazzling impact, such as Roman alternating with italics, boldface combined with increased fonts, and even Gothic characters for some German words in the translation of Dion. 2.11–13a (66).

It is well known that a group translation project runs the perilous risk of falling into inconsistency, even though the stylistic variety in the translation may be welcome, as Thelma Jurgrau writes in her foreword to Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand. A Group Translation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) 2–4. However, even if stylistic consistency is not among the aims of this group translation, Tales of Dionysus, which contains a pleasant introduction by Gordon Braden (1–17), the author of the recent volume Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), exposes itself to two preliminary criticisms.

First, about one-third of the forty-two translators have no knowledge of ancient Greek and approached the Dionysiaca through Rouse's translation to produce their own version of Nonnus's poem. Second, this translation does not follow the Greek text of the most recent critical edition, that of Francis Vian et al., 19 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976–2006). One cannot therefore consider this translation in the same way as those versions that aim to render the source text more or less faithfully on the basis of an authoritative critical text. For, as the editors write in their preface, "We have two aims in mind for this book. The first is to allow readers of English greater access to one of the most extraordinary poems of the Greek literary tradition […]. The second is to offer a sense of the wide spectrum of possibilities open to the contemporary practice of classical translation" (xiii).

From this perspective, the appendix "On Translating Nonnus" toward the end of the volume (725–52) proves indispensable for understanding the stylistic choices made by the different translators. For example, Catherine Anderson (B. 17), "a poet and not a scholar of [End Page 283] ancient Greek," adds "a few lines not found in the original, ones I thought were implied by the verse […] These narrations were offset in italics, implying a quiet...