For over 80 years the only access to Nonnus for anglophone readers has been through W.H.D. Rouse’s Loeb edition. This remains an indispensable resource, providing a readable translation that stays helpfully close to the Greek, shot through with a playful Joycean word-hoard of compound adjectives. A new English translation (able to take account of F. Vian’s Budé, along with the more recent four-volume Italian BUR edition) has been eagerly awaited and is long overdue. Like the proverbial bus, wait long enough and not one, but two come around at the same time. Alongside this current volume a University of California Press translation edited by T. Whitmarsh (to which I have contributed) will be published shortly.

Anyone who has tried to translate just a few lines of Nonnian Greek can readily comprehend the daunting prospect of taking on the full c. 21,000 lines of the Dionysiaca. Levitan and Lombardo have embraced the challenge with gusto. This is not a crowd-funded venture, but rather crowd-translated: a team of no fewer than 42 academics and professional translators and poets (with varying degrees of familiarity with Greek) have been brought together to complete the project. With such a vast team to control, the obvious problem facing the editors is how to maintain a sense of uniformity and coherence. Levitan and Lombardo, making a virtue of necessity, lean into the spirit of poikilia characterising Nonnus’ epic: this is a translation that retains multiple forms and voices, employing a variety of metrical forms including blank verse, free verse, fourteeners and hexameters.

The dangers of such an approach are obvious to anyone familiar with the first two books of the Dionysiaca. Nonnus memorably describes how the hundred-handed, polycephalic monster Typhon steals the thunderbolts of Zeus and launches an assault on Olympus. Those many hands (and heads) do not make for light work, and the incompetent monster is soon dispatched to smoulder resentfully under Mount Etna for the rest of time. Fortunately, Levitan and Lombardo prove much more adept. The project allows access to Nonnus in fresh and engaging ways. The title ‘Tales of Dionysus’ explicitly invokes the title coined by J. Winkler (whose unpublished Ph.D. of 1974 focused on scopophilia in the Dionysiaca), whilst the translation pays homage to the late D. Parker, whose 1970 translation of the first book and a half leads off the volume.

In the introduction G. Braden, a pioneer of Nonnian studies back in the 1970s, provides a succinct literary and cultural overview (pp. 1–17). He considers the ambiguous relationship between the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, confessing that the ‘intimated parallels between Christ and Dionysus are stubbornly hard to add up’ (p. 10). At the same time, he highlights an intriguing hagiography written by one Jacob the Deacon in which a bishop (who happens to share the name of the author of the Dionysiaca) expresses notable pangs of most unchristian eroticism. Following a discussion of the importance of astonishment and wonder within the text, Braden provides a brief history of the literary reception of the Dionysiaca, concluding with an analysis of a painting of ‘The Abduction of Europa’ by Noël-Nicholas Coypel, which takes its inspiration from the opening of Nonnus’ epic and is appropriately reproduced as a frontispiece to the volume (p. ii).

As set out in the Editors’ preface, the translation is not just designed to open up access to Nonnus’ epic for anglophone readers; it also aims to showcase ‘the wide spectrum of possibilities open to the contemporary practice of classical translation’ (p. xiii). To this end the volume is helpfully augmented by a section in which nineteen of the contributors discuss their different approaches to, and experiences of, translating Nonnus (pp. 725–52). Here follows a sample of these different perspectives.

Levitan continues Book 2 from the point where Parker’s translation breaks off. As he says, Parker presents ‘Nonnus writ large … in sheer size and verbal chutzpah, nothing later in the volume does surpass it’ (p. 743). Levitan, in preparation for the varied exuberance of the rest of the translation, consciously aims for ‘Nonnus writ small’. His lines are shorter for one thing, sometimes veering into prose. ‘I pulled back from the humor of the text, from its hijinks, bling, and dazzle, curtailed its performative swagger, and did what I could to lower its temperature’ (p. 743).

There is certainly plenty of performative swagger in the rest of the volume. Free verse is an understandably popular choice. C. Anderson confronts the celebratory nature of battle in Book 17 and decides to ‘level the killing field’ by revalorising the anonymous Indian enemy by naming them as ‘Warriors of the River Indus’. A questioning narrative voice is added to make clear to the modern reader ‘the paradox of loss felt in wars that obliterate everything human’ (p. 727). On the suicide of the Indian leader Orontes, we read (p. 297; lines 257–60):

A. Carson’s poetic reflections on translating Nonnus helpfully illuminate the potential relationship between Nonnus’ Paraphrase and Dionysiaca: ‘Personally, I like to work on several projects at once; I wonder if Nonnus did. It would be nice to know if he kept his rough drafts in separate notebooks, or made some days of the week pagan, some Christian’ (p. 731). Here are a few lines from the opening of her free-verse translation of Book 23, this ‘wordy, violent book’ (p. 731) (p. 370; lines 1–6):

A. Atkins uses free verse for Books 29 and 33. In her discussion she highlights the importance of glossing, not just because of an appreciation that readers will not necessarily be reading through the whole book, but because in Book 33, ‘given the difficult themes of sexual assault and suicide … it seemed important to explicate Nonnus’ allusions freely so that they didn’t act as a barrier between the reader and the characters’ (p. 728). In a similar way M. Larkin chooses to write against the grain of the text in her translation of Book 35: ‘I distilled the story and poured it back in, attempting to humanize the wives, the daughters, and the dead. Nonnus wrote a glorification of battle, and I translated a critique of the same. I hope thyrsus bearers have faces now’ (p. 742) (p. 517; lines 31–6):

Some translators opt for an Englished hexameter Nonnus – providing at the very least a pleasing alternative to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline. Hexameters are effectively employed by Cyrus Console in Book 47; F. Ahl, no stranger to hexameter translation, takes on Book 8 (‘my tiny fragment of this vast work was many months in the making’, p. 726). Here is Hera’s address to Peitho (p. 175; lines 126–30):

Braden tackles Book 24 using ottava rima, the same metre, as he points out, employed by Ludovico Ariosto for his Orlando furioso, by Giambatista Marino in his L’ Adone and by Lord Byron in his Don Juan. Braden explains how he makes explicit ‘the kind of literary self-reference everywhere operating in the Greek, though mostly now only visible to scholars’ (p. 730) – choosing also to supplement ‘Nonnus’ carpet of literary allusions’ (p. 730) with quotations of his own from the likes of Leonard Cohen and Frank Sinatra (p. 381; stanza VI):

J. Harrington embraces the ‘so bad it’s good’ school of Nonnian criticism and playfully incorporates into his version of Book 3 supposed fragments (together with an entertaining pseudo-biographical footnote) taken from a certain Scilly Cobber (reader beware), one of the ‘fourth- and fifth-string imitators of Pope’ (p. 737), who pad out eighteenth-century anthologies of English poetry. Harrington employs ‘well, not exactly hexameter, but rather a goosey-loosey accentual meter, with kinda-sorta six stresses per line, depending on how you read’ (p. 738); in Book 32 Harrington ventures from a sort of hexameter to ‘a more open-field, fragmentary, discontinuous form’ into trochaic tetrameter for ‘scene III. The Rout’, challenging us to hear Longfellow’s Hiawatha (via the Finnish epic Kalevala) (p. 486):

Harrington is not alone in his open disparagement of Nonnian poetry. As J. Mayhew confesses, ‘In conversations with some other translators in this project, I often heard his work described as simply “bad.” (I’m sure I expressed this opinion myself as well.)’ (p. 747). This tradition of antipathy of translators to Nonnus goes back at least as far as Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘I do not like Nonnus’ she confessed to her diary on Sunday, 1 April 1831). J. Roitman keeps up the negativity: ‘You don’t have to read Greek to realize that Nonnus is at best a mediocre writer’ (p. 748). For a translator, however, it turns out that this is not necessarily a drawback: ‘Nonnus’ mediocrity is a gift to those tasked to bring him into contemporary English, freeing us to find the shape beneath the sludge, even while following him closely’ (p. 749). Here is her attempt for Book 4, as Harmonia expresses her great reluctance to an arranged marriage with Cadmus (p. 108; lines 58–63):

We have come a long way from W.H.D. Rouse, but this multi-form translation is a resounding success.