The Picks of the Epics

It's been a good last few months for epics and other long poems. Robert and Jean Hollander have closed out their verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy with Paradiso (Doubleday, $40), which provides the Italian on facing pages. In the final canto, Dante gives haunting expression to the feeling of having something (in this case, a heavenly vision) slip out of mind: "Thus the sun unseals an imprint in the snow./Thus the Sibyl's oracles, on weightless leaves,/lifted by the wind, were swept away."

Numerous other translations of The Divine Comedy are available, but Persian scholar Dick Davis has brought something new into English: Vis & Ramin (Mage, $45), a version in heroic couplets of an 11th-century Persian romance that is thought to have been a source for the tale of Tristan and Iseult. Late in the poem, Ramin becomes so frustrated with Vis, the royal princess he was supposed to guard but with whom he has fallen in love, that he addresses her in terms of alternating despair and euphoria: "You are both good and evil now to me,/You are my sickness and its remedy,/You're all that's bitter to me, all that's sweet,/You're pleasure and disaster, cold and heat."

And a new verse rendition of the other great epic of the Western classical world, the Aeneid, will be published in May (Yale Univ., $30). The translator, Sarah Ruden, is a poet in her own right.

Those who would like to delve deeper into the Homeric epics should consider the highly praised recent translations by Robert Fagles, available in paperback from Penguin Classics ( Odyssey, $15; Iliad, $15.95), each with a superb introduction by Bernard Knox.

For a primer on the Greek gods who throw their weight around so much in both Greek epics, it's hard to beat Edith Hamilton's eminently readable Mythology, which dates from 1942 (Back Bay; paperback, $13.99). M.I. Finley's The World of Odysseus (New York Review Books Classics; paperback, $14) summarizes what we know of the society that produced both epics, and Mark W. Edwards's Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Johns Hopkins Univ., $25) includes detailed commentary on 10 of that poem's 24 books.

-- Dennis Drabelle