Some Penguin Classics are comprised of many authors, or no credited authors at all, and since Penguin doesn’t yet publish a Complete Poems of either Yevtushenko or Yeats (and since I’ll be buried in the cold, cold ground before I’ll recognize Zola), I thought it would be only fair to round out our inaugural Penguin Alphabet by mentioning a few of the many excellent anthology volumes that have entered the Classics lineup over the years:

The Metaphysical Poets – This 1985 volume was edited by the mighty Helen Gardner and featured a wider spectrum of poets than you might at first suspect, given the title: John Milton, Thomas Carew, William Davenant, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Walter Ralegh, Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, and John Donne are all in here, even though Gardner herself, in her magisterial Introduction, sometimes seems to doubt some of their qualifications

Elizabethan poetry, dramatic and lyric, abounds in conceits. They are used both as ornaments and as the basis of songs and sonnets. What differentiates the conceits of the metaphysicals is not the fact that they very frequently employ curious learning in their comparisons. Many of the poets whom we call metaphysical, Herbert for instance, do not. It is the use they make of the conceit and the rigorous nature of their conceits, springing from the use to which they are put, which is more important than their frequently learned content. A metaphysical conceit, unlike Richard II’s comparison of his prison to the world, is not indulged in for its own sake. It is used, as Lady Capulet uses hers [comparing Count Paris' face to a book], to persuade, or it is used to define, or to prove a point. Ralegh’s beautiful comparison of man’s life to a play is a good example of a poem which seems to me to hover on the verge of becoming a metaphysical poem. Its conclusion and completeness and the ironic, colloquially made point at the end – ‘Onely we dye in earnest, that’s no Jest’ – bring it very near, but it remains in the region of the conceited epigram and does not cross the border

Even so, her choices are superbly discriminating, which probably accounts for the book’s extraordinary longevity as a school text (this was the last US Penguin Classic to exist in mass market format, all the others having expanded to trade paperback size). But it’s worth finding even if you haven’t been a student in a long time.

Greek Literature: An Anthology – This 1977 re-issue (originally titled Greek Literature in Translation) is supervised by the indefatigable Michael Grant, who did in this volume and the next a brilliantly compressed version of the “In English” series Penguin later brought out. In that later series, individual classical authors get their own separate volumes, in which some of the best – and worst, and quirkiest – translations since the Renaissance are printed one after the other in a delightful jumble, to illustrate the enormously rich history of such translations. In this earlier volume, Grant operates on the same outline, only briefer – the authors are squeezed in cheek-to-cheek. Grant starts things off with a bit of off-the-cuff Introduction nonsense, as even the hardest-working editor must occasionally do:

These writings by the Greeks have a peculiarly large contribution to offer to this second half of the twentieth century A. D. The intervention of two and a half millennia has done nothing to hinder the effectiveness of that contribution. Indeed, readers of Greek literature have a lot in common with the Quechua Indians of Bolivia, who speak of the past not as behind them but ahead of them, since it can be grasped with the intelligence and consequently stands before their eyes. Similarly, the interval that has elapsed since the days of ancient Greece strengthens rather than weakens the impact its writers make upon our minds.

But then he gets down to business, presenting us not only with chucks of Homer and Hesiod and the great tragedians, but also with little gems from far lesser-known literary lights from ancient Greek, such as the wise old Theogonis, in a translation by the great Willis Barnstone:

Blessed is the man who knows how to make love

as one wrestles in a gym,

and then goes home happy to sleep the day

with a delicious young boy.

 

Or the even-more-obscure Timotheus, this time rendered by Gilbert Highet:

Old songs I will not sing.

Now better songs are sung.

Zeus reigns now, and is young,

Where Kronos once was king.

Old Muse, your knell is rung.

The volume is packed with unassuming erudition, and it represents a very good short course in ancient Greek literature. And as good as it is in those qualities, it’s outstripped by another Penguin anthology, also by Michael Grant:

Latin Literature: An Anthology – this was a 1979 reprint of Grant’s Roman Readings from 1958, and there’s no nonsense in it at all! This may very well be the best book Grant produced in a long and freakishly productive career, and he starts things off, very aptly, by talking about the act of translation itself. Which brings him right away to John Dryden, who “showed an almost uncanny insight into the intricate, lapidary stanzas and quintessential temperament of Horace – adding enough of himself to bring the Odes alive for a second time.” Grant references the master:

Dryden was also the first great theorist of translation, and the first to recognize and describe it clearly as an art. He distinguished between three ways of translating, the literal way, the looser paraphrase, and the even looser imitation or adaptation. He himself uses 171 words where Horace used seventy-eight, and so by modern standards he is paraphrasing – though this is perhaps not the final criterion, since English is far more diffuse than Latin; thirteen words of Virgil have been said to need sixty of English, and even then the sonorous, plangent overtones of trumpet-calls, like mortalia and lacrimae are lost.

And what follows is an absolute feast of those three different kinds of translation. Grant might have denied it, but he has a much surer grasp here of the bounty he’s presenting, and a much keener eye for which translations to pick. This is as close as you can get to all the ‘best’ of Roman literature in one volume.

And finally, there’s a less exalted entrant:

Early Irish Myths and Sagas – This 1981 Penguin Classic by the enterprising, always-interesting critic Jeffrey Gantz has an impossible task ahead of it. The ancient Irish epics it translates and re-tells in its intentionally plain prose are some of the most stark and strange narrative works the West has ever produced (“romantic, idealized, stylized, and yet vividly, even appallingly, concrete,” as Gantz puts it), and some of them are fairly long – indeed, for reasons of length, our editor can’t include one of the best and most famous of such stories, “The Cattle-Raid of Cuailnge.” Of the main bodies of Irish folklore, Gantz mainly represents two, with such stories as “The Wooing of Etain,” “The Dreams of Oengus,” and the stories of Cu Chulaind (as well as the delightfully gruesome “The Tale of Macc Da Tho’s Pig”).

But even in its humble style and in its omissions, Early Irish Myths and Sagas is quintessentially a Penguin Classic, bringing perhaps recondite material into the common discussion, putting invaluable volumes like this one in bookstores and schools where non-specialists can find them. Thousands of readers have encountered the Ulster Cycle through books like this one – and that’s one of the chief glories of some Penguin Classics.