J’s description of the spread of homosexuality parodies Virgil’s references to the spread of disease among sheep. At line 81, though with some misgivings, I accept the reading of the main manuscript, conspecta. Martyn opts for contacta, which he supports by the argument that J. was deliberately echoing, with satirical intent, the plague-imagery of Virgil’s Georgics. He could just be right, though the proverbial uva uvam videndo varia fit militates against him, and in favour of the traditional reading. Braund-Cloud argues that we have the core of the poem here: the narrator’s desire to flee from Rome is countered by Rome’s conquest of the world: there are no refuges left  – only an ever-spreading contagion.

As to the translation itself, Green offers the standard-issue translator’s deference:

No translator can hope to capture the condensed force of Juvenal’s enjambed hexameters, his skilful rhythmic variations, his dazzling displays of alliteration and assonance and onomatopeia: here I can claim no more than that I have recognized the problem, and done what I could to surmount it in a wholly different medium.

The more I read the classics of Rome and especially Greece in English translation, the more I fear that this is all true, that the precise mechanics of the original really can’t be faithfully reproduced in another language – in other words, the more I tend to agree with John Dryden oft-held contention that that best translators don’t reproduce their text but re-write it. Certainly some of the best English-language translations of classical texts I’ve ever read were firmly embedded in the mental vocabulary of their own eras (Dryden himself produced one stellar example of how to do this).

Green doesn’t seem to believe it, not entirely. He fills his Juvenal with all the necessary ribaldry, with results that certainly recall something of the scandalous original, as in this portion of Satire VI:

Off goes Saufeia’s wreath, she challenges the call-girls

To a contest of bumps and grinds, emerges victorious,

Herself admires the shimmy of Medullina’s buttocks:

So the ladies win all the prizes – skill rivalling pedigree.

No make-believe here, no faking, each act is performed

In earnest, the genuine article, fully guaranteed

To warm the age-chilled balls of a Nestor or a Priam.

…which is clear and functional in its own way but suggests almost nothing of the wowing pitch and yaw of the original, the sideways-slippery feel that anything could happen next, and maybe Green is right about the ultimate reason: maybe it just can’t be done in a language like English where, among other things, word-order is so casually imperative.

Other effects Green captures with ease, foremost the way Juvenal so mercilessly piles up detail after detail in his celebrated indictments, using them to build a cage from which his poor victim can’t escape, as in this bit of Satire VIII:

Youth rates a certain indulgence, but Lateranus was still going

The rounds of the bath-house bars, with their lettered awning,

When old enough for Eastern campaigns, for garrison duty

In Syria, maybe, or on the Rhine or Danube,

Old enough to protect the Emperor’s person. Send down

clearly, a terrifying book

To the docks for your general, Caesar – to the best-known tavern:

You’ll find him lolling there beside some hired killer,

With a bunch of thieves and matelots and fugitive criminals,

Among hangmen and coffin-makers and a castrated

Priest who’s passed out on the job, still clutching his drums.

Of all the countless editions of Juvenal that have appeared in English, Green’s is by far the best for its combination of stellar scholarship and at least a stab at vigorously representational translation. Since you can’t have Juvenal anymore without notes (whole passages – maybe whole satires – would simply sail right by the reader otherwise), and since definitive translatability might in this case be a mirage, it’s best that Penguin gives us this masterful edition, the best of both worlds.

Some Penguin Classics just automatically prompt a smile – because some classics are just happy occurrences, free of somber overtones, free of the burden of interpretation, free of the obligation to be anything other than entertaining (which hasn’t stopped academics and English departments from beavering away at them, but even so). And one of those classics is surely The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent by Washington Irving.

The little book was a huge success, the first secular American bestseller of them all and a great explosion of revelation to Irving himself. He was that rarest of rare birds, a natural-born literary man, and he’d had some taste of the satisfaction such a life could bring him when, in 1809, while still a teenager, he came out with A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker and promptly became the United States’ first hot young author.

There were very few literary critics in the country yet (O blessed day – they’ve multiplied like locusts since), so there was hardly any simpering or cool-following on Twitter. And there were no older, established literary lions to get up on a box in the pages of Ye Olde New York Revue of Books and say A History of New York “shows great promise” or “isn’t entirely without merit.” Instead, poor young Irving had to discover his celebrity the old-fashioned way: he found he couldn’t pay for a drink in the Bowery.

He did do one thing exactly the same as his much later hot young author counterparts, however: after his smash debut, he became creatively paralyzed, and he stayed that way for a good long time. Since there weren’t yet any “I once wrote a book” sinecures at City College, he took up a series of real jobs and slipped away from the dizzying heights.

It wasn’t until twenty years later, while he was living in England, that he wrote The Sketch Book, a collection of carefully nostalgic vignettes and tales of both old-time England and old-time America (including such immortal stories as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). The resulting book was exquisitely calculated to appeal to two nations that had only recently, almost in a daze, realized that they were also two nationalities – and now always would be. Irving would later refine this technique to the absolute, almost insubstantial perfection of Bracebridge Hall, but The Sketch Book is a far more muscular example of the same thing – as narratively irresistible today as it was when it was written (just as A History of New York is still genuinely funny).

The editor of this Penguin volume, William Hedges, understands all this perfectly in his masterful Introduction. He’s eager for his readers not to underestimate how aware Irving himself is of the game he’s playing:

To reduce The Sketch Book to the testament of a crypto-aristocratic anglophile and political conservative, as is sometimes done, is to miss its finer points and misunderstand Crayon. His England is admittedly only touristic, the product of “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination,” something he half-laughs at himself in offering the reader.

And he keeps the reader aware of the delicate balancing-act behind Irving’s seemingly effortless prose:

Fighting for his literary life, and fearful of British critics, Irving had no incentive to go far in exhibiting the harsh realities of contemporary English life, the hardships, social dislocations, and class conflicts being generated by the industrial revolution.

It’s amazing how many of the two dozen or so sketches in this book are really quite perfect little gems. Whether you’re reading such delights as “The Spectre Bridegroom” or “Christmas Eve” or “Stratford-on-Avon” or especially “The Boar’s Head Tavern, East Cheap” for the first time or the fiftieth time, the sheer charm of them will be just as bright. The thing swept through both England and the United States like wildfire. For mirror-image reasons, it was just what huge numbers of people in both countries were yearning to read in their studies at night.

Irving had a long and very productive writing life for the next thirty years, and although his little book about the Alhambra was much talked about and his enormous life of George Washington was, given its subject, immensely captivating (now there’s a volume that deserves a fat, annotated Penguin Classic of its own), a certain element of that free happiness in the Sketch Book had gone out of his writing, replaced by the more ponderous furniture of the Grand Old Man. That happiness (cannily mixed with just the right amount of fireside sighing) is on full display in this earlier work. It’s the common literary heritage of all Americans, one of the first such gems in the country’s literary crown – and yet most Americans today haven’t even heard of it, much less read it. That’s a shame – and one this Penguin Classic tries valiantly to correct.

Some Penguin Classics are just a bit more famous than others, and the top spot there will likely always go to E. V. Rieu’s 1946 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, because it got the whole show started.

And it started in the way all the best intellectual endeavors do: on amateur footing, without a thought of profit. During the Second World War, to alleviate the nightly tension of the German assault on London, Rieu translated passages of Homer for his family and found he had both a taste for it and a knack for it. After the war, he and his friend Allen Lane convinced their editors to print his translation in a cheap pocket book. It was the first Penguin Classic, and it sold three million copies (at a time when all of Greater London held perhaps eight million people). It’s safe to say Rieu’s Odyssey has been read by more people than any other edition since Homer smote his bloomin’ lyre.

Purists immediately lamented that fact, because Rieu’s Odyssey is rendered in prose. Classicists from Bristol to Boston wailed that this made Rieu’s version no better than a muddy little trot – a wretched thing fit for students to crib from, but nothing more. Rieu expects this reaction in the first line of his Introduction: “This version of the Odyssey is, in its intention at any rate, a genuine translation, not a paraphrase or a retold tale.” The man was an Oxford-trained scholar himself, so he knew first-hand the near-impossibility of translating Homer’s dactylic hexameters into intelligible English, and hence the inevitable necessity of throwing the whole long-winded, perfectly-balanced mess onto the bed of Procrustes and proceeding to chop and stretch with abandon. How anybody can look at some of the verse Odysseys that have resulted and call them more “faithful” than Rieu’s is one of the enduring mysteries of classical scholarship.

And Rieu’s version is quite often beautiful. It may not be done in verse, but you’d have to be deaf not to notice the poetry that’s obvious in even brief passages, as when Ulysses is telling the story of how his wayward men butchered the cattle of Hyperion the sun-god, who complains vigorously to Jupiter and gets a ringing response:

“Sun,” the Cloud-gatherer answered him, “shine on for the immortals and for mortal men on the fruitful earth. As for the culprits, I will soon strike their ship with a blinding bolt out on the wind-dark sea and break it to bits.”

(“This part of the tale I had from the fair Calypso,” Ulysses assures his listeners, “who told me that she herself had heard it from Hermes the Messenger.”)

It’s true that Rieu made free with the idioms of his own wartime era – there are bits and pieces of this Odyssey in which characters sound like they just stepped out of an Agatha Christie story – but in this too more sanctimonious translators share a measure of guilt, although they’re never willing to admit to it (unless their gimmick is to revel in it). And Rieu intended it to increase the transparency of his translation, however much passages like this one (in which Telemachus is lamenting – with an irony Homer’s audience would have picked up immediately – that he doesn’t have the same determination as Orestes) might make a 21^st century grin:

Ah, if the gods would only give me strength like his, to cope with the insufferable insolence of my mother’s suitors and settle accounts with those ruffians for their blackguardly tricks! But Fate has no such happiness in store for me, nor for my father either. I have to grin and bear things as they are.

Over the decades, even some of the starchiest teachers have made the concession that a prose Odyssey arranged in chapters and paragraphs is more hospitable to students than columns of over-straining blank verse. It’s friendlier for plenty of non-students as well, and Lane and Rieu must have suspected that would be the case, although they can’t in their wildest dreams have anticipated the reception this, the quintessential Penguin Classic, would get. Try it and see if you don’t find yourself liking it.

Some Penguin Classics make their courtroom cases with the blunt force of a bulldog trial lawyer, flatly asserting that their client deserves a better deal. Of course this is what all reprint editions should do, ideally: no book should assume a second life in print – books cost money to make and time to read, after all, and especially on the proving-ground of fiction, momentum should count for nothing. If there comes a time when “Beowulf” no longer speaks to readers, “Beowulf” should be taken off life support and allowed to lapse out of print (or at least as out of print as any classic can be at the dawn of the 21^st century, when anybody with an Internet connection can download a free copy of any classic they want in about fifteen seconds). From its inception, Penguin Classics has had a knack for finding audiences where nobody predicted they’d be, so the risk of advocacy becomes a moral duty.

The 1986 Penguin Classic reprint of the 1969 “Penguin English Library” edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s masterpiece Wives and Daughters, for instance, takes its advocacy very seriously: it considers the book to be one of the most underrated masterpieces in the fiction canon. “Jane Eyre, or Barchester Towers, or Pendennis are flabby in comparison to its wit, its pathos, its intelligence,” Laurence Lerner writes in his take-no-prisoners Introduction (since supplanted in more recent editions, sadly). “It raises Elizabeth Gaskell to the level when we can compare her with Jane Austen or George Eliot.”

Lerner makes his case for both book and author right away:

The great woman novelists all have two names: Jane Austen, Emily Bronte (or ‘Ellis Bell’), George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. The names may be false, or masculine, but at least they look like names. Behind them, dimly thronging the pages of the histories of literature, come the modestly feminine writers who shelter behind their marriage lines: Mrs Radcliffe, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Mrs Oliphant, Mrs Gaskell. Elizabeth Gasell was a modest woman, and would not have been surprised to find herself among the minor or even the unread. Those who have read only one of her books – it is invariably Cranford – may feel that she belongs there, assuming that her other novels are even more feminine, more limited, and perhaps not quite as charming. This book will give them the pleasure of discovering their mistake.

As charming (and deceptively subversive) as Cranford is, Lerner is certainly right that it’s a quick Homeric hymn compared to the Iliad that is Wives and Daughters, and although every plot-strand of the book is bracingly complex, the heart of that different elevation is the relationship between the book’s heroine, the virtuous Molly Gibson, and her stepsister Cynthia, who’s franker and more jadedly vivacious. The book has a great deal of action and plot in its 700 pages, but I’m sure I’m not the only reader who’d have been perfectly happy eavesdropping on Molly and Cynthia the whole time (or at least more time than we get) – imagine prolonged and slightly more even-footed dialogue between Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, and you’ll almost have it:

“What did he tell you?” asked Cynthia, almost fiercely.

“Nothing but that. Oh, yes! He praised your beauty, and wanted me to tell you what he had said.”

“I should have hated you if you had,” said Cynthia.

“Of course I should never have thought of doing such a thing,” replied Molly. “I didn’t like him; and Lady Harriet spoke of him the next day, as if he wasn’t a person to be liked.”

Cynthia was quite silent. At length she said:

“I wish I was good!”

“So do I,” said Molly simply.

“Nonsense, Molly! You are good. At least, if you’re not good, what am I? There’s rule-of-three sum for you to do! But it’s no use talking; I am not good, and I never shall be now. Perhaps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I know.”

“Do you think it easier to be a heroine?”

“Yes, as far as one knows of heroines from history. I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation – but steady, every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo!”

That question – the difference, if any, between a good woman and a heroine – runs all through Wives and Daughters (you might even say it’s adumbrated in the title), as was perhaps predictable when considering that the author was, as Lerner puts it, “a busy, happy woman who wrote her novels in the interstices of family life.” The narrative is big and boisterous like a bright choral performance, and it was all but – but not quite (think of the last-second scorpion-sting at the end of Northanger Abbey) – over when Mrs. Gaskell died suddenly in November of 1865 (“What promised to be the crowning work of a life is a memorial of death,” as her Cornhill  editor put it). But that’s OK – plenty of classics come to us incomplete. Penguin honors them anyway, as is only right.

Some Penguin Classics live forever in the shadow of their more famous brethren, which is of course unfair. My lit’rary friends and I have often lamented the way so many authors are best known for their second-best work, and predicting when and how it’ll happen seems to boil down to divining the urgencies of high school literature instructors. Joseph Heller is known for Catch-22, not God Knows; Anthony Burgess is known for A Clockwork Orange, not Earthly Powers; John Gardner is known for Grendel, not The Sunlight Dialogues …the list goes on, and it has a long pedigree.

Gustave Flaubert’s haunting 1869 masterpiece L’Education Sentimentale is a perfect case in point. Flaubert took longer to write it than any of his other novels, worked harder on it, populated it with more characters than anything else he’d written, sweated blood to purge the book clean of the petty contrivances and emotional shortcuts of, for instance, Madame Bovary (which he’d written more than a decade before), only to have the final product greeted with tepid curiosity – and to have his day’s foremost critic of contemporary fiction, Henry James, pin the thing to the cork-board of popular estimation with one of those instantly memorable put-downs at which he was so adept: he called it a dead novel.

As a critic, James had a bad habit (shared by many a critic in his own day and since) of confusing “I am bored and I am reading this novel” with “This novel is boring me,” and that’s certainly what he was doing in his review. But it’s unlikely the book would have prospered even if James had championed it (as some scattered other critics did)(although not in Boston, where the critic for the Evening Transcript made bad-tempered reference to “the endless, pointless chattering of a canopy full of monkeys”); it shared virtually none of the primary-color concentration of Madame Bovary, had no clear focal point of reader sympathy, indeed could almost be said to have no point, in the easy-reducibility modern understanding of that term.

In short, it’s a harder book than its much more famous predecessor, much as Tender is the Night is a harder book than The Great Gatsby or Against the Day is a harder book than Gravity’s Rainbow. Harder books are almost always more intriguing than easier books, especially when you know the author has genuine talent. That genuine talent is a quicksilver thing, half insecure improvisation, half nervous commercialism – the fact that it’s so untrustworthy is why we so often tend to distrust the writers who move us the most. The place where those writers can be most explicitly trusted – the place, ironically, where they’re most like the rest of us – is in the heart of the fire that burns them: if you want to know an author’s mind, go to his easiest work, but if you want to know an author, whole and personal, go to his hardest book and don’t let up until you’ve cracked it open.

Sentimental Education is tough to crack open, although readers without French are given every help by Robert Baldick’s clear-as-glass 1964 Penguin Classics translation. Flaubert’s cast of characters is bewilderingly vast, but at the heart of it all is Frederic Moreau, an innocent young man from the provinces (where have we heard that before?) who comes to the big city with half-articulated hopes to make it his own. He falls into an erotic-platonic strange relationship with Marie Arnoux, an older married woman, although that relationship doesn’t blind him to the fact that he himself is the object of a similar strange passion on the part of young Louise Roque. These characters (and many, many others) are intensely, immediately involved with each other, and yet Flaubert softens even their most trivial exchanges with the glow of nostalgia, as when Frederic and Louse are walking in a garden and just naturally start reminiscing like elders on an age long past:

“Do you remember when I used to take you into the country?”

“How kind you were to me!” she replied. “You helped me to make sand-castles, to fill my watering-can, to hold on to my swing.”

“What’s become of all those dolls of yours that were called after queens or marquises?”

“I’ve really no idea.”

“And your little dog Darky?”

“He got drowned, the poor dear!”

“And the Don Quixote with the illustrations we colored together?”

“I’ve still got it!”

A great deal of time passes in the novel; we follow our large cast of characters through all of life’s little triumphs and reversals, we see them come to mean everything to each other and then cease to, and the long shadows of oncoming loss darken even their few perfectly happy moments – and Flaubert finds the sweetness in that, better than any other French writer of his day. “In every parting,” he famously tells us, “there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.”

Frederic is feckless, but we’re never tempted to stop following him, and when the book’s end is closing in, we’re not surprised to find him – and everybody he knows – looking back instead of forward:

“This isn’t how we expected to end up in the old days at Sena, when you wanted to write a critical history of philosophy, and I a great medieval novel about Nogent. I’d found the subject in Froissart: How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Bishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache d’Ambrecicourt. Do you remember?”

And as they exhumed their youth, they asked each other after every sentence:

“Do you remember?”

Baldick emcumbers his excellent edition with very few end-notes and, miraculously, a brief and businesslike Introduction, so the whole focus of this Penguin Classic is on the book itself. It’s a valiant effort, however (fittingly?) doomed. Emma will have her way in the end.

Some Penguin Classics you’ll never the hell have heard of, period. Top of that list would be something like Alexander Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Rovers, published in a lovely little edition in Holland in 1678, and yet there it is, all dolled up in a 1969 Penguin Classic translation by Alexis Brown.

Exquemelin’s book translated into German the following year and eventually made its way – in much-altered form – into an English-language edition called Bucaniers of America in 1684, the same year that saw a freewheeling adaptation of the book called The History of the Bucaniers. These English editions were so outlandishly bad that the book’s principal subject, the notorious pirate captain Henry Morgan, sued the publishers for libel – and won (it was as beautifully-organized a cutting-out expedition as anything he ever did on the Spanish Main; he got court-awarded damages and also made his name immortal).

Alexis Brown claims, in his Introduction to this Penguin edition, that his is the first accurate translation into English of that Dutch original, but in any case a Penguin Classic of The Buccaneers of America raises more questions than it answers, foremost being – if you can stand it – “what IS a classic?” Exquemelin has plenty of dramatic stories to tell of his years as a barber-surgeon teamed up with one crew after another of pirates:

My own master often used to buy a butt of wine and set it in the middle of the street with the barrel-head knocked in, and stand barring the way. Every passer-by had to drink with him, or he’d have shot them dead with a gun he kept handy. Once he bought a cask of butter and threw the stuff at everyone who came by, daubing their clothes or their head, wherever he could best reach.

And he relates with drab but effective dispatch such well-worn stories as the time Morgan was hosting a large drinking-party on a ship that subsequently exploded, injuring him and killing almost everybody on board – and filling the water of the bay with bodies, a floating temptation no self-respecting band of pirates could resist:

A week after the ship had blown up, they fished out all the corpses floating in the water. This was not in order to give them a decent burial, but for the sake of their clothes and the gold rings on their fingers. As soon as they had fished out a body, they pulled off the garments and hacked off the fingers which were beringed, then threw back the corpse to be a floating prey for the sharks. Their bones are still to be found on the beaches, washed up by the sea.

But as interesting as all this is (and vogue-setting; Exquemelin’s book was much-imitated), it brings us back to that same question: what IS a classic, and how on Earth does this little book qualify? The prose is thoroughly unexceptional in Dutch, German, or English; the insights of the author are banal at best (old salts tell great yarns, but we must usually look elsewhere for wisdom); and while there’s some valuable first-hand information to be gleaned from these pages, the same is true of plenty of parish registers and loading manifests that have never (yet!) been indoctrinated into the Penguin Classics line. Surely even if we discount such things as quality of prose or quality of insight, the basic qualification for ‘classic’ status is a general approbation? Fifteen people (and, after this post, eighteen) have ever even heard of Esquemelin, and rightly so.

On the one hand, Alexis’ translation is an excellent ground-clearing point for future scholars, and Exquemelin’s book is a bit more entertaining than a collection of ship’s logs and manifests would be; on the other hand, if you call it a ‘classic’ in the same context as you call Anna Karenina a classic, what are you doing to the term ‘classic’ – or to your trusting readers? The editors of a ‘classics’ series are supposed to do much the same thing those ruthless pirates did: hack off the precious gems amidst the flotsam and jetsam, and leave the rest for shark-bait. If there’s ever been a Penguin Classic of Exquemelin, surely something slipped past the chum-line?

Two Years Before the Mast, chronicling 19-year-old Dana’s voyage as an ordinary seaman aboard the merchant vessel (little better than a hide drogher, in this case) Pilgrim, begins with the small, griping ship’s departure from Boston in August 1834, follows its progress to California via Cape Horn, gives readers an extended view of California coastal towns during the Gold Rush boom years, and then follows the young man, now aboard the Alert, as he rounds the Horn again – this time in winter – and makes his way back to Boston in 1836, where he promptly went back to Harvard College and began writing up his adventures and unwittingly proving, indeed almost inaugurating, Rule #117. Two Years Before the Mast is, even now, a revelation of readability, so gripping in parts and so evocative in other parts that even in Dana’s own day, there were cynical souls who suspected his friend James Fenimore Cooper might have had a more active hand in the book than simply championing it.

Dana made the trip out of headlong adolescent impulse. His Boston bookselling acquaintances tried to dissuade him (“You’re taking a vacation to Pakistan?” they asked him incredulously – or words to that effect), but like so many 19-year-olds, he wanted to experience something real. Our editor Philbrick is quick to point out how much was at stake:

The decision entailed, moreover, the risk of the annihilation of his social identity, the possibility that he might be trapped irretrievably in a world of forecastles and waterfront boardinghouses. There was something suicidal about the decision to commit himself to a long voyage before the mast …

Dana had been a student of Emerson and a classmate of Thoreau; his father was a nationally-recognized poet, essayist, and editor; he knew such things wouldn’t matter in the alien world he was hell-bent on joining, but he joined it anyway, and Two Years Before the Mast is his report from that world. It’s full of well-turned episodes regarding his hapless crewmates and nefarious captain, plus the ordinary onboard tasks he had to perform, like tarring down the masts:

There he “swings aloft ‘twixt heaven and earth,” and if the rope slips, breaks, or is let go, or if the bowline slips, he falls overboard or breaks his neck. This, however, is a thing which never enters into a sailor’s calculation. He only thinks of leaving no holydays (places not tarred,) for in case he should, he would have to go over the whole again; or of dropping no tar upon deck, for then there would be a soft word in his ear from the mate. In this manner I tarred down all the head-stays, but found the rigging about the jib-booms, martingale, and spiritsail yard upon which I was afterwards put, the hardest. Here you have to hang on with your eye-lids and tar with your hands.

He bucked the slightly romanticized view of seagoing life by writing about its dangers, its jealousies and petty rivalries, and especially its tediums. During one of his protracted stays onshore on the West Coast, he finds himself desperate for something to read:

… anything, even a little child’s storybook, or the half of a shipping calendar, appeared like a treasure. I actually read a jest-book through, from beginning to end, in one day, as I should a novel, and enjoyed it very much.

And even when the voyage at last turns its eyes back to Boston, the adventure isn’t over, not by a long shot: the vessel must face rounding Cape Horn in winter with a reduced crew  – a harrowing prospect, as anybody who’s ever made that trip in a wind-driven vessel will attest. Dana recounts the dangers of that passage with thrilling skill, but he does equally memorable work showing his readers the human costs along the way. Who can’t read his account of leaving a stricken crewmate behind and not feel moved, just as Dana intended:

Our crew was somewhat diminished; for a man and a boy had gone in the Pilgrim; another was second mate of the Ayacucho; and a third, the oldest man of the crew, had broken down under the hard work and constant exposure on the coast, and, having had a stroke of palsy, was left behind at the hide-house, under the charge of Captain Arthur. The poor fellow wished very much to come home in the ship; and he ought to have been brought home in her. But a live dog is better than a dead lion, and a sick sailor belongs to nobody’s mess; so he was sent ashore with the rest of the lumber, which was only in the way.

Dana had planned all along to write up this foolhardy adventure he undertook, but nothing could have prepared him for the success it would enjoy – had he had any inkling of the vast hunger for his book, he wouldn’t have sold its copyright to a New York publisher (there’d been an earlier offer of royalties after the first thousand copies sold, which Dana turned down on the advice of his family and of Boston bookselling acquaintances who loudly told him the book wouldn’t sell a thousand copies in a million years). As it was, he had to nurse his draft of $250 while he watched Two Years Before the Mast sell like griddle-cakes and create something of a sea-change in the American literary scene (it profoundly influenced virtually every American writer then working, to one extent or another).

Dana went on to build a life for himself not substantially different from the one he would likely have lived had he never taken his trip. He got his law degree, opened a practice, married a shrew, raised a family, went on the lecture circuit, became the revered and generally loved “Duke of Cambridge,” and looked back more and more wistfully on the great adventure of his life. Once the copyright of Two Years Before the Mast reverted to him (a quarter-century after its original appearance), he immediately revised it, softening the tougher elements, pumping in plenty of old-man sentimentality into what he had somewhat disparagingly referred to as “a boy’s book.” Philbrick very wisely chooses to use the original version for his Penguin Classic, but Dana’s actions serve to prove another one of my Rules About Authors, #10: they shouldn’t be allowed within twenty yards of their finished works.

Some Penguin Classics are eerily prescient, sometimes in decidedly unpleasant ways. In 2013 we’re resolutely gearing up for the 2014 centennial of the opening of the First World War, gearing up for a probable onslaught of books, documentaries, and commemorative magazines designed to remember/reassess/cash in on one of the gruesome formative events of the 20^th century. Publishers will scour their slush-piles for WWI novels, and maybe we’ll see some reprints nifty enough to counterbalance the faintly unsavory air of opportunism that hangs over the whole affair.

The centennial is hardly the first occasion for such opportunism, of course. The first such occasion was the war itself, which suddenly burst on the world in 1914 and was thereafter the main topic of conversation (and the main avenue of sales) from Birmingham to Bombay. Even relatively well-adjusted people felt the urge to jump on such a big, vivid bandwagon – and writers aren’t known for being particularly well-adjusted.

Enter Joseph Conrad, author of such classics as Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness. He was aghast at the cataclysm enveloping Europe, and in 1915 he set about writing a novella which he serialized in the magazines in 1916 and brought out as a slim book in 1917: The Shadow-Line, produced as an elegant little Penguin Classic in 1986 edited by Conrad scholar Jacques Berthoud. The Shadow-Line is a brief sea-story patterned fairly closely on some of Conrad’s own experiences as a young man in the merchant navy forty years before, but Conrad didn’t leave it at that; he tried his best to link his novella to the ongoing war, invoking his son Borys, who was fighting on the front. Early on, in 1915, Conrad was saying it was an act of “criminal levity” to natter on about made-up stories while brave young men were being shot, blown up, and gassed on the Western front. But he was also feeling old and seeking not to be sidelined by history, and by the time his novella was being reprinted, he was saying the “shadow-line” referred to the harsh maturation being experienced by Borys and his comrades under fire. And a century of Conrad explicators – including Berthoud in his generally incisive Introduction – have worked hard to shore up that connection.

It’s utter nonsense. There is no connection. Conrad wrote a rock-solid, hugely enjoyable and challenging novella about an untried young captain whose vessel is fatally becalmed in the hot waters of the gulf of Siam and whose crew is stricken with malaria (with quinine supplies running vanishingly low). This self-doubting young captain must navigate the complex personalities of the crew he inherits, and Conrad tells the story with, I find, a greater and surer insight than I’ve ever seen in him before (one of the many happy gifts arising from these Penguin re-readings). It’s a pure joy to see him shape even the quickest scenes, as when our young captain interviews his first mate Burns about the shape of the ship:

Now a question like this might have been answered normally, either in accents of apologetic sorrow or with a visibly suppressed pride. In a ‘I don’t want to boast, but you shall see,’ sort of tone. There are sailors, too who would have been roughly outspoken: ‘Lazy brute,’ or openly delighted: ‘She’s a flyer.’ Two ways, if four manners.

The doldrums seem to hold forever, and Conrad plumbs his memories with a wonderfully controlled narrative, taking the reader inside the semi-delirium of a ship becalmed at sea, stretching out time and warping our perceptions to the point where, when unlooked-for relief suddenly arrives, we initially find it as bewildering as the captain does:

It’s extraordinary I should not have heard myself doing it [grinding his teeth]: but I hadn’t. By an effort which absorbed all my faculties I managed to keep my jaw still. It required much attention, and while thus engaged I became bothered by curious, irregular sound of faint tapping on the deck. They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups. While I wondered at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek. Raindrops. Enormous. Forerunners of something. Tap, tap, tap …

This is all first-rate stuff, the kind of inventive, confident writing I’ve tended to deny attributing to Conrad. But it has no more to do with World War I than it does with the price of Chesapeake oysters. One can sympathize with Conrad, of course – a boy at the front, a world at war – and one can sympathize with his future editors, since a writer alchemizing some ongoing crisis has a lot more dramatic oomph than a writer simply carrying on with his criminal levity while a world burns.

The Shadow-Line is as neat and powerful a little sea-story as anything Marryat or Forester or Monsarrat could have devised. Bandwagon or not, that should be good enough.

Some Penguin Classics – in fact, perhaps a good deal more than we like to tell ourselves – enshrine books that aren’t really ‘classics’ at all, or ought not to be. This problem – if you view it as a problem, which I tend to – has been hugely exacerbated in the last twenty years by the howling blight of cultural relativism (Christy Mathewson’s Pitching in a Pinch, which had to be heavily ghostwritten just to get it to the level of semi-literate, has just been so enshrined in the Penguin Classic line, and I, Rigoberta Menchu can’t have long to wait), but it’s always been a minefield for any publisher wanting to clothe their scruples in a little warm, fashionable lucre. The so-called common reader feels the kindred impulse all the time: the impulse to elevate what he likes to what’s good. It’s an impulse that should be strongly resisted (you will never see me calling for Penguin Classics of The Price of the Phoenix, or Red Dragon or The Illearth War), and don’t we all feel a queasy touch of it, when we see a Penguin Classic of The Prince and the Pauper, or Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, or The Last of the Mohicans?

Still, the forces of multi-culturalism and the grindstoning of academe will have their way, and things reach a state where it’s no longer even permissible to speak of certain books as ‘really enjoyable trash,’ since they’ve been raised to the literary firmament for a century and have been studied in school by hundreds of thousands of luckless teenage drug addicts. If you say of such books, “Look, these are very enjoyable to read, I grant you, but if you call them ‘classics’ in the same sense as La Vita Nuova or The House of Mirth, you’re stretching ‘classics’ to the point where it becomes meaningless,” you’ll be sneered out of the room. Maybe that’s just; maybe “classics” are, in the end, books that survive in spite of themselves.

Such is surely the case with the 5,678 books dashed off by Honore Balzac during his lifetime (some under made-up names, the brute), and it certainly applies to what may be the most famous of all his books to English-speaking audiences, Le Pere Goriot, written in 1834 just as its author was contracting the always-fatal writerly disease of taking himself seriously. In the grip of this malady, he’d already begun thinking of his headlong potboilers as one huge interconnected work, a study of mankind, gawd help us all, that he with a straight face started calling the Comedie humaine. In Old Goriot, he sets up some term paper-ready contrasting characters around his central figure, the meek and doting father Goriot, who’s spoiled his two daughters to the point where they seethe with contempt for him (and he eventually, just for one moment, seethes with contempt for himself as well). While the daughters are making good marriages to bad men, we also follow the adventures of parvenu young man from the provinces Eugene Rastignac as he strives to worm his way into the glittering upper classes, tutored in part by the charismatic criminal Vautrin.

The Penguin Classic that presents all this overheated foie gras to the English-speaking world is the 1951 translation by M. A. Crawford, and she does a very sound job and has already sworn fidelity to her dark lord:

Balzac’s psychological observations are of extreme acuteness and penetration, and all that the science of psychology has discovered in its immense advances in the hundred years since Balzac’s death has done nothing to invalidate them. Of course Balzac was here proceeding not by the careful piling up of evidence, hypothesis and verification of the scientist, but by the intuitive knowledge of human nature and flashes of insight of the novelist, which when the novelist is a genius is a much swifter and not less sure method. It is a measure of the authenticity of the characters he creates that conclusions drawn from them are felt to be so valid. One never for one moment feels that they are puppets set up to demonstrate the truth of his theories.

There’s hardly a scrap of truth in that passage – psychology, lacking disprovability, isn’t a science and certainly hasn’t made any immense advances in the last century; Balzac’s characters hardly show any insight or penetration at all; one feels constantly that every character in all of his books is a puppet set up to demonstrate whatever crackpot theory was uppermost in his mind that morning, etc. (Crawford also, when talking about Old Goriot’s long opening description of Madame Vauquer’s boading house, baldly states “No novel ever had its setting more exactly visualized” – which takes quite a bit of gumption to claim if you’ve ever read The Return of the Native). But when our translator tells us “There is no possibility of sitting back to read Balzac in a lazy, half-awake fashion,” she’s being nothing but honest. It’s the saving charm of virtually all Balzac’s books: they’re consummately, almost hysterically headstrong. If you set one well-intentioned foot onto their slopes, you’re off.

Balzac is also boffo at endings, and he never wrote one better than the one he gives us on the last page of Old Goriot. The old man has died at last, and only poor furtive conflicted Rastignac is present at his grave. He sheds one melodramatic tear and then turns away from the innocence of his youth. It’s all predictable and simple stuff, and Balzac plays it for all its worth:

Then, left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendome and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he had wished to gain. He eyed that humming hive with a look that foretold his despoilation, as if he already felt on his lips the sweetness of its honey, and said with superb defiance,

“It’s war between us now!”

That rendition of “A nous deux, maintenant!” is, in its unabashed ham, worthy of the master. So who knows? Maybe after all fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

Some Penguin Classics, no matter how brilliantly executed, can’t help but represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and surely in both those respects – brilliant execution and tantalizing lost worlds – few Penguin Classics can beat the 1977 paperback of Robert Fagles’ great 1966 translation of the Oresteia by Aeschylus.

The translation is a work of surpassing beauty and immediacy, certainly the best Aeschylus in English (beating out some mighty stiff competition), ranging with assured grace from the conversational to the Olympian and back, often in the span of 50 lines. Mary Renault summarized part of its allure perfectly when she commented that it was “not intimidated by grandeur,” but there’s also a very sound sense of ordinary conversation running throughout. Probably this is understandable given the unaffected humanity of Fagles’ brief, obligatory translator’s comments:

My thanks to Aeschylus for is companionship, his rigours and his kindness. I found him a burly, eloquent ghost, with more human decency and strength than I could hope to equal.

If his translator’s apologia is brief, his actual introductory essay certainly is not: the magnificent essay “The Serpent and the Eagle” is nearly 100 pages long, and it’s so full of muscular thinking and flashes of insight that it repays any amount of re-reading, as when he offers an entirely convincing characterization of the typically slighted middle play in Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Libation Bearers:

If people are demonized in Agamemnon, here they personalize their gods. The gods remain in Delphi or Olympus, but ‘the rough work of the world is still to do’, and men who go about it find divinity in themselves. The magnificence of the opening play is muted, less because the king is gone and the work at hand is ugly than because a fresh spirit is required. The gorgeous arias yield to conversations. There is an intimacy breathing in the shadows, warm, confiding, alive. Something can be done. The Libation Bearers is a play of action.

That long opening essay is bracketed with equally long and jam-packed notes at the back of the volume, notes that gamely take up all the vexed textual and historical issues of these plays and talks about them all with a clarity so accessible you can practically hear the man in seminar. When in the Eumenides Athena says she’s not really fit to decide a case of murder, Fagles is right there to comment:

… perhaps it is simply not her province or too emotional an issue, as she suggests; but it is strange, after she had killed so many men at Troy, that she should hesitate to learn what murder means. This is Athena’s education in the post-war years, and she does not hesitate for long.

But even though you can feel yourself in the presence of translation greatness on every page of this Penguin Classic, you simultaneously can’t stop yourself from dreaming of what might have been. Aeschylus wrote over seventy plays in his career; we have only seven. Greek playwriting culture produced who knows how many hundreds or thousands of plays-in-trilogy; we have only this one. Aeschylus was revered as not only a master theatrical innovator but also a conveyer of massive power (burly ghost indeed!) – but we have no way of knowing if he considered his Oresteia to be his best work, and the numerical odds are against it. Who knows what genius was on offer in his trilogy about Jason and the voyage of the Argo? And can anybody doubt, given the very Aeschylean nature of the source material, that his Achilles trilogy would have culminated in almost unbearable drama? Those are Penguin Classics we’ll never see, fat, dense volumes that will never tempt great translators like Robert Fagles to sink years of their lives into the task of bringing them into dialogue with the present age.

It lends a melancholy shading to this particular volume, as indispensable as it is.