Audio book Dan Stevens: 1/??
The Iliad/The Odyssey
Macmillan Audio produced audios of the Robert Fitzgerald translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, narrated by dishy Dan Stevens, late of Downton Abbey (and sorely missed). Though they’re meant be used as educational tools, the titles will be available in unabridged CD format for trade sales in August.
Esther Bochner, senior publicist at Macmillan Audio, said, “He’s really doing such a fantastic job—his pronunciations and tone really make the stories so much easier to understand.” (A boon for teachers and students everywhere.) This audio clip confirms what she says—Stevens’s reading is smooth, comprehensible, enjoyable. I for one am ready to re-embrace the classics.
The lightness of Fitzgerald’s touch, his almost conversational poetry, is well suited to the spoken word and to an audio version. His translation is in turn well served by the audio production. A flourish of epic music, “Gladiator”-style, introduces each recording — studied heroic fare to which this reviewer, at least, admits susceptibility. The reader is the talented actor Dan Stevens, whose professional résumé contains many stage, television and film roles (including that of Matthew Crawley in the inescapable “Downton Abbey”), as well as previous audiobook readings. His tone is not conventionally “bardic,” which is to say not dark, ponderous or declamatory, but rather young, bright and noble — as if King Harry had decided to deliver Homer instead of his St. Crispin’s Day speech. The epics conjure a shimmering cast of some of the most memorable characters in all of literature — Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen of Troy, Hector, Andromache, Odysseus, Penelope, Nausicaä — and their own words are the epic stories’ bedrock. x
