Knowledge of Greek was not a requirement, and those without it relied heavily on Rouse’s translation, dictionaries, and specialist help. There are academic classicists, academics from different fields, PhD students, creative writers (with or without experience in Classical topics) and journalists. Most of the other 41 collaborators of this volume had a connection with Parker, and on recruiting them for this project the editors sought “ to offer a sense of the wide spectrum of possibilities open to the contemporary practice of classical translation”. He never published on Nonnus, but his translation of book 1 and part of book 2 circulated among his students, colleagues and friends. William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo recruited 38 translators to complete the work initiated in the late 1960s by Douglass Parker, Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, who offered innovative courses on the Dionysiaca. Tales of Dionysus is therefore a welcome addition to our libraries, and an original one. This is not an easy task: the Dionysiaca is made of 48 books, written in a convoluted and constantly changing style, supercharged with long compound adjectives, most of which have no obvious equivalent in modern languages. Rouse (3 volumes, published in 1940), something scholars could cite and new readers be attracted to.
What was missing was a new English translation, based on Vian’s sound text, to supersede the Loeb translation by W. He could also read an Italian bilingual edition furnished with introductions and commentaries, supervised by Daria Gigli Piccardi for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli (4 volumes, 2003-4). When he died in 2008 he left behind a full edition in 19 books, some by himself and some others produced under his supervision. Francis Vian started editing, translating, and commenting on his Dionysiaca in the Belles Lettres series of the Collection des Universités de France. AD, whereabouts in the century depending on who you talk to) got lucky in the 1970s.
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