Verse Epics for Readers Who Want a Journey With Their Poetry

Begin with Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s expedition to the Cedar Forest in Andrew George’s Penguin Classics translation. It makes the pair’s appetite for adventure easy to grasp. Later, when Gilgamesh goes looking for Uta-napishti, keep that earlier expedition in mind. The same king now travels because there is something he cannot bear to lose.

Start with the birds’ excuses for staying home. Each has a reason to avoid the search for the Simorgh, and the hoopoe replies with stories of its own. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis’s Penguin edition uses rhyming couplets, which lend themselves to reading one bird’s exchange at a time before following the company through the seven valleys.

David C. Conrad’s Hackett edition follows a performance by the Mande storyteller Djanka Tassey Condé. Look for the episode in which a party goes to find the exiled Sunjata and bring him back to Manden. The publisher also has a recording of Condé’s opening, so you can hear how an answering voice helps set the story in motion.

Start with the fishermen in Saint Lucia, then follow Achille’s visionary passage to Africa in Book Three. His conversation with Afolabe about his name gives a personal scale to a voyage across centuries. The Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition presents Walcott’s original English poem, whose three-line stanzas carry both conversations and voyages.

Begin with Rama’s exile and follow how it turns into the search for Sita after Ravana takes her. The Macmillan Collector’s Library edition uses Romesh C. Dutt’s abridged verse translation, with an introduction by Arshia Sattar. Try Book Eight, where Hanuman crosses to Lanka and finds Sita, for a short reading within the longer rescue story.

Michael Bazzett’s verse translation for Milkweed Editions is a way into the K’iche’ Maya creation epic. Start with the Hero Twins and their journey to Xibalba. The ball games and night trials give you a series of contests to follow, while the repeated challenges show how much of the twins’ strength lies in outthinking their opponents.

Keith Bosley’s Oxford World’s Classics translation gives you numbered songs to follow through the Finnish epic Lönnrot assembled from oral poetry. Try the forging of the Sampo in Song 10, then the attempt to take it from the North in Songs 39 and 42–43. You can follow this one object from invention to pursuit.

Begin in Book Two, where Aeneas tells how he escaped the fall of Troy. In Book Six he meets his father again among the dead, and his arrival in Italy begins to look like the start of a future beyond his own life. Robert Fagles’s Penguin Classics verse translation makes those two books a good route through the larger epic.

Simon Armitage’s Norton verse translation sets a simple deadline. Gawain takes a swing at the Green Knight and has to seek him out for a return blow a year and a day later. Follow the road from Camelot to the winter castle and then to the Green Chapel, keeping an eye on the promises Gawain picks up along the way.

Allen Mandelbaum’s Everyman’s Library volume takes you through all three parts of Dante’s journey. Read the opening canto of each part as a threshold, from the dark wood to the shore of Purgatory and on to the ascent with Beatrice. Then go back to the beginning and see how much the traveler has to learn about movement and guidance.

Burton Raffel’s Penguin Classics verse translation opens with the Cid driven from his home and entering a town where people are forbidden to help him. Follow his route from Burgos toward Valencia and watch how a man leaving with a band of followers rebuilds the authority he has lost. The poem gives as much attention to negotiations and obligations as to battles.

Landeg White’s Oxford World’s Classics translation follows Vasco da Gama’s voyage around southern Africa toward India. Turn to Canto Five for Adamastor, the giant who gives the Cape’s dangers a voice. Read it as an encounter at sea and then listen to the future he predicts for the people who make the passage.

Use Barbara Reynolds’s first Penguin volume and follow Angelica as she rides away from the fighting in Canto One. Riders on divergent errands keep crossing paths, and the poem changes company just when a chase seems settled. Keeping track of whom Angelica is trying to evade gives you a way through the first rush of names.

Richard Parkinson’s Oxford World’s Classics collection includes the story of a courtier who flees Egypt after the king’s death. Sinuhe prospers abroad, but the turning point is the invitation to return. Read the escape and the homecoming together to see how a journey can change from a question of survival to a question of where you belong.

Open the Penguin Classics edition edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr. and C. Patrick O’Donnell Jr. at Book One. Redcrosse and Una set out to face a dragon, but the detours test whether the knight can recognize who is guiding him. Read a stanza at a time when the older spelling slows you down, and let the quest give you your bearings.