Patrick Quinn, Robert Graves and "a labor of nearly love"

With the publishing this week  of “Translating Rome,” the twentieth book in the planned twenty-four volumes of the
Collected Works of Robert Graves,
general editor Patrick Quinn, Ph.D., dean of Chapman’s Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences,  breathed a sigh of relief.

“This collection began back in 1993 and has survived a number of obstacles in its 17-year history.” said Dean Quinn.  The proofs of two volumes were destroyed back in June 1996 when an IRA bomb blasted part of the publisher’s office in Manchester, England. Quinn remembers the phone call the next day from the publisher saying everyone in the office was fine, but the proofs had simply evaporated by the force of the explosion.

“So, we started again from scratch and managed to publish both volumes the following year. Then there was the introduction of a volume of two Graves novels which was belatedly considered a bit too politicized to go to press, and Carcanet Press determined that a new 10,000-word introduction had to be written in a week’s time or the volume’s appearance would be delayed by two years. Somehow the introduction got finished on time! ”

 And still ahead, says Dean Quinn,  lies Graves’ most polemical work:
The Nazarene Gospel Restored. 
Co-written with Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro, the book is Graves’ re-writing of the New Testament.  “When the volume appeared originally in 1953, it caused quite a stir in British and North American literary and religious circles,”  Quinn recalls.  “Who knows what will happen when the volume is received by a new generation of readers fed on
The DaVinci Code
 and
The Gospel of Judas
?”

Dean Quinn expects the final volume of Graves’ work to appear in 2013, making the entire project a twenty-year labor of nearly love. “Twenty-four volumes in twenty years is quite an undertaking, but Graves was such an fascinating figure, poet, novelist, critic, mythographer, dramatist and translator that one never gets bored or disinterested  in his life or works,” says Quinn. “And when you consider that he wrote his own best-selling autobiography,
Good-Bye to All That
, at 33, he must have had a good sense that whatever he wrote would be read. One would have to agree with his assessment ”

 Robert Graves’
Translating Rome,
edited by Robert Cummings, is available from Carcanet Press at www.carcanet.co.uk