THE CHALLENGES OF AUDIOBOOK NARRATION, PART 10: FORGIVING YOURSELF FOR YOUR EARLIEST WORKS (OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY)

Another reposting of an entry recently appearing on the Plum Tree Books page on Facebook.

For those who might be interested in seeing how an audiobook narrator’s prosodic abilities can evolve (hopefully improve) over time, you need look (or listen) no further than my most recent epic-length offering on LibriVox. I've mentioned in previous posts the substantial challenges in bringing to life a modern verse (mostly iambic pentameter) version of the classic work, ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, written originally in Latin verse by Lucretius as an extended discourse on Epicurean philosophy for the aesthetes of the Roman Empire.

I was inspired to produce the audiobook (and put it into the public domain via LibriVox) after reading the New York Times bestseller, THE SWERVE, by Stephen Greenblatt, which (in its less-controversial passages) makes the case that Lucretius's work is one of the foundational works of our "modern" world, via the substantial influence it had on most of the superstars of the Enlightenment era (including Newton, Voltaire, Jefferson, and many others).

Here's the thing, though: I started work on my recording of ON THE NATURE OF THINGS before I had gone very far in developing my skills as an audiobook narrator, about half a year before I ever attempted my first professional audiobook work. As such, I am fairly horrified at the sound of the opening sections of the work -- the over-enunciation of consonants, the half-assed dramatization of simple phrases, and a host of other sins of commission and omission.

But at moments when I can forgive myself for my early-on display of ineptitude, I can start to appreciate my full recording of ON THE NATURE OF THINGS as a longitudinal record of my development as an audiobook narrator.

To get a quick idea of what I’m talking about, listen (if you can bear it) to a few lines of one of the first sections that I recorded in Book 1; then listen to one in the middle (perhaps one of the sections of Book 3), and finally to one of the very last sections, in Book 6. I think you'll agree that the differences are striking!

WRITINGS OF EPICURUS & LUCRETIUS