Don Juan

Looking for an audiobook of Byron\’s comic epic masterpiece? Try listening online to Peter Gallagher\’s wonderful free performance of five selected cantos and you\’ll wonder why Audible hasn\’t commissioned him to do the entire poem. Until then, Michael Sheen\’s reading of a 22-minute selection from Canto One on the \”Great Poets of the Romantic Age\” anthology is not to be missed (but what uncredited actress so splendidly takes on the women\’s parts?). And Tyrone Power\’s similar selection is certainly worthwhile. But if you want to listen to the whole shimmering shebang, you could do worse than Frederick Davidson. Davidson somehow does not know how Byron pronounces \”Juan,\” and for some reason reads the stanza numbers out loud, but his impersonation of Byron\’s *narrator* seems to me the best full-length interpretation on Audible. Your other choices are Robert Bethune, who has heroically recorded ALL of Byron\’s poetry for us, but has has even less understanding of how Byron pronounces \”Juan\”; Jonathan Keeble, a supremely accomplished performer who somehow (to my ears, but not everyone\’s) misses the lion\’s share of Byron\’s humor; and Charlton Griffin, whose usually over-inflated mannerisms I tend to find off-putting, but who has finally won me over as (so far) the best-ever performer of the entire poem.

It\’s nice to see this finally has become available online. Do not let Davidson\’s accent put you off. He does a fine job and ably conveys Byron\’s uproarious wit. He does make one rather appalling mistake: he pronounces Juan as the Spanish pronounce it. As almost any English lit major will tell you, it is to be pronounced: \”JOO-un\”. A vastly entertaining poem by a truly great poet.

I have listen to numerous books. This has been one of the hardest to follow. The accent of the reader and story line was to much for me. I tried to listen to this book but after 1 hour I could not stand it any more. Save use your credit for another book.

The narrator has a strong British Accent. Sometimes, it is barely understandable. I have listened to a lot of audiobooks in English, including TMS and TTC letures on physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics and biology. Given, I am not a native English speaker. But I have never had any trouble understanding and following much more complex content than this. What ruins this audiobook for me is simply the author\’s accent, which makes this very, very hard to listen to. It surprises me Blackstone Audio would use such a narrator, when there are narrators out there that would be better understood by a great number of people. If you are not very accustomed to the British English accent, I\’d advise you to save your 20$ and stay away from this version.

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