Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Shahid Abari.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast, which is recorded with an audience before one of the concerts in this year's BBC proms.

This is the BBC.

What's the literary equivalent of music's variations on a theme? The list of composers who've reworked Bach

runs from Mozart, via Hindemit and David Bowie, to Eminem. And the list of writers who've reworked the

classics of ancient literature is at least as long. But how do we translate a classic text?

When does it stop being the original and become somebody's new retelling?

Joining me to discuss these questions and more are two people very well qualified to do so.

Short O'Brien wrote a version of Aristophanes, The Birds, for the National Theatre,

and has poetically translated Dante's Inferno, while Sandeep Palmer's poem, Idleon,

sees Clytemnestra on a talk show and Helen of Troy in therapy.

Sean, what makes the text a classic? How do you personally recognise one when you see it?

That's actually extraordinarily difficult question to answer, but it's partly a matter of cultural habit and accumulation.

There are certain books which are somehow felt to stay in circulation, though that's not a fixed condition.

Things come and go.

Things are discovered late.

Things have got rid of.

But major works that seem to try and speak to the condition of humanity, a society at one time that persist in speaking to us later on,

seem to me to be words of describing a classic.

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