Aeneid fitzgerald translation
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The power of this tale-the uncanny and the tragic so tightly wound-is a reminder and example of why we brave the classics, and how they may become our common and permanent possessions. I’m just beginning to realize that the story of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld, to encounter his dead father-found so many years after my own father’s death-is an image that’s going to be with me for a very long time. And now, a few weeks after my first reading, I’m finding that parts of the story have started breaking into my thoughts with an intensity almost like being kidnapped. All these folk, fleeing from the destruction of their homes, sailing into the unmapped and unknown, are perhaps no poor image of how so many live today, and Ferry has caught Virgil’s concern and passion for them, so that we finally can feel the founding of Rome-the dream of safe harbor and the rule of rational law-with the glory it was meant to have. In the Aeneid the gods and goddesses are the unpredictable and mad-tempered instruments of our fates, never to be guessed at, never to be trusted. In these current days of increasing right-wing political threat, I have read very few things more terrifying than the goddess Juno’s recruitment of Alecto, one of the Furies, to create havoc where peace had reigned, compared by Virgil to boys having set a spinning top on its destructive path. Virgil famously likes to pique us by shifting in mid-tale from past tense to present, a device which can make scenes remarkably vivid, fully visualized. We get the sense too of how warfare in those times happened person to person: we get the name of who killed whom, how it was done, the terrible fall of a slaughtered body. I hardly expected to be moved by the story of Aeneas’s fatal romance with Dido, which has been refurbished and sold in who knows how many poems, operas, eighteenth-century paintings, lithographs, etc.-and yet, by the end of Ferry’s telling, I was in tears. So what do we get, at this vast distance, from Virgil? The discovery that all those dusty tales we got stuffed with in high school still have force and blood in them. April Bernard has suggested that it’s not so much a new translation as a new iteration: “Another version but also-perhaps, almost-the thing itself.” It really is one of those wonderful moments when a contemporary poet has successfully taken on, not only a classic work, but the author’s voice.
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I have a few quibbles with the translation, odd prolixities and such, and the edition has been criticized for wanting notes, which would have been helpful but after having stalled out on several older versions (Lewis, Dryden, even Fitzgerald) I found this was the version that pulled me in and helped me understand its almost intimidating status. (At this late date I have a hard time getting wound-up happy about empires and such.) But I'd loved David Ferry’s translations of the Eclogues and the Georgics, so when I’d heard of his new (2017) version of the Aeneid, I leapt at it, and was not disappointed. Its existence as an ordered-up epic on the founding of Rome, its required optimism about this momentous event, its unfinished state, and its preoccupation with the martial ethos all left me a bit cool.
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Elio, the bookish adolescent who narrates Andre Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name, says, “Everybody in Italy has read Dante, Homer and Virgil…Doesn’t matter whom you’re talking to, so long as you Dante-and-Homer them first…Virgil is a must.” Homer (in Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful translation) has long been a touchstone for me, and recently I was lucky enough to discover the Hollanders’ version of Dante, but until recently the Aeneid had escaped me.