The Aeneid (50 page)
Yet my versions of all three poems, different as those versions may be, share a common impulse. Again I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no-man’s-land, if I can help it) between the features of an ancient author and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-by-line translation, my version of the
Aeneid
is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Virgil’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he writes as possible—nor so “literary,” in the stilted, bookish sense, as to brake his forward motion once too often. For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more “literary,” too little Latin. I have tried to find a cross between the two: a modern English Virgil.
Aeneid
is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Virgil’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he writes as possible—nor so “literary,” in the stilted, bookish sense, as to brake his forward motion once too often. For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more “literary,” too little Latin. I have tried to find a cross between the two: a modern English Virgil.
Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do, or worse, the principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). Yet a few words of explanation seem in order, some further thoughts about “the Virgilian performance,” at least as I understand it, and how it may condition my translation. I return to what many would observe, that, short of reciting in public, even our private acts of reading, and especially the Romans’ private acts of reading, have by nature a dramatic side as well. As W. A. Camps reminds us, drawing from Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician, Latin education in the first century A.D. “laid a particular emphasis on the element of sound in style,” and “sensitivity to this was general in a world in which the normal way of reading to oneself was to read aloud” (note p. 67). Virgil, to put it in Pope’s terms, may write in order to “leave us readers,” yet his writing “makes us hearers” too, reading alone and yet aloud, and listening for the writer’s own distinctive voice.
And Virgil invites us to play a still more active role, as his preference for verbs in the historical present, rather than in the past tenses, may imply. The predominance of the historical present throughout the poem (“nearly two-thirds of all indicative verbs in the
Aeneid,
” as Sara Mack reports, p. 48) has a range of effects upon the reader. They go from generating the broad, irrepressible sweep of the poem, which K. W. Gransden (1984, p. 76) and others note, to all that the Greek word
enargeia
can convey: the vividness, the immediacy, the dramatic impact of every action and every speech, as clear as Venus in Aeneas’ eyes, “her pure radiance shining down upon [him] through the night” (2.731). Similarly, the reader is surrounded by a luminous, recurrent Now that not only captures his or her attention but also makes the reader a witness and even, within one’s private study, a participant in a series of events. It is as if—Gransden again, to whom many of these remarks are much indebted—the “when” of an action is less important than the fact and “how” of its occurrence. And as Andreola Rossi pursues the point, most occurrences in the poem are presented “here and now” instead of “then and there,” as Virgil creates “a forged continuum, even an identity, between the past retold and the present perceived” (p. 130).
Aeneid,
” as Sara Mack reports, p. 48) has a range of effects upon the reader. They go from generating the broad, irrepressible sweep of the poem, which K. W. Gransden (1984, p. 76) and others note, to all that the Greek word
enargeia
can convey: the vividness, the immediacy, the dramatic impact of every action and every speech, as clear as Venus in Aeneas’ eyes, “her pure radiance shining down upon [him] through the night” (2.731). Similarly, the reader is surrounded by a luminous, recurrent Now that not only captures his or her attention but also makes the reader a witness and even, within one’s private study, a participant in a series of events. It is as if—Gransden again, to whom many of these remarks are much indebted—the “when” of an action is less important than the fact and “how” of its occurrence. And as Andreola Rossi pursues the point, most occurrences in the poem are presented “here and now” instead of “then and there,” as Virgil creates “a forged continuum, even an identity, between the past retold and the present perceived” (p. 130).
Consequently the scenes on the Libyan temple that recall the late Trojan War unite with the unfolding, tragic events in Carthage that will take the life of Dido and, evoked by her dying curses, ultimately lead to the Punic Wars. The legendary Cyclops beat their metal into Aeneas’ shield, emblazoning it with the triumphs of Rome that lie a thousand years ahead, yet the weld between the mythic and the historical, the miraculous work of Vulcan and the battle of Actium, is seamless. As Eliot muses in his Heraclitean way:
Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past.(
Burnt Norton,
1)
So frequent is Virgil’s use of the historical present that he can intersperse the imperfect among his verbs, producing a confident shuttling back and forth in time, even within the same verse paragraph. The translation suggests the effect in a more cautious, discretionary way, to spare the English reader some confusion. Yet the historical present prevails, to register one of Virgil’s leading ways of bringing home the
Aeneid
to his audience.
Aeneid
to his audience.
Other features of his performance do the same, each reinforcing the
enargeia
of his epic, and each has a bearing, however distant, on the translation at hand. One is Virgil’s reputation, during his lifetime and cited by others now, for directness of speech, his preference for the plain instead of the “poetic” word, a preference I have often tried to follow. Another is Virgil’s way of echoing himself. As John Swallow analyzes the matter, some echoes may be temporary props or
tibicines,
which Virgil used to keep his narrative flowing, rather than stop and search for the
mots justes
he hoped to find when he revised his work, like “a she-bear,” as he described the process in Suetonius’ “Life” (p. 473), and “gradually licked it into shape.” But other echoes express the moral symmetry we call “poetic justice”—as when the lines describing Camilla’s death by treachery (11.973-74) echo in the last lines of the poem, where Turnus dies at Aeneas’ hands, not by treachery but as retribution outright for the death of Pallas. A contrast, yet also an echo reminding us, as R. D. Williams (1973, note 12.948) and W. S. Macguinness (1953, p. 13) remark, that far from stressing Aeneas’ conquest rather than his cruelty, Virgil binds his final act to the other acts of cruelty that pervade the closing books. This and other echoes—when Latin context and English sense and syntax will permit—the translation often sounds within itself.
enargeia
of his epic, and each has a bearing, however distant, on the translation at hand. One is Virgil’s reputation, during his lifetime and cited by others now, for directness of speech, his preference for the plain instead of the “poetic” word, a preference I have often tried to follow. Another is Virgil’s way of echoing himself. As John Swallow analyzes the matter, some echoes may be temporary props or
tibicines,
which Virgil used to keep his narrative flowing, rather than stop and search for the
mots justes
he hoped to find when he revised his work, like “a she-bear,” as he described the process in Suetonius’ “Life” (p. 473), and “gradually licked it into shape.” But other echoes express the moral symmetry we call “poetic justice”—as when the lines describing Camilla’s death by treachery (11.973-74) echo in the last lines of the poem, where Turnus dies at Aeneas’ hands, not by treachery but as retribution outright for the death of Pallas. A contrast, yet also an echo reminding us, as R. D. Williams (1973, note 12.948) and W. S. Macguinness (1953, p. 13) remark, that far from stressing Aeneas’ conquest rather than his cruelty, Virgil binds his final act to the other acts of cruelty that pervade the closing books. This and other echoes—when Latin context and English sense and syntax will permit—the translation often sounds within itself.
Even more important in bringing the
Aeneid
home are Virgil’s numberless forms of expression that alert and delight the reader, galvanizing one’s imagination, winning one’s belief. I refer to the magnificent panoply of the epic poem, whose forms extend, to mention only a few, from the dramatic, when Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy for Dido—until, like Desdemona, she may wish “that heaven had made her such a man”—to the operatic, in Dido’s arias and agonies of passion, to the pastoral interludes, formal elegies, martial catalogues, duels to the death, vehement debates between the gods on high, and urgent invocations of the Muse. And perhaps the most epic feature of all is one already mentioned: the pulsing sweep of the narrative itself, borne along by Virgil’s voice, its rise and fall throughout the
Aeneid
’s length and breadth, “the enormous onward pressure” that C. S. Lewis felt as strongly in Virgil as he did in Milton, “of the great stream on which you are embarked” (p. 45). No wonder Tennyson praises Virgil not only for his ennoble ments, for wielding “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but also for his sheer kinetic power, his “ocean-roll of rhythm” (“To Virgil”). And nothing makes it stronger than the rhythmic variety that Virgil offers, as Knox observes in his review of Fitzgerald’s
Aeneid
(
The New Republic,
November 28, 1983, p. 36), “the infinite variations on the play of the Latin stress accent against the quantitative Greek meter [that] all combine to produce a music that works like an incantation.”
Aeneid
home are Virgil’s numberless forms of expression that alert and delight the reader, galvanizing one’s imagination, winning one’s belief. I refer to the magnificent panoply of the epic poem, whose forms extend, to mention only a few, from the dramatic, when Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy for Dido—until, like Desdemona, she may wish “that heaven had made her such a man”—to the operatic, in Dido’s arias and agonies of passion, to the pastoral interludes, formal elegies, martial catalogues, duels to the death, vehement debates between the gods on high, and urgent invocations of the Muse. And perhaps the most epic feature of all is one already mentioned: the pulsing sweep of the narrative itself, borne along by Virgil’s voice, its rise and fall throughout the
Aeneid
’s length and breadth, “the enormous onward pressure” that C. S. Lewis felt as strongly in Virgil as he did in Milton, “of the great stream on which you are embarked” (p. 45). No wonder Tennyson praises Virgil not only for his ennoble ments, for wielding “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but also for his sheer kinetic power, his “ocean-roll of rhythm” (“To Virgil”). And nothing makes it stronger than the rhythmic variety that Virgil offers, as Knox observes in his review of Fitzgerald’s
Aeneid
(
The New Republic,
November 28, 1983, p. 36), “the infinite variations on the play of the Latin stress accent against the quantitative Greek meter [that] all combine to produce a music that works like an incantation.”
So if, as Knox remarks in his Introductions to our
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
“the strongest weapon in [Homer’s] poetic arsenal” is variety within a metrical norm, Virgil creates an analog in Latin, and the English translation tries, in a far-off way, to follow suit. However remotely, I have sought a compromise between Virgil’s spacious hexameter, his “ocean-roll of rhythm,” and a tighter line more native to English verse. Yet I have opted for a freer give-and-take, for more variety than uniformity with Virgil than with Homer. This may be unavoidable in trying to “unpack” Virgil’s more compressed effects, his virtuoso displays of highly inflected, and deeply suggestive, word order, which can take one’s breath away. In any event, working from a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six, I expand at times to seven, to convey the reach of an “Homeric” simile in the
Aeneid,
or the vehemence of a storm at sea or a battle waged on land. Or I contract at times to three or four beats, not when Virgil does (perhaps implying with his half lines that revision is on its way), but to give a speech or action sharper stress in English. Free as it is, such variety in unity results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation: in this case, from trying to convey the meaning of the Latin on the one hand, and trying to find a cadence for one’s English on the other, while joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. All told, I hope not only to give my own language a slight stretching now and then, but also to lend Virgil the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make a version of the
Aeneid,
like a version of the two Homeric poems, engaging to a modern reader.
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
“the strongest weapon in [Homer’s] poetic arsenal” is variety within a metrical norm, Virgil creates an analog in Latin, and the English translation tries, in a far-off way, to follow suit. However remotely, I have sought a compromise between Virgil’s spacious hexameter, his “ocean-roll of rhythm,” and a tighter line more native to English verse. Yet I have opted for a freer give-and-take, for more variety than uniformity with Virgil than with Homer. This may be unavoidable in trying to “unpack” Virgil’s more compressed effects, his virtuoso displays of highly inflected, and deeply suggestive, word order, which can take one’s breath away. In any event, working from a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six, I expand at times to seven, to convey the reach of an “Homeric” simile in the
Aeneid,
or the vehemence of a storm at sea or a battle waged on land. Or I contract at times to three or four beats, not when Virgil does (perhaps implying with his half lines that revision is on its way), but to give a speech or action sharper stress in English. Free as it is, such variety in unity results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation: in this case, from trying to convey the meaning of the Latin on the one hand, and trying to find a cadence for one’s English on the other, while joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. All told, I hope not only to give my own language a slight stretching now and then, but also to lend Virgil the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make a version of the
Aeneid,
like a version of the two Homeric poems, engaging to a modern reader.
For Virgil’s performance in Latin is a reperformance of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
in Greek, a “Homerization” of the legendary past of Rome. This, of course, is a subject that has engaged generations of scholars and brought forth many a brilliant study over time. I can only touch on the broadest outlines of the matter here, and I do so from the viewpoint of a translator. At any rate, what announces the bond between Virgil’s work and Homer’s, as readers from Suetonius onward have remarked, are the first three words of the
Aeneid, arma virumque cano,
that sing the themes of war and humankind—the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
in effect—in one and the same phrase, and eventually in the same epic poem. As many observe, like Knox in his Introduction, Virgil presents an
Odyssey
of wandering in the first half of the
Aeneid
and an
Iliad
of warfare in the second. And as others have continued the analogy (usefully, for this translator), the Odyssean half of Virgil’s epic has many Iliadic elements: Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy, and the funeral games for Anchises, and the return of many Trojan figures, some still alive, like Andromache and Helenus, and several more as ghosts. Similarly, the second, Iliadic half of the
Aeneid
has many Odyssean elements, chief among them perhaps the objective of the warfare waged: not to destroy an enemy capital but to found one’s own, or as a later idiom would have it, to “win home” to the promised city, Rome.
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
in Greek, a “Homerization” of the legendary past of Rome. This, of course, is a subject that has engaged generations of scholars and brought forth many a brilliant study over time. I can only touch on the broadest outlines of the matter here, and I do so from the viewpoint of a translator. At any rate, what announces the bond between Virgil’s work and Homer’s, as readers from Suetonius onward have remarked, are the first three words of the
Aeneid, arma virumque cano,
that sing the themes of war and humankind—the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
in effect—in one and the same phrase, and eventually in the same epic poem. As many observe, like Knox in his Introduction, Virgil presents an
Odyssey
of wandering in the first half of the
Aeneid
and an
Iliad
of warfare in the second. And as others have continued the analogy (usefully, for this translator), the Odyssean half of Virgil’s epic has many Iliadic elements: Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy, and the funeral games for Anchises, and the return of many Trojan figures, some still alive, like Andromache and Helenus, and several more as ghosts. Similarly, the second, Iliadic half of the
Aeneid
has many Odyssean elements, chief among them perhaps the objective of the warfare waged: not to destroy an enemy capital but to found one’s own, or as a later idiom would have it, to “win home” to the promised city, Rome.
Home, for since, as Gransden and Knox’s Introduction remind us, the legendary founder of Troy and an ancestor of Aeneas was Dardanus, who migrated from Italy to Troy, Aeneas’ arrival in Latium is a kind of
nostos
too, a return to the homeland of his forebears. His linear journey to a point is circular in result, like the motion of Achilles’ rage and the homing of Odysseus, yet Virgil conceives his hero’s journey on a larger, more historical—but in no way more compelling—scale. As Gransden sums up the matter, “Rome became in due time the new Troy, risen like the phoenix from the ashes of the destroyed city of Priam; indeed in the perspective of history the fall of Troy could be seen as the necessary precursor of the rise of Rome, and the whole mighty sequence as part of a divine plan, the working out of fate” (1990, p. 27). Or as Knox puts it, pungently, “The death agonies of Troy are the birthpangs of Rome” (Commager, p. 125), and the entire chain reaction binds together the
Iliad,
the
Odyssey,
and the
Aeneid.
nostos
too, a return to the homeland of his forebears. His linear journey to a point is circular in result, like the motion of Achilles’ rage and the homing of Odysseus, yet Virgil conceives his hero’s journey on a larger, more historical—but in no way more compelling—scale. As Gransden sums up the matter, “Rome became in due time the new Troy, risen like the phoenix from the ashes of the destroyed city of Priam; indeed in the perspective of history the fall of Troy could be seen as the necessary precursor of the rise of Rome, and the whole mighty sequence as part of a divine plan, the working out of fate” (1990, p. 27). Or as Knox puts it, pungently, “The death agonies of Troy are the birthpangs of Rome” (Commager, p. 125), and the entire chain reaction binds together the
Iliad,
the
Odyssey,
and the
Aeneid.
Virgil is the great translator of Homer, from phrase to simile to episode to epic scope and goal. And Virgil’s every act of translation honors his source, not only by imitation but by emulation, a strenuous, competitive struggle in which Virgil may have found it “easier,” as Virgil himself would say, “to filch his club from Hercules than a line from Homer” (Suetonius’ “Life,” p. 483). But in the
Aeneid
one may sense the exhilaration of influence as much as the anxiety, and watch the two at work in all their force, as when Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, completing—and competing with?—Homer, who leaves the catastrophe, more dramatically for many, foreshadowed yet forever still to strike. Emulatively too, Virgil’s leading characters often undertake a sequence or a composite of Homeric roles. Dido portrays the temptresses in the
Odyssey,
Circe and Calypso, who impede the hero’s progress. But Dido is potentially still more vivid as Arete, who rules her ideal kingdom well, and as Nausicaa, who lends it a fresh young beauty, and ultimately as Penelope, loyal to Aeneas, if only he will embrace her as his queen.
Aeneid
one may sense the exhilaration of influence as much as the anxiety, and watch the two at work in all their force, as when Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, completing—and competing with?—Homer, who leaves the catastrophe, more dramatically for many, foreshadowed yet forever still to strike. Emulatively too, Virgil’s leading characters often undertake a sequence or a composite of Homeric roles. Dido portrays the temptresses in the
Odyssey,
Circe and Calypso, who impede the hero’s progress. But Dido is potentially still more vivid as Arete, who rules her ideal kingdom well, and as Nausicaa, who lends it a fresh young beauty, and ultimately as Penelope, loyal to Aeneas, if only he will embrace her as his queen.
Yet it is the hero himself who plays, at times inverting, at times asserting, the most consequential range of Homeric roles throughout the poem, until in his climactic action—killing Turnus—Aeneas resembles, at one and the same moment, an Achilles avenging the death of a cherished comrade, a Hector defending his homeland successfully, and an Odysseus winning his rightful bride by killing her suitor, reclaiming his kingdom, and laying the groundwork for its future. And Aeneas’ range of Homeric roles within the
Aeneid
reflects his possible roles in later history as well. For he prefigures, in his tenuous way, Romulus the founder and Augustus the first emperor of Rome, and as some may see the ancient hero, a modern hero in the making.
2Aeneid
reflects his possible roles in later history as well. For he prefigures, in his tenuous way, Romulus the founder and Augustus the first emperor of Rome, and as some may see the ancient hero, a modern hero in the making.
Seeing is believing that all three epic poems coexist, but giving voice to that belief is another matter—enough to leave one standing “silent, upon a peak in Darien.” So let me extend these questions of style to others that also affect a translator, his mood and mind, and his appreciation of his author. Whether or not such things find full expression, they may inform his approach, and perhaps a part of his work as well. Yves Bonnefoy, the celebrated French poet and translator of Yeats and Shakespeare, says that “if a work does not compel us, it is untranslatable” (Schulte and Biguenet, p. 192). Yet the obverse may be just as true. If a work does compel us, we will try to find a way, some way, to translate it or, as they say, die trying. What follows, then, are some of the features of Virgil that I have found especially compelling.
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