Sherry Chandler

Robert Fagles’ new translation of The Aeneid is out this week to rave reviews from the NYTimes. I was struck by this passage:

“I usually try not to ride the horse of relevance very hard,” Mr. Fagles said recently at his home near Princeton University, from which he recently retired, after teaching comparative literature for more than 40 years. “My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely.” But he went on to say that “The Aeneid” did speak to the contemporary situation. It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.

“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

The classical scholar in my house tells me that Virgil did not want to write The Aeneid. He wanted to write pastoral poetry, such as his Eclogues. But Augustus was Virgil’s patron — Augustus saw himself as a great patron of the arts, but he was pretty hard on poets who defied him — and Augustus wanted a great national epic to justify his empire. He was, after all, the first undisputed emperor Rome had ever had.

And so Virgil wrote The Aeneid, over ten years at the rate, this article says, of about three lines a day. He was still working on it when he died and some say he wanted it burned as a failure.

Mr. Fagles says the work transcends propaganda.

Now’s your chance to find out.

From the NYTimes:

KETE KRACHI, Ghana — Just before 5 a.m., with the sky still dark over Lake Volta, Mark Kwadwo was rousted from his spot on the damp dirt floor. It was time for work.

Shivering in the predawn chill, he helped paddle a canoe a mile out from shore. For five more hours, as his coworkers yanked up a fishing net, inch by inch, Mark bailed water to keep the canoe from swamping.

He last ate the day before. His broken wooden paddle was so heavy he could barely lift it. But he raptly followed each command from Kwadwo Takyi, the powerfully built 31-year-old in the back of the canoe who freely deals out beatings.

“I don’t like it here,” he whispered, out of Mr. Takyi’s earshot.

Mark Kwadwo is 6 years old.

Sold into endentured servitude by his parents, who don’t have enough money to feed him.

A story that tends to make my grilled tilapia taste like sawdust.