Sherry Chandler

Translating the Aeneid

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.

Possibly related posts:

Catullus 41–C*nni indelicias

Wolff On Ovid and Caesar

Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933)

Ars Poetica

Not quite serendipity

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