For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil's Aeneid as a manly poem. From its arms-and-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer's Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage.
In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil's dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden.
And she has plenty of company. The Aeneid has never been a forgotten work, but since the most recent millennial turn, it has enjoyed a burst of renewed popularity with translators.
Four major English-language versions have appeared in the past three years alone. They include a blockbuster 2006 translation from Viking by the late Robert Fagles, who was an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. In 2005, Stanley Lombardo, a professor of classics at the University of Kansas, came out with a version, published by the Hackett Publishing Company, that has legions of admirers. And Frederick Ahl, a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University, weighed in with a version last November, published by Oxford University Press.
At least two more editions are in the works, one by the poet and translator David Ferry, widely admired for his Horace translations, and the other by Jane Wilson Joyce, a professor of literature in the classical-studies program at Centre College, in Kentucky, who is about four-fifths of the way through her own Aeneid.
All this activity comes at a time when scholars have broken free of the constraints imposed by a tradition that stretches back to the early English translations of the 17th and 18th centuries. Bringing a sense of personal passion to the task, modern translators are reminding readers that for all the fierceness and grandeur of the events it describes, the Aeneid is also intimate, at times even tender.
It raises an urgent question — What price empire? — even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil's epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes.
Although the biographical details remains sketchy, we know that Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) lived through the civil wars that marked the death throes of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. He found a powerful patron, Maecenas, at the court of Augustus Caesar and probably read the Aeneid to the emperor and his sister, Octavia. We also know that the epic was unfinished at Virgil's death. Almost immediately, however, it became required reading for Roman schoolboys, for whom it was a model tale of empire building and the making of a leader.
But this war story is also a tale of piety, loyalty, sacrifice, grief, and perseverance. It describes how a family and a people survive catastrophe — the sack of Troy — and make a new home for themselves, founding what will one day become a great empire, Rome.
The first six books of the tale describe Aeneas' flight from Troy with his father, Anchises, and his young son, Iulus. Along the way, the hero encounters storms, shipwreck, and ill-fated romance. He briefly falls for Dido, queen of Carthage, who kills herself after Aeneas abandons her to fulfill his destiny.
The second, less familiar half of the epic — Books 7-12 — follows the hero as he lands in Italy and must fight what amounts to a bitter civil war to claim his empire. Aeneas wins, but not before countless warriors have slaughtered one another. The epic ends with an especially troubling moment: Aeneas denies mercy to Turnus, leader of the opposing force, and skewers him in a fit of rage on the battlefield. The moment ends the story on a discordant note, as the most faithful and pious of heroes succumbs to a dramatic loss of self-control.
It is likely that Virgil did not intend to end the book with that scene; he probably had in mind a much longer work, which would have followed Aeneas' evolution from warrior to statesman. Either way the harsh ending and the story's account of the human cost of war have kept scholars debating: Was Virgil an empire booster, or a critic who managed to question the imperial enterprise even as he celebrated it?
Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil's tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.
"Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned," says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. "This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?"
He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors "who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet." That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on Lombardo's 2005 version is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone.
On the subject of Virgil's attitude toward war, Sarah Ruden warns against casting an ancient tragedy as some kind of modern political statement.
"People make a fundamental mistake arguing about the politics of the Aeneid," says Ruden, a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School. "It's about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it's about submission to the divine will."
Ruden acknowledges "a lot of grappling" with that aspect of the Aeneid. "This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will," she says. "People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better."
Born in 1962 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and raised in the countryside, Ruden grew up Methodist and became a Quaker late in her graduate training at Harvard University. She had already studied and translated Virgil as a classics major at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote her senior thesis on the poet's Eclogues.
"It was all about stylistic hotdogging and emotional grandstanding," she says. "I'd had enough Latin by that time that I could see what an amazing writer he was."
She did her doctoral work in classics at Harvard. There, she recalls, "somebody told me, 'Don't work on Ovid. All of these women work on Ovid.'" Rather than study a writer known for his love elegies as well as the Metamorphoses, she chose the harder-edged satirist Petronius instead.
Scholars, she believes, should be careful not to wall themselves off. "Several generations of women have been trained in classical languages and literature just the same as men. But you still see many, many women working on love poetry — a tiny portion of the works that survive — and talking and writing endlessly about 'gender' in prescribed terms. It's like a seraglio."
Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius' Satyricon, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as "an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature."
Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil's translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
Even in her own work, Ruden has never been drawn to free-form verse. "I haven't published any nonmetrical poetry," she says. "I think my personal inclinations can be justified in terms of ancient poetry, which is very strictly metrical, very intricately metrical."
That predilection matches up well with Virgil's hexameter scheme. The trick for Ruden, as for every translator, is how to render Virgil's economical Latin compelling in English, which is a far baggier language.
Like many other translators, including Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry, Ruden opted to work in iambic pentameter. More unusual was her decision to translate roughly line for line, so that her Aeneid is about the same length as the original. Most English versions run longer. The risk of her approach, she says, "is too much compression. I could even be accused of translating in a way that's inappropriate to English."
But she did not approach the epic for the poetic challenge of it, or to be a feminist trailblazer. She signed on for practical reasons.
"I had to do it to stay in translation," she explains. "I had to do a major work. I had to do one that's taught very often."
She continues, "But I got caught up. This was something that came to mean a lot to me."
Here her personal history guided her. After completing her doctorate, Ruden found her first teaching job at the University of Cape Town. Living in South Africa, a country still gripped by turmoil at the end of apartheid, she says she came to understand how Virgil felt about the brutality of civil war.
"How imperial conflict works itself out isn't an academic matter for me," she explains. "The Aeneid isn't a stiff antiquarian pageant. It's immediate and primal. 'They're taking our stuff! They want all of it! They're killing us for it! Let's kill them first!'"
"I don't believe I put the slightest strain on the Latin in trying to echo Virgil's defensiveness and helpless grief," she says, "but first I had to understand it, and Africa gave me that gift."
Although most scholars agree that women have, until now, mostly steered clear of Greek and Latin epic, they have more than one theory about why.
Stephen Harrison, a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Oxford, believes that the phenomenon dates back to the time when the works themselves took shape.
"Epic was perceived in antiquity as a male prestige genre," he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "and the fact that anyone who knows any classical languages will have a view on a translation of Homer or Virgil makes it a tough thing to do, especially for women in prefeminist days when it was wrongly thought that women could not learn classical languages to the levels of men."
Another scholar, Barbara Weiden Boyd, thinks that the combination of language and genre has not been very hospitable to women. A professor of classics at Bowdoin College, she has published a textbook of selections from the Aeneid.
"There's something about Latin, but there's also something about epic, because that's also so implicated and embedded in Western literary hierarchy," Boyd says. "The subject matter is about the world of men, but it's also poetry that forms men and that educates men and that's for a male readership, and somehow that all works together, it seems to me."
For Stanley Lombardo, the tradition of English translation hasn't helped. "Pope's Iliad and Odyssey established this standard for epic decorum, and it's all grand and high diction. What woman would want to touch that?"
Lombardo has made a name for himself not only as a translator but also as a performer of Homer and Virgil. He is emblematic of the new breed of Virgil translator, for whom the Aeneid is anything but stuffy and highfalutin.
"This is living literature, and that's how it should be rendered," he says. "The immediacy of Greek and Latin literature is astonishing when you read it that way." To do justice to the the Aeneid, Lombardo says, "it's got to pulse with life."
Richard Thomas, of Harvard, points to a phrase in Lombardo's edition that illustrates that turn in translation. "Without very much justification on the level of Virgil's Latin but a great deal of justification from what's going on in the poem," he says, "Lombardo writes 'shock and awe,' which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?"
Jane Wilson Joyce, well into her own translation of the Aeneid, has, like Ruden, opted for a line-for-line approach. "I try, at least in general, to keep a vaguely dactylic rhythm going, but it's amazing how often it wants to turn around into anapests," she says. The economy of Latin compared to English is "so unfair," she adds. "It's just a joy."
Like Ruden, she sees beyond the story's martial themes: "I find Virgil a tender presence. So even when horrible things are happening on the battlefield, there is a tenderness, and his feel for human relationships, his feel for landscape, and his pity for humans is something that I find intensely appealing."
Joyce laughs. "I don't know — I'm in love with the guy."
Such a sense of personal connection, Sarah Ruden believes, gives female translators an edge over their male counterparts. "I'm going to get killed for voicing this, but I believe women have the right attitude," she says. "Women get more involved. The authors are more real to us. We develop relationships with them."
Not long ago, she heard a talk at Yale given by Edith Grossman, who translates Gabriel García Márquez's works into English and has done an English-language version of Don Quixote. "I came away convinced that women, not men, are the natural translators for the great books," Ruden says.
But she cautions that women who translate "must follow the Edith Grossman line" and keep a certain scholarly distance and balance. "The danger of emotional engagement is to impose the self on this alien author," she says.
Women now have far greater liberties and a much greater sense of their historical oppression than the women of 2,000 years ago did, but that doesn't mean that a 21st-century translator should, say, portray Dido as a victim of male chauvinism.
"You shouldn't take that to an author like Virgil," Ruden argues. "You're not being true to his context if you're thinking in those terms. You have to go back to tragedy."
"Everybody in here is a person, an individual, and they get annihilated in these big events. You have these injured or abandoned women; you have these men who are cannon fodder."
That sense of poignant fatalism touches translators male and female. David Ferry, an emeritus professor of English at Wellesley College, is in the first stages of translation, at work on Book 3 of the Aeneid. But even in the grand early passages, in which Aeneas and his family flee Troy, Ferry sees "so much else going on besides the epic" — for example, the way that Aeneas' boy, Iulus, "is trying to keep up, matching his father's footsteps" as the city burns behind them (see the excerpts on Page B11).
Richard Thomas, who taught Ruden at Harvard, puts it this way: "Epic poetry is the title we give it, but look onto any page and you're looking at human voices, male and female, you're looking at the human condition, you're looking at worlds gone wrong, you're looking at power and victory and defeat."
Translators take up a text like the Aeneid for an army of reasons. For Sarah Ruden, it began as a practical decision. For Stanley Lombardo, Virgil represented the logical next step in retracing the literary journey from Homer to Dante. (The Inferno is Lombardo's current project.) For publishers, however, the decision to take on the Aeneid is more and more perilous. How many additional versions does the world need?
"It's fair to say that it gets more difficult to do this the more translations are published," says Brian Rak, Lombardo's editor at Hackett. Most Aeneid translations are intended to work their way into the undergraduate curriculum, but, like Aeneas, they have to fight to earn their place.
In Rak's experience, an edition becomes entrenched for a while as the classroom favorite, "and it's difficult to even think of another translation that could compete with it," he says. "But along comes a new translation, and people want to have a look at it."
Every new translation offers the tantalizing possibility that it will strike closer to the thrill and beauty of the original than any has before. "The sorrow with any translation," Lombardo says, "is that you're never really quite there. You may be someplace almost as good."
Behind the hope is a never-ending struggle to crack the code of language. "I know the Latin of a particular passage once I've worked on it," says Ferry. "Then I start my whole life over again."
"Great works of literature do come from God," Ruden says. "They are so miraculous, you can't figure out how a human being could have pulled off something like this."
A translator must strive to see the work in its own terms, she believes, while knowing that such a goal will always be just out of reach. "But it's something that you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, until you pass out from exhaustion. You have to keep up hope for an impossible thing. Again, it comes back to religion."
No wonder the ancient poets always began their work with an invocation of the muse.
In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil's dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden.
And she has plenty of company. The Aeneid has never been a forgotten work, but since the most recent millennial turn, it has enjoyed a burst of renewed popularity with translators.
Four major English-language versions have appeared in the past three years alone. They include a blockbuster 2006 translation from Viking by the late Robert Fagles, who was an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. In 2005, Stanley Lombardo, a professor of classics at the University of Kansas, came out with a version, published by the Hackett Publishing Company, that has legions of admirers. And Frederick Ahl, a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University, weighed in with a version last November, published by Oxford University Press.
At least two more editions are in the works, one by the poet and translator David Ferry, widely admired for his Horace translations, and the other by Jane Wilson Joyce, a professor of literature in the classical-studies program at Centre College, in Kentucky, who is about four-fifths of the way through her own Aeneid.
All this activity comes at a time when scholars have broken free of the constraints imposed by a tradition that stretches back to the early English translations of the 17th and 18th centuries. Bringing a sense of personal passion to the task, modern translators are reminding readers that for all the fierceness and grandeur of the events it describes, the Aeneid is also intimate, at times even tender.
It raises an urgent question — What price empire? — even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil's epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes.
Although the biographical details remains sketchy, we know that Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) lived through the civil wars that marked the death throes of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. He found a powerful patron, Maecenas, at the court of Augustus Caesar and probably read the Aeneid to the emperor and his sister, Octavia. We also know that the epic was unfinished at Virgil's death. Almost immediately, however, it became required reading for Roman schoolboys, for whom it was a model tale of empire building and the making of a leader.
But this war story is also a tale of piety, loyalty, sacrifice, grief, and perseverance. It describes how a family and a people survive catastrophe — the sack of Troy — and make a new home for themselves, founding what will one day become a great empire, Rome.
The first six books of the tale describe Aeneas' flight from Troy with his father, Anchises, and his young son, Iulus. Along the way, the hero encounters storms, shipwreck, and ill-fated romance. He briefly falls for Dido, queen of Carthage, who kills herself after Aeneas abandons her to fulfill his destiny.
The second, less familiar half of the epic — Books 7-12 — follows the hero as he lands in Italy and must fight what amounts to a bitter civil war to claim his empire. Aeneas wins, but not before countless warriors have slaughtered one another. The epic ends with an especially troubling moment: Aeneas denies mercy to Turnus, leader of the opposing force, and skewers him in a fit of rage on the battlefield. The moment ends the story on a discordant note, as the most faithful and pious of heroes succumbs to a dramatic loss of self-control.
It is likely that Virgil did not intend to end the book with that scene; he probably had in mind a much longer work, which would have followed Aeneas' evolution from warrior to statesman. Either way the harsh ending and the story's account of the human cost of war have kept scholars debating: Was Virgil an empire booster, or a critic who managed to question the imperial enterprise even as he celebrated it?
Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil's tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.
"Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned," says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. "This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?"
He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors "who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet." That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on Lombardo's 2005 version is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone.
On the subject of Virgil's attitude toward war, Sarah Ruden warns against casting an ancient tragedy as some kind of modern political statement.
"People make a fundamental mistake arguing about the politics of the Aeneid," says Ruden, a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School. "It's about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it's about submission to the divine will."
Ruden acknowledges "a lot of grappling" with that aspect of the Aeneid. "This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will," she says. "People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better."
Born in 1962 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and raised in the countryside, Ruden grew up Methodist and became a Quaker late in her graduate training at Harvard University. She had already studied and translated Virgil as a classics major at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote her senior thesis on the poet's Eclogues.
"It was all about stylistic hotdogging and emotional grandstanding," she says. "I'd had enough Latin by that time that I could see what an amazing writer he was."
She did her doctoral work in classics at Harvard. There, she recalls, "somebody told me, 'Don't work on Ovid. All of these women work on Ovid.'" Rather than study a writer known for his love elegies as well as the Metamorphoses, she chose the harder-edged satirist Petronius instead.
Scholars, she believes, should be careful not to wall themselves off. "Several generations of women have been trained in classical languages and literature just the same as men. But you still see many, many women working on love poetry — a tiny portion of the works that survive — and talking and writing endlessly about 'gender' in prescribed terms. It's like a seraglio."
Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius' Satyricon, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as "an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature."
Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil's translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
Even in her own work, Ruden has never been drawn to free-form verse. "I haven't published any nonmetrical poetry," she says. "I think my personal inclinations can be justified in terms of ancient poetry, which is very strictly metrical, very intricately metrical."
That predilection matches up well with Virgil's hexameter scheme. The trick for Ruden, as for every translator, is how to render Virgil's economical Latin compelling in English, which is a far baggier language.
Like many other translators, including Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry, Ruden opted to work in iambic pentameter. More unusual was her decision to translate roughly line for line, so that her Aeneid is about the same length as the original. Most English versions run longer. The risk of her approach, she says, "is too much compression. I could even be accused of translating in a way that's inappropriate to English."
But she did not approach the epic for the poetic challenge of it, or to be a feminist trailblazer. She signed on for practical reasons.
"I had to do it to stay in translation," she explains. "I had to do a major work. I had to do one that's taught very often."
She continues, "But I got caught up. This was something that came to mean a lot to me."
Here her personal history guided her. After completing her doctorate, Ruden found her first teaching job at the University of Cape Town. Living in South Africa, a country still gripped by turmoil at the end of apartheid, she says she came to understand how Virgil felt about the brutality of civil war.
"How imperial conflict works itself out isn't an academic matter for me," she explains. "The Aeneid isn't a stiff antiquarian pageant. It's immediate and primal. 'They're taking our stuff! They want all of it! They're killing us for it! Let's kill them first!'"
"I don't believe I put the slightest strain on the Latin in trying to echo Virgil's defensiveness and helpless grief," she says, "but first I had to understand it, and Africa gave me that gift."
Although most scholars agree that women have, until now, mostly steered clear of Greek and Latin epic, they have more than one theory about why.
Stephen Harrison, a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Oxford, believes that the phenomenon dates back to the time when the works themselves took shape.
"Epic was perceived in antiquity as a male prestige genre," he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "and the fact that anyone who knows any classical languages will have a view on a translation of Homer or Virgil makes it a tough thing to do, especially for women in prefeminist days when it was wrongly thought that women could not learn classical languages to the levels of men."
Another scholar, Barbara Weiden Boyd, thinks that the combination of language and genre has not been very hospitable to women. A professor of classics at Bowdoin College, she has published a textbook of selections from the Aeneid.
"There's something about Latin, but there's also something about epic, because that's also so implicated and embedded in Western literary hierarchy," Boyd says. "The subject matter is about the world of men, but it's also poetry that forms men and that educates men and that's for a male readership, and somehow that all works together, it seems to me."
For Stanley Lombardo, the tradition of English translation hasn't helped. "Pope's Iliad and Odyssey established this standard for epic decorum, and it's all grand and high diction. What woman would want to touch that?"
Lombardo has made a name for himself not only as a translator but also as a performer of Homer and Virgil. He is emblematic of the new breed of Virgil translator, for whom the Aeneid is anything but stuffy and highfalutin.
"This is living literature, and that's how it should be rendered," he says. "The immediacy of Greek and Latin literature is astonishing when you read it that way." To do justice to the the Aeneid, Lombardo says, "it's got to pulse with life."
Richard Thomas, of Harvard, points to a phrase in Lombardo's edition that illustrates that turn in translation. "Without very much justification on the level of Virgil's Latin but a great deal of justification from what's going on in the poem," he says, "Lombardo writes 'shock and awe,' which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?"
Jane Wilson Joyce, well into her own translation of the Aeneid, has, like Ruden, opted for a line-for-line approach. "I try, at least in general, to keep a vaguely dactylic rhythm going, but it's amazing how often it wants to turn around into anapests," she says. The economy of Latin compared to English is "so unfair," she adds. "It's just a joy."
Like Ruden, she sees beyond the story's martial themes: "I find Virgil a tender presence. So even when horrible things are happening on the battlefield, there is a tenderness, and his feel for human relationships, his feel for landscape, and his pity for humans is something that I find intensely appealing."
Joyce laughs. "I don't know — I'm in love with the guy."
Such a sense of personal connection, Sarah Ruden believes, gives female translators an edge over their male counterparts. "I'm going to get killed for voicing this, but I believe women have the right attitude," she says. "Women get more involved. The authors are more real to us. We develop relationships with them."
Not long ago, she heard a talk at Yale given by Edith Grossman, who translates Gabriel García Márquez's works into English and has done an English-language version of Don Quixote. "I came away convinced that women, not men, are the natural translators for the great books," Ruden says.
But she cautions that women who translate "must follow the Edith Grossman line" and keep a certain scholarly distance and balance. "The danger of emotional engagement is to impose the self on this alien author," she says.
Women now have far greater liberties and a much greater sense of their historical oppression than the women of 2,000 years ago did, but that doesn't mean that a 21st-century translator should, say, portray Dido as a victim of male chauvinism.
"You shouldn't take that to an author like Virgil," Ruden argues. "You're not being true to his context if you're thinking in those terms. You have to go back to tragedy."
"Everybody in here is a person, an individual, and they get annihilated in these big events. You have these injured or abandoned women; you have these men who are cannon fodder."
That sense of poignant fatalism touches translators male and female. David Ferry, an emeritus professor of English at Wellesley College, is in the first stages of translation, at work on Book 3 of the Aeneid. But even in the grand early passages, in which Aeneas and his family flee Troy, Ferry sees "so much else going on besides the epic" — for example, the way that Aeneas' boy, Iulus, "is trying to keep up, matching his father's footsteps" as the city burns behind them (see the excerpts on Page B11).
Richard Thomas, who taught Ruden at Harvard, puts it this way: "Epic poetry is the title we give it, but look onto any page and you're looking at human voices, male and female, you're looking at the human condition, you're looking at worlds gone wrong, you're looking at power and victory and defeat."
Translators take up a text like the Aeneid for an army of reasons. For Sarah Ruden, it began as a practical decision. For Stanley Lombardo, Virgil represented the logical next step in retracing the literary journey from Homer to Dante. (The Inferno is Lombardo's current project.) For publishers, however, the decision to take on the Aeneid is more and more perilous. How many additional versions does the world need?
"It's fair to say that it gets more difficult to do this the more translations are published," says Brian Rak, Lombardo's editor at Hackett. Most Aeneid translations are intended to work their way into the undergraduate curriculum, but, like Aeneas, they have to fight to earn their place.
In Rak's experience, an edition becomes entrenched for a while as the classroom favorite, "and it's difficult to even think of another translation that could compete with it," he says. "But along comes a new translation, and people want to have a look at it."
Every new translation offers the tantalizing possibility that it will strike closer to the thrill and beauty of the original than any has before. "The sorrow with any translation," Lombardo says, "is that you're never really quite there. You may be someplace almost as good."
Behind the hope is a never-ending struggle to crack the code of language. "I know the Latin of a particular passage once I've worked on it," says Ferry. "Then I start my whole life over again."
"Great works of literature do come from God," Ruden says. "They are so miraculous, you can't figure out how a human being could have pulled off something like this."
A translator must strive to see the work in its own terms, she believes, while knowing that such a goal will always be just out of reach. "But it's something that you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, until you pass out from exhaustion. You have to keep up hope for an impossible thing. Again, it comes back to religion."
No wonder the ancient poets always began their work with an invocation of the muse.
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