After his two superb (and best selling) translations of Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996), Robert Fagles has just published a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Paul Friedrich introduced many generations of his students (including me) at the University of Chicago to Fagles’ wonderful translations, which as Fagles himself says aren’t literal or literary. Still, Fagles has produced some wonderful poetry, which makes us all look forward to partaking this new epic feast.
New York Times has a story on Fagles’ new Aeneid. There are two paragraphs which caught my attention. Speaking about the text, Fagles says:
The great challenge, he said, was to master the two voices of “The Aeneid”: the stately public voice, the one that critics of Virgil used to say was just propaganda for Augustus, and the private voice of Aeneas’s personal sorrow.
“The modern tendency is to hear one voice to the exclusion of the other,” he explained. “We generally think of the public voice as the voice of betrayal, and the private voice as the only place where truth resides. But the truth in Virgil is more complicated than that, and you need to hear both.”
Fagles also talked about the contemporary relevance of Aeneid:
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.”
Time to read Aeneid again.
Post a Comment