They also led, a-glisten with Rutulian blood.’
His cheeks torn by his nails at times he fell,įull-length, flinging himself to earth. Fitzgerald illuminates the Latin with rhetorical grandeur, but needs five lines to Virgil’s four and sacrifices architectural precision:Īnd misery, his breast stung by his blows, Each line is self-contained and paints a compelling picture. Virgil’s writing is rhythmical and precise. Sternitur et toto proiectus corpore terrae.ĭucunt et Rutulo perfusos sanguine currus. Pectora nunc foedans pugnis, nunc unguibus ora, A passage in 11.85-88 illustrates the differing treatments: Pacy and often colloquial, with occasional italics for emphasis, much of it reads like prose. Ruden’s poetry is ‘more spare and muscular with the same number of lines as the original Latin’.ī.’s new translation has been praised by an American professor as ‘probably the best version of the Aeneid in modern English’. Fitzgerald draws out the nuances of the Latin at greater length. She particularly praised Robert Fitzgerald (1981) and Sarah Ruden (2008), who both use a modernised iambic pentameter with heightened language. In our review of Virgil and his Translators (14 March 2019), we noted Susanna Braund’s assessment of recent translations of the Aeneid. Above all, they require a poetic instinct. Successful translations of poetry need more than linguistic accuracy and metrical proficiency. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Spring 2018 on Apby Kelly.Profile Books (2020) h/b 400pp £16.99 (ISBN 9781788162678)
Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. In Ferry’s version, there’s a notable balance of an eloquent sensibility and a narrative simplicity-both of which Virgil’s epic demands, often simultaneously. Passages both of warfare and human suffering abound in The Aeneid, as they do in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or trying to go nor can we get there where-Įver where might be, and who knows who it is Won’t tell wherever we are nor where we’re going Our languid eyelids close and in their dream It’s as in sleep, in the quiet of the night, The tone of his work feels carefully accomplished, as when he describes the bewilderment of Turnus as he is pursued by Aeneas to his death:
AENEID FITZGERALD TRANSLATION ONLINE FULL
Through the aloof moon’s friendly stillnessesįerry’s “under the silent / Stillness of the moon,” by contrast, falls a bit short in phrasing the total beauty of Virgil’s “per amica silentia lunae,” but his translation often has a measured eloquence that can be full of feeling:Īurora rose, spreading her pitying light,Īnd with it bringing back to sight the laborsĪnd what has been done to them and what they must doįerry’s version gains by its simplicity of language, especially as The Aeneid offers “a quick succession of events.” Where another prominent Virgil translator, Robert Fagles, gives us “One hope saves the defeated: they know they can’t be saved” in his 2006 version, Ferry conveys thoughtfully and simply that the defeated are “clarified by despair.” In Book II’s recounting of the fall of Troy, the merit of Ferry’s simplicity is palpable the narration flows but retains a literary quality.
During passages of warfare, Virgil even tends to be exquisitely delicate, as can be seen in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation: The tone of Virgil’s poem is frequently elegiac. Every new translation holds its mirror up to the original, so we might ask: by what features might a reader in English come to know Virgil in Ferry’s version? In a poem in his 2012 collection Bewilderment, David Ferry works with a letter in which Goethe says, “To live / Long is to outlive many.” Ferry’s poem is about “The death that lives in the intention of things / To have a meaning of some sort or other.” The imagery of loss and yearning in the work of this mature master suggests how suited he is to appreciate that same profoundly mournful quality in Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid.
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