![]() ![]() Avoiding Dryden, as translators are tempted to do, is bound to take one further from the Latin. Dryden’s beginning has the advantage of a word-for-word metaphrase of the Virgil-“Arma virumque cano”-and in the same rhythm too. Its opening, “Arms, and the man I sing,” is itself a famous quotation, as the title of Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Arms and the Boy” suggests. And Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid (1697) remains an unmatched achievement. The Earl of Surrey invented blank verse-unrhymed iambic pentameter-for his translation of books 2 and 4 in the mid-1550s. The Aeneid holds a special place in the history of English translation. The Aeneid seems to be something major translators turn to only when they have run out of Homer or Dante and still need something meaty to get their chops into. The shopworn copy of blurbers, “long-awaited,” leans, for once, in the direction of understatement. Robert Fagles, after his acclaimed translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, has now turned his attention to this more problematic work. Robert Fitzgerald’s elegant rendition of The Aeneid, the standard text, has been the reigning champion for more than 20 years and can buy a drink without getting carded. If that is so, we are in need of a new Aeneid. Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “every generation needs a new revolution” has long been adopted by translators it is a commonplace that every generation needs a new Homer, a new Virgil, a new Dante. ![]() ![]() The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles, Viking, $40 ![]()
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