We are never led to believe in the Odyssey, for instance, that the world will be forever changed if Odysseus never makes it safely home. And because it is a story about how to live, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Unlike the Iliad, the Aeneid is not a story about a single soldier’s wrath. And Ferry’s work captures how integral this is to the story. The Latin burials are hasty, scattered, and done “without ceremony or honor.” The scene is a great contrast to an earlier one from Book Nine when, in the heat of the same battle, the Latin soldier Numanus taunts the Trojans for their love of ceremony and dance: “You’re not Phrygian men, you’re Phrygian women.”īut the ceremony and the refinement of the Trojans is what makes them admirable. The Trojan burials are conducted with lavish rituals and ceremony. In Ferry’s words, the entire poem is about “the accounting of what men have done and what has been done to them and what they must do to mourn.” He points to a scene from Book Eleven, beautifully translated, where after a raging battle both the Trojans and the enemy Latins are burying their dead. Eliot conceded that Homer was certainly the better poet, and that Rome never lived up to Virgil’s romantic vision, but despite that he argued that the Aeneid still holds a special place in the Western canon because of Virgil’s vision of a world of dignity and order. The “it” of the Aeneid is not proficiency in translation or prose (or not only that), but the message at the heart of the work.
But David Ferry’s new translation from the University of Chicago Press transported me back to what it was like reading it for the first time.įrom the first pages of the introduction, Ferry establishes that he gets it, understands what Virgil is trying to accomplish. I have re-read the Aeneid many times and in many different translations since then. Ironically, I have Schuler to thank for what faith I still have. Over the course of a semester we read Robert Fagles’s translation of the Aeneid and my soul was hooked. But he loved his subject and he made his students love it. Schuler was an atheist, a liberal, and a college professor: three things I had been told to mistrust. I then found myself at age eighteen in Professor Charlie Schuler’s Latin class at the local community college. In the midst of this I managed to get my G.E.D. Within five years it would almost vanish completely. The seemingly sturdy community of family and faith that I grew up in had begun to disintegrate. Therecession devastated our city’s economy. I worked through my teenage years and never attended high school. That was certainly true of my first encounter with the epic at age eighteen. Lewis once said of Virgil’s Aeneid that “No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent.”
0 kommentar(er)
