Virgil, The Aeneid. Translated from the Latin of Virgil (70-19 BC) by W.F. Jackson Knight. Penguin Classics, 1964 (first published 1956), 361pp.
As Knight says in his introduction to this prose translation of Virgil’s epic, unfinished poem, The Aeneid, it is a ‘legendary narrative’ about ‘the imagined origin of the Roman nation in times long before the foundation of Rome itself’. According to legend some Romans could trace their origins back to the Trojans who escaped the sack of their city by the Greeks (as told in The Odyssey and The Iliad, about which I posted recently, having just seen the Nolan film).
The Trojan prince Aeneas is said to have fled Troy and sailed with a group of others to the west coast of Italy, experiencing various trials, setbacks and adventures on the way. In this sense it resembles The Odyssey, and echoes many of the incidents endured by Odysseus/Ulysses in those Greek epics. Aeneas and his compatriots settled there, having fought a bloody war with jealous locals, and their descendants are later said to have played a part in the founding of Rome. So it’s a sort of origin story, as well as another adventure/voyage/quest narrative.
One of the most striking parallels with the adventures of Odysseus on his homeward journey relates Aeneas’ romantic idyll with Dido, Queen of Carthage (in Odysseus’ case it was Calypso). Purcell’s beautiful lament of Dido from his 1688 opera, which takes place when she’s abandoned by Aeneas, who’d been summoned by the gods to resume his quest, is a haunting companion to the depiction of her grief, anger and despondency as related in The Aeneid. The Trojan hero doesn’t cover himself in glory here, and she’s still understandably furious with him when he later encounters her shade in the underworld (another parallel scene with the one in The Odyssey).
My Latin is pretty rudimentary, and I don’t have a copy of Virgil’s original to consult, so I can’t get into an Emily Wilson kind of analysis of Knight’s prose translation. All I can do is comment on some aspects of it as an English version.
Knight favours an uneasy blend of faux-archaic and lofty ‘literary’ style with occasional more readable, smooth-flowing vernacular. But mostly it’s the former. Here’s an example chosen at random; it’s from Book 6, ‘The Visit to the Underworld’.
From this place starts the road which leads to Tartarean Acheron. There in mud and murk seethes the Abyss…[Then there’s a description of Charon, the underworld’s ferryman] a ragged figure, filthy, repulsive, with white hair copious and unkempt covering his chin…
Most of that isn’t too clunky, but why those foregrounded inversions and unnatural word order? ‘White hair copious’ just sounds like a literal translation from a language which doesn’t have the same adjective-precedes-the-noun sort of structure as English. I know that Latin, as an inflected language, has very different structures and word order from ours, and Knight is no doubt trying to convey some of the high style of the original. But as Wilson says in her essays reviewed here last time, it’s still necessary to write well when translating, to strive to produce an English text that’s enjoyable to read.
It’s a difficult feat to pull off, and I don’t mean to be too hard on Knight; but I’d be interested to hear if anyone knows of a more recent translation that works better.
Great post, Simon! I’ve had a very pleasant hour or so, poking around among my poetry books and clicking on the internet, looking at various classical things. It’s so great to see something like renewed interest in these topics; I’m sure it’s due to Nolan’s movie (one of my nephews, who’s never read a myth in his life, recently told me how much he loved it!) and perhaps, in some circles at least, to the controversy stirred up by Wilson’s criticism of it. In these dark times, even the faintest glimmering that the approaching barbarism might not prevail is so very welcome, n’est-ce pas?
In response to your specific question I have Robert Fagles’ translation of the Aeneid, which I think is generally well regarded by most, despite a few cavils by the purists. It’s free verse (I think; not much of an expert here), moves quickly & is very readable (quite different from the translations I read back in the day, which were rather stiff & self-consciously “epic”). I have a really beautiful Viking edition, with an introduction by Bernard Knox, translator’s post script and lots of supporting material (maps, notes, glossary and so on). Even better, I also have Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Book VI. It’s really beautiful and especially moving when you realize that Heaney’s account of the visit to the underworld was one of the last works he completed before his death. As a matter of fact, this might be might be my afternoon read, out on the lanai with a nice glass of something chilly & white (it’s still quite warm down here in ruby-red Florida), accompanied by a cat or two!
Thanks – I’ll look out for that translation. And the Heaney.
I read Cecil Day Lewis’s translation in The Oxford World’s Classics, here’s a sample:
‘From here is the road that leads to the dismal waters of Acheron. Here a whirlpool boils with mud and immense swirlings of water, spouting up all the slimy sand of Cocytus. A dreadful ferryman looks after the river crossing (and then the description of Charon)
I found it very comfortable to read, and hope this is useful.
That certainly reads more naturally, it seems to me, than Knights’ stiff version. Thanks for tracking down that particular passage – interesting to compare the two versions.
I like Robert Fagles’ translations. I have his Odyssey, Iliad and Aeneas and I think his Latin is as good as his Greek.
As an aside, when my (adult attempt at learning) Latin was good enough to attempt translating from the original, we began with Dido and Aeneas, and learned how the accent on the words can put a different slant on their meaning in Latin poetry (where like any other kind of poetry the reader has to fill the blanks with matters unspoken because of the demands of writing to fit the form and because the poet wants to express things in a literary (i.e. opaque) way. But since my spoken Latin has always had the accents in the wrong place, I found the whole business incomprehensible. I still reckon I could translate Tacitus but I’ve given up on the poets.
That’s another vote for Fagles – thanks, Lisa. Your point about the difficulty in translating verse is similar to some of E Wilson’s analysis. Any attempt to render such texts will involve compromise and transformation. And there will be cultural and other references embedded in the original that may be lost in translation – EW gives the example of ‘oak tree’, which for the Ancient Greek audience would have conveyed deep spiritual significance that would be missed by most modern readers, unless the translator explained and brought out the significance- and of course that leads to a kind of exegesis, not just straight translation.