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.