The Aeneid

...In addition to its exotic charm, Greek literature has a liveliness and an immediacy that allow it, even when read in translation, to delight and move us...

...The Romans, by contrast, valued gravitas, seriousness of purpose...

...The author of Stepping Over, a former Foreign Service officer and Peace Corps director in Mauritania, has circled the globe in search of exemplars...

...And now what of Fitzgerald's translation...

...Such virtues, he complained, could not be appreciated by an age espousing "extreme toleration of all self-expression, however abnormal or pathologic...

...Fitzgerald does give us a sense of what Dryden meant when he said, in regard to one of his favorite lines "amongst a thousand others," that "For my part, I am lost in the admiration of it: I contemn the world when I think on it, and myself when I translate it...

...The Aeneid thus celebrates Roman achievements...

...As Aeneas concludes the narration of this deed, he steps back from the immediate action to reflect on the vanity of human pride...

...But since the epic is not currently a thriving genre of poetry in America, the question of how Virgil would have written if he were living among us, with a grant from NEH, becomes somewhat perplexing...

...The Fitzgerald translation, then, is inappropriate for careful study of the Aeneid (a task for which one really should learn Latin...

...Likewise, most of the teenage prostitutes McConnell interviewed in Los Angeles were latchkey children from broken homes, starved for affection and attention from older people...

...Though I affected shock, I was not surprised, for the Aeneid is likely to be one of those books we all keep meaning to read each summer, along with War and Peace, Paradise Lost, and other weighty texts that never seem to fit into the beach bag of good intentions...

...Tantae molis erat--"so hard and huge/A task it was to found the Roman people" (Fitzgerald's rendition): but was it worthwhile...

...His travels took him, in sequence, to Indiana, Iran, Greece, California, Tulsa, Texas, Italy, back to California, Tennessee, and finally, to Washington, D.C...

...Fitzgerald's taste and restraint in using this approach make him succeed where less judicious men have failed...

...The American love of the underdog and outsider makes it difficult for us to side wholeheartedly with the victors in any battle...

...In saying this I do not mean to trivialize it, for it is extraordinarily interesting and revealing, although in a very unsystematic way...

...But Mandelbaum's awkward line divisions detract from the power of the words, and the increased accuracy is more than offset by the loss of verbal compression...

...I have in mind the hapless nineteenth-century translator of Homer whom Matthew Arnold ridiculed for writing lines like "Between the outwork of thy teeth what word hath split...

...The Aeneid, in contrast, although it declares its vast debt to Homer in its first words, "Arms and a man," presents a new heroic ethic...

...the truth, alas, is that most of them are easily recognizable, ordinary, even banal...

...The result is a rather discursive, uneven book, which shifts uneasily back and forth between pop-sociology and poppsychology...

...McConnell originally set for himself the task of finding some common threads to iink his people beyond their ideological or national differences...

...But Fitzgerald's English does not faithfully reproduce either repetition...

...It was only after he was discharged under less than honorable conditions from the Navy (for drug use and also trafficking) that--having been summarily rejected by his father--he assumed his present "radical" persona...

...Fitzgerald renders this: That was the end Of Priam's age, the doom that took him off, with Troy in flames before his eyes, his towers Headlong fallen--he that in other days Had ruled in pride so many lands and peoples, The power of Asia...

...Such words appear just often enough to remind the reader of the antiquity and dignity of the poetry...

...The phenomenon is worldwide, although apparently evident largely in Western countries, where a combination of abundance and freedom has produced precisely the opposite effects anticipated by social theorists a generation or two ago...

...Now the publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by Robert Fitzgerald has provided the classicist's wife, and others like her, with an ideal opportunity to read Virgil's poem...

...In each of these places he found a different story--a young cousin "burned out" by drugs...

...the quintessential Bay Area radical, an embittered veteran of Vietnam...

...The weightiness that characterizes Roman literary efforts seems to make them particularly ill-suited to current tastes...

...in the non-Western world, the clash of traditional values with modernity, itself often a "foreign" import...

...likewise the description of Aeneas' vain attempt to embrace the shade of his father echoes precisely his The National League of Families, 1608 K St...

...The human desire for individual fame had to be redirected towards national glory...

...Perhaps the most important contribution McConnell makes is to liberate our analysis of social disaffection at least partially from the quasiMarxist thralldom in which it has languished for the past half-century or so...

...One example must suffice...

...Fitzgerald's departures from the text are always slight, and because of the difficulty of translating Virgilian Latin they seem less intrusive than the licenses he takes in his popular versions of the Iliad and Odyssey...

...This implies the need for constant retranslation of great works of poetry...

...Such sloppiness belies the meticulously conceived structure of the poem...

...N.W., Washington, D.C 20006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 33 attempt to embrace the shade of his wife earlier in the poem...

...This is particularly true of the Americans, who after all function in a society so jaded by sensation that by now nothing is capable of shocking it...

...fanatical Islamic fundamentalists living only to overthrow the Shah...

...Can any translator hope to convey the Aeneid's complex and elusive layers of meaning, expressed in vivid sounds and memorable images...

...But at times there is no direct relationship between family background and later marginality...

...Mandelbaum's poetry often reads like prose arbitrarily divided into lines of verse, whereas in reading Fitzgerald one can never escape the sense that one is reading an epic poem...

...Although he is not as literal a translator as Allen Mandelbaum, whose version currently holds sway in college humanities courses, his slightly unexpected turns of phrase better convey the strength and beauty of Virgil's hexameters...

...Instead of holding up that allpurpose abstraction "society" to blame, McConnell focuses his analysis at the micro-level of personal relationships...

...By means of minor departures from the Latin text Fitzgerald often preserves poetic devices like alliteration, and generally retains the flavor of the epic better than the slower and limper phrases of Mandelbaum...

...In telling of Aeneas' struggle to found a new city from the seeds of an older world, Virgil shows us the virtues requisite to a ruling people...

...For many modern exegetes Aeneas has become an unfeeling villain rather than a noble exemplar of fortitude, and Virgil a disillusioned opponent of the Augustan regime rather than its poet laureate...

...If past generations of scholars were deaf to what a recent critic has called the "private voice" of the Aeneid, in the last twenty years the mainstream of Virgilian interpretation in America has gone to the opposite extreme...

...One of the themes of the poem is duty to family and gods, expressed repeatedly by the noun pietas and Aeneas' epithet pigs...

...The challenge to the translator is thus to reproduce the power and precision of Latin expression while remaining faithful to the meaning of the text...

...Grandeur has not been stylish for some time now, and it does not seem to be one of the new ideas for the eighties either...

...a young man who murdered his mother while under the influence of drugs...

...And yet the neglect of the Aeneid is a pity, because the poem has much to say to the citizens of a powerful nation...

...Again and again Aeneas is forced to relinquish beloved people and places and to witness the death of brave young warriors...

...Thus, given a choice between "the glory that was Greece" and "the grandeur that was Rome," most will choose the glory...

...Even the future glory of his progeny cannot fully repay him for his sorrows...

...Paradoxically, had Virgil's prediction been less accurate and Rome less successful, we might today be more prepared to admire the hero of his epic...

...Take McConnell's cousin Karen, permanently invalided out of the drug wars of the 1960s: She had a healthy, untroubled childhood...

...In Latin, unlike English, he continues, "the sentence fits together like a piece of polished machinery...

...He carries a shield arrayed with scenes of "the fame and destinies of his descendants," but, as Virgil remarks, Aeneas does not know what these pictures mean...

...And in this reluctance we do no injustice to the poet of the Aeneid, who predicts the transformation of a defeated people, the Trojans, into the "lords of the world...

...Fitzgerald, on the other hand, has added the word "distant" and failed to translate the Latin words for "corpse" and "torn from his shoulders...

...She may carry this handsome volume to any gathering of literati and deflect potential embarrassment with a modest smile: "Oh, I'm just comparing it with the Dryden translation...

...Yet in so doing he has eloquently captured the concise pathos of our final glimpse of Priam...

...Oddly enough, the most unusual and surely the most repugnant personalities to make an appearance--the Islamic radicals McConnell met in Iran--seem the most rational in terms of time and place: Unlike their Western counterparts, they, at least, have a clear idea of what they want, and by all accounts, are willing to pay for it...

...but if the emperor Augustus "commissioned" it, this poem can scarcely be what he had in mind...

...Why the struggle to avoid the repetition Virgil has intended...

...On the distant shore The vast trunk headless lies without a n a n l e . Mandelbaum, by contrast, is more faithful to the final line and a half of the Latin: Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk, his head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a name...

...For example, the Vietnam veteran turns out to be a young man perpetually in searcla of parental approval...

...mission, stated in a famous passage in Book Six: "To pacify, to impose the rule of law,/To spare the conquered, battle down the proud...

...in Western Europe, identity...

...In Fitzgerald's rendition, pigs Aeneas is variously "devout," "grave," "dutybound," "god-fearing," "dedicated," "zealous," or "the man of honor...

...teenage runaways who sell their bodies on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles...

...Already in 1927 an American scholar had occasion to lament the devaluation among his contemporaries of Aeneas' "sterner, more austere, and less picturesque virtues of self-control and devotion to ideas of rectitude...

...Even though more of us have studied Latin than Greek, we are far more likely to dip into Homer or Sophocles, when in search of ancient wisdom, than Virgil...

...In the United States it is drugs...

...The author tries to sort these pheqomena out with the aid of clinical psychology, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not...

...Her parents had seen that she was immunized against not only polio, but also against other threatening childhood ill34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984...

...For example, the penultimate line of the epic contains a verbal reminiscence of the first appearance of Aeneas in the poem...

...Italian Maoists who have moved along the peripheries of urban guerrilla warfare...

...a follower of Jim Jones who perished with hundreds of others by drinking cyanide in backwoods Guyana...

...The Romans in that stern antiquity considered such a method weak and unworthy...

...As Winston Churchill, who confessed himself unable to learn Latin despite years of schooling, observes in his autobiography: "In a sensible language like English important words are connected and related to one another by other little words...

...Among the most moving episodes in the Aeneid is the death of the aged King Priam, impiously slain at the altar before the eyes of his family by the savage son of Achilles...

...John Dryden, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid, writes that his aim was "to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age...

...Fitzgerald's solution is to write in blank verse, rendered more formal by the capitalization of each 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 line, and to incorporate archaic and unusual vocabulary: rondure, kirtled, godling, lucent, leafage, coracle, jargoning, windrows, scabrous...

...The fierce heroes of the Homeric world could have no part in the Roman Susan Scheinberg is assistant professor o f classical studies at Brandeis University...

...Or is the Aeneid so little read that the classicist's wife need feel no embarrassment...

...For one of the remarkable features of the epic is its melancholy insistence on the personal costs of imperial glory...

...It is, however, probably the best choice available, both for first-time readers and for those who wish a fresh presentation of the poem...

...T h i s book is about a quiet crisis in our civilization--the disaffection and dislocation of many of its young people...

...As with other literary masterpieces, no age can resist using the Aeneid as a mirror of its own concerns...

...and finally, a leader of the "new" Ku Klux Klan...

...the self-indulgent radicals of the German Left...

...But some flaws do mar his impressive accomplishment...

...Have times changed...

...It is therefore possible to read the Fitzgerald translation without fully grasping the centrality of this theme...

...Sometimes this works very well...

...And so the Aeneid ends with the death of Aeneas' Italian opponent Turnus, the closest approximation in Virgil to a Homeric hero...

...This free approach to translating hinders the reader's ability to trace the connections carefully mapped out by the poet...

...Why is this...

...The finest quality of Fitzgerald's translation, in fact, is its dignity...

...The extraordinarily compact nature of the Latin language compounds the problem...

...Such an attitude was fostered by the fashion of debunking heroes, as well as more specific opposition to the Vietnam war in academic circles, but it is interesting to note that it is not entirely new...

...In this he did not wholly succeed, but certain themes do habitually recur...

...Every phrase can be tensely charged with meaning...

...It would be comforting to report that these people are as exotic as their appellations make them sound...

...Homer's epics tell the story of brilliant, proud warriors seeking personal honor and renown...