and they hung their votive clothes in thanks for rescue.
But the Trojans—no exceptions, hallowed tree that it was—
chopped down its trunk to clear the spot for combat.
Now here the spear of Aeneas had stuck, borne home
by its hurling force, and the tough roots held it fast.
He bent down over it, trying to wrench the iron loose and
track with a spear the kill he could not catch on foot.
Turnus, truly beside himself with terror—“Faunus!”
he cried, “I beg you, pity me! You, dear Earth,
hold fast to that spear! If I have always kept
your rites—a far cry from Aeneas’ men
who stain your rites with war.”
So he appealed,
calling out for the god’s help, and not for nothing.
Aeneas struggled long, wasting time on the tough stump,
no power of his could loose the timber’s stubborn bite.
As he bravely heaves and hauls, the goddess Juturna,
changing back again to the charioteer Metiscus,
rushes in and returns her brother’s sword to Turnus.
But Venus, incensed that the nymph has had her brazen way,
steps up and plucks Aeneas’ spear from the clinging root.
So standing tall, with their arms and fighting hearts refreshed—
one who trusted all to his sword, the other looming fiercely
with his spear—confronting each other, both men breathless,
brace for the war-god’s fray.
Now at the same moment
Jove, the king of mighty Olympus, turns to Juno,
gazing down on the war from her golden cloud, and says:
“Where will it end, my queen? What is left at the last?
Aeneas the hero, god of the land: you know yourself,
you confess you know that he is heaven bound,
his fate will raise Aeneas to the stars.
What are you plotting? What hope can make you
cling to the chilly clouds? So, was it right
for a mortal hand to wound, to mortify a god?
Right to restore that mislaid sword to Turnus—
for without your power what could Juturna do?—
and lend the defeated strength? Have done at last.
Bow to my appeals. Don’t let your corrosive grief
devour you in silence, or let your dire concerns come
pouring from your sweet lips and plaguing me forever.
We have reached the limit. To harass the Trojans
over land and sea, to ignite an unspeakable war,
degrade a royal house and blend the wedding hymn
with the dirge of grief: all that lay in your power.
But go no further. I forbid you now.”
Jove said no more.
And so, with head bent low, Saturn’s daughter replied:
“Because I have known your will so well, great Jove,
against my own I deserted Turnus and the earth.
Or else you would never see me now, alone
on a windswept throne enduring right and wrong.
No, wrapped in flames I would be up on the front lines,
dragging the Trojan into mortal combat. Juturna?
I was the one, I admit, who spurred her on
to help her embattled brother, true, and blessed
whatever greater daring it took to save his life,
but never to shower arrows, never tense the bow.
I swear by the unappeasable fountainhead of the Styx,
the one dread oath decreed for the gods on high.
“So,
now I yield, Juno yields, and I leave this war I loathe.
But this—and there is no law of Fate to stop it now—
this I beg for Latium, for the glory of your people.
When, soon, they join in their happy wedding-bonds—
and wedded let them be—in pacts of peace at last,
never command the Latins, here on native soil,
to exchange their age-old name,
to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer,
alter their language, change their style of dress.
Let Latium endure. Let Alban kings hold sway for all time.
Let Roman stock grow strong with Italian strength.
Troy has fallen—and fallen let her stay—
with the very name of Troy!”
Smiling down,
the creator of man and the wide world returned:
“Now there’s my sister. Saturn’s second child—
such tides of rage go churning through your heart.
Come, relax your anger. It started all for nothing.
I grant your wish. I surrender. Freely, gladly too.
Latium’s sons will retain their fathers’ words and ways.
Their name till now is the name that shall endure.
Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside.
And I will add the rites and the forms of worship,
and make them Latins all, who speak one Latin tongue.
Mixed with Ausonian blood, one race will spring from them,
and you will see them outstrip all men, outstrip all gods
in reverence. No nation on earth will match the honors
they shower down on you.”
Juno nodded assent to this,
her spirit reversed to joy. She departs the sky
and leaves her cloud behind.
His task accomplished,
the Father turned his mind to another matter, set
to dismiss Juturna from her brother’s battles.
They say there are twin Curses called the Furies . . .
Night had born them once in the dead of darkness,
one and the same spawn, and birthed infernal Megaera,
wreathing all their heads with coiled serpents,
fitting them out with wings that race the wind.
They hover at Jove’s throne, crouch at his gates
to serve that savage king
and whet the fears of afflicted men whenever
the king of gods lets loose horrific deaths and plagues
or panics towns that deserve the scourge of war.
Jove sped one of them down the sky, commanding:
“Cross Juturna’s path as a wicked omen!”
Down she swoops, hurled to earth by a whirlwind,
swift as a darting arrow whipped from a bowstring
through the clouds, a shaft armed by a Parthian,
tipped with deadly poison, shot by a Parthian
or a Cretan archer—well past any cure—
hissing on unseen through the rushing dark.
So raced this daughter of Night and sped to earth.
Soon as she spots the Trojan ranks and Turnus’ lines
she quickly shrinks into that small bird that often,
hunched at dusk on deserted tombs and rooftops, sings
its ominous song in shadows late at night. Shrunken so,
the demon flutters over and over again in Turnus’ face,
screeching, drumming his shield with its whirring wings.
An eerie numbness unnerved him head to toe with dread,
his hackles bristled in horror, voice choked in his throat.
Recognizing the Fury’s ruffling wings at a distance,
wretched Juturna tears her hair, nails clawing her face,
fists beating her breast, and cries to her brother:
“How, Turnus, how can your sister help you now?
What’s left for me now, after all I have endured?
What skill do I have to lengthen out your life?
How can I fight against this dreadful omen?
At last, at last I leave the field of battle.
Afraid as I am, now frighten me no more,
you obscene birds of night! Too well I know
the beat of your wings, the drumb
eat of doom.
Nor do the proud commands of Jove escape me now,
our great, warm-hearted Jove. Are these his wages
for taking my virginity? Why did he grant me life
eternal—rob me of our one privilege, death?
Then, for a fact, I now could end this agony,
keep my brother company down among the shades.
Doomed to live forever? Without you, my brother,
what do I have still mine that’s sweet to taste?
If only the earth gaped deep enough to take me down,
to plunge this goddess into the depths of hell!”
With that,
shrouding her head with a gray-green veil and moaning low,
down to her own stream’s bed the goddess sank away.
All hot pursuit, Aeneas brandishes high his spear,
that tree of a spear, and shouts from a savage heart:
“More delay! Why now? Still in retreat, Turnus, why?
This is no foot-race. It’s savagery, swordplay cut-and-thrust!
Change yourself into any shape you please, call up
whatever courage or skill you still have left.
Pray to wing your way to the starry sky
or bury yourself in the earth’s deep pits!”
Turnus shakes his head: “I don’t fear you,
you and your blazing threats, my fierce friend.
It’s the gods that frighten me—Jove, my mortal foe.”
No more words. Glancing around he spots a huge rock,
huge, ages old, and lying out in the field by chance,
placed as a boundary stone to settle border wars.
A dozen picked men could barely shoulder it up, men
of such physique as the earth brings forth these days,
but he wrenched it up, hands trembling, tried to heave it
right at Aeneas, Turnus stretching to full height, the hero
at speed, at peak strength. Yet he’s losing touch with himself,
racing, hoisting that massive rock in his hands and hurling,
true, but his knees buckle, blood’s like ice in his veins
and the rock he flings through the air, plummeting under
its own weight, cannot cover the space between them,
cannot strike full force . . .
Just as in dreams
when the nightly spell of sleep falls heavy on our eyes
and we seem entranced by longing to keep on racing on,
no use, in the midst of one last burst of speed
we sink down, consumed, our tongue won’t work,
and tried and true, the power that filled our body
fails—we strain but the voice and words won’t follow.
So with Turnus. Wherever he fought to force his way,
no luck, the merciless Fury blocks his efforts.
A swirl of thoughts goes racing through his mind,
he glances toward his own Rutulians and their town,
he hangs back in dread, he quakes at death—it’s here.
Where can he run? How can he strike out at the enemy?
Where’s his chariot? His charioteer, his sister? Vanished.
As he hangs back, the fatal spear of Aeneas streaks on—
spotting a lucky opening he had flung from a distance,
all his might and main. Rocks heaved by a catapult
pounding city ramparts never storm so loudly, never
such a shattering bolt of thunder crashing forth.
Like a black whirlwind churning on, that spear
flies on with its weight of iron death to pierce
the breastplate’s lower edge and the outmost rim
of the round shield with its seven plies and right
at the thick of Turnus’ thigh it whizzes through,
it strikes home and the blow drops great Turnus
down to the ground, battered down on his bent knees.
The Rutulians spring up with a groan and the hillsides
round groan back and the tall groves far and wide
resound with the long-drawn moan.
Turnus lowered
his eyes and reached with his right hand and begged,
a suppliant: “I deserve it all. No mercy, please,”
Turnus pleaded. “Seize your moment now. Or if
some care for a parent’s grief can touch you still,
I pray you—you had such a father, in old Anchises—
pity Daunus in his old age and send me back
to my own people, or if you would prefer,
send them my dead body stripped of life. Here,
the victor and vanquished, I stretch my hands to you,
so the men of Latium have seen me in defeat.
Lavinia is your bride.
Go no further down the road of hatred.”
Aeneas, ferocious in armor, stood there, still,
shifting his gaze, and held his sword-arm back,
holding himself back too as Turnus’ words began
to sway him more and more . . . when all at once
he caught sight of the fateful sword-belt of Pallas,
swept over Turnus’ shoulder, gleaming with shining studs
Aeneas knew by heart. Young Pallas, whom Turnus had overpowered,
taken down with a wound, and now his shoulder flaunted
his enemy’s battle-emblem like a trophy. Aeneas,
soon as his eyes drank in that plunder—keepsake
of his own savage grief—flaring up in fury,
terrible in his rage, he cries: “Decked in the spoils
you stripped from one I loved—escape my clutches? Never—
Pallas strikes this blow, Pallas sacrifices you now,
makes you pay the price with your own guilty blood!”
In the same breath, blazing with wrath he plants
his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart.
Turnus’ limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below.
NOTES
TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT
1
“Homer makes us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers.” So writes Alexander Pope in his preface to the Iliad, and so the great translator of Homer, no doubt unwittingly, sets at odds the claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as we would call them now, or as C. S. Lewis calls their two protagonists, the Primary and the Secondary Epics. Much in their opposition rings true, especially with regard to Homer. Surely his work should impress us, audibly and irresistibly, as a performance and even in part a public, musical event. Homer makes us hearers indeed, and that may be a major source of his speed, directness, and simplicity, and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Matthew Arnold praised in recommending Homer, well more than a century after Pope, to the Victorian era and beyond. And yet Pope’s contrast may be too extreme, and his characterization of Virgil, beyond the fact that Virgil was a writer, may be open to question. For according to Suetonius’ “Life” of the poet, as the Introduction makes abundantly clear, Virgil was hardly a stranger to recitation. He was a remarkably effective reciter at that, especially when he read his work aloud in the presence of Augustus Caesar and Octavia, his sister.
And so, to turn to the translator, who writes at a far remove from Virgil in every way, I have tried to lend my work a performative cast as well. My approach to the Aeneid, in other words, resembles the one I took in rendering the Iliad and the Odyssey. With the Aeneid, however, I have aimed for certain more literary effects—occasional pauses for second thoughts, phrases that resonate a few ways at once—that writing, more than singing, will allow. And I have tried to modulate my voice a little further than I did with Homer, making it somewhat more intimate for Virgil, particularly for his introspective, often heartrending moments, and yet at the same time more formal too, for his famous, lapidary lines. In other words, at every step I have seen how impo
ssible it is to translate Virgil, especially his unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility (as Brooke Holmes suggests), of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity, and countless other features too. To cite only one, my voice is willing, if less than able, to sound “a thin wisp of a cry” (6.571), like that of the Greek dead in hell, for Virgil’s great crescendos of battle that dominate the last four books.
Yet my versions of all three poems, different as those versions may be, share a common impulse. Again I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no-man’s-land, if I can help it) between the features of an ancient author and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-by-line translation, my version of the Aeneid is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Virgil’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he writes as possible—nor so “literary,” in the stilted, bookish sense, as to brake his forward motion once too often. For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more “literary,” too little Latin. I have tried to find a cross between the two: a modern English Virgil.
Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do, or worse, the principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). Yet a few words of explanation seem in order, some further thoughts about “the Virgilian performance,” at least as I understand it, and how it may condition my translation. I return to what many would observe, that, short of reciting in public, even our private acts of reading, and especially the Romans’ private acts of reading, have by nature a dramatic side as well. As W. A. Camps reminds us, drawing from Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician, Latin education in the first century A.D. “laid a particular emphasis on the element of sound in style,” and “sensitivity to this was general in a world in which the normal way of reading to oneself was to read aloud” (note p. 67). Virgil, to put it in Pope’s terms, may write in order to “leave us readers,” yet his writing “makes us hearers” too, reading alone and yet aloud, and listening for the writer’s own distinctive voice.
And Virgil invites us to play a still more active role, as his preference for verbs in the historical present, rather than in the past tenses, may imply. The predominance of the historical present throughout the poem (“nearly two-thirds of all indicative verbs in the Aeneid,” as Sara Mack reports, p. 48) has a range of effects upon the reader. They go from generating the broad, irrepressible sweep of the poem, which K. W. Gransden (1984, p. 76) and others note, to all that the Greek word enargeia can convey: the vividness, the immediacy, the dramatic impact of every action and every speech, as clear as Venus in Aeneas’ eyes, “her pure radiance shining down upon [him] through the night” (2.731). Similarly, the reader is surrounded by a luminous, recurrent Now that not only captures his or her attention but also makes the reader a witness and even, within one’s private study, a participant in a series of events. It is as if—Gransden again, to whom many of these remarks are much indebted—the “when” of an action is less important than the fact and “how” of its occurrence. And as Andreola Rossi pursues the point, most occurrences in the poem are presented “here and now” instead of “then and there,” as Virgil creates “a forged continuum, even an identity, between the past retold and the present perceived” (p. 130).
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