Consequently the scenes on the Libyan temple that recall the late Trojan War unite with the unfolding, tragic events in Carthage that will take the life of Dido and, evoked by her dying curses, ultimately lead to the Punic Wars. The legendary Cyclops beat their metal into Aeneas’ shield, emblazoning it with the triumphs of Rome that lie a thousand years ahead, yet the weld between the mythic and the historical, the miraculous work of Vulcan and the battle of Actium, is seamless. As Eliot muses in his Heraclitean way:
Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past.
(Burnt Norton, 1)
So frequent is Virgil’s use of the historical present that he can intersperse the imperfect among his verbs, producing a confident shuttling back and forth in time, even within the same verse paragraph. The translation suggests the effect in a more cautious, discretionary way, to spare the English reader some confusion. Yet the historical present prevails, to register one of Virgil’s leading ways of bringing home the Aeneid to his audience.
Other features of his performance do the same, each reinforcing the enargeia of his epic, and each has a bearing, however distant, on the translation at hand. One is Virgil’s reputation, during his lifetime and cited by others now, for directness of speech, his preference for the plain instead of the “poetic” word, a preference I have often tried to follow. Another is Virgil’s way of echoing himself. As John Swallow analyzes the matter, some echoes may be temporary props or tibicines, which Virgil used to keep his narrative flowing, rather than stop and search for the mots justes he hoped to find when he revised his work, like “a she-bear,” as he described the process in Suetonius’ “Life” (p. 473), and “gradually licked it into shape.” But other echoes express the moral symmetry we call “poetic justice”—as when the lines describing Camilla’s death by treachery (11.973-74) echo in the last lines of the poem, where Turnus dies at Aeneas’ hands, not by treachery but as retribution outright for the death of Pallas. A contrast, yet also an echo reminding us, as R. D. Williams (1973, note 12.948) and W. S. Macguinness (1953, p. 13) remark, that far from stressing Aeneas’ conquest rather than his cruelty, Virgil binds his final act to the other acts of cruelty that pervade the closing books. This and other echoes—when Latin context and English sense and syntax will permit—the translation often sounds within itself.
Even more important in bringing the Aeneid home are Virgil’s numberless forms of expression that alert and delight the reader, galvanizing one’s imagination, winning one’s belief. I refer to the magnificent panoply of the epic poem, whose forms extend, to mention only a few, from the dramatic, when Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy for Dido—until, like Desdemona, she may wish “that heaven had made her such a man”—to the operatic, in Dido’s arias and agonies of passion, to the pastoral interludes, formal elegies, martial catalogues, duels to the death, vehement debates between the gods on high, and urgent invocations of the Muse. And perhaps the most epic feature of all is one already mentioned: the pulsing sweep of the narrative itself, borne along by Virgil’s voice, its rise and fall throughout the Aeneid’s length and breadth, “the enormous onward pressure” that C. S. Lewis felt as strongly in Virgil as he did in Milton, “of the great stream on which you are embarked” (p. 45). No wonder Tennyson praises Virgil not only for his ennoble ments, for wielding “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but also for his sheer kinetic power, his “ocean-roll of rhythm” (“To Virgil”). And nothing makes it stronger than the rhythmic variety that Virgil offers, as Knox observes in his review of Fitzgerald’s Aeneid (The New Republic, November 28, 1983, p. 36), “the infinite variations on the play of the Latin stress accent against the quantitative Greek meter [that] all combine to produce a music that works like an incantation.”
So if, as Knox remarks in his Introductions to our Iliad and Odyssey, “the strongest weapon in [Homer’s] poetic arsenal” is variety within a metrical norm, Virgil creates an analog in Latin, and the English translation tries, in a far-off way, to follow suit. However remotely, I have sought a compromise between Virgil’s spacious hexameter, his “ocean-roll of rhythm,” and a tighter line more native to English verse. Yet I have opted for a freer give-and-take, for more variety than uniformity with Virgil than with Homer. This may be unavoidable in trying to “unpack” Virgil’s more compressed effects, his virtuoso displays of highly inflected, and deeply suggestive, word order, which can take one’s breath away. In any event, working from a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six, I expand at times to seven, to convey the reach of an “Homeric” simile in the Aeneid, or the vehemence of a storm at sea or a battle waged on land. Or I contract at times to three or four beats, not when Virgil does (perhaps implying with his half lines that revision is on its way), but to give a speech or action sharper stress in English. Free as it is, such variety in unity results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation: in this case, from trying to convey the meaning of the Latin on the one hand, and trying to find a cadence for one’s English on the other, while joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. All told, I hope not only to give my own language a slight stretching now and then, but also to lend Virgil the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make a version of the Aeneid, like a version of the two Homeric poems, engaging to a modern reader.
For Virgil’s performance in Latin is a reperformance of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, a “Homerization” of the legendary past of Rome. This, of course, is a subject that has engaged generations of scholars and brought forth many a brilliant study over time. I can only touch on the broadest outlines of the matter here, and I do so from the viewpoint of a translator. At any rate, what announces the bond between Virgil’s work and Homer’s, as readers from Suetonius onward have remarked, are the first three words of the Aeneid, arma virumque cano, that sing the themes of war and humankind—the Iliad and the Odyssey, in effect—in one and the same phrase, and eventually in the same epic poem. As many observe, like Knox in his Introduction, Virgil presents an Odyssey of wandering in the first half of the Aeneid and an Iliad of warfare in the second. And as others have continued the analogy (usefully, for this translator), the Odyssean half of Virgil’s epic has many Iliadic elements: Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy, and the funeral games for Anchises, and the return of many Trojan figures, some still alive, like Andromache and Helenus, and several more as ghosts. Similarly, the second, Iliadic half of the Aeneid has many Odyssean elements, chief among them perhaps the objective of the warfare waged: not to destroy an enemy capital but to found one’s own, or as a later idiom would have it, to “win home” to the promised city, Rome.
Home, for since, as Gransden and Knox’s Introduction remind us, the legendary founder of Troy and an ancestor of Aeneas was Dardanus, who migrated from Italy to Troy, Aeneas’ arrival in Latium is a kind of nostos too, a return to the homeland of his forebears. His linear journey to a point is circular in result, like the motion of Achilles’ rage and the homing of Odysseus, yet Virgil conceives his hero’s journey on a larger, more historical—but in no way more compelling—scale. As Gransden sums up the matter, “Rome became in due time the new Troy, risen like the phoenix from the ashes of the destroyed city of Priam; indeed in the perspective of history the fall of Troy could be seen as the necessary precursor of the rise of Rome, and the whole mighty sequence as part of a divine plan, the working out of fate” (1990, p. 27). Or as Knox puts it, pungently, “The death agonies of Troy are the birthpangs of Rome” (Commager, p. 125), and the entire chain reaction binds together the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.
Virgil is the great translator of Homer, from phrase to simile to episode to epic scope and goal. And Virgil’s every act of translation honors his source, not only by imitation but by emulation, a strenuous, competitive struggle in which Virgil may have found it “easier,” as Virgil himself would say, “to filch his club from Hercule
s than a line from Homer” (Suetonius’ “Life,” p. 483). But in the Aeneid one may sense the exhilaration of influence as much as the anxiety, and watch the two at work in all their force, as when Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, completing—and competing with?—Homer, who leaves the catastrophe, more dramatically for many, foreshadowed yet forever still to strike. Emulatively too, Virgil’s leading characters often undertake a sequence or a composite of Homeric roles. Dido portrays the temptresses in the Odyssey, Circe and Calypso, who impede the hero’s progress. But Dido is potentially still more vivid as Arete, who rules her ideal kingdom well, and as Nausicaa, who lends it a fresh young beauty, and ultimately as Penelope, loyal to Aeneas, if only he will embrace her as his queen.
Yet it is the hero himself who plays, at times inverting, at times asserting, the most consequential range of Homeric roles throughout the poem, until in his climactic action—killing Turnus—Aeneas resembles, at one and the same moment, an Achilles avenging the death of a cherished comrade, a Hector defending his homeland successfully, and an Odysseus winning his rightful bride by killing her suitor, reclaiming his kingdom, and laying the groundwork for its future. And Aeneas’ range of Homeric roles within the Aeneid reflects his possible roles in later history as well. For he prefigures, in his tenuous way, Romulus the founder and Augustus the first emperor of Rome, and as some may see the ancient hero, a modern hero in the making.
2
Seeing is believing that all three epic poems coexist, but giving voice to that belief is another matter—enough to leave one standing “silent, upon a peak in Darien.” So let me extend these questions of style to others that also affect a translator, his mood and mind, and his appreciation of his author. Whether or not such things find full expression, they may inform his approach, and perhaps a part of his work as well. Yves Bonnefoy, the celebrated French poet and translator of Yeats and Shakespeare, says that “if a work does not compel us, it is untranslatable” (Schulte and Biguenet, p. 192). Yet the obverse may be just as true. If a work does compel us, we will try to find a way, some way, to translate it or, as they say, die trying. What follows, then, are some of the features of Virgil that I have found especially compelling.
First, mindful of Virgil’s relationship with Homer, their kinship and their contrasts, I have drawn on my translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey to suggest an Homeric echo here, an adaptation there, in the Aeneid. This, for example, is the simile that describes Achilles’ pursuit of Hector as he races to escape his mortal enemy. One pursuing, the other pursued, and both caught in a blur of perpetual motion——until Zeus with his golden scales decrees Hector’s death, and Apollo deserts the hero, and Achilles, aided by Athena, takes his life. However vivid the moment and the simile that keeps its pace, the situation is strangely removed from us at first. It occurs in the third person, and the action itself in the past tense, as if to stress how far beyond our reach is Hector’s fate, how remote and impersonal his doom.
endless as in a dream . . .
when a man can’t catch another fleeing on ahead
and he can never escape nor his rival overtake him—
so the one could never run the other down in his speed
nor the other spring away. . . .
(Iliad 22.237-41)
But Virgil “translates” Homer’s simile to tell another story as Aeneas pursues his enemy Turnus to his death:
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. . . .
(12.1053-60)
As Michael Putnam remarks, “Vergil humanizes this description in an extraordinary way. He turns third-person narrative—one man chases, one flees—into first-person. It is now we, the readers, who suffer the dream, we who follow” (Spence, p. 91). We are drawn into a sympathy for, and even an identification with, Turnus, until the Fury in Aeneas could kill us all in the same moment that it chokes off Turnus’ life. The more personal our involvement in his fate, the more inhuman it becomes. The two perspectives, Homeric and Virgilian, could hardly be more opposed, and their difference is underscored by Rossi, describing the recurrent immediacy of Virgil (pp. 148-49), and Andrew Ford, the far-off time and place of Homer’s actions (pp. 52-55). Yet the final impression that each poet presents is equally intense. The terror that Homer creates by turning us into spectators—struck by a life-or-death event that sweeps us back to an era older and yet more vivid than our own—Virgil creates through direct engagement: we are racers too, and like Turnus we are transfixed by Aeneas’ sword.
Central to the give-and-take between the two great poets, as this translator sees it (his vision largely shaped by Putnam and others), is Virgil’s cumulative, Homeric presentation of Aeneas. As with an Homeric hero—unlike some later heroes whose qualities are winnowed down to a few strong traits—by gradually enlarging Aeneas’ qualities, which multiply as his situations multiply about him, Virgil displays his hero in the round, not as the distillation but the sum of all his parts.
“What hero?” asked “the plain sailor man” whom Yeats befriended once, according to a famous anecdote mentioned in the Introduction and recorded in Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (p. 44):
[the sailor] took a notion to study Latin, and his teacher [Yeats] tried him with Virgil; after many lessons he asked him something about the hero.
Said the sailor: “What hero?”
Said the teacher: “What hero, why, Aeneas, the hero.”
Said the sailor: “Ach, a hero, him a hero? Bigob, I t’ought he waz a priest.”
So have others, impressed, perhaps, by Aeneas’ many acts of service to a higher power, which often seem performed at the price of his own self-assertion. But however faceless Aeneas may appear in the first half of the Aeneid—although that half includes his narrative of the fall of Troy, where he strives at first to be a headlong Iliadic hero, and his desperate grief at the loss of his wife, Creusa—throughout the second half of the poem he begins to be himself. The crux of his career, it seems, is his visit to the Underworld—“the dream center of the sixth book” as Arthur Hanson sees it (Luce, vol. 1, p. 697)—where Aeneas witnesses his father’s visionary pageant of the Roman chiefs to come. From that experience, no matter how frail Aeneas’ understanding or flawed his memory of it may be—and the Introduction clearly demonstrates his limits—he emerges from the Underworld as nothing more and nothing less than human. Moreover, bearing the mantle of his mission on his shoulders, which once had borne his father, he is “fired . . . with a love of glory still to come” (6.1025).
So Aeneas prepares for the second half of the Aeneid, Virgil’s “greater labor” (7.50), which tells how the Trojans fight to found an Italian settlement where Rome will one day rise. That task requires of the hero, in addition to his growing prowess, a growing resolve to endure the hardships he must face, as his father’s ghost describes them (6.1024-29), and the dual fate that he must undertake. For if the gradual, cumulative growth of Aeneas is Homeric, his ultimate identity within the Aeneid is not. He is at last as far from Achilles—who will blaze out on the crest of battle, his tomb to be a beacon on a headland—as he is from Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns” (Odyssey 1.1), the wily paterfamilias who wins home to reclaim his wife and son, his father and his kingdom here and now. But Aeneas, for all his potential, ends in a paradoxical position. He is both deprived and empowered, a lost and a latent hero, too late to impersonate Achilles or Odysseus fully, too early to live within Augustus’ promised reign. Aeneas will live, in fact, only three years after his marriage to Lavinia, and so he will die 330 years before the founding of Rome. Cut short as he is, however, it seems a hopeful sign that his arri
val at the site should fall one calendar day before Augustus’ triumph a thousand years thereafter.
For Aeneas may well be, particularly after Jupiter’s abdication from the workings of human history in Book 10, “the loneliest man in literature” (Gransden, 1996, p. xix), yet he is still the founder of his people. As C. S. Lewis sees him, he is “a ghost of Troy until he becomes the father of Rome” (p. 35). That consummation is incomplete. Even at the end of the poem, the hero remains a work in progress, and for Virgil to pretend otherwise would be too comforting, too pat and absolute. But Aeneas has made an impressive start. He has begun to unify his sense of duty and his sense of desire, and the two together will comprise his sense of destiny. In word and action both, he has begun to meet that destiny, for all its demands, with stoic endurance, a warrior’s readiness, and even Homeric ferocity when required: a range of strengths that marks his enlargement throughout the Aeneid and most visibly in its second half. His aristeia—his heroic demonstration of excellence—is proof not only of his martial prowess but also, especially in his compassion for a world at war, of his emerging moral awareness, his humanity and its powers.
The Aeneid Page 46