Yet for all his progress, Aeneas has some way to go. His destiny, like his character, remains double-edged, a “yoking by violence together” of opposing tugs, of profit and loss, of gain and bitter grief. Indeed as Aeneas wrestles with his destiny, so his creator wrestles with the epic tradition, its gods and its heroes, its rigors and rewards. For Virgil, as we have known for long, thanks to Adam Parry, Putnam, and others, was a poet agonistes, one whose hardest struggle may have been to find his voice, or rather his two voices, as Parry heard them (1989, pp. 78-96), and to forge a bond between them. One voice is devoted to the emperor Augustus, who, to borrow from Wendell Clausen’s formulation (Introduction, Conington-Symonds trans., 1965, p. xv), may have urged, though he did not order the Aeneid. This voice is the public, “official” voice of imperial triumph, that sounds out the blare of the battle trumpets, the drumbeat of bronze squadrons marching in formation. The other voice is the muted, intimate voice of loss and suffering, the personal voice that bravely confronts, and unforgettably laments, “the burdens of mortality [that] touch the heart” (1.559) and the anguish that appears throughout the Aeneid in many haunting forms, the “Italian fields forever / receding on the horizon” (3.582-83), and the beloved ghosts that vanish, “sifting through [the] fingers, / light as wind, quick as a dream in flight” (2.985-86).
Time and again one hears the two Virgilian voices at odds, echoing an opposition between action and reflection, patriotism and personal assertion, public exultation and wrenching private sorrow. Rather than hear the two voices clashing, in fact, it may be the modern preference, in re ponse to dubious, often shattered national hopes, to hear in Virgil’s lines the private voice to the exclusion of the public. His version of “the price of empire,” as it is often called, is very high indeed, and it extends from the deaths that end the majority of books in the Aeneid, to the poem’s grim, unforgiving perspective at the end, to the legacy of suffering it bequeaths to all of us. For it seems to be a price we keep on paying, in the loss of blood and treasure, time-worn faith and hard-won hope, down to the present day.
Yet both of Virgil’s voices ask to be heard, even though their relationship may remain ambiguous. That is one of the reasons the poem seems to stop but never end. Another is that much of the hero’s work, especially that of adjusting to a postwar era, is still to be performed, and there are prophecies—Creusa’s about her husband’s second wife (2.972), and Jupiter’s about the nationhood of Aeneas’ people (1.304-55)—still to be fulfilled. And yet another reason, as the Introduction recounts, is that Virgil left instructions at his death that the Aeneid, still unfinished, be destroyed. For he thought it needed three more years of licking into shape, time spent, perhaps, in harmonizing the voices he had sounded out. Or was he simply driven by his perfectionism as a poet? It is impossible to say, but fortunately, as we know, Augustus countermanded Virgil’s “final orders” and preserved the Aeneid as we have it now. And so, despite the conclusiveness of Turnus’ death, the poem still feels open-ended, its eventual outcome “‘something evermore about to be’” (Wordsworth, quoted by Gransden, 1984, p. 209)—an effect that owes a good deal to Virgil’s choice of the historical present as his favored tense. For it may enable his two voices, one devoted to Roman prowess, the other to its human costs, to be held in suspension, side by side, as opposites that share the Virgilian experience of power and pathos both. The saddest poem one may know may be among the strongest.
So whether Aeneas is “the loneliest man in literature” or “the founder of his people,” or something of both, is a matter of prophecy, for it concerns a future still unfolding, even now. To recall the opening lines of Auden’s “Secondary Epic”——in the light of the historical present, hindsight may make a bit more sense as foresight than we thought. “Prophecy is really hard,” an American sage once said, “especially about the future.” But a few things may be ventured even so. One is Sara Mack’s conclusion: “The Aeneid, rooted in time, becomes itself timeless, for all time. It involves all its readers in Rome’s destiny; it makes us all Romans” (p. 87). That is the paradox of the historical present: it makes the eternal timely, the timely eternal. So since we are Romans all, their story still resounds within us, reading in private, and at times aloud, of Roman greatness or Roman grief, or both at once.
No, Virgil, no:
Not even the first of the Romans can learn
His Roman history in the future tense,
Not even to serve your political turn;
Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.
What shall we hear when we read the Aeneid today? The story of Aeneas’ bleak reward as Eliot describes it? “Hardly more than a narrow beachhead and a political marriage in a weary middle age: his youth interred, its shadow moving with the shades the other side of Cumae” (1957, p. 70)? Or worse, as Hanson hears the Aeneid, a story that stops “suicidally where it began, without resolving the conflicts it so forcefully portrays” (Luce, vol. 1, p. 700). Or as Clausen hears it, more com plexly still, a story of affirmation as well as of regret, “a perception of Roman history as a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit that makes Virgil his country’s truest historian” (Commager, p. 86). And so he may speak, from a distance that seems to narrow every year, to our own history as well, particularly to the tug of war between “private life, public destiny,” as Garry Wills would phrase it, that Aeneas begins to reconcile within himself, but that tears apart the lives of many modern readers. As Auden says of Virgil, “Behind your verse so masterfully made / We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed” (“Secondary Epic”). Yet we can also hear Augustus’ triumph over Antony at Actium, and the ghost of Anchises who foretells the power of Rome to place the world beneath the rule of law.
So, if the two voices are concurrent in Virgil’s time and ours, might they be dissonant yet moving, with proper encouragement, toward a state of harmony? Or might they work together even more effectively? Might one voice reinforce the other, conspiring to make the modern reader, like Aeneas, more complete, more accepting of uncertainties, and so perhaps more seasoned and humane, as Virgil calls us toward a future far beyond our ken and our control? His “ocean-roll of rhythm” may well serve, as another has suggested, quoting Arnold, to “bring / the eternal note of sadness in.” A note we cannot, should not avoid. For Virgil’s world of tears, like that of Keats, may become a “vale of soul-making” after all, a place to restore ourselves and our societies to wholeness, health, and peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These, at least, are some of the things that have occurred to the translator, and in trying to express them I have had many kinds of help. The strongest has come from Bernard Knox, my teacher once and my collaborator now, whom I prefer to call a comrade. Much as we worked together on Sophocles’ Theban plays and the two Homeric poems, so we have worked on the Aeneid. Not only has he written the Introduction to the translation, but he has commented on my drafts for many years. And when I leaf through the pages now, his reactions ring my manuscript so completely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear, dog-eared copy encircled by a scholiast’s remarks. Yet Knox’s gifts are more magnanimous than that. All told, he has offered me what I have needed most: “Doric discipline,” in Yeats’s words, and “Platonic tolerance” too. It has been my great good luck to work with such a man.
Michael Putnam has stood by the undertaking from the start, offering me his help in conversation, in encouragement, and even more essentially in his masterful writings about Virgil, which extend from matters of diction to the resonance of a simile or a symbol, to the dramatic construction of a scene, to the vision of the Aeneid. Still more immediately, with Putnam serving as classical authority, he and I have worked together closely to produce the Suggestions for Further Reading, the Notes on the Translation, and the Pronouncing Glossary that conclude the book. He has been swift in his pace, unstinting in his erudition, and the soul of generosity—I owe him “more than word can wield the matter.”
Several other scholars and crit
ics, cited among the Suggestions for Further Reading, have instructed me as well. Of the commentaries I would underscore those of R. G. Austin on Books 1, 2, 4 and 6; of R. D. Williams on Books 1 through 12; C. J. Fordyce on 7 and 8; K. W. Gransden on 8 and 11; Philip Hardie on 9; W. S. Macguinness on 12; and, often relayed by Knox as the occasion required, the commentaries of Conington et al., Mackail, and Servius. All their writings have been resources to me, assisting in matters that include the proper English phrase and syntax for the Latin, the background of Virgil’s place-names, their geographical locations, folk tales and founding myths, and the broad historical reaches of the Roman world.
Several modern translators of the Aeneid have helped as well. Each has introduced me to a new aspect of the poem, another potential for the present. “For if it is true,” as Maynard Mack proposes, “that what we translate from a given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true that we see in it what we have the power to translate” (The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 5th ed., p. 2045). So the help I have derived from others is considerable, and dividing them for convenience into groups, I say my thanks to each in turn. First, to those who have translated the Aeneid into prose: John Conington, edited by J. A. Symonds; H. R. Fairclough as revised by G. P. Goold; W. F. Jackson Knight (for his translation, and for the genealogical table of the royal houses of Troy and Greece drawn by Bernard Vasquez appearing within it); and David West (for his translation and also his comprehensive introduction to the poem). Each presents an example of accuracy as well as grace, and the stronger that example, the more instructive each has been in bringing me a little closer to the Latin. Next, my thanks to the translators who have turned the Aeneid into verse: F. O. Copley, Patrick Dickinson, Robert Fitzgerald, Rolfe Humphries, C. Day Lewis, Stanley Lombardo, Allen Mandelbaum (for his translation and also his extremely helpful glossary), Edward McCrorie, and C. H. Sisson. Each presents a kind of aspiration, a striving to find the strongest English line for Virgil’s Latin line; and I have learned from each in turn, probably most from Fitzgerald, for the Latinity of his stamina and his style.
And finally, there are the unapproachables, all impossible to reach, who have caught the Virgilian spirit on the wing and turned it into words. I will mention only a few. John Dryden, who produced his Aeneid at the end of the seventeenth century, is far and away the first among them, and its greatness is anticipated, in brief, by his elegy “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,” perhaps the most Virgilian poem that I know in English. Dryden’s work is preceded by certain Virgilian adaptations in the English Renaissance, particularly Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, and followed by many selections, new as well as old, in Gransden’s generous edition of Virgil in English. Closest to me in time are Auden’s “Secondary Epic” and “Memorial for the City,” Allen Tate’s “Aeneas at Washington” and “The Mediterranean,” Robert Lowell’s “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid,” and several other works discussed in Theodore Ziolkowski’s Virgil and the Moderns, with its superb analysis of Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil.
Of the more recent translators, I have known only a few in person, yet we all may know each other in a way, having trekked across the same territory, perhaps having had the same nightmare that haunted Pope throughout his Homeric efforts. “He was engaged in a long journey,” as Joseph Spence reports Pope’s dream, “puzzled which way to take, and full of fears” that it would never end. And if you reach the end, the fears may start in earnest. Your best hope, I suppose, a distant one at that (and for some not all that hopeful), is the one held out by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator.” “Even the greatest translation,” he writes, “is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal” (p. 73).
Many classicists have helped as well, with prompting and advice, some viva voce and some in their writings: Paul Alpers, Charles Beye, Ward Briggs III, Edward Champlin, Andrew Feldherr, Andrew Ford, Eric Grey, Arthur Hanson, Georgia Nugent, David Quint, Sarah Spence, and James Zetzel. And many other friends, most of them writers, have helped with caution or encouragement or a healthy blend of both. Most heartening of all, none has asked me, “Why another Aeneid?” Each understands, it seems, that if Virgil was a performer, even in his writerly way, his translator might aim to be one as well. And no two performances of the same work—surely not of a musical composition, so probably not of a work of language either—will ever be the same. The tempo and timbre of each will be distinct, let alone its deeper resonance, build, and thrust. So there may always be room for one translation more, especially as idioms and eras change, and I thank the following friends for suggesting that I try my hand at Virgil: André Aciman, Christopher Davis, James Dickey, Charles Gillispie, Shirley Hazzard, Christopher Hedges, Robert Hollander, John McPhee, Jeffrey Perl, Theodore Weiss, and Theodore Ziolkowski.
I have been especially fortunate in finding readers for the work in progress. First the classicists. Robert Kaster went through books 1, 4, 6, 10, and 11 in considerable detail; Denis Feeney generously did the same—amid a demanding chairmanship—throughout the entire poem; and the late Douglas Knight, having worked through the first four books with me, no sooner saw Dido out of this world than he followed her himself. And then there were the writers, Edmund Keeley, Chang-rae Lee, J. D. McClatchy, Paul Muldoon, and C. K. Williams with Catherine Mauger. Each has read my drafts with sharp eyes and open minds and a tireless fellow feeling. They have looked a gift horse in the mouth, as Robert Graves once said to a would-be writer, and prescribed the dentistry it needed.
I would also thank the friends who asked me to read the work in public and perhaps improve it in the bargain. First my hosts at Princeton University, who invited me to their classes, their colloquia and other con venings—Sandra Bermann, Andrew Feldherr, Brooke Holmes, Nancy Malkiel, Susan Taylor, and Michael Wood. Then Robert Goheen at the Wistar Association, Karl Kirchwey at Bryn Mawr College, and Rosanna Warren and Steven Shankman at the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
The roofs of some great houses have extended welcome shelter to the translator and his work. My thanks to Mary and Theodore Cross for turning Nantucket into Rome West with their Virgilian hospitality. And my thanks to the house of Viking Penguin that has produced the book at hand. My editor, Kathryn Court, assisted by Alexis Washam, once again has treated the writer and the writing too with insight, affection, and address. My senior development editor has been Beena Kamlani, and once again her efforts to tame and train a fairly unruly piece of work have been heroic. And all the good people at Viking Penguin—Susan Petersen Kennedy, Clare Ferraro, Paul Slovak, Paul Buckley, Leigh Butler, Mau reen Donnelly, Francesca Belanger, Florence Eichin, John Fagan, Matt Giar ratano, Dan Lundy, Patti Pirooz, John McElroy, Nancy Sheppard—all have been loyal allies in New York, joined by Adam Freudenheim and Simon Winder in London. And through it all, without the unfailing strategies and support of my friend and agent Georges Borchardt, assisted by DeAnna Heindel and Jonathan Zev Berman in turn, this translation might not have seen the light.
In closing, I thank the familiar spirits of Anne and Adam Parry, dear ghosts who pour the wine and lead the way. And first and last, my abiding thanks to Lynne, the Muse, and to our daughters, Katya and Nina, their husbands and their children. They have borne me through the work with the power of their love.
R. F.
Princeton, N. J.
Thanksgiving 2005
THE ROYAL HOUSES OF GREECE AND TROY
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
I. Texts and Commentaries
Austin, R. G., ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Oxford, 1955).
———, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Secundus (Oxford, 1964).
———, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Primus (Oxford, 1971).
———, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Sextus (Oxford, 1977).
Conington, J., H. Nettleship, and F. Haverfield, eds. with co
mmentary, The Works of Virgil, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1858-83; repr. Hildesheim, 1963).
Eden, P. T., ed., A Commentary on Virgil Aeneid VIII (Leiden, 1975).
Fairclough, H. R., ed. and trans., 2 vols. Virgil: vol. 1: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI (Cambridge, 1916); vol. 2: Aeneid VII-XII. Appendix Vergiliana (Cambridge, 1918); rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, 1999, 2000).
Fordyce, C. J., ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Libri VII-VIII (Oxford, 1977). Gransden, K. W., ed., Virgil Aeneid Book VIII (Cambridge, 1976).
———, ed., Virgil Aeneid Book XI (Cambridge, 1991).
Greenough, J. B., G. L. Kittredge, and Thornton Jenkins, eds. Virgil and Other Latin Poets (Boston, 1930).
Hardie, P., ed., Virgil Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge, 1994).
Harrison, S. J., ed., Virgil Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991).
Henry, J., Aeneidea, or Critical, Exegetical, and Aesthetical Remarks on the Aeneid (London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Meissen, 1873-92; repr. New York, 1972).
Horsfall, N., ed., Virgil Aeneid 7: A Commentary (Leiden, 2000).
———, ed., Virgil Aeneid 11: A Commentary (Leiden, 2004).
Mackail, J. W., ed., The Aeneid of Virgil (Oxford, 1930).
Maguinness, W. S., ed., Virgil: Aeneid Book XII (London, 1953; repr. London, 1992).
Mynors, R. A. B., ed., P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Oxford Classical Text: Oxford, 1969).
Norden, E., ed., P. Vergilius Maro: Aeneid Buch VI (Leipzig, 1916; 4th ed.: Darmstadt, 1957).
Page, T. E., ed., The Aeneid of Virgil, 2 vols. (London, 1894, 1900).
Pease, A. S., ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Cambridge, 1935).
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