Virgil and his Translators (Classical Presences) 9780198810810, 0198810814

Table of contents :
Cover
Virgil and His Translators
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version
PART 1: Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital
1: Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation
Appendix: Virgil translations, 1469–1850
2: Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428
2.1 Volgarizzamento in Italy
2.2 The Cultural Situation of Enrique de Villena
2.3 The Translation
2.4 Conclusion
3: Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia
4: Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (from Caxton until Today)
Appendix: Table of the profession(s) of English translators, including military experience
Acknowledgement
5: The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700
Appendix: English translations of or from Aeneid 4 before 1700
6: An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2
7: Virgil after Vietnam
Appendix: Latin text of passages quoted above
8: Translations of Virgilin to Esperanto
8.1 Introduction
8.2 The Context of Early Esperanto Translations
8.3 Later Translations
8.4 A Comparison of the Three Translations
8.5 Conclusion
9: Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek
10: Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid
10.1 The Context
10.2 The Text
11: Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil
12: Reviving Virgil in Turkish
12.1 Distant but Not Apart
12.2 Virgil and His Silent Interlocutors
12.3 The Early Turkish Translation History of Virgil
13: Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and the Politics of Language
13.1 Norwegian Language and Ancient Texts
13.2 Pastoral in a Cold Climate
13.3 The Selection
13.4 Virgil’s Challenge
13.5 Title and Terminology
13.6 Setting the Scene
13.7 Domesticating and Foreignizing
13.8 Rustic Urbanity and Urban Rusticity
14: The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret
14.1 Paul Veyne’s Translation as a Necessary and Welcome Renewal
14.2 Clarifications
14.3 Like a Novel
14.4 The (Failed?) Marriage of Philology and Music: Jacques Perret as Translator
14.5 The Ideal Translator and the Principles of Translation: Latin et culture
14.6 Verse above All Else
14.7 Conclusion
15: Virgil in Chinese
15.1 Virgil in a Latinless and Epicless Context
15.2 The ‘Kind-Hearted’ Aeneas: The 1930s
15.3 The First Complete Aeneid in Chinese and Its Translator: The 1980s
15.4 Conclusion
Acknowledgement
PART 2: Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification
16: Domesticating Aesthetic Effects Virgilian Case Studies
16.1 Hexameters to Hexameters
16.2 Puns, Anagrams, and Other Ludic Devices
16.3 More Patterns
16.4 Tricolon Abundans
16.5 Extended Epanalepsis
16.6 Preserving Structural Aesthetics at the Visual Level
16.7 Preserving Structural Aesthetics at a Larger Level
16.8 Tityrus and Meliboeus
17: Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention?
17.1 Paraphrase and Reorientation in Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid: The ‘Naturalization’ of Virgil
17.2 Translation as a Bridge towards Creativity: The ‘Bellayization’ of Virgil
18: Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis
18.1 Dryden on Virgil and Homer
18.2 Dryden’s Æneis and Ilias
18.3 Aesthetics and Politics
19: Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile
19.1 Introduction: Delille Is Dead, Long Live Delille
19.2 Delille as a Translation Theorist
19.3 The Translator at Work
19.4 Word Choice and Didactic Tone
19.5 Rhythm and Sound Effects
19.6 Imagery and Domestication
19.7 Conclusion
20: ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi
Appendix
21: Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil
22: Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian Translations of the Aeneid
23: Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century
24: Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid
24.1 Preliminary Remarks
24.2 The German Tradition of Translating Ancient Literature
24.3 Voß’s Translations and Influence
24.4 Schröder’s Translations
24.5 Conclusions
25: Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol
25.1 The Eclogues According to Paul Valéry and His Variations on the Eclogues
25.1.1 His critical reflections
25.1.2 His translation
25.2 The Eclogues According to Marcel Pagnol
25.3 Conclusion
26: Come tradurre?: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid
26.1 Virgil as ‘Italian’ Poet
26.2 Italian Translations of the Twentieth Century
26.3 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Translation of 1959
26.4 The Political Impact of Pasolini’s Translation
26.5 Conclusions
27: Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics
27.1 Heaney’s Eclogues
27.2 Fallon’s Georgics
28: Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid
Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Titles
Notes on Contributors
Index Locorum
General Index

Citation preview

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I. PORTER

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Virgil and His Translators EDITED BY

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Susanna Braund, Zara Martirosova Torlone, and OUP 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945290 ISBN 978–0–19–881081–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank numerous scholars and friends for their assistance in bringing this volume into being. The genesis of the volume lay in three workshops and conferences, held in Vancouver (2012), in Paris (2014), and at Cuma near Naples (2014). All three were inspiring events and we express our deep gratitude to all the participants, many of whose papers appear in this book. Our co-organizers, Craig Kallendorf at Naples and Siobhán McElduff at Paris, were crucial collaborators and interlocutors to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude. Two key scholars at the Vancouver event who are not present in the volume were Stuart Gillespie and Stephen Harrison: we thank them profoundly for their insights and encouragement. The level of discourse at all three events was exceptional and exemplary; we recommend strongly the model we adopted, of precirculating the papers, and we thank all participants for honouring our desire to maximize engaged discussion at the events. The conferences that generated this volume would not have been possible without funding from several sources. The award, to Susanna Braund, of a Standard Research Grant by SSHRC, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, funded the Vancouver conference. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia supported the Wall Colloquium Abroad at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris with a generous award; we acknowledge with gratitude the warm hospitality of the Institut and its director. The Villa Vergiliana and the Vergilian Society provided Zara Torlone with the venue for the Naples/Cuma conference. The final stages of editorial work on the volume have been funded by Susanna Braund’s Canada Research Chair funds, which happily were finally released to her by the University of British Columbia. Translations from French and Italian were undertaken by Liza Bolen, Gillian Glass, and Jelena Todorovic; we thank Marco Romani Mistretta for additional help with Italian idioms. We thank Einaudi for permission to print an English translation of pages from the introduction to Alessandro Fo’s Italian translation of the Aeneid. Some additional acknowledgements of permissions to reproduce selected material follow below: • Josephine Balmer’s ‘Lost’ and ‘Let Go’ have been reproduced from her collection Letting Go: Thirty Mourning Sonnets and Two Poems (Agenda Editions, Mayfield, 2017), and ‘Creusa’ has been reproduced from her collection Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastleupon-Tyne, 2004) by kind permission of the author.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon have been reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press (www.gallerypress.com). • Excerpts in Chapter 27 from Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (Faber & Faber, London, 1980), The Cure at Troy (Faber & Faber, London, 2002), and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ and ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ from Electric Light (Faber & Faber, London, 2001) have been reproduced with kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. • The lines from ‘The Great Hunger’ and the poem ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh in Chapter 27 are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, London, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. For their dedicated hard work we thank Jake Beard for editorial assistance, Emma Hilliard for devising the index, and Graham Butler for completing it. Brian North worked wonders with a challenging set of proofs and we are most grateful. We especially thank the general editors of the series and the readers for their extremely thoughtful and constructive criticisms and guidance on the shape of the volume. No volume of collected essays is perfect, but we believe that, thanks to the support we have received, we have produced a balanced and polished book, which will stimulate many future conversations on the important topic of the translations of Virgil. Finally, we thank our immediate support networks, who provided calmness and sanity when the volume was threatening to become unruly: Susanna thanks her wonderful husband Adam Morton and her many old dogs; Zara thanks her husband Mark Torlone, her two daughters Christina and Francesca, and her parents, Dr Sergey Martirosov and Samvelina Pogosova, for their love and support. We have both loved this collaboration with each other: we are always, it seems, on the same page, and that has been affirming and encouraging throughout the project. Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone The publisher and the editors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

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Contents Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

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Part 1. Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital 1. Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation Craig Kallendorf

23

2. Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428 Richard H. Armstrong

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3. Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia Stephen Rupp

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4. Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (from Caxton until Today) Alison Keith

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5. The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 Gordon Braden 6. An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2 Fiona Cox

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7. Virgil after Vietnam Susanna Braund

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8. Translations of Virgil into Esperanto Geoffrey Greatrex

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9. Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek Michael Paschalis

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10. Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid Sophia Papaioannou 11. Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil Marko Marinčič

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CONTENTS

12. Reviving Virgil in Turkish Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken

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13. Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and the Politics of Language Mathilde Skoie

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14. The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret Séverine Clément-Tarantino

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15. Virgil in Chinese Jinyu Liu

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Part 2. Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification 16. Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies Richard F. Thomas

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17. Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? Hélène Gautier

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18. Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis Stephen Scully

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19. Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile Marco Romani Mistretta

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20. ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi Giampiero Scafoglio

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21. Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil Philip Hardie

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22. Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian Translations of the Aeneid Zara Martirosova Torlone

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23. Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos

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24. Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid Ulrich Eigler

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25. Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol Jacqueline Fabre-Serris

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26. Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid Ulrich Eigler

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27. Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics Cillian O’Hogan

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28. Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid Alessandro Fo

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Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils Josephine Balmer

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Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index Locorum General Index

431 473 481 496

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Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil The Elevator Version Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid, have been translated many times since long before the advent of printing; and they continue to be translated to the present day. As early as the mid-first century CE, Polybius, Seneca’s freedman, is said to have translated Virgil into Greek. The Middle Irish Imtheachta Aeniasa (Wanderings of Aeneas), written between the tenth century and the twelfth, can lay claim to being the first extant vernacular translation, yet is best regarded as an adaptation, because of how it recasts the Latin poem into the Irish tradition of heroic prose narrative. Likewise, the mid-twelfth century Old French Roman d’Énéas is an important text, but it, too, rejigs the material to reflect contemporary concerns. Italy produced fourteenth-century prose translations of the Aeneid, while the first verse translation is that of Tommaso Cambiatore (1430). At the same time, in Spain, Enrique de Villena was writing in Castilian prose his own version, divided into 366 chapters. The earliest printed Aeneid ‘translation’ (really a loose adaptation in the medieval mode) appeared in Italian in 1476¹ and was subsequently translated into French in 1483 and into English in 1490, by William Caxton, as The Eneydos of Vyrgyl. More rigorous translations quickly followed, as Renaissance humanism took off: into French in 1500 (Octovien de Saint-Gelais, published in 1509), into mid-Scots in 1513 (Gavin Douglas, published 1553), into German in 1515 (Thomas Murner), into Italian 1534 (Niccolò Liburnio), into English in the 1540s (Henry Howard, Books 2 and 4, published in 1554 and 1557) and into Spanish in 1555 (Gregorio Hernández de Velasco). The first complete Aeneid in English is that of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, published over the period 1558–84. Candidates for the major European Aeneid translations include those of Joachim du Bellay (Books 4 and 6) in 1562 and 1560, Annibale Caro in 1581, and John Dryden in 1697. Production of Aeneid translations ¹ Just eight years after the editio princeps of the Latin text, which appeared in 1469.

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continues apace; and similar (though not identical) narratives apply to the Eclogues and the Georgics, which, because of their subject matter, move in and out of favour more dramatically. The history of the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in particular is closely bound up with the emerging phenomenon of nationalism from the Renaissance onwards, whether or not it is avant la lettre to call it that. As nations sought to establish and develop their own national literatures and to articulate their sovereign or imperialist agendas, they turned to translating the poem that was at the apex of European culture and that had been at the centre of the school curriculum since it was first published, in 19 BCE. They did this deliberately, seeking to yoke the language and the heroic patriotic story to their own histories, helped in no small degree by claims made by the aristocratic families of descent from Aeneas’s Trojans.² The process continued in countries and cultures further from the seat of Renaissance humanism, like ripples expanding from a pebble dropped into a pond. Thus Russia’s first Aeneid translation does not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, while the first attempt in Hebrew dates from the nineteenth century. The process continues into the twentieth century, as demonstrated by the case of Esperanto, which boasts three Aeneid translations since the language was invented in 1887. Translations, just like other interpretations, are always framed and freighted ideologically. Theodore Ziolkowski’s (1993) book Virgil and the Moderns did an exemplary job of identifying the malleability of Virgil’s poems during the years 1914 to 1945, when American and European interpreters found in Virgil mirrors of their own very different concerns, whether to do with populism or elitism, fascism or democracy, commitment or escapism. This ideological hermeneutics is readily extrapolated and applied to translations just as much as to adaptations and to the other forms of reception discussed by Ziolkowski. That is what makes our volume important. * *

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There are literally thousands of translations of the works of Virgil, complete or selective, in dozens of languages.³ And yet there is no book dedicated to the study of translations of Virgil as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon. There are of course books, instigated especially by Charles Martindale,⁴ that investigate the reception of Virgil; and there are studies of specific aspects of that reception, whether by time period,⁵ by location,⁶ by genre,⁷ by interpretation,⁸ or by combinations

² See Waswo 1995, Federico 2003, some of the essays in Shepard and Powell 2004, and Hardie 2014. ³ Kallendorf 2012 is an absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in this topic. ⁴ In Martindale 1984 and Martindale 1997, the latter of which deliberately starts with reception. Three notable recent contributions are Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008, Farrell and Putnam 2010, and Hardie 2014. ⁵ For example, Wilson-Okamura 2010, Ziolkowski 1993, and Atherton 2006. ⁶ For example, Kallendorf 1989, 1999, and Torlone 2014. ⁷ For example, Patterson 1987a. ⁸ For example, Thomas 2001b and Kallendorf 2007a (on ‘pessimistic’ readings).

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of those categories.⁹ In understanding translation as a special case of reception, the work of Lorna Hardwick and Stuart Gillespie has been key, especially the latter’s English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary Theory (Gillespie 2011). There are a few studies that specifically discuss Virgil’s English translation history, but these are limited chronologically or unable to delve deep: the two important articles by Tony Harrison,¹⁰ Colin Burrow’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,¹¹ Tanya Caldwell’s (2008) Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority, Robin Sowerby’s (2010) Early Augustan Virgil: Translations by Denham, Godolphin, and Waller, and Sheldon Brammall’s (2015) The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646. But there is nothing yet that attempts to open up the truly big picture. One of the editors, Susanna Braund, is at work on a major study, titled A Cultural History of Translations of Virgil: From the Twelfth Century to the Present, which will attempt a synthetic vision. In the meantime, this volume is designed to get the conversation moving. In this introduction we first describe the broad landscape of Virgilian translation from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. We then explain the genesis of the volume and indicate how the individual chapters, each of which is summarized, illuminate the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries and across the world. We then indicate points of connection between the chapters, in order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We are acutely aware that a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies; therefore we understand the importance of extrapolating larger phenomena from the specifics presented here.¹² We conclude by suggesting ways in which other scholars can build on this material. This volume, then, is intended as a landmark publication devoted to the complex role that translations of Virgil’s poetry have played in world literature and culture from the early modern period down to the present day. The majority of the chapters collected here focus, perhaps inevitably, on European translations of the Aeneid. ‘Perhaps inevitably’, we say, because the Aeneid provided a paradigm for what was called in medieval times translatio imperii et studii (‘the transmission of power and learning’).¹³ The significance of Virgil to our collective literary tradition can scarcely be overemphasized: there is not a single Western poetic tradition unaffected by his poetry. His influence extends beyond the literary sphere into public discourse, education, morality, kingship theory, and imperial justifications. Beyond Europe, his work is still gaining ground, and there is growing interest in translating Virgil in non-European traditions—including into Asian languages and, so it is said, into

⁹ For example, Cox 1999. ¹⁰ Harrison 1967 and 1969. ¹¹ Burrow 1997. ¹² We acknowledge with gratitude the stimulating seminar ‘Beyond the Case Study: Theorizing Classical Reception’, organized by Rosa Andujar and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos at the Society for Classical Studies meeting in January 2016. ¹³ Explored eloquently by Waswo in his essential 1997 book.

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Arabic. Although most of the essays in this book relate to the dominant cultures of Renaissance and modern-day Europe, we are delighted to be able to include studies from more ‘peripheral’ cultures as well as non-European traditions, including Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Chinese, alongside Esperanto. All of these give important glimpses of what Virgil translation might look like in its infancy, instead of groaning under the weight of a tradition five centuries long. Of course we could not achieve comprehensiveness in our scope, but this volume does address a broad spectrum of theories that defined Virgilian translations across time and space. Our contribution will by no means be the last word. Rather, it will be the (we hope) highly significant first word in a discussion that is long overdue. * * * The field of translation studies has been growing now for several decades and occupies a privileged space between comparative literature, reception studies, hermeneutics, cultural studies, book history, creative writing, and, to some degree, even philosophy. Because of the complicated interdisciplinary nature of translation studies, any theoretical concept proposed in analysis of a specific translation practice has to take into account the disciplinary background from which that analysis arose. At the same time, there is clearly a tension between the case study approach and overarching theoretical approaches. Top-down and bottom-up: we propose that both types of approach are essential to understanding a canonical author such as Virgil and that ideally a dialogue between them can be achieved. The influence of Michel Foucault and the New Historicists is more or less ubiquitous in this volume:¹⁴ the significance of translations extends beyond the aesthetic sphere into the social, political, moral, and even economic spheres. Collectively the essays here make a major contribution to illuminating the cultural and ideological work done by translations of the poetry of the most esteemed Latin poet. Likewise, the influence of the ideas of Walter Benjamin is pervasive, if unacknowledged; the focus of many of the contributions here is upon ‘that element in a translation which does not lend itself to translation’.¹⁵ The language of translation theory generally works in binaries. It distinguishes the ‘source’ text from the ‘target’ language. It constructs dichotomies between ‘literal’ and ‘free’, ‘formalist’ and ‘functionalist’, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ translation strategies.¹⁶ It analyses the role of the translator in terms of ‘visibility’ or

¹⁴ Most obviously, Foucault 1991; for further bibliography, see Chapter 1, n. 1. ¹⁵ Benjamin 1968, p. 75. ¹⁶ Venuti’s brief overview ‘What Is a Translation Theory?’ (Venuti 2000, pp. 4–6) is a good startingpoint. His articulation of the domestication/foreignization binary is of course a development of Schleiermacher’s early nineteenth-century construct of the translator as either moving the reader towards the author or vice versa.

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‘invisibility’.¹⁷ It distinguishes between use of the language of translation in the ‘instrumental’ or the ‘hermeneutic’ senses,¹⁸ in which the ‘instrumental’ approach privileges the idea of language as communication, while the hermeneutic approach privileges the idea of language as interpretation and thus sanctions variations in form and effects from the source text.¹⁹ As we write, these ‘simple’ binaries are increasingly being problematized by translation studies scholars. Likewise, the common metaphors deployed as rhetorical strategies to describe translation, such as appropriation, recovery, conversion, and transplantation, all emphasize the gap between the original and the translation, at a moment when translation studies scholars are expressing unhappiness with the concept of ‘gaps’ and with the idea of ‘bridging’ gaps, and are applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ to translation studies.²⁰ Whether such a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory will be productive for the study of the Urtext of European colonialism remains to be seen; however, thinking of translation as an activity that produces hybrids and oscillations between worlds does strike us as valuable.²¹ Among the approaches mentioned above, the metaphor of domestication/foreignization is particularly useful in the case of Virgil: the vast majority of translators set out to ‘domesticate’ his poems, appropriating them to their own national literary conventions for a mixture of aesthetic, moral, ideological, and patriotic reasons and often obscuring the quintessentially Roman features of the original. A few translators, preferring the foreignizing approach, have been brave enough to make their translations difficult in order to remind readers that they are engaging with literature produced by an alien culture; but, for the majority, the cultural capital gained from appropriating Virgil outweighs any such considerations, as this volume will repeatedly demonstrate. * * * The chapters in this volume were mostly produced for three colloquia on translations of Virgil held during the years 2012 and 2014; a few more were commissioned for the volume, to achieve balance and breadth. The first event took place in Vancouver, in September 2012; the second in Paris, at the Institut d’Études Avancées, in June 2014; and the third at the Symposium Cumanum at the Villa Vergiliana, near Naples, also in June 2014, with funding primarily from the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Miami University, Ohio. Funding from the Canada Council to support Susanna Braund’s Canada Research Chair, formerly withheld by UBC but finally passed along, has

¹⁷ See Venuti 1995. ¹⁸ See Kelly 1979, ch. 1. ¹⁹ The theory of ‘compensation’ developed by du Bellay in his 1549 Deffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse is a prime example of this approach, whereby literalistic translation is eschewed in favour of techniques that reproduce the effects of the original, but not necessarily in the same sequence or form. ²⁰ Bhabha 2004. ²¹ See Ette 2016. Thanks to Patricia Milewski for this reference.

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made it possible to bring the editorial work to completion. The two co-editors were the co-organizers of these three colloquia, alongside Siobhán McElduff (Paris) and Craig Kallendorf (Naples), to whom we extend our deep thanks for their vision and collaboration. The contributors include scholars at all stages of their careers— retired and veteran full professors, mid-career scholars, postdoctoral and graduate students—from Athens, Boston, Brazil, Cambridge, Crete, Exeter, Harvard, Houston, Istanbul, Lille, Ljubljana, Nice, Ohio, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris Sorbonne, Shanghai, Siena, Texas A&M, Toronto, Virginia, Zurich, and UBC; one contribution—that of Fo (Chapter 28)—is by a recent translator of the Aeneid. Their combined expertise embraces Castilian, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, (Homeric) Greek, Hiberno-English, Italian, Norwegian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and Turkish translation traditions. We were lucky enough to persuade the poet Josephine Balmer, who has recently turned her hand to translating Virgil, to write an Afterword that looks forward to future translations of Virgil. In terms of historical scope, the volume extends from the period of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy and fifteenth-century Spain all the way down to twenty-first-century translations in English, French, and Italian. Some of the translation traditions discussed stretch across many centuries, for example the English, the French, and the Italian ones, while other traditions, such as the Norwegian, Slovenian, Esperanto, Turkish, and Chinese, are relatively young and allow us a glimpse into the sometimes highly contingent factors that affect the development of a translation tradition. * * * In organizing these twenty-eight essays we could have adopted a geographical formula or a strictly chronological sequence. We rejected those approaches in favour of creating two broad categories: one uses the rubric of Virgilian translation as cultural capital, which permits some useful juxtapositions, and the other groups together the numerous translations written by poets, sometimes preeminent ones in their own cultures. That said, the two parts of the volume are closely interwoven and contain numerous overlaps, both cultural and theoretical. We use this introduction to indicate valuable cross-fertilizations within the volume; and we have inserted footnotes in the chapters themselves, to direct readers to comparable or dialogic material elsewhere in the volume. After our summaries of the chapters we will make specific connections between individual papers, so that readers can pursue their particular interests most easily. We also want to explain that we have developed a novel form of interlinear translation for this project that we have applied as consistently as possible throughout the volume. We insert this interlinear translation in the translations from Esperanto, French, German and so on in order to indicate the word order and syntax used by each translator. We use hyphens to reflect where a single word in the receiving language should be translated by more than one word in English; for example, we represent

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French du and Spanish del by ‘of-the’. We have followed OUP conventions in using [ ] to indicate matter added and < > to indicate matter excluded. These interlinear translations often look very clunky in English, but we hope that they will facilitate greater understanding of the translations discussed in the volume. The volume is accordingly divided into two parts—‘Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital’, comprising Chapters 1–15, and ‘Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification’, comprising the remaining thirteen chapters (16–28)—followed by an Afterword. Part 1 explicitly examines the role of Virgilian translations in a range of different national cultures. In organizing the essays for this section we took into account the broader theoretical issues that often drive the translation of classical texts with canonical status; and we have juxtaposed essays that raise specific questions. The resulting sequence follows broadly, but not exactly, a chronological progression. Several chapters offer diachronic perspectives on numerous Virgil translations within one particular culture, for example Chapter 1 on French translations, Chapters 4 and 5 on English translations, and Chapter 7 on American translations. Others make fruitful cross-cultural connections, for example the study of the influence of Italian vernacular literature on Spanish translation (Chapter 2), or that of the eighteenth-century Homeric Greek translation of the Aeneid in its Russian context (Chapter 10). Chapters 3 and 6 each spotlight one particular translator and his/her context, while Chapter 8 throws light on the recent phenomenon of Virgil’s translation in Esperanto and Chapter 9 tracks the much older phenomenon of Greek translations of Virgil. Other chapters explore territory that is less familiar to anglophone readers: they analyse the theory and practice of Virgil translation at or beyond the periphery of our conventional European scope. Thus Chapter 11 is devoted to Slovenian translations, Chapter 12 to Turkish, Chapter 13 to Norwegian, and Chapter 15 to the relatively recent Chinese translations. Chapters 1 and 14 take pairs of translations from French culture to offer contrastive insights into the range of theory and practice that can inform translation activity. These very varied essays raise issues central to and familiar from wider translation theory—for example claims to authority and legitimacy within and beyond Europe, the process of developing a literary vernacular by means of translation, and the significance of understanding the political, social, and linguistic discourses of the moment. All of these essays to some degree challenge any literary complacency when it comes to translation practice in general; specifically in the case of Virgil, they offer a kaleidoscope of patterns, some of which recur while others are unique. There was no contest for initial position in this volume. Craig Kallendorf ’s wide-ranging discussion entitled ‘Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation’ (Chapter 1) starts with essential statistics that represent the fruit of several decades of painstaking research. It is a sobering thought to realize that ‘Virgil’s poetry . . . was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones,

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the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times’ (p. 25). Kallendorf ’s figures relate to printed translations from incunabula down to 1850; translations that never made it into print and translations published since 1850 take those figures much higher, of course. Against this backdrop, Kallendorf proceeds to select three pairs of pre-1850 Virgilian translations into French, which represent the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, under the rubric of successes and failures in Virgilian translation. He thus brings back from obscurity the translations of Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cynyngham (whose translation of the Georgics was never published), Marot and Gresset and, without offering any aesthetic judgements, considers the immediate and subsequent career success of these translators. Explicitly using a New Historicist framework, he identifies political and religious ideologies as crucial factors in the sometimes surprising outcomes and emphasizes that translations can never be ranked only in terms of failure or success, because each one has elements of both and contributes to future translation attempts. In this way Kallendorf provides an important historical framework for the different directions of Virgilian translations in Europe and beyond. Richard Armstrong’s ‘Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428’ (Chapter 2) uses a similar approach to raise a complementary set of fundamental questions about the role of translation as reception in vernacular literatures. He uses another little-known translation as his focus. According to Armstrong, the Eneida of Enrique de Villena (1384–1434), in Castilian prose, is arguably ‘the first full scholarly translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into a modern language’ (p. 38). It can be seen as a transitional point between medieval and modern translational practices and as marking the beginning of the ‘vernacularization’ of translation, which was designed to make it more accessible to the target audience. He argues for ‘Dante’s influence on Virgil’ in that the Divine Comedy’s configuration of Virgil as a figure of authority in effect ‘“authorizes” the epic genre even in the vernacular’ (p. 50). In his analysis, Armstrong contemplates the philological conscience of the translator who ‘chose to present a prosaic, dissected, logocentric Virgil’ (p. 50) rather than a Dantesque Virgil in terza rima. We stay with early Spanish translations of the Aeneid in Stephen Rupp’s ‘Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia’ (Chapter 3). Rupp’s discussion of the Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso castellano (1555) provides an understanding of the role that translations of ancient epics played in the Renaissance. Writing poetry about war raised ethical questions about the justification of wars of conquest and expansion, as weighed against individual emotions. In that context, the translation of Virgil moves beyond literary relevance and into the realm of philosophical inquiry. For Velasco, his translation of the Aeneid serves as a means of moral instruction, because he casts Aeneas as an exemplar of Stoic virtue and examines the importance of control over intense emotional states.

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Next comes a pair of essays that examine the English Aeneid with a tighter focus on particular books: the much studied Book 4 and the much less studied Book 7. These two essays focus upon the representations of Dido and Lavinia. Alison Keith’s ‘Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (From Caxton until Today)’ (Chapter 4), which follows on neatly from Rupp’s analysis of the representation of warfare in translation, looks at English renditions of Aeneid 7 that appear in translations of the complete poem. She explores the relationship drawn by Virgil’s English translators between ‘arms’ and a ‘woman’ and shows how these representations help us to understand how the translators shaped Virgil’s Italian war narrative— beginning with Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation and ending with Sarah Ruden’s (2008) and Patricia A. Johnston’s (2012). In contrast with the chronological breadth of Keith’s chapter, which runs from Caxton in 1490 to the twenty-first century, Gordon Braden’s ‘The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700’ (Chapter 5) puts an intense spotlight on translations of Book 4 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when England and the English language were becoming prominent on the European and global scene. He highlights the consistent self-consciousness of this effort to use Virgil both as a vehicle for translatio imperii and as a medium in the search for an English metre and idiom that could adequately convey the gravity of ancient epic poetry. Braden resists the teleological reading of Aeneid translations of this era as mere precursors to the achievement of Dryden in 1697 and instead analyses the handling of three key passages from Book 4 by translators across the two centuries. We now turn from women as the object of translation to discussion of one of the few women translators featured in this volume in Fiona Cox’s ‘An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2’ (Chapter 6). Cox observes that, while de Gournay’s 1626 translation is marked by imprecisions, it also conveys a sense of pride in breaching the stronghold of men, as she places herself in the lineage of French translators of Virgil. De Gournay uses her translation as part of her struggle for sexual equality, a struggle intensified by her loneliness and sense of alienation from her own times. The isolation of the female translator is also addressed by Susanna Braund in ‘Virgil after Vietnam’ (Chapter 7), a discussion of the major American verse translations published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance in relation to the war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s, and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, she offers a provocative gender perspective by juxtaposing the male translators, who as professors were all influenced by the scholarly debates, with Sarah Ruden, who as a woman and as a professional translator carries out her task away from the margins of academic controversies and hence provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced perspective.

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Many of the central issues of cultural capital and of the cultural agendas involved in translating Virgil are instantiated in Geoffrey Greatrex’s ‘Translations of Virgil into Esperanto’ (Chapter 8). In some respects this contribution might seem to stand apart, since it discusses the translations of Virgil into an artificial language—the international language invented in 1887 in Poland by Ludwig Zamenhof. Yet the translators of Virgil into Esperanto replicate the widespread phenomenon of translation of Virgil as a means of gaining cultural capital: they insist on the importance of producing translations of great works of world literature to give legitimacy to this new international language. Greatrex’s essay looks at three verse translations into Esperanto, deploying examples from Book 4 and discussing metrical choices. He suggests that these translations may have stimulated the production of original Esperanto epics in the following years, which, again, is a phenomenon paralleled in the national languages of Europe. However, these translations were—and remain— isolated from the translations of Virgil into other languages. Cultural capital is also a key concept in the next two essays, which address what may look like a surprising phenomenon: the translation of Virgil into ancient Greek. First, Michael Paschalis’s ‘Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek’ (Chapter 9) supplies a panoramic overview of translations of Virgil’s poems into ancient Greek down to the nineteenth century. Although he discusses the Georgics and Aeneid too, his main focus is on translations of the Eclogues, where translators have been moved to attempt renderings in the Doric dialect, in a nod towards Theocritus, the originator of the pastoral genre. Interest in translating the Eclogues into ancient Greek manifests in the early seventeenth century, when Scaliger and Heinsius perform this task not once but twice. Paschalis documents Eugenios Voulgaris’s archaizing translations of the Georgics (in 1786) and Aeneid (in 1791–2) into epic Greek with notes in Attic Greek. Voulgaris, who was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to serve as archbishop of Cherson and Slaviansk, wrote his translations as part of Catherine’s social and political programme; and his translations, though they failed in their purpose of helping to teach Latin to Greco-Russian youth, did exercise an influence on subsequent Russian translators. In the next century translators—including Christophoros Philitas and Philippos Ioannou, both of them professors at Athens— continued to use ancient Greek; only later on did modern Greek take over. The second essay on ancient Greek translations of Virgil is Sophia Papaioannou’s ‘Sing It like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 10). Papaioannou’s focus is Voulgaris’s rendition of the Aeneid (1791–2) at the behest of the Russian tsarina. This peculiar translation had a pronounced pedagogical mission for an intended audience that was not Russian but belonged to the Greek diaspora. Furthermore, Voulgaris’s strange undertaking was closely aligned with Catherine’s complex agenda in her so-called ‘Greek Project’, which aimed at creating an image of Russia as a Western military power and as heir to Greek Orthodoxy. Papaioannou justifies study of this perhaps bizarre phenomenon noting that it belonged to the same era as the first translations of Homer and Virgil in Russia, which she describes

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as ‘a project tightly entwined with Catherine’s political and cultural aspirations to project Russia at once as a Western military power in the footsteps of Rome and the heir to Greek Orthodox Byzantium’ (p. 152). In other words, Papaioannou demonstrates clearly how translation was used for cultural ideology. This essay is profitably read alongside Torlone’s discussion of nineteenth-century Russian translations of Virgil. The subject of Marko Marinčič’s ‘Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil’ (Chapter 11) is the early Slovenian translation history of Virgil, which, while still within the confines of the European school of translation, is nonetheless poorly explored, even in Slovenian scholarship. Marinčič analyses a little known 1863 translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which offers an important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts. Written in a hybrid metrical pattern, Šubic’s version is by no means a literary masterpiece; but it is a groundbreaking work, which stays surprisingly faithful to the original, revealing to its reader how Slovenian literary consciousness formed itself in relation to the ancient classics. The exploration of the twentieth-century translations starts with a contribution by Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken entitled ‘Reviving Virgil in Turkish’ (Chapter 12), which presents an interdisciplinary approach informed by literary history, reception studies, and translation history; the last one of course has a strong tradition in Turkey. Öyken and Dürüşken examine the complexity of translating Virgil at a point of knowledge transmission between Asia and Europe and ask how these translations have been deployed for different political agendas. They contrast the limited knowledge of Virgil in the Ottoman era with the state of full acquaintanceship in modern-day Turkey, suggesting that the Christianizing reading of Virgil may have delayed recognition of his work in Turkey as a result of the Islamic aspect of the Ottoman literary tradition. Öyken and Dürüşken contrast the 1928 prose translations of the Eclogues and Georgics by Ruşen Eşref with the archaizing 1935–6 prose version of the Aeneid by Ahmed Reşit. That said, both translators, in their different ways, can be seen to deploy Virgil as a foundational text. Mathilde Skoie’s ‘Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and the Politics of Language’ (Chapter 13) introduces yet another European ‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on translation and reception. This discussion is profitably read in dialogue with Cillian O’Hogan’s paper on Irish Virgils (Chapter 27). Skoie focuses on three Norwegian translations of Virgil’s Eclogues published in 1950, 1975, and 2016 and analyses the way they exhibit tendencies of domestication and foreignization as the language of translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity. With a particular focus on Eclogue 4, Skoie explores the juxtaposition of rural and urban voices in the context of language politics. Séverine Clément-Tarantino performs a similar comparison in ‘The Aeneid and “Les Belles Lettres”: Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from

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Veyne back to Perret’ (Chapter 14). She walks us back all the way between two French translations published in the same Belles Lettres series, from Paul Veyne in 2012 to Jacques Perret in 1959. She emphasizes that Veyne’s fluid and vivacious translation rekindled interest in Virgil in the French reading public, then proceeds to analyse the principles behind Perret’s translation of the Aeneid in the context of his 1947 work Latin et culture. In this work, elaborating on the ‘art of translation’, Perret presented attention to the philological and prosodic intricacies of a source text as the main goal of the ‘ideal translator’; yet he decided to translate the Aeneid in prose. For Perret, translation had to serve the goal of facilitating the reading of Virgil in Latin; by contrast, Veyne distanced himself from philological scrutiny, offering instead a renewed pleasure in reading Virgil in French. We conclude Part 1 with Jinyu Liu’s ‘Virgil in Chinese’ (Chapter 15). This essay takes us firmly into the realm of ‘other’ Virgils, a realm that is neither conditioned nor influenced by the concerns of European renditions of the Roman poet. Liu offers a fascinating study of the perception of Virgil in twentieth-century China: while Chinese engagement with Virgil is limited, it nonetheless sheds light on how a nonEuropean culture might engage with this text, which was completely foreign to Chinese literary culture in all its aspects, from genre and metre to plot and aesthetics. Looking at the handful of Chinese translations of the Eclogues from 1957 and of the Aeneid from 1930 and 1984 (as the Georgics is still awaiting its first complete Chinese version), Liu tackles the important question of Virgil’s ‘translatability’ and significance in non-Western contexts. She finds that Chinese translations of the Aeneid embrace the ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid and eschew the theme of imperialism in favour of sorrow, anxiety, and disillusion. Part 2 addresses the important phenomenon of poets who have turned to Virgil in search of inspiration or legitimization of their national literary canons (or both). Many of the chapters gathered here reflect closely the challenges encountered by translators in their effort to convey the meaning of the source text to their audiences while retaining the formal features of the Virgilian original. Again, we have organized this section broadly in chronological order, and the poets discussed include Du Bellay, Dryden, Delille, Voß, Leopardi, Wordsworth, Zhukovskii, Mendes, Schröder, Valéry, Pasolini, Fallon, and Heaney. While this part of the volume is mainly concerned with specific case studies, it draws on broader theoretical frameworks, such as the domestication of the foreign in translation (Thomas, Torlone, Eigler, Fabre-Serris, Eigler again, and O’Hogan). Several chapters address the matter of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, which emerges in poets’ feelings of inadequacy at translating Virgil or, by contrast, in a confidence that amounts to a cultural challenge to, and even identification with, Virgil (Gautier, Scully, Romani Mistretta, Scafoglio, Hardie, and Vasconcellos). Part 2 concludes with insights from Alessandro Fo, a contemporary Italian poet and translator, about how to find a place within one of the longest continuous traditions of Virgil translation. The volume closes with a provocative outline of future possibilities in Virgil translation by Josephine Balmer.

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We have placed Richard F. Thomas’s ‘Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies’ (Chapter 16) in initial position because it ranges so widely across the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid; because it discusses poet-translators such as Dryden, Day-Lewis, Lee, and Ferry; and because it identifies some central issues in the analysis of equivalence against the backdrop of Venuti’s foreignization– domestication framework. Thomas explores domestication by examining closely aesthetic, linguistic, and metre-specific effects. Using many examples, he raises the question of whether or not it is possible to translate language-specific idioms into the target language without losing the poignancy of the source text. We move back to sixteenth-century France for Hélène Gautier’s ‘Du Bellay’s L’Aeneid: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention?’ (Chapter 17). Gautier expands the discussion on Virgilian translations into French by focusing on Books 4 and 6 of Joachim Du Bellay’s translations of the Aeneid, written in the 1550s. She places Du Bellay’s translation in the context of Renaissance translations and of the evolution of French language and poetics. Furthermore, she contemplates how Du Bellay’s translations of Virgil made a mark on his own original poetry, and vice versa: Du Bellay not only assimilates the imagery and rhythm of Virgilian epic but through Virgil ponders upon his own poetic voice. Stephen Scully’s ‘Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis’ (Chapter 18) addresses the most influential translation of the Aeneid into English. Scully proposes that Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil reflected Dryden’s own time, because the poem resonated with the political turmoil in England. Although, by Dryden’s own admission, Virgil’s restrained mien was at odds with his poetics, he strove to bring the voice of Virgil into British culture, retaining at the same time the Latin poet’s lexical range and multifaceted textual fabric and conveying the poem’s force in asserting the cause of nationhood. Scully offers a close reading of passages from the Aeneid, which are sometimes contrasted with Dryden’s translation of Iliad 1. This chapter looks back to many of the issues raised in Part 1. In ‘Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile’ (Chapter 19), Marco Romani Mistretta shows that, for Delille, Virgil was more than a poetic influence: he was rather the fons and origo of poetry itself. With the rising interest in agricultural treatises during the Enlightenment, Delille’s 1770 translation of the Georgics acquired a wide appeal. His lifelong work on his Géorgiques displays Delille’s aspiration to emulate the Virgilian text and to appropriate Virgil’s poetics by intertwining in his own poetry the physical, the aesthetic, and the moral worlds. In that quest Delille’s Virgil becomes not only the herald of agricultural wisdom but also a master of poetic harmony. Delille blurs the lines between ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’ as he contextualizes antiquity within the cultural framing and cultural cravings of his own epoch. This chapter raises many of the same big picture questions as does Richard Thomas’s. Many of the same issues arise again in Giampiero Scafoglio’s ‘ “Only a poet can translate true poetry”: The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi’

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(Chapter 20). Here Scafoglio tackles one of the most debated dilemmas in translation practice: whether or not one has to be a poet in order to translate poetry. Leopardi was not only a great poet but also a passionate lover of classical texts, as well as a rigorous and fine scholar of Greek and Latin language and literature. In 1816, at the age of eighteen, he translated Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, in a fusion of his philological and scholarly interests with his aesthetic and creative ambitions. Scafoglio shows that Leopardi came into his own poetic vocation as his translation progressed and that the translation, which combined literary faithfulness to the original with the expressive musicality of Italian, effectively laid the groundwork for Leopardi’s outstanding poetic activity that followed. The title ‘Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil’ (Chapter 21) indicates the focus of Philip Hardie’s contribution to this volume. As a major translation project by a major English poet, this work of Wordsworth, which engaged him during the years 1823–31, can be compared with the Æneis of Dryden, with whom he competes, and with Pope’s Iliad. Hardie considers Wordsworth’s undertaking not only within the longer history of English translations of the Aeneid, but also within the history of English poetry. He explores how Wordsworth, in anxious competition with Dryden, chooses the rhyming couplet for his translation to show how a different verse movement and vocabulary can produce another version of the classic English Aeneid. Zara Torlone’s ‘Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s “Destruction of Troy” and Russian Translations of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 22) addresses the lack of canonical translations of the Aeneid into Russian. While Homer found his widely accepted rendition in Nikolai Gnedich’s Iliad and Vasilii Zhukovskii’s Odyssey translations, Virgil has had no such luck. Torlone argues that Zhukovskii, a major Russian Romantic poet, in his 1823 rendition of Aeneid 2 (later titled ‘The Destruction of Troy’), succeeded where later translators such as Fet (1888) and Briusov (1933), who were greater poets than Zhukovskii, failed: it achieved the goal of ‘demystifying’ the foreign text and of conveying ‘in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text’ without alienating the reader. The chapter is usefully read alongside Papaioannou’s discussion of Russia in the preceding century; and it shares with those of Kallendorf and Vasconcellos the theme of success and failure. Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos’s discussion of Virgil translations in Brazil in the nineteenth century takes this volume once more outside of the European context. Specifically, in ‘Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century’ (Chapter 23), Vasconcellos analyses the intriguing nature of the complete poetic translation of Virgil’s work by the poet Manuel Odorico Mendes, which exercised a direct influence on modern Brazilian literature and remains popular in Brazil. Vasconcellos raises crucial questions about poetic identity in translation: ‘Is its author Virgil? But what are we to do with the “Brazilian” in the title? Or do we need to register Odorico Mendes as its author?’ He argues that the title encapsulates the project of an emulator who maintains himself in a dialectical relation with the

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original and who signals his authorship in a way that unites source and target texts inextricably. There is thus a great synergy between this contribution and those of Romani Mistretta and Scafoglio. In ‘Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 24), Ulrich Eigler discusses the German tradition of translations of Virgil with a specific focus on those by Johann Heinrich Voß (1789–99) and Rudolf Alexander Schröder (1924–30). He frames his essay by referring to Sarah Ruden’s recent translation, which has been acclaimed as ‘a great English poem in itself ’, and uses it to assess his chosen translations. Eigler shows how Voß, influenced by modern ideas that emanated from Göttingen and from the community of pre-Romantic poets, juxtaposes his translation with the poetical experiments of Schiller’s translations of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid. Schröder, on the other hand, in his translation of the whole of the Virgilian corpus, adhered to a meticulous imitation of Virgilian prosody. These two translations could not have been more different, but by setting them against each other Eigler builds a comprehensive picture of the history of German translations of the Aeneid. From twentieth-century Germany we move now to twentieth-century France, with Jacqueline Fabre-Serris’s ‘Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the Twentieth Century’ (Chapter 25)—namely by the poet Paul Valéry (1956) and by the playwright and novelist Marcel Pagnol (1958). Jacqueline Fabre-Serris offers a comparison of these two translations because they differ drastically in the choice of poetic form and in their theoretical positions on the precise purpose of translation. Furthermore Fabre-Serris compares these two translations with that of Eugène de Saint-Denis, whose 1942 prose translation of the Eclogues she considers more successful. Ulrich Eigler’s second chapter in the volume, ‘Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 26), takes us into the twentyfirst century. Eigler contextualizes the translation of Virgil in Italian within the complex social, political, and linguistic history of Italy in ways that connect fruitfully with Alessandro Fo’s experience as a translator at the end of this volume. Eigler addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations paying special attention to the poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1959 version of the opening of the Aeneid, which he contrasts with the 2007 traditional modern Italian translation of Vittorio Sermonti: Pasolini’s translation rejects the conventional linguistic, semantic, and cultural unities, while Sermonti aims at continuity between the classical author and the Italian readers of today. Next is Cillian O’Hogan’s ‘Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics’ (Chapter 27). These versions serve as another salient example of how culture and nationhood define themselves through Virgil. In his essay O’Hogan explores how Virgil has provided a way of navigating Irish identity and looks at the language choices in Irish translations that lead away from British classically infused literature and towards an alternative classical tradition. This chapter complements closely

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Chapter 13 on Norwegian versions of Virgilian pastoral. Examining Seamus Heaney’s 2001 translation of Eclogue 9 and Peter Fallon’s 2006 translation of the Georgics, O’Hogan argues that both enact aspects of Virgilian ‘repossession’: poets relocate Virgilian poems into their familiar Irish landscape replete with the grim realities of rural life; and they make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English used in Ireland. Part 2 concludes with a chapter by a contemporary translator of the Aeneid, the poet and academic Alessandro Fo, whose own Eneide was published in 2012. This piece, titled ‘Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid’ (Chapter 28), is translated from Italian and published here with the kind permission of the author and the publishing house Einaudi. Here the arduous path of the challenges faced by a translator of Virgil is mapped out. What is most striking about Fo’s reflections on the difficulty of translating Virgil is how personal the relationship with the Roman poet has become for the translator. Moreover, today’s translators face an issue never experienced by the first translators of Virgil: they need to justify the preparation of a new translation. This chapter, perhaps more than any other, explores the actual nuts and bolts of the translation process. It is an excellent reminder that, whatever theoretical framework a translator may lay claim to, when faced with the moment of choice, s/he may throw theory out of the window in search of a particular effect. The editors were delighted to recruit the English poet Josephine Balmer to write an Afterword to the volume. Her fascinating, personal ‘Let Go Fear: Future Virgils’ serves as a perfect conclusion to this multifaceted and complicated volume. Evoking the work of Alice Oswald and Anne Carson on Homer and Catullus respectively, Balmer looks towards ‘future Virgils’, reimagined and adapted to contemporary contexts, where women translators will not be an oddity and where Virgil’s stories of victories and defeats will inspire a creativity readily understood by contemporary audiences. * *

*

The chapters of this volume deal with the era of print culture, and thus start at the moment of transition from the medieval world to the humanist theories and practices of translation that have remained by and large stable up to the present day. The arc of the volume is initiated by Armstrong’s discussion of the transition from medievalism to humanism, and proceeds through Braden’s assertion of translators’ selfconsciousness in their use of Virgil as a vehicle for the translatio imperii to Greatrex’s demonstration that the new culture of Esperanto replicates the familiar phenomenon whereby national literatures seek dignity, authority, and legitimacy by crafting an elevated poetic language through translating Virgil. The essays by Öyken and Dürüşken, and Liu, on Virgil in Turkish and Chinese respectively, depict two different collisions between Europe and Asia that will continue to reverberate. The majority of the essays deal with verse translations of the Aeneid, which reflects the poem’s cultural significance as a marker of prestige and as a means to gain

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authority. But there is also discussion of prose versions in Castilian (Armstrong), Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and French (Clément-Tarantino and Fabre-Serris), while translations of Eclogues feature in the essays on French (Kallendorf), ancient Greek (Paschalis), Norwegian (Skoie), English (Thomas), Chinese (Liu), and Hiberno-English (O’Hogan) translations. Of the major Virgilian works, the Georgics is represented in the volume in French (Kallendorf and Romani Mistretta), ancient Greek (Paschalis), Slovenian (Marinčič), English (Thomas), and Hiberno-English (O’Hogan). Methods adopted by contributors include closely observed comparisons between translators, often in pairs—thus Kallendorf ’s three pairs of French translations of the Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues; Fabre-Serris on the Eclogues; ClémentTarantino on prose Aeneids; Eigler on Voß and Schröder and again on Pasolini and Sermonti. Other contributors deploy a greater number of comparisons: Keith and Braden on English translations of the Aeneid; Braund on five post-Vietnam American translations; Greatrex on Esperanto and Skoie on Norwegian translations; Thomas on domesticating translations; and Torlone on Zhukovskii’s Aeneid as measured against those of his successors. Other chapters have a single focus, for example Cox on de Gournay, Marinčič on Šubic, Gautier on Du Bellay, Scully on Dryden, Romani Mistretta on Delille, Scafoglio on Leopardi, Hardie on Wordsworth, Vasconcellos on Mendes, and O’Hogan on Heaney’s Eclogues and Fallon’s Georgics. Most of the contributors deploy, more or less explicitly, a New Historicist approach, which is well articulated by Kallendorf in the opening paper. The chapters demonstrate repeatedly that translations are embedded in their own cultures: Kallendorf on the fates of less familiar French translations, Scully on Dryden, Eigler on German Aeneids, and Braund on post-Vietnam American translators. Armstrong illuminates the intellectual traffic between Italy and Spain, and Gautier shows how translating played a role in forging a national idiom in France. Papaioannou throws light on Voulgaris’s cultural–political–pedagogical programme at the court of Catherine the Great in eighteenth-century Russia, and Öyken and Dürüşken ask why in Turkey Virgil has served diverse political agendas so well through the years when encounters with Virgil take place through the prism of European culture. Skoie illuminates the intricacies of language politics in Norway, which are manifested in debates about city and country in relation to translations of the Eclogues. Philosophical and ethical dimensions to translating Virgil are raised with respect to Spanish and French translations: Rupp connects Velasco’s translation of the Aeneid with contemporary questions about war, and Romani Mistretta shows how the Enlightenment interest in agricultural treatises informs Delille’s Georgics. All the essays carry assumptions about whether the language of translation is used in the ‘instrumental’ or in the ‘hermeneutic’ sense. Many of the translators discussed in the volume are keenly concerned with issues of aesthetic equivalence: in Castilian (Armstrong), English (Thomas), German (Eigler), French (Fabre-Serris) and Slovenian (Marinčič). This is a central concern for the poets Wordsworth

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(Hardie), Leopardi (Scafoglio), and Du Bellay (Gautier), who develops his theory of compensation precisely to address this issue, while the contemporary Italian translator Alessandro Fo lays bare how he wrestled with it. Other chapters address the moral and ethical ramifications inherent in translations that view the source text as a way to educate or improve the readers in the target audience, for example Voulgaris, whose project was utterly wrongheaded, according to Paschalis. Venuti’s development of Schleiermacher’s ideas into the spectrum of foreignizing and domesticating translations provides a framework, implicit or otherwise, for many essays in this volume. Torlone’s discussion of Zhukovskii’s ‘demystifying’ Russian Aeneid is the one most explicitly theorized in this respect. Degrees of domestication map closely onto degrees of vernacularization, a topic that recurs throughout. Armstrong depicts Villena as a pioneer in his Castilian Aeneid, whereas for Paschalis and Papaioannou Voulgaris’s Homeric Greek translation is an archaizing throwback, as is the earliest Turkish Aeneid translation for Öyken and Dürüşken. The translators’ search for an echt localized idiom permeates the material—in English (Braden, Thomas, Scully, Braund), French (Gautier, Fabre-Serris, and Clément-Tarantino, especially on Veyne’s novelistic Aeneid), and Italian (Eigler, Fo). This debate is particularly visible in the Esperanto versions (Greatrex). It is productive to juxtapose the concept of the ideal translator, a topic addressed by Clément-Tarantino and Fo, for example, with Scully’s problematization of Dryden’s attitude to his achievement in his 1697 Aeneid: Dryden claims that his 1700 Iliad was much more congenial and authentic. Several chapters on poettranslators argue that translation is a two-way process that profoundly affects the original poetry of a translator: thus the discussions of Du Bellay (Gautier), Delille (Romani Mistretta), Leopardi (Scafoglio), Mendes (Vasconcellos), and Fo. The tools of literary history are deployed to trace sequences of translations that influence one another within the national traditions of France (Kallendorf), England (Scully and Hardie), and Germany (Eigler), while Armstrong makes a telling connection across the national traditions of Italy and Spain. Imagery of lineage or heredity, or echoes of a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’, occur in chapters about the French (Cox, Clément-Tarantino), English (Thomas, Hardie, Braund), Russian (Torlone), Esperanto (Greatrex), Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and Italian (Fo) traditions. By contrast, while many of the chapters depict the ongoing dialogue between translators, Cox spotlights the lonely (female) translator and Liu highlights the alienness of Virgil for Chinese translators and their audiences. At least two chapters explicitly depict translation as a form of resistance: Eigler on Pasolini’s Aeneid fragment and O’Hogan on the Irish poets’ attempts to renegotiate power relationships. Gender and feminist readings play a small role in this volume, partly perhaps because so few women have published translations of Virgil. Several chapters examine the handling of gender and militarism, either singly or as a nexus (Rupp, Keith, Braden, and Braund). Both Cox and Braund problematize the role of the

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female translator and see her as isolated from the academy; in her Afterword Balmer calls for a future where this gender divide will be closed. *

*

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We deliberately saved till the end the ruminations of two active poet-translators of Virgil, Fo and Balmer, as a way of looking both backwards and forwards. Balmer’s vision of future Virgil translation activity calls for gender roles to be addressed, or, better, redressed. This takes us neatly to the final topic in this introduction: a consideration of things the volume does not do, and which remain open for exploration. This volume does not address the phenomenon of Virgil translations that exist in manuscript and were never printed, aside from one of Kallendorf ’s cases. Pioneering work by Stuart Gillespie and Sheldon Brammall is already proceeding on English manuscript translations, but much more remains to be done, in English and in other languages.²² None of our essays addresses the translation history of the Appendix Vergiliana; Sheldon Brammall has a major project on the Appendix under way, but, again, there are opportunities for further work on translations specifically. There is a good deal more work to be done on the translation histories of both the Eclogues and the Georgics; in the case of the Eclogues, the issue of dialect, raised here by the essays on the ancient Greek and Hiberno-Irish translations, could be developed further. Little attention is given here to the phenomenon of prose translations. Another promising topic that arises here only in the chapter on Turkish translations is the use of intermediary translations; likewise the phenomenon of translation as commentary, raised here only by Romani Mistretta. Questions concerning the equivalence of metrical form arise in a number of the essays, but there is surely space for a systematic and overarching exploration of this important topic, especially of translations that seek to replicate the Latin dactylic hexameter. There are a few major translations that are not discussed in this volume, such as those of Gavin Douglas, Henry Howard, Annibale Caro, and Friedrich Schiller, with his attempted rehabilitation of Virgil in early nineteenth-century Germany; and there is no discussion of the Dutch, Danish, Japanese, or Polish translation traditions. We throw open an invitation to others to take up the conversation.

²² Both Gillespie and Brammall were generous participants in the workshops.

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PART 1

Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital

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1 Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation Craig Kallendorf

My subject in this chapter is premodern Virgilian translations, those that predate 1850. I am not going to say much about the literary qualities of these translations, although much could be said. Rather I am going to look at what one could do with a translation of a canonical poet a millennium and a half or more after he passed on to the Elysian Fields, and at whether his translators (or at least some of them) succeeded or not in doing what they set out to do. Now initially, this might seem to be a belaboured exercise in the obvious. A translation is designed to make a poem accessible to those in another culture who cannot read the literary work in the language in which it is written. If the translation passes on the gist of the original poem, conveying in the process something of the literary qualities of the original, then presumably it is successful; if not, it fails. That is what traditional literary criticism tells us. For the traditionalist at least, literary translation rests in the aesthetic, the goal being to extend something of the pleasure and utility of the original to new and different kinds of readers. But we are now in the second, perhaps even third generation of critics who have emphasized that literature also does work in society. As Michel Foucault and the New Historicists have taught us, poetry cannot be extricated from power, so that translation does cultural, political, ideological, and even economic work as well.¹ It is this kind of work that I wish to concentrate on here. And, since this work in the present context is done through books, I shall also draw on the newly fashionable field of book history in order to focus on the early printed editions as physical objects as well as on the translations they contain. A chapter in a book is by no means sufficient even to scratch the surface here, but I want to use three carefully chosen pairs of translations, one for each of Virgil’s major works, to show that translations of the classics can ¹ In thinking through this chapter, I have been most heavily influenced by Foucault and by the New Historicists. Among the many works that could be cited here, see Foucault 1991 and Power in Foucault 2000, along with Kinney and Collins 1987 and with Cox and Reynolds 1993.

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stimulate some of the same kinds of questions that scholars in other areas of the humanities are asking and answering today. * *

*

First, the big picture. In order to say something meaningful about how Virgilian translations affected the societies in which they were created, distributed, and consumed, we obviously have to know where and when these translations were printed. Not all translations were printed, of course: I have in my library at home two renderings, one of the Georgics and one of the Aeneid, that were never published. I shall have something to say about one of them later, but, ever since Gutenberg’s invention reshaped European culture, unprinted manuscripts in general have receded to the cultural margins.² I shall therefore concentrate on published translations. It has proven surprisingly difficult to get basic information on where and when Virgilian translations were printed. One would think that, after the so-called third revolution in book history, the one inaugurated by computers, it would be easy to collect this information, but in fact this has not been the case.³ A shocking number of early printed editions, somewhere around 10 per cent, survive in only one or two copies, with another significant group in the three- to four-copy range, so that many editions are not recorded in the standard bibliographical sources.⁴ Virgil is a major author who has stood at the centre of Western education for over two thousand years, so one would think that his works would have attracted the attention of bibliographers who were aware of this problem and prepared to work around it. Indeed, over fifty years ago, Giuliano Mambelli published his Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane, which includes translations as well as Latin texts and which should have provided the information we are seeking.⁵ Mambelli, however, was working in the chaotic conditions of the immediate postwar period, when resources were scarce and scholars did not travel as they do now; in fact, he appears not to have made it even to the libraries in the southern part of his own country, much less outside Italy. As a result his census is filled with mistakes and woefully incomplete. I have therefore used the resources available to us now to do the job myself. My A Bibliography of Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850 contains the answers we are looking for.⁶ ² The now classic argument that the printing press revolutionized Western culture is Eisenstein 1979. In the past thirty years book historians have been emphasizing continuities as well as ruptures in assessing the movement from manuscript to printed book, but Eisenstein’s basic point remains valid. ³ While much has been written lately on the subject, Birkerts 1994 presents one of the earliest compelling arguments that computerization does not involve merely doing the same things faster, but doing them in a fundamentally different way. Mercier 2002 is a nice exhibition catalogue that organizes a survey of book history by focusing on the passage first from script to print, then from the printed book to computer-driven technology. ⁴ Polastron 2007 stresses how many books have been destroyed throughout history. Green, McIntyre, and Needham 2011 note that the average number of surviving copies of a book printed before 1501 is one, while Wilkinson 2009 estimates that over 30% of the vernacular French books originally published in the sixteenth century did not survive. ⁵ See Mambelli 1954. ⁶ See Kallendorf 2012.

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A survey of the early printed editions shows that, through to the beginning of the modern era, more readers encountered Virgil in the original than in translation. Of the 5,062 pre-1850 Virgilian editions described in my bibliography, however, 2,099, or 41 per cent, contain a translation. As Appendix 1 shows, Virgil’s poetry, at least in part, was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and German 188 times. There are seventy-five Spanish translations and fifty-five Dutch ones, the other European languages being represented thirty-five or fewer times. All statistics require interpretation in order to become meaningful; and, if the goal is to figure out what cultural work is being done by Virgilian translations and the early printed books that carry them, then this information can suggest where we should focus our attention. For one thing, it is clear that Virgilian translations are going to play a relatively minor role in those cultures where the classics came late to the educational system or where Latin was not a natural base for the vernacular culture. We would expect this to be the case in the Slavic language areas; and in fact it is, for we see only a handful of translations into Polish and Russian and virtually none into the other Slavic languages. The same holds for the Scandinavian countries, where Greek and Latin always remained a somewhat artificial addition to the basic educational curriculum. Given this generalization, there is rather more translation into German than one might expect, especially given the relative popularity of Homer, and rather less than we might anticipate into Spanish and Portuguese, which are Romance cultures, just like the French and the Italian. This is probably due to the peculiarly restrictive publishing environment in the Iberian Peninsula, which even resulted in a disproportionate number of Latin texts being imported from abroad, especially from France.⁷ All in all, this is a great deal of translating activity, which suggests that a lot of people thought it was worth getting access to this poetry, so it behoves us to try to figure out why. Because my space is limited, I will restrict myself to French examples, since, as these statistics make clear, Virgil was translated into French far more than into any other vernacular language. *

*

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In the best Virgilian manner, let us plunge in medias res. One of the better-known seventeenth-century French translations of the Aeneid—and one that comes embellished with an engraved title page and a scene by Abraham Bosse (1604–76), a prominent engraver in Baroque France, before each book—can be found in an edition originally printed in two parts, in 1648 and 1658, in Paris.⁸ The work is described in 1859 as a ‘miserable translation’ by Grässe, who was undoubtedly reacting to it on

⁷ Beardsley 1970 identifies only 216 translations of all classical authors into Spanish during the period covered. ⁸ See Kallendorf 2012, where volume 1 (of 1648) features as ‘FA1648.1’ and volume 2 (of 1658) as ‘FA1658.1’.

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aesthetic grounds; but, if we ask a different set of questions, the book becomes considerably more interesting. The translator was one Pierre Perrin, who explains in his preface exactly what he was trying to accomplish. Like any educated person of his day, Perrin knew that Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the early days of rule by Augustus, who slowly but surely transformed Rome from a republic into an empire. Then as now, it was a commonplace of Virgilian criticism that Augustus and Virgil worked closely together, that, through Maecenas, Augustus paid Virgil’s bills, and that Virgil in turn wrote a poem about Rome’s mythical founder that also praised the man who was refashioning it in Aeneas’s image. Perrin knew all this and saw here an opportunity: he dedicated his translation to Cardinal Mazarin, the influential cleric and diplomat who played an important role in shaping the foreign policy of several French monarchs, and placed the translation into the cultural setting of the Ancien Régime: In effect, Sir, the famous century of this grand author, does it not seem to have come around again in the present? Is Paris not now a Rome triumphant, like her [sic] enormous in population and territory, like her [sic] queen of cities, mistress of nations, capital of the world? Is our monarch not a nascent Augustus, in his first years already the most victorious, already the most august of kings? And your eminence, sir, are you not a faithful Maecenas, like him a Roman, like him the most grand and the most cherished minister, and the sacred depository of his secrets and his power? To complete these illustrious connections, does not Heaven require for France a French Virgil?⁹

Perrin, of course, is presenting himself as the French Virgil. In this preface he transfers the entire ideological framework of Virgil’s Rome to seventeenth-century France, but in doing so he also makes it clear that he wants the same sort of rewards that the author he was translating had received centuries ago. In other words, his translation was part of his authorial self-fashioning, which had material as well as aesthetic goals. Sometimes, however, the decision to translate is more complicated than this. Within the Virgilian tradition, a special kind of translation is the ‘travesty’, a rewriting that takes the common cultural stock and uses it to poke fun at someone or something. The Virgilian parodies of Charles Cotton (1630–87) in English, Paul Scarron (1610–60) in French, Aloys Blumauer (1755–98) in German, and Giovanni Battista Lalli (1572–1637) in Italian are known at least to the specialists, but the parody of Victor Alexandre Chrétien Le Plat du Temple (b. 1762) resides now only in the darkest recesses of off-site library storage. Le Plat’s poem has a curious history. Composed originally in Flemish, it was published in 1802–4 but was savaged immediately, in the Vaderlandsche Letter-Oeffeningen and Vaderlandsche Bibliotheek, by critics who denigrated Le Plat, calling him an ‘ape of Scarron’, then

⁹ I am quoting from Vergilius Maro 1664, fo. 31r–v (‘FA1664.1’ in Kallendorf 2012; this is a reprint of the 1648–58 edn).

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insulted him with a bewildering variety of epithets: buffoon and barbarian, liar and slanderer, an author of mediocre talent and impoverished imagination, and so on.¹⁰ One’s initial impulse is to feel sorry for the author—how can the parody be that bad?—until we discover that, when Le Plat translated the poem into French, he reprinted all the negative reviews in the new edition, which is certainly a failed intelligence test of sorts. He explains there that his poem is a satire, whose goal is to instruct, to amuse, and to correct. The last goal is often not attained (Le Plat du Temple 1807–8, vol. 1, p. xxvi), but it is one he found congenial, so he set out with enthusiasm to correct the faults of a number of peoples. Among them were the Belgians, whose people are liars, whose aristocracy is corrupt (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 292–6), whose clergy is degraded, and so forth (vol. 2, pp. 189–93). Then he decided to publish his translation in Brussels . . . Anyway, in this parody, Troy is France—specifically, Paris during the Revolution— and the Greeks who sack Troy are the Jacobins who enter the city by guile, hidden in the Trojan horse of liberté through which the Reign of Terror was introduced. Aeneas’s wanderings take him from the new world to the old, from Haiti to Belgium and Switzerland, then down the Dalmatian coast to Egypt, where in Le Plat’s geography Dido lives, and eventually to Rome. The text has been described as ‘grotesque and most strange’, and it certainly needs the accompanying notes that were designed to stabilize the poem and explain what is going on.¹¹ It is difficult to pin down Le Plat’s attitude towards the events he is recounting. On the one hand, Louis XVI is identified with Priam, whose death is equated with the regicide of the French Revolution. The condemnation of the king is presented as treasonable treachery, and Le Plat’s sympathies seem to lie with King Louis XVI in the person of Priam, ‘victim at the same time of fraternal jealousy and of the double dagger of open slander’, who is slain, we are told, ‘like a heifer’ (Le Plat du Temple 1807–8, vol. 1, pp. 135–6). At the sight of Louis XVI’s headless trunk, Le Plat writes, ‘I felt this chill, this impulse of horror’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 136), and he writes later that ‘[a]mong the revolutionary evils brought forth by liberty, equality, and fraternity, the confusion of stations is without doubt not the least, because it is a permanent source which perpetuates the calamities of society’ (vol. 2, p. 165). Further on, however, Le Plat’s rewrite focuses on Dido and makes changes that begin with the other voices in Virgil’s poem and strengthen them, at the expense of Aeneas. In his Virgile en France, Dido’s confidante is not her sister Anna, but her confessor, and a priest is present during the scene in the cave where Dido and Aeneas are joined together, adding the blessing of the church to a union that was profoundly ambiguous in Virgil’s original poem and making Aeneas the clear offender when he leaves his lawfully wedded wife

¹⁰ Le Plat du Temple 1807–8, vol. 1, pp. 178–81. The original Flemish version is Le Plat du Temple 1802–4. An extended discussion of this parody from a somewhat different perspective can be found in Kallendorf 2007a, pp. 196–212. ¹¹ Brunet 1864, vol. 5, col. 1305.

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later on (vol. 2, pp. 1–28). In Book 5 we find a long note explaining that religion and politics have conspired throughout history to oppress women (vol. 2, pp. 244–5), and several notes in Book 6 include the Jews among the peoples who will participate in the coming glories of Rome. Whatever vices the Jews exhibit, Le Plat explains, they ‘are the result of their oppression by the Christians’ (vol. 2, pp. 379–80); and he argues that it is important that the Jews be fully integrated into the emerging nationstates of Europe. In other words, at several key places in the poem Le Plat responds to and strengthens the other voices in Virgil’s poem, the ones that represent all that is lost in the creation of Rome and of the absolutist states that were built upon it. In the end, even though Louis XVI traced his ideological roots back to Augustus and Augustus in turn identified with Aeneas, Le Plat’s Aeneas is not an imperialist but a republican. Aeneas aligns himself throughout the poem with what he calls ‘the good republicans’ (vol. 1, p. 123, 1. 128), and in his ‘new Troy’ he has had his new order and his new code adopted ‘in this republic’ (vol. 1, p. 213). Indeed we cannot forget that the allegory in Le Plat’s translation makes the Aeneid a story about the French Revolution, and that the outcome of the French Revolution, at least initially, was a republic. There is one problem here, however: at the time when Virgile en France was published France was no longer a republic, but an empire under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte. Le Plat tried to work this out, explaining that France passed from a republic to an empire when the people voted to declare the first consul of the French republic their emperor, making this ‘the only example history offers us of an emperor elected by subscription’ (vol. 1, pp. 65–6). The same passage, however, suggests that the people could take away what they had offered, and a note in Book 5 argues that the power of the governor and the liberty of the governed both rest in common law, making it clear that, if the governor exceeds his authority, the people can—and should—replace him (vol. 2, pp. 207–8). Le Plat’s translation, in other words, ends up as a thoroughly republican poem, not the allegorical support for the establishment of the new ‘Roman Empire on the Seine’ that Napoleon would have preferred. Virgile en France was therefore a thoroughly subversive document, the polar opposite to Perrin’s sycophantic screed, and Napoleon responded by having his agents seize all the copies they could find and burn them. Le Plat did finish the book, but from the safety of exile in Germany. As we have seen, then, Roman poetry did not—indeed, I would argue, could not— remain ideologically neutral in early modern France. What is interesting to me is the fact that two translations of the same poem could do work that was diametrically opposed, one enlisted in support of the Ancien Régime and the other pulling away to challenge the ideological and political power structures of its day. * *

*

My second pair of translations will reinforce the same point, but in a less overtly political and more traditionally literary context. As Appendix 1 shows, the Aeneid was by far the most popular of Virgil’s poems among translators, but the Georgics

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also attracted its share of attention. The subject of the Georgics is ostensibly farming, which does not appear to be a very promising theme for great poetry, but in Virgil’s hands farming with its attendant challenges and opportunities becomes a metaphor for life, which makes the poem, like the Aeneid, a potential commentary on society in general. Twenty-five years ago Anthony Low published a wonderful book, The Georgic Revolution, which tracks the entrance of georgic into seventeenth-century English poetry.¹² What is less well known is that the incursion continued into the eighteenth-century and extended to France as well as to England. Beginning in the sixteenth century, French translators like Thomas Guyot, Pierre Tredehan, and Jean Regnauld de Segrais turned their hands to the Georgics, but none of these efforts really caught on, each being published just a couple of times in turn. This situation changed dramatically in 1770, when Jacques Montanier, generally called Delille (1738–1813), published his translation.¹³ I shall say something about the literary qualities of Delille’s Georgics a little later, but for now I want to focus on its role as an instrument of power. It is hard to imagine how one could use an object like a translation of a poem about farming to get something worth having in the world of politics and personal relationships, but this is precisely what happened. Delille had a pedigree of sorts—his mother was a descendant of the chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital—but he was illegitimate by birth and began his career as an elementary school teacher—then as now, not a direct route to fame and fortune. He wrote poetry in his off hours and gradually began to acquire a reputation of sorts. Then came the Georgics translation in 1769. Delille’s version was an immediate bestseller, going into five editions before the end of 1770 and an average of one more each year through to the middle of the next century. And these were not small-run, vanity press editions: his publisher was Claude Bleuet, who presided over a prominent Parisian house, and the fact that these early editions of Delille’s Georgics are among the most common items of early Virgiliana on the rare book market today suggests that the press runs must have been enormous. So far, so good, but it is what happens next that matters. Delille’s cause was taken up by Voltaire, one of the most famous writers of the burgeoning Enlightenment; and the successful translator was proposed for membership in the Académie française. This is important. The French Academy, whose nominal function was (and still is) to exercise oversight over the French language and its usage, was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu. There are only forty members, who elect their peers and are referred to as the ‘immortals’. The membership rolls of the French Academy read like a ‘Who’s Who’ in French literary history: Rousseau, Balzac, Descartes, Diderot, Flaubert, Molière, Proust, Sartre. This is the club Delille was nominated for. He was elected immediately but his entrance was delayed by the king, who argued that he ¹² See Low 1985. ¹³ For an account of Delille and his translation of the Georgics, see Guitton 1974, pp. 237–53. See also Chapter 19 in this volume.

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was too young (he was thirty-two at the time). Finally, in 1774, Delille took his seat. He was able to exchange his school position for the professorship of Latin poetry at the Collège de France, and in 1782 the successful publication of Jardins, a collection of original poems, seemed to confirm the wisdom of the Academy electors. Membership in the French Academy is power, then and now, and Dellile got it by translating Virgil. But not everyone liked what Delille had done. On my bookshelf at home is a manuscript, written by Antoine Cunyngham, containing his translation of the Georgics. Cunyngham had achieved recognition in the 1820s and 1830s as a writer of poetry and treatises on French literature and the rights of man, and he had also translated Pope and Goldsmith, so his Georgics translation was not his first effort in this area.¹⁴ Cunyngham’s interest in Virgil was not unknown in his day: in La littérature française contemporaine, Joseph-Marie Quérard (1848) cites Cunyngham’s Essai d’une nouvelle traduction en vers des Géorgiques de Virgile (published in Lille in 1839), which contains extracts from the first book of the Georgics, and notes that ‘we do not know if this translation was continued’.¹⁵ Thanks to the appearance of this manuscript at auction several years ago and to my good fortune in the bidding, you and we now know what Quérard did not: that Cunyngham continued to work on his translation. Cunyngham states very clearly in this unpublished manuscript that he began his translation out of dissatisfaction with Delille’s version, which was still being published again—each year in his lifetime. As he puts it in the Advertisement that precedes his text, among the different versions, there is one that has for a long time enjoyed great fame. This is the one that is owed to the elegant and fertile pen of Delille. But in reading this version, and comparing it with the original text throughout, I have been surprised to see that it leaves a great deal to desire in its fidelity [to the original], and that in places its author has entirely disfigured the poetry of Virgil.

For this reason Cunyngham redid the work himself, but his translation was never published. So, if we look back to the title of this chapter, which of these translators succeeded, and which ones failed? One could argue, certainly, that Cunyngham was not very successful, given that his translation was never published and got him nothing but a passing reference in the literary history of his day. Delille strikes us as the successful translator in this pair, and, at one level at least, this is certainly true: his version of the Georgics was republished again and again and outsold all its competitors, so ¹⁴ The manuscript probably dates to the early 1840s, since a note on p. 10 attributes the decision to abandon the project to Cunyngham’s ill health; besides, his last published work dates to the early 1840s, but an accompanying letter by Henri Auguste Gouttière, Cunyngham’s brother-in-law, is dated 1862, making this a firm terminus ante quem. ¹⁵ Quérard 1848, vol. 3, p. 118.

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that, even two generations later, complaining about it accomplished little, as the unfortunate Cunyngham discovered. But we should not rush to judgement. Not twenty years after Delille’s translation got him his seat in the French Academy, the Revolution arrived. Delille managed to stay alive by swearing allegiance to the new order; but he was reduced to poverty and forced to leave Paris. He completed his translation of the Aeneid in the thriving metropolis of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, whose population today is under 25,000 and was even smaller then. By now circumstances had changed and Delille’s new Virgilian translation could not be leveraged into anything substantive. Delille was forced to flee to Switzerland, then to Germany, then to London. He was able to return to Paris in 1802 and even to reoccupy his chair at the French Academy, but by that time he was old and blind, barely managing to hang on in retirement for another decade, and his Aeneid translation is virtually unknown today. Delille may have been an ‘immortal’, but he did not end up having the kind of immortality that any writer wants: the power to attract and hold readers from one generation to the next. Something similar could be said about Perrin and Le Plat. Perrin served the state well and his translation of the Aeneid helped Cardinal Mazarin prop up the ideological underpinnings of the Ancien Régime for almost another 150 years. Yet nobody reads this translation any more either. And then there is poor Le Plat. He tried to have it both ways, showing sympathy for the powerful and for the common man, but he ended up where most centrists who lack Bill Clinton’s nine lives seem to end up: without the support of either side. Like Cunyngham, he failed both to attain literary fame and to use his translation to material or ideological advantage. So, among the four translators in my two case studies, we have two men (Cunyngham and Le Plat) who seem to have received little if anything in exchange for their efforts, and two others (Perrin and Delille) whose flirtation with power brought them initial success, but whose success did not endure. *

*

*

I have now covered two of my three pairs of translators: those who rendered the Georgics and the Aeneid into French. This leaves the Eclogues. The two translators of the remaining pair are more alike than the previous ones in terms of their literary careers, but a close look at the early printed editions of their translations allows us to judge their relative success, at least initially, in a somewhat different light. For the Eclogues I have focused on Clement Marot (1496–1544) and Jean-Louis Gresset (1709–77), the two men whose French translations dominate the early modern literary scene. Marot only translated the first eclogue, but his version, which was initially published in the 1530s, appeared more than sixty times over the next two centuries in collections of his poetry and another ten times between 1574 and 1615 in French translations of Virgil’s works in which each poem was rendered by a different translator. One year before 1731, when the last major edition of Marot’s collected works appeared, the first edition of Gresset’s translation of all ten eclogues

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was published. Reprinted more than seventy times, this translation was the prevalent one for the next seventy-five years.¹⁶ Both Marot and Gresset achieved considerable fame during their lifetimes, but religious issues impacted their literary careers negatively and both translators were out of favour when they died. Marot was a favorite of King Francis I and his sister Marguerite d’Alençon, who appreciated his literary talents, but was imprisoned on a charge of heresy in 1526; was implicated in the Affair of the Placards in 1534; took refuge with Renée, duchess of Ferrara, who supported the Protestant Reformation in France; renounced heresy and returned to France; then produced a translation of the Psalms that remained popular in Protestant circles and fled to Geneva, finally dying in exile in Turin. It is difficult to say whether he was more of a freethinker than a Protestant sympathizer, but in any event he came to be identified as a Protestant, and that got him into trouble.¹⁷ Gresset was educated by the Jesuits and was teaching in a Jesuit college when the reaction to his Vert-Vert, a satire on monastic life, forced him to withdraw from the order, which he did reluctantly. He achieved sufficient success in the larger world to obtain the support of Madame de Pompadour and a place in the Académie française, but the religious feelings that initially drew him towards the Jesuits caused him later on to renounce poetry as a dangerous art and to express regrets for the scandal that his comic writings had caused. He died in Amiens, in a sort of self-imposed exile from the centre of French literary life in Paris.¹⁸ For both Marot and Gresset, translating the Eclogues got mixed up in the larger religious and political events of their day. Given that pastoral is often envisioned as an escape from such matters, this might seem ironic at first glance; but we should recall that the outside world impinges regularly on Virgil’s pastoral landscape, just as it does on those who tried to keep that landscape alive in early modern Europe. Annabel Patterson has written eloquently about how Marot used Virgilian pastoral in an effort to create a space for free inquiry in the religious, intellectual, and political milieu of his day, and I have little to add to that discussion.¹⁹ But, in line with the argument of this chapter, it is worth noting that Patterson’s analysis can be complemented by a closer look at the publication history of Marot’s translation. As I mentioned earlier, this translation of Eclogue 1 appears in two different venues: the collected works of Virgil and the collected works of Marot. The first five editions in the first group were published in Paris, but the last five were published either in Geneva (perhaps Cologny), Switzerland, which was under Protestant control, or in Lyons and Rouen, where press restraints were less rigid than in Paris. A similar pattern prevails with the publication of Marot’s complete works: initial publication is centred in Paris,

¹⁶ These statistics are from Kallendorf 2012, pp. 179–80, 191–209. ¹⁷ On Marot’s life and works, see Mayer 1972 and Smith 1970. ¹⁸ On Gresset’s life and works, see de Cayrol 1844 and Wogue 1894. ¹⁹ See Patterson 1987b (also reprinted in Patterson 1987a, pp. 106–32). As Patterson notes, Marot’s interest in Virgil’s Eclogues influenced several of his other poems as well; see also Renner 2012.

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but from 1583 to 1607 reprints appeared in Lyons and Rouen. Marot’s work was not printed again in France during the seventeenth century. This was undoubtedly due in part to the perception that, after the Pléïade poets, his verse appeared somewhat unrefined, but it also reflects the fact that he was identified as a Protestant at a time when that was a big problem in France. Publication of Marot’s collected works resumes at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but only in the Hague, which was beyond the reach of the agents of the French crown. After several editions had appeared early in the eighteenth century, Marot was not published in France again until 1823, well past the end of the French Revolution. Gresset began his career as a teacher of Latin literature in a series of Jesuit colleges—in fact his translation of the Eclogues was made while he was at the college of La Flèche, after he had been censured by his religious superior for Vert-Vert and right before he was forced to leave the Jesuit order. It is hard to imagine what could be controversial about translating Virgil—indeed one wonders whether the translation project was designed, at least in part, to underline his commitment to the Christian humanism taught by the Jesuits—but, since Gresset’s translation was always published as part of his collected works, its fate became tied up with the reaction to the other licentious, anticlerical writings in his œuvre. As book historians like Robert Darnton have shown, the French monarchs of the eighteenth century were unusually sensitive to the seditious potential of books and established a system of denying a publication licence to any work that might threaten the established order and of confiscating and destroying any dangerous books that managed to get into circulation.²⁰ An examination of where and when Gresset’s works were published shows clearly that they ran afoul of this system. The first three editions were published in Tours and Blois, but publication was quickly suppressed and editions began to appear in Amsterdam, the Hague, Geneva, even Vienna—the places where books that were destined for the French market but could not obtain a publication licence at home were printed. The title pages of the largest single block of editions assert that they were printed in London, either by Édouard Kelmarneck or Kermaleck, but no such printer existed: these were false imprints, printed most probably in Paris and shielded by a title page that was designed to deflect the ire of the authorities if copies were found.²¹ One edition was printed openly by the widow of NicolasBonaventure Duchesne in Paris in 1783, but the relatively small number of surviving copies suggests that much of the press run may have been confiscated and destroyed. Once the Revolution arrived and controls began to break down, editions appeared again in the provinces, like the one that was published in 1790 in Saint-Brieuc

²⁰ Darnton 1995. See also Dawson 2006. ²¹ See Dawson 1991. Dawson was the expert on eighteenth-century false imprints in France; his collection of books, which contains many examples of false imprints, is in the Cushing Library at Texas A&M University.

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(in Brittany) by Louis-Jean Prud’homme, a printer whose anticlerical sentiments aligned nicely with those of Gresset.²² So, how successful were these two translations of the Eclogues? Over seventy editions spread over the decades suggest initially that both did the job, and did it well. A closer look at their publication history, though, reveals that the issue is more complicated than it first appears and confirms that even the effort to translate poems about shepherds and singing contests becomes caught up in politics, religion, and the control mechanisms of power that Foucault has written about so influentially. Marot’s case is perhaps the simpler of the two: as France evolved into a modern state with authority centralized in the crown, a poet who became increasingly identified with Protestantism moved to the margins of French culture. Gresset’s translation in turn became collateral damage in the war between the French crown and the liberating ideals of the Enlightenment, such that the full force of the most powerful monarchy in Europe was directed against it. Yet the number of editions—over seventy in less than a hundred years—suggests just how ineffective, in the end, the efforts to contain subversive texts like Gresset’s were: in spite of the crown’s best efforts, Gresset’s translation became the standard rendering of the Eclogues in French for the last two thirds of the eighteenth century. So, initially, the translations of Marot and Gresset seem to occupy a middle ground between those of Perrin and Delille, who obtained enough support from the rich and powerful to amass considerable success during their lifetimes, and Le Plat and Cunyngham, whose work never caught on in any serious way. The fortunes of Marot and Gresset rose and fell repeatedly during their lifetimes, and the publication history of their translations reflects their changing positions within their society. Yet in the course of time all six translators have ended up in the same place; for no one in search of a French translation today would go to any of these versions. To be sure, newer versions always push older ones aside, at least to a certain extent, but Dryden’s translation, for example, still maintains a viability that has been denied to all six of the French renderings we have examined here. So where does that leave us? Perhaps with the writer of long ago who said, Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity! What does man gain by all the toil At which he toils under the sun? ... There is no rememberance of former things, Nor will there be any rememberance Of later things yet to happen Among those who come after.²³ ²² Information on this printer can be found at http://thesaurus.cerl.org/cgi-bin/record.pl?rid=cni00011295, an entry in the CERL Thesaurus (a resource maintained by the Consortium of European Research Libraries in London; accessed on 14 May, 2014). ²³ Ecclesiastes 1:2–3, 11.

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Perhaps all such efforts to transfer a poem from one culture to another are doomed to eventual failure. Or perhaps not: now, thanks to this chapter, Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cunyngham, and Marot and Gresset are remembered again. If someone were to go out and read their translations, that would bring them back to literary life. And if someone would write about one of them the equivalent of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, that would firm up an academic position at Harvard and open the door to riches and power.²⁴ Successes or failures? Perhaps the jury, as it were, is still out.

Appendix: Virgil translations, 1469–1850 This chart offers statistics on how often translations of one or more of Virgil’s works were published in the early modern period. No distinction is made between partial and complete renderings of the various works.

Language Danish Dutch English French German Greek (Modern) Hungarian Italian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Swedish Other* Total

Complete Works

Eclogues

Georgics

Aeneid

Total

1 11 163 148 21 1 0 71 3 2 0 19 2 0 442

11 9 55 273 39 7 2 109 5 5 2 15 2 2 536

8 3 66 139 38 2 1 75 8 4 2 7 2 1 356

15 32 135 172 90 3 6 239 13 6 5 34 8 7 765

35 55 419 732 188 13 9 494 29 17 9 75 14 10 2099

* Armenian (2), Bengali (1), Croatian (1), Czech (1), Hebrew (1), Norwegian (1), Serbian (2), and Slovak (1)

²⁴ Greenblatt 2011.

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2 Dante’s Influence on Virgil Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428 Richard H. Armstrong

It is a curious fact of culture that a literary series such as the succession of great epic poems in Western literature has an accretive force that does not articulate itself in a tidy, linear sequence. That is, influence does not solely flow in one chronological direction, but can take a recursive form when we think of the role of cultural reception in the formation of traditions, canons, and interpretations. Nowhere is this better observed than in the dynamic that arose between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Virgil’s Aeneid. Consciously constructed in dialogue with the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy also seeks to surpass its Latin predecessor in an emulative dynamic familiar in Western literature—indeed, familiar within the Aeneid itself, in its relationship with Homeric and Alexandrian epic as well as with Virgil’s Roman predecessors. But, unlike the Aeneid with its subtle intertextual gestures, the Divine Comedy inscribes the poet Virgil into the plot and ranges him alongside the character ‘Dante’ as guide and auctor. This figuration of authority is complex, as Virgil seems both revered and overcome in this arrangement. But it did much to give him an authorial presence that is not inherent in the narrative voice of the Aeneid (there is no ‘Virgil’ in the Aeneid to correspond to the narrating ‘Dante’ of the Divine Comedy). At particular moments in Western literary culture, then, Dante has done much to establish Virgil—and not simply the Aeneid—as a force to be reckoned with. So we can indeed talk about Dante’s influence on Virgil in a meaningful sense in terms of reception generally, and, I argue, translation should be considered a key aspect of this reception, particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Classicists used to think in terms of an unbroken continuity between the ancient past and the modern vernacular present, as if the great poets were always safe in their niches; the notion that Dante may be responsible for shoring up Virgil’s authority was not particularly impressive from that old disciplinary point of view. But I will highlight a particular moment in translation history that reveals this recursive

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dynamic, one that has strong reverberations within vernacular literature. I will focus on the work of Enrique de Villena (1384–1434), an atypical Spanish nobleman whose value lies precisely in the unique and straddling nature of his life and work. He is not well known in our day, nor was his translation of great consequence; rather, its value is perhaps more like that of an index fossil, helping us to mark a transition between medieval and early modern translational practices. But even such a metaphor is misleading, in that, as we shall see, some of what made him a scrupulous translator in a seemingly ‘modern’ scholarly sense—by comparison with medieval translators and adapters—was a rather unmodern sense of Virgil’s arcane poetic wisdom. My lead question is this. What circumstances made desirable and necessary not just a vernacular Aeneid (a retelling of the story of Aeneas) but, more specifically, a vernacular Virgil, the rendering of the text and paratext, in order to convey to a vernacular-reading public both the fabula and its auctoritas? I insist upon the term vernacular precisely because the cultural realities of linguistic prestige in fourteenthand fifteenth-century Europe require it. In this moment, on the one hand Latin is the prestigious idiom of the church and of the universities, of much of the law and of many court chanceries, of medicine and of contemporary sciences; it is also increasingly the hegemonic vehicle for the new humanism of Italy. On the other hand, vernacular languages have come into their own as vital literary idioms, particularly for courtly literature—lyric, romance, epic, and the vernacular oratory of the court and of the rising third estate. While the tutelary influence of Latin on the emerging Romance vernaculars is strong at this time, there is a genuine vernacular consciousness that makes possible not only the production of great works of literature such as the Divine Comedy, but also the receptivity of this new vernacular to great works of literature in translation. Latin may be the language of intellectual prestige, but the vernacular is the language of courtly access and the idiom of secular power. The phenomenon from which I take my beginning has often been described in Italy as volgarizzamento; to render this in English as ‘vulgarization’ is too pejorative, since that would suggest a division between high and low culture that makes less sense in the vernacular courtly or burgherly context in which these translations were produced.¹ A text made to entertain kings, nobles, or wealthy merchants is hardly ‘pop culture’ in the modern sense. I would rather speak of vernacularization, a shift that should not be seen reductively as mere ‘downshifting’ into the blunt instrument of the mother tongue, but as involving its own courtly preoccupations and norms. Vernacularization often presupposes a shift in style and narrative organization as well, since the Latin high style and ordo artificialis of a poet like Virgil are not always perceived as desirable in the vulgar eloquence of the vernacular. Anyone who has read the charming twelfth-century Roman d’Eneas in Old French ¹ ‘Burgherly’ relates to the prosperous mercantile class, asserting its values over and against the aristocracy and the clergy.

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can feel the brisk confidence of its poetic voice. It is rather the case that the literary norms are self-consciously different—and what this ‘difference’ indicates, varies according to context.² More specifically, I want to examine in this chapter the curious circumstances that led to what we might arguably call the first full scholarly translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into a modern language. Emerging from the background of other vernacularizations, the Castilian Eneida of Enrique de Villena reflects many of the default values we tend to stress in a scholarly rendering of an ancient text: strict concern for semantic equivalence (not just communicative similarity) and respect for precise diction, narrative order, authorial intentions, nuances beyond the surface that are structured into or encoded in the source text, and the boundaries between text and paratext. These features imply a subservient relation to the source text that suggests a genuine philological conscience. And yet, as we shall see, it is the self-conscious vernacular target culture of Spain, and not the reverent philology of Latin humanism, that made this translation possible. The translation embodies contradictions that are instructive to any student of the history of translation.

2.1 Volgarizzamento in Italy The phenomenon of volgarizzamento in Italy has slowly been attracting more attention generally (see Rizzi 2018, Benes 2011, Cornish 2010, Rinoldi and Ronchi 2005, Folena 1991), and will continue to do so as more of the vernacularizations of the duecento and trecento become available through the ENAV project in Italy.³ But the great significance of Virgilian volgarizzamenti lies in their ability to detach both Virgil and Aeneas from the mass of medieval legends and retellings (in which Virgil figured as a necromancer and Aeneas as a traitor to Troy) and to recentre these figures respectively as the great poet and the foundational hero of Rome, as they are depicted by Dante. Especially in Tuscany, this translating activity coincides with a time when the communes of Florence and Siena in particular were ‘in search of a foundational myth, which could only find its origins in Rome, and therefore in the Urbs’ foundational poem par excellence’.⁴ There are two vernacularizations of Virgil that are of particular relevance, both from Tuscany. The first is a compendium translation ascribed to the Florentine notary Andrea Lancia (c.1280–1360), and the second is a different work ascribed to the Sienese Ciampolo di Meo degli Ugurgieri (c.1290–1347) (Lagomarsini 2018). There are some issues about the priority and composition of these works, but for our ² For a discussion of French translation and the concept of a missing subtilité in the vernacular vis-à-vis Latin, see Boucher 2003. By far the best thorough examination of academic vernacular translation remains Copeland 1991. ³ ENAV: Edizione Nazionale degli Antichi Volgarizzamenti dei testi latini nei volgari italiani, at http://www.ilritornodeiclassici.it/enav. ⁴ Ricotta and Vaccaro forthcoming, p. 2.

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purposes the following facts are reasonably established.⁵ The ‘Lancia’ work comprises four parts by different hands done roughly between 1310 and 1350, though the first part comprises most of Aeneid 1–6; the whole work is based in part upon a lost Latin compendium or cento of the Virgilian text by a certain friar Nastagio or Anastasio.⁶ The attribution to the notary Lancia, who served as a translator for the commune of Florence; the story that it was instigated by the powerful Florentine merchant Coppo di Borghese Migliorato Domenichi (fl. 1308–53), a close friend of Boccaccio’s; and the Dantean colouring both of its language and conception of Virgil and of his hero certainly justify Ricotta and Vaccaro’s estimation of the work as ‘a pillar of the culture of the Florentine trecento, so much so that we could call it the Aeneid of Florence’.⁷ It certainly had an extraordinary shelf life: it exists in some twenty-seven manuscripts, and even found its way into print in three editions (the editio princeps appeared in 1476; see Kallendorf 1994, p. 17), the last one published in Venice as late as 1528.⁸ Ciampolo’s version is far more unitary and extensive than the Florentine compendium, but is far less represented in manuscripts; all the same, for all its inaccuracies and peculiarities, it has been suggested as the ‘first’ full translation of the Aeneid, and can be dated between 1316 and 1321.⁹ To return now to the Dantean horizon on Virgil, it is significant that both Lancia and Ciampolo’s brother Cecco (with whom he is often confused) have been identified as authors of early commentaries on the Divine Comedy; there are also copies of manuscripts of Dante’s epic in Lancia’s hand.¹⁰ Both authors’ prose vernacularizations of Virgil show such Dantean colours that Luca Azzetta considers them to be the earliest examples of Dantean imitation—a factor of importance in understanding the early diffusion of the Divine Comedy (written in 1308–21).¹¹ Of particular note is Ciampolo’s use of Dante’s line from Purgatorio 30.48, cognosco i segni dell’antica fiamma, to translate the Virgilian agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae (Aeneid 4.23), ‘I recognize the signs of the old flame’.¹² In the Purgatorio, Dante had thus rendered the words of Dido to her sister Anna to express his consternation at the appearance of Beatrice, words the poet directs to his guide Virgil, who shockingly vanishes at this point. To return so fraught a line to its ‘original’ place in the vernacular Aeneid was certainly a conscious homage on Ciampolo’s part. Lancia’s commentary on the Purgatorio interprets the moment quite allegorically: ‘Here the author wants to ⁵ Folena 1956, p. xxxiv had placed Lancia’s text between 1314 and 1316; Azzetta 1996, p. 129 dates it to before 1322; but Bertin 2014 reveals the greater complexity of its composition in four parts from c.1310 to 1350. Valerio 1985, pp. 3–18 argues for the priority of Ciampolo’s version, which Lagomarsini 2015, p. 73 accepts. The fundamental argument is that the Florentine compendium includes mistakes made in Ciampolo’s version, but not vice versa, so the Sienese text may have been used by the Florentine translator(s). ⁶ Bertin 2014. ⁷ Ricotta and Vaccaro forthcoming, p. 4. ⁸ Virgilio volgare qual narra le aspre battaglie et li fatti di Enea nuovamente istoriato, Venice: Niccolò Zoppino, 1528. ⁹ Lagomarsini 2018, p. 133. ¹⁰ Azzetta 2011, pp. 4–5. ¹¹ Azzetta 1996, p. 129. ¹² Lagomarsini 2015, p. 68.

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represent that he once loved the study of theology [sc. represented by Beatrice] and later left it. Now he begins to take it up again, saying that in such a state of wonder he turned to Virgil, that is, to the judgement of Reason.’¹³ One scholar has even suggested a tight causal relationship between the initial publication of the Purgatorio and the vernacular Virgil. Lagomarsini entertains the scenario that the Purgatorio was first being circulated in 1315 and early 1316, so Ciampolo’s vernacular version was then put into circulation as well (and thus used by Lancia for his version by 1317), allowing vernacular readers a chance to know Virgil’s epic right at a point when his character peaks in Dante’s (Virgil has no role in the Paradiso). This is an interesting conjecture, very difficult to prove. All the same, the two men definitely represent a generation deeply marked by Dante’s singular poem, which quickly stimulated both commentary and literary imitation until the Black Death of 1348–53 decimated these cultural circles. A manuscript in the Vatican Library (Barb. lat. 4038) contains a text from the turn of the fifteenth century that is an amalgamation of both vernacularizations.¹⁴ Through the Italian vernacularizations, we have a direct link to Spain here as well. A fifteenth-century manuscript of the text of ‘Lancia’ was in the great library of Villena’s influential friend, the marquis of Santillana (el marqués de Santillana), and this specific work may have played a (largely negative) role in how Villena conceptualized his own translation (see §2.3 here).¹⁵ There appear to be no manuscripts of Ciampolo’s version outside Italy, save for one in England (Bodleian Canon. it. 285). But a further relevant link to Italy’s Dantean horizon for the vernacular Virgil is a work by Guido da Pisa (fl. 1323–47) titled I fatti d’Enea, which was part of a larger work known as the Fiore d’Italia or Fiorita d’Italia. The ‘deeds of Aeneas’s portion belonged in a larger vernacular history of ancient Italy, but what is notable in this text is the open inclusion, amid the episodes of Aeneas’s adventures, of actual quotations from Dante. My teacher Paolo Cherchi has established that Villena knew this work quite well.¹⁶ Further elaboration of the Florentine compendium was undertaken at the hands of Angilu di Capua di Messina (c.1314–37), who produced a Sicilian Istoria di Eneas truyanu based on the ‘Lancia’ version with additions from Virgil’s Latin text. Besides the interesting phenomenon of retranslation between vernaculars—or even triangulated translation between two vernaculars and the source text—we have another Spanish connection here as well: the work was done for the court of the Aragonese King Federico III of Sicily. The precedent of Italian volgarizzamento was to be very crucial in Spain as figures like Villena and the marquis of Santillana set about their work of translation and adaptation. But how this precedent motivated Spanish translators differed. In a prologue to his Memorial de cosas notables, the marquis of Santillana shows an explicit deference to los libros de Toscano for their suitable vernacular expression, but ¹³ Azzetta 2011, p. 678. ¹⁵ Schiff 1905, pp. 90–1.

¹⁴ Lagomarsini 2015, p. 79. ¹⁶ Cherchi 2002.

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he is also under the conviction that the Italians possess better manuscripts than the Spanish.¹⁷ Villena, by contrast, strove to do better than his predecessors, being motivated by their abbreviated or inaccurate work to produce not just ‘the deeds of Aeneas’, but a proper Virgil in the vernacular. But even here his insistence on including a thick array of vernacular commentary replicates what had quickly become a practice in Italy, namely the provision of commentary to the Divine Comedy—a practice itself inspired by Dante’s self-exegesis in his Convivio and, to come full circle, rooted in the academic tradition for the treatment of Latin auctores. Finally, we should end this survey of Dantean Virgilian texts by mentioning Villena’s contemporary, the Italian jurist, philosopher, and poet laureate Tommaso Cambiatore (c.1370–1444). Around 1430—very close to the time of Villena’s work— Cambiatore completed a translation of the Aeneid in Dante’s terza rima, a literal repouring of the story of Aeneas into a Dantean mould. This work in progress was known to the humanist Guarino da Verona, but its fuller public appearance seems to have been delayed until the printed edition that came out in Venice in 1532, with hefty reworking by Giampaolo Vasio.¹⁸

2.2 The Cultural Situation of Enrique de Villena Enrique de Villena was a scion of the high Aragonese nobility, but transferred himself to Castile where he lived until his death in 1434. Culturally, he was a contemporary of the second wave of Italian humanism. To put him in relation to Italian humanists: he was born around 1384, ten years after the death of Petrarch (1304–74); he was in his early twenties when Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) died and when Lorenzo Valla (c.1407–57) and Maffeo Vegio (1407–58) were born. His most immediate contemporaries were Leonardo Bruni (c.1370–1444), fourteen years his elder, and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), born about four years before our translator. To understand the situation of Villena, one must stand precariously on the edge of two different conceptions of Spanish culture in the fifteenth century. I will spend some time providing a thick description of this cultural situation, because it will highlight the curious, straddling nature of his translation, which seems steeped in many ways in the medieval tradition while also breaking out of it and going beyond it. On the one hand, we are still in medieval Spain, the Spain before the advent of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and the unification of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon through their marriage (1469), before the Inquisition (1478), before the conquest of Granada (1492), before Columbus (1492), and before the expulsion of the Jews and their transformation into Sephardim through the Alhambra Decree (1492). We are still, then, in the Spain of three cultures and

¹⁷ Schiff 1905, p. 467.

¹⁸ Cremona-Casoli 1931.

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three religions, the Spain that was one of the most important centres for cultural contact and translation between the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds. Translation was a characteristic activity of this medieval Spain, which proved more advanced on this front than most of Europe. In Toledo during the twelfth century, there resided the first ‘school of translators’ in Europe, which caused a major revolution in European thought by making available scientific and philosophical texts until then unknown to the Latin West. The process often unfolded like this: a Jew with a powerful command of Arabic would translate orally, into a Romance vernacular, a text written in Arabic, which was often itself a translation from ancient Greek; a Christian cleric would then translate the vernacular into Latin, thus making the text available to the Western European intelligentsia at large.¹⁹ Medieval Spain was very much at the forefront of translations into the vernacular. Kings such as Alfonso X of Castile (1221–84) had instigated the translation of great classics of Arabic science and literature such as the Calila wa Dimna and Sendebar, themselves Arabic translations of Persian translations of Indian originals. Spain alone had a fresh translation into the vernacular of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, a project known now as the Alba Bible, which was going on at the very time when Villena translated Virgil.²⁰ This work was done at the instigation of Luis González de Guzmán (d. 1443), Villena’s rival for the position of Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava. Later, in 1456, the first Castilian translation of the Qur’an was made by Spanish Muslims in need of their holy book in the vernacular.²¹ It bears remembering that the Muslims living in Christian Spain were the first Islamic communities outside the Dar-al-Islam (‘house of Islam’) and lived originally as protected religious minorities (mudéjars). Even when we speak of Romance vernacular culture we are still in a polyglot environment; for, well into the fifteenth century, Spain still enjoyed a trilingual literature in Gallego-Portuguese, Catalan, and Castilian and there was still a distinct and identifiable production in Aragonese. Through Catalonia and Navarre, the Spanish courts also maintain a close connection to the medieval heritage of Provençal lyric and the massive body of medieval French literature. All this is to say that, at this moment in late medieval Europe, Spain is indeed a very likely place for a translation to be done: that a king should order a translation of Virgil is a small step from other, more complicated projects of the past, such as the translation of the Old Testament or works of Arab astrology. By the time Enrique de Villena sat down to translate, he had behind him a long cultural history of translational activity that led organically to a vernacular humanism. He himself straddled languages; he wrote in both Catalan and Castilian and participated in the Jocs florals, a poetic competition

¹⁹ D’Alverny 1989, Hasse 2006; see also Sirat 1989. ²⁰ A recent facsimile edition of this Bible has recently been published (for a modest $44,250 a copy). See http://www.facsimile-editions.com/en/ab. ²¹ On the Spanish translations of the Qur’an, see López-Morillas 2006, 1999, 1995.

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introduced into Barcelona and modelled on troubadoric competitions of Provence. He later wrote an arte de trovar detailing the finer points of troubadoric prosody. For these reasons Villena would appear as an archetypal late medieval figure, a practitioner of the ‘troubadour revival’ discussed at length by the scholar Roger Boase.²² But we now come at last to the long-deferred ‘other hand’ of this exposition. The culture of Spain is at this moment undergoing a serious transformation. The separate but heavily intermarried courts of Navarre, Aragon, and Castile are at this point quite open to the nascent humanistic culture of Italy, a connection made very strong thanks to the sprawling Aragonese empire and its involvements in Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples. Villena’s status of ‘intermediary’ between kingdoms makes him pivotal in this regard, since Italian humanism was an earlier influence in Catalan.²³ So great was the attraction of Italy that, ten years after Villena’s death, from 1443 on, Alfonso V (el Magnánimo) of Aragon would hold a magnificent Renaissance court in Naples, completely abandoning his Iberian territories to regents.²⁴ As Italy is undergoing the second wave of humanism, in which Latin is the predominant language of discourse and Greek is becoming a serious object of study, Spain is beginning to digest the first wave of Italian humanism—that is, the work of the tre corone: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. We see the considerable influence of Petrarch’s Italian poetry in Villena’s own work, Tratado del soneto de Petrarca, in the complex poetry of the Catalan poet Ausias March (1397–1459), and in the Italianate sonnets of the marquis of Santillana. It was for this same marqués that Villena translated the Divine Comedy—a translation done simultaneously with his version of the Aeneid, and the first one into a vernacular language.²⁵ The marquis of Santillana later recopied and preserved Villena’s translation of the Aeneid, though it was not originally intended for him. So, clearly, the Spanish courts were establishing a culture where people came to Virgil through Dante and where Italian precedents—in classical scholarship as in other areas—were regarded with great respect. It is hard not to see, in the Spanish literati, a group of people who sense their cultural backwardness vis-à-vis their Italian contemporaries. Spain the captor is indeed captivated by the culture of captured Italy, to paraphrase Horace. Greek authors were becoming known in Spain through Italian humanists’ translations into Latin, which were again translated into Castilian or Catalan. As yet there

²² Boase 1978. ²³ On the relationship between Italian humanism and Catalan culture, see Casella 1966; on Catalan humanism generally, see de Riquer 1934. For Spain generally in relation to Italian humanism, see Gómez Moreno 1994; Carrera de la Red 2008 discusses translations of Sallust. More specifically on Villena’s relations with Catalan humanism, see Gascón Vera 1992 and de Riquer 1958–61. ²⁴ On humanism at his court, see Soria 1956. ²⁵ The Divine Comedy had been translated into Latin prose in 1416 by Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle, and then again into Latin hexameters by Matteo Ronto in 1427–31. It was translated into Catalan in 1429 by Andreu Febrer, the year after Villena completed his Castilian version. Febrer’s work, however, is a remarkable poetic rendering in terza rima, while Villena’s is not rhymed (Gallina 1974–). See Ciceri 1982 for a detailed comparison of Villena’s Virgil and Dante translations.

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were no Spanish Hellenists, printing had yet to appear, and the flood of editions and philological activity that would so alter the culture of Europe in the sixteenth century had not happened. On the other hand, Spain had yet to feel the chilling effects of the Counter-Reformation, which would give Spanish humanism a very different character, isolated from that of Northern Europe to the extent that Ernst Robert Curtius would refer to the ‘cultural belatedness’ of Spain vis-à-vis the Renaissance.²⁶ One could still read Dante uncensored at that time (this would change) and write widely and freely about astrology, alchemy, magic, leprosy, table carving, and the evil eye (as Don Enrique did). I have dwelt upon this cultural moment at some length because it is one of the most extraordinary and confusing historical periods in European history; the situation of fifteenth-century Spain is unique, even within the arc of further Spanish history. Translation is always the love child of knowledge and ignorance, and Villena’s work is no exception. He was a man so learned for his times that modern scholars dubbed him the Faust of the era, though his contemporaries were not entirely appreciative of his wide learning. Upon his death, King Juan II of Castile had his library purged by a friar, who discovered some fifty volumes of works dedicated to malas artes; they were consigned to the flames—but not his Virgil.²⁷ Villena proved such an intriguing figure to later writers that, like Virgil, he had something of an afterlife as a magus and necromancer; a later legend has him learning the dark arts from the devil himself, in a cave in Salamanca. But enough folklore; now let us turn to the translation itself.

2.3 The Translation Considering this complex background, I shall approach Don Enrique’s translation of the Aeneid not only as a work that could compete for the prize of being perhaps the first attempted full scholarly translation, but as one that shows in rich detail the process of translational practices during a pivotal moment in European culture. We strive perhaps in vain to decide whether to call this work high medieval or protohumanistic. I am inclined to think of it as a kind of archaeopteryx: an organism in its own right that gains dimensions of greater interest once read against certain historical trajectories. But it remains an odd bird all the same, and, as I conclude, perhaps its uniqueness has something to teach us about why Spain, and not Italy, produced a work of this kind. It is remarkable that we know so much about the circumstances surrounding this translation, which we do from Villena’s own prefatory writings. As mentioned, Don Enrique was from the high nobility in the then separate kingdom of Aragon. ²⁶ Curtius 1963, pp. 541–3. Curtius’s assertion has triggered various responses, but see Gil Fernández 1997 for a highly nuanced view of Spanish humanism. ²⁷ Gascón Vera 1979.

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His nephew was Juan II, king of the small kingdom of Navarre and one of the Aragonese infantes. Juan II had an active interest in literary matters that had been stimulated by his adventures in Italy, and had read with interest the Divine Comedy, in which Virgil is praised to the skies. It was thus that he decided to read the Aeneid, which he found nowhere in complete translation, so he begged his uncle, Don Enrique, to undertake the translation of the work in its entirety. Don Enrique was to do more than that. He conceived of a plan first to translate the entire work in prose, then to add to it glosses for difficult words, which later grew into a larger plan for an extensive commentary he considered an indispensable part of the final product.²⁸ Thus the final edition he envisioned was an organic unity of prose translation and commentary, and his words on this matter make it very clear that they were inseparable components. He implores anyone who wishes to copy the work to do so only with his commentary (con glosas), so that the ‘narrative secrets’ (secretos istoriales) and ‘hidden poetic meanings’ (integumentos poéthicos) may be conveyed to the readers, who, being literate for the most part only in the Romance vernacular (romançistas), will otherwise have great difficulty with the text. He goes so far as to say that, should anyone have the desire to copy it without the commentary, this comes ‘through diabolical temptation and suggestion, seeking to prevent that the fruitful doctrine contained in the commentary should come to the attention of the readers’ (de Villena 1994, vol. 2, p. 8). Thanks to Don Enrique’s fascination with astrology, on which he also wrote, we have the actual dates of his labour. On 28 September 1427 he began the draft of the translation, which he completed in one year and twelve days, alongside other projects such as a translation of the Divine Comedy for the marquis of Santillana and a no longer extant translation of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Thus we can say that on 10 November 1428 there existed, in draft, the first complete translation of the Aeneid into Castilian. He then recopied the translation in a format allowing for the addition of his glosas and commentary. However, political events interrupted his work, which he decided not to present to Juan II of Navarre, since the latter had conspired with the king of Aragon to rob Villena of his inheritance. He only finished his commentary through the third book, as far as we know, and the translation of these three, with their commentary, may have circulated independently among vernacular humanists in Castile, where Villena had settled since 1417. Among these humanists was certainly the marquis of Santillana, who recopied and preserved the translation in its entirety after Don Enrique’s death in 1434.²⁹ It presently exists in five manuscripts in Spain, most of which are incomplete.

²⁸ See the detailed discussion by Pedro Cátedra in the introduction to his edition (Villena 1994, vol. 2, pp. xv–xxxiii). ²⁹ On the presence of the Aeneid in the Marqués de Santillana’s work and its relevance to Villena’s translation, see Cristóbal 2002.

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So much, then, for the details of this translation’s production. How can we characterize the work as a whole? On the one hand, it is very different from medieval vernacular versions of the Aeneid—most importantly, from the influential Old French Roman d’Eneas (c.1160), which also spawned the medieval German Eneit of Heinrich von Veldeke (c.1175). It is not attempting to body forth a poetic text that conforms to contemporary rules of epic or romance, so it clearly differs from Cambiatore’s contemporary terza rima rendition. Villena takes issue with any vernacularization that makes use of omission or lengthy addition as translational strategies; in this regard, he differs from the Italian volgarizzatori predecessors (save for Ciampolo, whom he did not know). Though the translation is in prose, Villena also eschews assimilating the text into another genre, such as prose history—something that we have seen occurring in works like the Fiore d’Italia. This he avoids doing, even as he points out the sad lack of contemporary chroniclers who could aptly record the deeds of Spanish kings in a manner as suitable as Virgil’s (de Villena 1994, vol. 2, pp. 24–5). Though a model for history, the Aeneid is not reduced to it in translation. Villena’s view of the work as a unique poetic creation containing provechosa doctrina led him to adopt what we would have to call a more philological attitude— it may also be tempting to say modern, but in many ways it is high medieval—toward rendering the source text. Villena’s remarks about previous renditions clearly show his motivations, as he says in a gloss to his own ‘Prohemio’: in Italy, some have translated this Aeneid into the vernacular, but in shortened or abbreviated form, leaving out many of the poetic fictions contained in it, caring only for the simple story for the most part, especially in the material from the fifth book concerning the games that Aeneas held in Sicily. And others turned this work from Italian to French or Catalan, just as abbreviated as it was in the Italian original; but never until now has someone taken it from the original Latin without abridging anything of it, save for the aforementioned Don Enrique. (Ibid., vol. 2, p. 54, gloss 100)

So it is not just the translation of epic poetry that we should attend to here, but the conscious dynamic of retranslation, or the production of a better translation than any predecessor, that defines this translator’s ambitions. As I have argued elsewhere, this dynamic of competitive retranslation is a constant in the long history of the translation of ancient epic, and is hardly unusual here.³⁰ That Villena was essentially ahead of his time can be seen if we compare two other texts from later in the same century: the Livre des Eneydes of 1483 in French prose, itself a translation of an Italian paraphrase of the Aeneid with added bits of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium; and the English version of this same, the Eneydos, which became one of the first books to be printed in English at Caxton’s press in 1490. Like Villena’s work, these are in prose, but they have nothing in common with Villena’s strategies; for one thing, as Chris Baswell states, these works break down all ³⁰ Armstrong 2005, pp. 188–9; 2008.

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hierarchical distinctions between the text itself and its apparatus, glosses, accessus, and commentary.³¹ Villena’s basic design renders in full the textual structure of an introductory vita et accessus, and then the text with marginal commentary—all of which he conceives of as a whole not to be altered or emended, as we have seen. In contrast, the British Isles will not produce such a vernacular Virgil until 1553, when the first real translation of Virgil (completed in 1513) appears in print—not in English but in Scots, from the pen of Gavin Douglas, who was in turn reacting against the messy Eneydos of Caxton.³² Don Enrique’s translation, then, differs from the courtly translational practice of the Old French Roman or the burgherly Italian volgarizzamenti in that he is first of all convinced that Virgil is an author of considerable authority and doctrine in his own right, whose text must be respected line by line and unpacked through hefty paratextual elaborations. He thus knowingly and polemically departs from the practice of his acknowledged predecessors, striking out in a new direction. Note that he does so not just compelled by royal command, but also assured by the native resources of Castilian, which has a special compatibility or conformity (conveniençia) with Latin: And although a few others have attempted to translate the above-mentioned Aeneid into the Italic tongue, they did it incompletely, leaving out many stories and speeches and dialogues which they thought superfluous to the understanding of the story. Thus until the present hour no one has appeared who has represented its image word for word, transferring its conceived understanding into one of the vulgar tongues, as I have done into Castilian by your order and written instruction, so that there might come to your royal attention, as far as it was possible, the pleasant texture of the original Latin contained in your interpretive paternal tongue, Excellent Señor, keeping in mind what I have said above and the compatibility which those tongues, Castilian and Latin, possess. (de Villena 1994, vol. 2, p. 27)

To have an Aeneid available in Castilian is, Don Enrique insists, a great blessing from God; but, he hastens to add, this blessing does not negate the fact that, before this, Castilian was very blessed with many notable writings (ibid., vol. 2, p. 53, gloss 99). It seems important to point out the odd phrase he uses here to praise Juan’s native tongue: la trujumana lengua patrial vuestra, ‘your interpretive paternal tongue’. The word trujumán or trujamán means literally ‘dragoman, interpreter’ and came to Spanish via the Arabic tarjuman. This philological detail suggests a world of medieval translational practices in which the Castilian vernacular came into its own as a mediator between the three great cultural traditions. But this view of Virgil as an auctor of great auctoritas is, specifically, a feature of Villena’s post-Dantean horizon of expectation, a horizon of course mediated by the late antique Servian commentaries, Lactantius, and Fulgentius (among other Latin authors). More than just a plot, a narrative, or a history, the Aeneid is a text, a plazible texedura (‘pleasurable weaving/texture’) of words, speeches, and actions that must be

³¹ See Baswell 1995, pp. 272–4.

³² Douglas 2013, pp. 4–5.

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respected lest something of vital interest be lost. The high conception of epic that medieval Latinity had known was not always transferrable to the vernacular realm, where the chançons de geste or courtly romances remained the paradigms for narrative poetry. But at this particular moment, when the prestige of Italian epic in the form of Dante’s learned Divine Comedy has raised Virgil and his text to such a level of respect, we find the vernacular making room for a most precise rendition— line by line, book by book, from beginning to end. The point can be raised, of course, that, by imparting Virgil’s poetic wisdom in prose, Villena is fracturing an important element: he is decomposing poetic effects into highly prosaic renderings, ‘negating poetic structure as a locus of meaning in its own right’.³³ But one should at least take a good look at his rather exegetical style to appreciate his concern for analytical accuracy. Although he is of course fallible, he remains conscientious within the tangle of Virgilian syntax (de Villena 1994, vol. 2, p. 67): Yo, Virgilio, en versos cuento los fechos de armas e las virtudes de aquel varón que, partido de la troyana region e çibdat fuidizo, veno primero por fatal influençia a las de Italia partes ha los puertos, siquiere riberas ho fines, del regno de Lavina, por muchas tierras e mares aquél trabajado, siquiere traído afanosamente, por la fuerça de los dioses, mayormente por la ira recordante de la cruel Juno. I, Virgil, recount in verses the feats of arms and the virtues of that man, who having left the Trojan region and city a fugitive, came first by fateful influence to the lands of Italy, to the ports, or if you will shores or boundaries, of the realm of Lavinia, he being belaboured over many lands and seas, or if you will, dragged relentlessly, by the force of the gods, especially by the remembering anger of cruel Juno.

Just take that first segment: Yo, Virgilio, en versos cuento los fechos de armas e las virtudes de aquel varón: all of this for Virgil’s arma virumque cano. Clearly there is a strategy of explication at work, as is made evident in the commentary. To render cano as Yo, Virgilio, en versos cuento is justifiable to Don Enrique because in the Latin text the name appears in a gloss, which is better made explicit in the vernacular text, in order to bring into daylight what is ‘understood’ or presupposed (subintellecto) in the Latin; ‘in verses’ must be added because the reader of the prose translation needs to know that the original Latin is in poetic metre (ibid., vol. 2, p. 68, gloss 129).³⁴ No such justification is given for rendering arma virumque as ‘the feats of arms and the virtues of that man’; presumably the metonymy is taken for granted. Villena does take pains to explain in a gloss why he writes ‘that man’, to distinguish Aeneas from another refugee to Italy—namely, Saturn (ibid., vol. 2, pp. 68–9, gloss 130). Another feature besides this explication is Villena’s interjection of alternative renderings, often with the term siquiere, as in this example. So the words Laviniaque ³³ Gilbert-Santamaría 2005, p. 416. ³⁴ Note the beginning of the Florentine compendium: Delle aspre bataglie Io Virgilio in versi narro ei facti di quello homo il quale fugito. This points to Villena’s possible use of this version in parts; see the remarks about the manuscript owned by the marquis of Santillana §2.1 here.

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venit / litora are rendered as ‘to the ports, or if you will, shores or boundaries of the realm of Lavinia’. Similarly, multum . . . iactatus is rendered as ‘belaboured . . . or if you will, dragged relentlessly’. For all its halting cadences, this prose is not without its ornaments; notice the hyperbaton a las de Italia partes, for example, or the exact rendering of saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram as por la ira recordante de la cruel Juno. But it is clear that Villena aims more to unpack meanings than to replicate textual effects. He makes this evident in his introduction, where he declares his procedure. He will translate the Latin not word for word, nor according to the order of words that is in the original Latin, but word for word according to the sense and to the order that sounds best, or appears best in the vernacular tongue. In such a way that nothing of the content in the original is left out or left behind, or omitted; rather, it’s better stated here [in the translation] and will be better comprehended by some expressions I place there as subintellected [subintellectas], that is, implicit or obscurely said, as anyone will clearly see who knows both the Latin and vernacular languages and sees the original compared with this translation. (Ibid., vol. 2, p. 28)

What this method sacrifices in poetic economy it hopes to gain in analytical accuracy, following a desire to unlock poetic meaning to a vernacular audience that will have a text in some ways superior to the original in that it will better explicate itself.³⁵ What is more, Don Enrique completely reorganized the work. The reorganization smacks of the medieval remaniement approach, except of course that Villena’s version is complete, without either omissions or additions; but the idea that a translator can have the freedom to reorganize the material is worth some discussion. Instead of Virgil’s twelve books, he broke the Aeneid down into smaller chapters, each to be copied out with its commentary. Once again their number is significant: 366 counting the introduction, ‘as many as there are days in a year’ (ibid., vol. 2, pp. 56, 108). Even a lazy reader could finish the work in a year, he declares, and such organizational devices are useful because they attract those with a desire to read the work—and even those without such a desire. He has numbered these sections and employed letters to mark where the glosses go; and he explains at great length a detailed system of punctuation he employs, all to increase the work’s accessibility to his noble public and to remove any excuse from the indolent romançista (vernacular reader) who reads slowly or just plain badly.

2.4 Conclusion Now a final word about why such a vernacular Virgil emerged in Spain and not in Italy, despite the powerful precedent of Italian volgarizzamento. The historical ³⁵ See gloss 105 to the ‘Prohemio’: Dize que non solamente fue tan bien romançado como está en el latín, mas aún mejor, ‘he says it was not only vernacularized as well as it is in Latin, but even better’ (de Villena 1994, vol. 2, p. 55).

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circumstances of the fifteenth century produced a cultural lag between the dynamic humanism of Italy and the late medieval and largely vernacular culture of Spain. Spain’s unique historical trajectory had made it a fearless centre of translation, even if it would fail to develop until much later (and then in more limited form) the kind of Latin humanism enjoyed elsewhere in Western Europe. In Villena’s day, Spain was a culture of warrior aristocrats, not one of merchants, prelates, and their Latin secretaries. Spain had used its vernacular languages for sophisticated translations in prose long before the Italians had the confidence to do so (the great travelogue of Marco Polo and the encyclopaedia of Brunetto Latini, Dante’s teacher, were both written in the langue d’ouïl; since it had a much wider reading public at the time). Moreover, the cultural lag made vernacular Italian works popular in Spain at a time when Ciceronian Latin and classical Greek were coming into their own in Italy and the question of the language was hampering vernacular translation. But Italian vernacular culture caused a huge shift of horizon in Spain. So it is not inappropriate to talk here of Dante’s influence on Virgil, that is, the Divine Comedy’s configuration of the Mantuan as a great figure of authority, one who ‘authorizes’ the epic genre even in the vernacular. Under such peculiar circumstances, Don Enrique thought it necessary to create a vernacular translation that would give access to a Virgil formerly known only to the learned Latinist. And it is worth recalling that, unlike his contemporary Cambiatore in Italy, he chose to present a prosaic, dissected, logocentric Virgil instead of one neatly recast in Dantean form through terza rima, in spite of the fact that he was simultaneously translating Dante. Unlike his Italian predecessors, he kept the two poets distinctly apart. The evolving conception of epic that a target culture holds affects the translational horizon to a significant degree, as I have argued elsewhere (Armstrong 2008). Dante’s vernacular epic raised the bar on what one should expect from a long narrative poem and interjected a view of Virgil that required a rigorous new approach to the story of Aeneas. By 1444, Castile would produce its own learned vernacular epic, Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna, the next major epic in a Romance language after Dante. But, as confidence in vernacular epic grew, translation would begin to find readymade forms, both in Italy and Spain. It is very telling that the next Castilian translation of the Aeneid won’t appear until a century later, in 1555, from the pen of Gregorio Hernández de Velasco, who knew nothing of Enrique Villena’s first valiant effort.³⁶ This later epic is partly in ottava rima, the metre of the Orlando epics in the Renaissance, showing yet another symbiosis between vernacular and classical epic.

³⁶ As is evident in the printer’s preface: ‘Italy has well understood for many years, as has France, the worth of this poet [i.e. Virgil] and the benefit of reading his work; so not remaining content with having it in the original language in which it was written, they have translated and printed it many times in their vernacular languages, it seeming to them unfair that only those who understand that Latin language should enjoy so pleasing and beneficial an author. This task only Spain had yet to do until our time. I do not know the reason why’ (Hernández de Velasco 1555, preface, n.p.).

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3 Epic and the Lexicon of Violence Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia Stephen Rupp

Translations of classical epics from early modern Europe respond to a contemporary body of literary theory that values epic as a received genre. Neo-Aristotelian poetics establishes a hierarchy of genres, with some local variation in the inclusion of particular forms and in their ordering.¹ The highest position is nonetheless consistently assigned to epic, on the grounds of its high style and serious subject matter. In his 1594 Discourses on the Heroic Poem, Torquato Tasso states that epic presents the noblest of characters engaged in the most illustrious kinds of action: ‘epic illustriousness is based on lofty military valour and the magnanimous resolve to die, on piety, religion, and deeds alight with these virtues’.² In classical epic such distinguished action occurs in a specific context and appeals to a traditional code of male excellence. Its central characters engage in acts of war—open battles, skirmishes, nocturnal raids, assaults on fixed defences—and share an ethos of valour and military accomplishment. Epic provides a lexicon to describe martial violence and the means of strategy and success in war. Renaissance epic considers these matters from a perspective shaped by the tactical challenges and ethical discomforts of early modern warfare. Michael Murrin has proposed that the shift in literary theory and poetic practice from chivalric romance to classical epic reflected the displacement of cavalry warfare by new skills and tactics, all based on the use of infantry formations and gunpowder weapons.³ These innovations in military technology and strategy raised ethical questions related to the

¹ Fowler 1982, pp. 216–21 reviews hierarchies of genre in Renaissance literary theory, with comment on variations among influential treatises on poetics. Differences centre on the genres in the middle of the scale; epic is consistently placed in the highest position and pastoral or epigram in the lowest. ² Tasso 1973, p. 43. ³ See Murrin 1994, pp. 13–17. The historical relationship between new technologies and tactics of warfare and the recovery of the genre of classical epic is one of the central arguments of Murrin’s study.

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STEPHEN RUPP

legitimate causes of war, the limits of siege warfare, and the justification of wars of conquest and expansion in the context of a growing corpus of legal theory on the concept of just war. The Spanish translation of the Aeneid by the Castilian poet and theologian Gregorio Hernández de Velasco engages the lexicon in which these questions were framed and debated. In translating Book 2 of Virgil’s epic, Hernández de Velasco uses the term engaño to categorize the strategies that the Greeks employed to enter and occupy the city of Troy and the terms furor and furia to describe the warriors’ state of mind in the violence and confusion of open combat. Comparison with the Latin text suggests the importance of these concepts in portraying the fall of the city and in characterizing the self-control that enables Aeneas to escape from the ruins of Troy and defines his role as a Stoic hero. Parallels from early modern Spanish texts on warfare can be illustrated by reference to Cervantes’s early play El cerco de Numancia (1580–5), a work that draws on the conventions of epic to explore competing forms of heroism, all based on strategic calculation and on the exercise of force. Through the contrast between the Roman besiegers and the defenders of Numantia, Cervantes questions the Stoic code of strategy and self-control and presents heroism as inseparable from the affective use of violence. First published in Toledo in 1555 and reissued with substantial revisions in the same city in 1574, Hernández de Velasco’s Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso castellano appeared in thirteen editions in a period that extended to 1586. Its publication history in Toledo, Alcalá, Antwerp—all centres of printing in the realms of the Spanish Habsburgs—and its familiarity to such canonical authors as Lope de Vega and Cervantes attest to its influence as the first complete Spanish translation of Virgil’s epic.⁴ Hernández de Velasco renders the first six books of the Aeneid into hendecasyllabics ordered in octava rima (i.e. eight-line stanzas), the form of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and of later vernacular Spanish epics such as Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (published in 1569) and Juan Rufo’s La Austríada (published in 1584). The length of the stanza invites expansion of Virgil’s text, which is done through explanatory glosses and variations on key terms. The translation incorporates an interpretation of the text, and in Book 2 Hernández de Velasco’s reading stresses the dangers of engaño and the need to resist furor, attitudes central to Aeneas’s creation as a Stoic figure.⁵ Humanist views on the process and purposes of translation form a body of theory that shapes Hernández de Velasco’s translation and its reception in early modern Spanish literature. The lexicon that applies to translation itself is revealing. The two verbs that convey the sense ‘to translate’ in early modern Spanish—traducir and

⁴ McGrady 1973 reviews the publication history of Hernández de Velasco’s Eneyda in the sixteenth century. Cervantes quotes Hernández de Velasco’s translation of the opening half-line of Aeneid 2 in Don Quixote (II. 26), in the comic context of Maese Pedro’s puppet theatre. ⁵ The seminal study of Aeneas as a Stoic hero is Bowra 1933, qualified by Cairns 1989, pp. 78–80 and by Galinsky’s work on ancient concepts of anger in the Aeneid in Galinsky 1988.

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trasladar—have two related but separable meanings: to transfer a text or utterance across languages; and to move something from one place to another. The sense of spatial movement can affect the understanding of the significance of linguistic translation for constructing a tradition of high culture in the vernacular. In rendering texts from classical languages into Spanish, early modern translators often perceive themselves as moving privileged material from a cultural space reserved for the ancient canon to a space that can be claimed for vernacular works.⁶ This process is central to the creation of a vernacular literature based on Latin models. Antonio de Nebrija articulates these views on linguistic capital in the preface to his 1492 Gramática de la lengua castellana, an important cultural text for early modern Spain. Nebrija outlines the didactic purposes that have led him to describe and codify the grammatical principles of his native language. He intends to provide stability for syntactic uses that have been subject to change over time, so that Spanish texts will remain comprehensible to future readers. The connection between linguistic classification and cultural value is clear. Nebrija praises the eloquence (copia) of such Latin authors as Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Livy and proposes that his grammar will place Spanish on cultural terms equal to those of ancient languages. Works written in classical languages have endured over time because art has governed them. By placing within the bounds of artifice (reduzir en artificio) the language of Castile, Nebrija’s grammar will make it a worthy vehicle for literary and cultural expression, enabling the production of artful and correct works in the vernacular. Nebrija claims for Spain’s improved vernacular the capacity to preserve in historical chronicles the attainments of its monarchs.⁷ Writers on the poetics of epic extend this argument concerning language and national purposes to the creation of foundational narratives in heroic verse.⁸ Translation connects Latin epic to the linguistic improvement of the vernacular and to the cultural uses of texts in canonical genres. Hernández de Velasco responds to Renaissance concepts related to eloquence and the style and ethos appropriate to heroic poetry. His practices as translator and explicator are clear in his rendering of Aeneas’s initial response to Dido’s request that he speak to her court about the fall of his city: Mándasme renovar, Reyna excelente, You-order-me to-retell, Queen excellent, La orrible historia, y el dolor infando, The terrible story, and the sorrow shameful, Como de Troya el oro, el Reyno y gente How of Troy the gold, the Kingdom and people ⁶ Hamann 2015, pp. 1–10 discusses the senses of verbs related to translation in early modern Spanish and the implications of this semantic field for Antonio de Nebrija’s widely disseminated work as a grammarian and Castilian Latin lexicographer. ⁷ For Nebrija’s discussion of grammatical stability and the cultural uses of vernacular eloquence, see Quilis 1980, pp. 100–1. ⁸ Lara Garrido 1999, pp. 39–40.

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STEPHEN RUPP

Destruyó el gran furor del Griego vando: Destroyed the great furor [NOM.] of-the Greek army: Los tristes casos á que fui presente, The sad events at which I-was present, Gran parte de la pérdida probando. [A] great measure of the loss experiencing. Qual Myrmidon, qual Dólope, ó Soldado What Myrmidon, what Dolopian or Soldier De Ulyses, tal diria no lastimado. Of Ulysses of-this could-speak without pity. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 57) infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem, Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima uidi et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando Myrmidonum Dolopumue aut duri miles Vlixi temperet a lacrimis? (Verg. A. 2.3–8)⁹

Here recollection stresses the violence and suffering of war. To retell the end of Troy is to renew the pain of those who fought against its enemies and escaped from its ruins. Through standard rhetorical techniques, Aeneas appeals to the attention and affective response of his auditors, as in his claim that even Troy’s enemies could not tell of such events without being moved to pity.¹⁰ Hernández de Velasco reproduces and intensifies this rhetoric of loss. In his version Aeneas laments the destruction not only of Troy’s wealth and kingdom but also of its people (gente), and speaks directly of the loss that he has experienced (pérdida probando). Terms are introduced that have particular connotations in early modern Spanish. Aeneas’s orrible istoria plays on the ambiguity of historia as both ‘history’ and ‘story’; his tristes casos evoke the didactic literature of the Middle Ages, which presents exempla (casos) of human greatness and tragedy. The translation also introduces the term furor to describe the purposeful violence that animates the Greeks in their assault on the city. Through amplification and variation Hernández de Velasco explains Virgil’s text and intensifies its language of dispossession and violence. The opening of Aeneid 2 also characterizes the Greeks as practitioners of engaño. This term signifies deceit or deception in general, but it can also designate a particular instance of this, a cheat or a trick played on another person. The Greeks resort to such deception when they pretend to abandon the siege of Troy and lay plans to place their soldiers within its walls by stealth: ⁹ I cite the text of Virgil’s Aeneid from Mynors 1969. Quotations from Hernández de Velasco’s Spanish translation are from the 1793 edition. Translations of quotations from Hernández de Velasco’s translation are my own, and so are all translations from Cervantes’s Numancia. ¹⁰ Curtius 1953, pp. 160–1 classifies this amplification or extension of a reaction of wonder or grief as a variant of the inexpressibility topos.

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Despues que en guerra de tan largos años After [being] at war for such long years Los Capitanes Griegos se cansaron, The commanders Greek grew weary, Y los hados cuidosos de sus daños, And the fates solicitous of their losses Del todo la esperanza les quitaron, Completely of hope them robbed, Dando Pálas industria á sus engaños, Lending Athena [NOM.] ingenuity to their deceptions, Un valiente Caballo edificaron, A valiant Horse they-built, De bulto de un gran monte, cuyos lados Of size of a great mountain, its flanks De fuerte Abeto fueron fabricados. Of strong fir were constructed. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 58) fracti bello fatisque repulsi ductores Danaum tot iam labentibus annis instar montis equum diuina Palladis arte aedificant, sectaque intexunt abiete costas. (Verg. A. 2.13–16)

Few stratagems in European literature are as well known as the wooden horse that conceals the Greek troops within its hollow flanks, and Hernández de Velasco stresses from the start the intent that lies behind its construction. In the Latin text the Greek leaders build the horse according to the art of Athena; in the translation, the goddess lends her industria—a term that suggests skill in construction, with a connotation of ingenuity or inventiveness—to the engaños that they employ in building this unusual instrument, which they deploy against the Trojans. Given Athena’s traditional attributes of cleverness and intellectual agility, her art may be seen to encompass the skills of the trickster, an idea that the Spanish version makes explicit. The plural engaños points to the multiple deceptions involved in this ruse: constructing the wooden horse, filling it with armed men, and placing it close to the walls of Troy, as an enigma for the enemy to solve. Similar explication and amplification of Virgil’s text can be noted in Laocoön’s warning against trusting the apparent retreat of the Greek troops and accepting the horse as their gift to Troy: ¿Pensais que en Griegos puede haber franqueza Do-you-think that in Greeks there-can-be any candour Donde engaño mortal no esté escondido? Where deceit mortal is not concealed? ¿Así entendeis de Ulyses la agudeza? Is-this-how you-understand Ulysses’s keen wit?

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STEPHEN RUPP

¿Así su astucia habeis comprehendido? Is-this-how his cunning you-have grasped? Esta engañosa máquina, sed ciertos, This deceitful device, be certain, Que tiene aquí los Griegos encubiertos. That it-has here Greeks hidden-within. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 60) aut ulla putatis dona carere dolis Danaum? sic notus Vlixes? aut hoc inclusi ligno occultantur Achiui. (Verg. A. 2.43–5)

Here engaño translates dolus, a term that describes the deceit or fraud that Laocoön believes the Greeks to have hidden in their false gift. The related adjective in the phrase engañosa máquina intensifies the stress on deception, a practice attributed generally to the Greeks and specifically to Ulysses. While the Latin text assumes this aspect of Ulysses as a matter of received knowledge, the translation spells out his agudeza (keenness) and astucia (cunning, guile), both qualities associated with Ulysses’s form of heroism in the medieval reception of Homer and of the subject matter of Troy.¹¹ The emphasis falls on deception as the strategic recourse that will secure victory over Troy. Both engaño and dolus are embedded in a semantic field related to deception as a stratagem and as a matter of ethics in war. Aeneas turns to broadly defined terms when he invites Dido to regard the wooden horse as a paradigmatic instance of Greek treachery: Oye, Reyna ilustre, atentamente, Listen, Queen illustrious, attentively, De Griegos las celadas é invenciones, To the Greeks’ ambuscades and inventions, Y aprende en sola la maldad presente And learn from [this] one evil present Las maldades de todos y traiciones. The evils of all and treacheries. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 61) accipe nunc Danaum insidias et crimine ab uno disce omnis. (Verg. A. 2.65–6)

Hernández de Velasco refers here to military tactics—ambuscades (celadas, which renders Virgil’s insidiae) in siege warfare—and to the general evil and treacherous acts perpetrated by Troy’s enemies. The destructive aspect of the Greeks’ inventions (invenciones) reinforces the negative connotations of their skill and ingenuity (industria). The idea of a single act that reveals the false character of many others engages a broad language of deception. ¹¹ Ibid., pp. 170–3; de Armas 1998, pp. 104–6.

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Recourse to engaño is, nonetheless, not limited to the Greeks. As Aeneas and his fellow Trojans rush to defend the city’s houses and temples, the soldier Coroebus seizes his advantage over the enemy by taking up their arms: Escudos me parece que mudemos, Shields I believe that we-can-exchange, Y las insignias Griegas nos pongamos: And the insignia Greek let-us put-on: No hay por que mas virtud que engaño usemos There-is no-reason that more [on] virtue than deceit we-should-rely Con los que enemistad mortal tratamos: Against those with enmity mortal we-treat: Ellos darán las armas que queremos, They will-provide the arms that we-desire, Con que encubiertos por entre ellos vamos. With which hidden among them we-will-pass. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 84) mutemos clipeos Danaumque insignia nobis aptemus. dolus an uirtus, quis in hoste requirat? arma dabunt ipsi. (Verg. A. 2.389–91)

The purpose of Coroebus’s ruse is to enable an attack on the invaders under the protection of signs of false identity. Although this stratagem induces confusion (Latin error, 2.412) in the enemy, it is of limited practical effectiveness, since the Greeks, in their superior numbers, soon overwhelm the disguised Trojans, killing Coroebus and four of his companions. Coroebus’s exhortation and its sequel clearly indicate two distinct means of prevailing in war: engaño and virtud. Hernández de Velasco again translates dolus as engaño, and uses the Spanish virtud in the Latinate sense of male excellence or fortitude (as e.g. at Aeneid 12.435–6). The opposition of these terms reflects epic’s preference for open confrontation with the enemy. Conditions of combat may justify the use of deception, but epic heroism rests on the exercise of direct force. Aeneas’s escape from the ruins of his ancestral city instructs him in the proper use of such force. Through Hector’s appearance to him in a dream, Aeneas learns that the Greeks are within the walls of Troy and receives instructions that he should escape the destruction of the city and of all its sacred objects and household gods. As Aeneas awakens, his first response is to arm himself to resist the invaders: Atónito, corriendo, baxo á armarme, Astounded, running, I-descend to arm-myself, Sin discurrir por do ó á do guiarme. Without thinking of how or where to-direct-myself. Solo llevaba intento el pecho airado sole intent bore my breast angry [NOM.] De juntar esquadron y armada mano:

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STEPHEN RUPP

To assemble squadron and armed band: Y concurrir con paso apresurado And to-proceed with pace hurried Al alto alcázar, y era intento vano. To-the high citadel, and it-was vain attempt. Tenían el seso entonces perturbado Held my mind then perturbed La ciega saña y el furor insano. rage blind [NOM.] and fury insane [NOM.]. Viame ir corriendo á la infelice muerte, I was running toward [the] unfortunate death, Y esta juzgaba por felice suerte. And this I-took for good fortune. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 79) arma amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis, sed glomerare manum bello et concurrere in arcem cum sociis ardent animi; furor iraque mentem praecipitat, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis. (Verg. A. 2.314–17)

The translation emphasizes the confusion and haste of Aeneas’s actions. He seizes his weapons having no plan of defence in mind (sin discurrir por do ó á do guiarme) and rushes to put together a squadron of men and to lead them into battle for his city (con paso apresurado). The recourse to arms is beyond reason; Aeneas’s mind has suffered the disturbance of blind rage (ciega saña) and insane fury ( furor insano). Here Hernández de Velasco closely follows the Latin text (furor iraque mentem praecipitat) and uses language associated with the passions of the soul in Stoic thought (perturbado). These lexical correspondences suggest common moral assumptions. In ancient ethics, furor is without qualification a vice, and Aeneas condemns the furor and ira that he records here.¹² The violence of war may induce intense emotional states, but these are irrational and place the soldier at moral risk. Hernández de Velasco often attributes the state of furor to the defenders who continue to fight the Greeks in the ruins of Troy, including in contexts where the Latin text uses other terms. Aeneas prepares to enter this struggle by asking Panthus, priest of Apollo, what point in Troy’s defences might be held against the invaders. Panthus’s reply—that the Greeks now hold the city’s gates and streets as its masters— presses Aeneas forward into the clash of arms: Yo de tan malas nuevas incitado, I by such bad news incited, Y del furor divino, corro al fuego, And by fury divine, run to-the fire ¹² Cairns 1989, pp. 82–3.

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Y al hierro, á do mi ardor y Erimnis quiere, And to-the iron, to where my zeal and Erinys desire, Y á do suena el clamor que el Cielo hiere. And to where sounds the clash [of arms] that the heaven strikes. (Hernández de Velasco, 1, p. 81) talibus Othryadae dictis et numine diuum in flammas et in arma feror, quo tristis Erinys, quo fremitus uocat et sublatus ad aethera clamor. (Verg. A. 2.336–8)

Here Aeneas surrenders himself to the confused sensations of war. In the Latin text, he responds to the priest’s words and to the power of the gods (numine diuum); in the translation, he is incited by the unfortunate notice of Troy’s fall and by divine fury (furor divino). The adjective divino (in contrast to insano) and the reference to the will of Erinys may signal that this fury differs in kind from the emotion that seized Aeneas’s mind when he roused himself to the Greek invasion, but the repetition of furor suggests continuity in his emotional state. This state consistently animates the Trojans as they attempt to protect the remains of their city. Aeneas attracts companions who respond to his exhortation to arms, los mancebos valerosos / Nuevo furor al viejo acrecentando (‘the valiant youths, new fury to old increasing’; sic animis iuuenum furor additus, 2.355). This company rushes to resist the assault on Priam’s palace, en furor nuevo encendidos (‘with new fury alight’; instaurati animi, 2.451). Hernández de Velasco uses furor to translate a series of terms that describe the condition of the Trojans who take up arms against the Greek invaders. The Aeneid presents the emotions that press Aeneas into skirmishes with the enemy as states that he must overcome if he is to flee from Troy as the leader of its surviving citizens and as the protector of its household gods. Furor and ira are incompatible with self-control, one of the central virtues in ancient ideals of kingship.¹³ When Venus reveals that the Olympian gods are spurring on the Greeks and using their own weapons to destroy the walls of Troy, Aeneas turns his mind to gathering his household for flight, and a subsequent portent from Jupiter confirms him in this intention. These acts of self-control anticipate his role in the rest of the poem. In the physical and moral itinerary that leads to the founding of Rome, Aeneas leaves behind the challenges of war at Troy and practises the skills of control and command on Italian ground. Aeneid 2 considers the limits of engaño and furor in the context of warfare. The Greeks enter Troy through an inventive ruse, but neither the stratagem of stealing the arms of enemy soldiers nor the use of impassioned force is sufficient to enable Aeneas to escape from the ruins of the defeated city. His formation involves a heroism built around the Stoic requirement of self-control—a heroism that will secure Rome’s foundation and underwrite its imperial order. The concepts of engaño and furor are

¹³ Ibid., p. 27.

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STEPHEN RUPP

also central to Cervantes’s Numancia, a play in high style that presents an important event in early modern Spanish historiography—Rome’s siege and conquest of the Celtiberian city of Numantia in 133 BCE—as an epic subject.¹⁴ Cervantes portrays the Numantians as heroic figures who offer concerted resistance to Roman aggression. When the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (Cipión in Spanish) resorts to siege warfare, the Numantian defenders turn to force and furor, in acts of collective violence. The play’s action presents the Roman siege as an instance of engaño, prudent in military terms but non-heroic. At the same time it suggests that furor cannot be separated from the force that defines epic heroism.¹⁵ Cipión takes command of the Roman troops by delivering a set speech on the virtues of valour and common purpose and by challenging the Numantians to open battle, gestures that recognize the importance of furor in motivating soldiers. In a parley, an ambassador from Numantia warns Cipión that false confidence in his army’s capacities may lead to engaños; and he uses this term to denote illusion or selfdeception (277–8).¹⁶ It quickly becomes clear that Cipión is prepared to resort to engaños in the sense of military stratagems when he announces to his subordinates that he plans to spare Roman lives by encircling the city and by subduing it through siege tactics. For the Romans, this is a matter of skilful generalship. The Numantians, by contrast, criticize Cipión for the tactics of attrition that he has used against them; and in doing so they employ a lexicon of deception and ingenuity. In a council of war they complain that he is destroying them through cobardes mañas (‘cowardly tricks’, 541–2). In a second parley their leader Caravino curses the Romans as unworthy enemies, known for their industriosas, mas cobardes manos (‘skilful, but cowardly hands’, 1213–14), and accuses them of prevailing in war by deceitful means: Mas, como siempre estáis acostumbrados, But, since always you-are accustomed a vencer con ventajas y con mañas, to winning with advantages and with tricks, estos conciertos, en valor fundados, these concords, on valour based, no los admiten vuestras marañas. do-not them allow your deceptions [NOM.]. (Cervantes, Numancia, 1225–8)

As in Hernández de Velasco’s translation of Aeneid 2, a range of terms in the semantic field of engaño stresses the deceptive character of siegecraft. The Numantians have

¹⁴ Schmidt 1995 discusses the treatment of Numantia as a foundational narrative in early modern Spanish historiography. ¹⁵ Criticism of La Numancia has analysed in detail its engagement with the techniques and ideological claims of classical epic. Representative readings along these lines include Bergmann 1982; de Armas 1998, pp. 97–153; King 1979; Rupp 2014, pp. 33–62; and Simerka 2003, pp. 87–106. ¹⁶ I cite Cervantes’s Numancia from Marrast 1984.

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proposed that the conflict be decided through single combat of champions or through a decisive battle; Caravino asserts that the Romans refuse these agreements because they prefer trickery to valour. In the face of the enemy’s determined resistance, Cipión’s prudence declines into a mere calculus of victory. This shift stresses the fundamental contrast between Rome and Numantia. In word and deed, the Numantians maintain a code that links heroism to the furor that incites warriors to exercise force. With striking consistency, they respond to the Romans by inviting open conflict. They are keen to face their enemies in battle, and their considerations of strategy centre not on calculations but on measures that will break the siege through definitive action. They counter the ‘skilful hands’ of the Romans with the right arm (diestro, 1208) that wields the sword in battle. Both sides are aware of this opposition, articulated in the contrast between engaño or industria on the one hand and furor on the other—together with related lexical items such as furia, ira, and rabia (286–8, 1792–5). In the difficult conditions of siege warfare, the Numantians keep their faith with an ethos of Iliadic heroism. Cipión’s tactics reduce the Numantians’ heroic conduct to the furor of inwardly directed violence. Siege warfare is a method of attrition that extends martial aggression to soldiers and civilians alike, on the principle that the force of suffering and heightened mortality in the civilian population will cause the encircled city to surrender. The Numantians destroy the logic of the siege by forming a common cause designed to frustrate Cipión’s pragmatic tactics. Within the restricted space of the city walls, their furor drives them to kill one another so as to avoid delivering themselves to the Romans. Their actions are presented from various perspectives: the personified figure of War takes the stage accompanied by her familiars, Disease and Hunger, to describe the acts of war that the Numantians inflict on each other; Numantian characters appear in vignettes, inciting others to mutual violence; Cipión’s subordinates mount the walls to survey the devastation within them. In dialogue with the other allegorical figures, Disease explains that the Numantians have usurped the destructive work that Hunger would normally take on to end the siege: El Furor y la Rabia, tus secuaces, Furor and Rage, your hirelings, han tomado en su pecho tal asiento have settled in their breasts so much que cual si fuese de romanas haces, that as if for Roman fasces, cada cual de su sangre está sediento. each one for his own blood is thirsty. Muertos, incendios, iras son sus paces; Death, fire, anger are their peace; en el morir han puesto su contento, in death they-have found their happiness,

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y por quitar el triunfo a los romanos, and to deny triumph to the Romans ellos mesmos se matan con sus manos. they themselves are-killing with their-own hands. (Cervantes, Numancia 2016–23)

Here the states of furor and rage are central to the ethos and nature of war. The words of the Roman and Numantian characters confirm this principle. Teógenes urges his fellow citizens to turn the attachment of friendship into the rage and fury (rabia y furia, 2162–3) against enemies in battle. The child Bariato, who flees from the collective suicide and then leaps to his death from a tower, in a refusal of Roman clemency, concentrates in his will all the furor of his people (2361–5). In conceding that the glory of the siege rests with the Numantians, Cipión praises the ‘heroic virtue’ that they have shown through their open violence (2405). The fame of Numantia depends not on selfcontrol but on the furor of these bellicose acts. In early modern Europe, neo-Aristotelian literary theory and neo-Stoic political thought can be understood as parallel intellectual movements, and the influence of the latter is particularly clear in treatises on the conduct of kings and their counsellors.¹⁷ Moral instruction urges such persons to subordinate their senses and emotions to the interests of the state, through an ethos of fortitude and self-control. Classical epic could be read if one looked for paradigms of such public virtue, in accordance with the ethical thrust of neo-Aristotelian poetics and interpretation. The Stoic conduct of Aeneas casts him as a hero in this mould, and Hernández de Velasco’s translation of the Aeneid frames terms for examining the employment of stratagems and the importance of control over intense emotional and mental states. The use of this lexicon in La Numancia suggests a sceptical response to the tenets of neo-Stoicism. In a tradition of epic writing on warfare and its ethos, Cervantes (re)considers the limits of engaño and the claims of furor. Cipión’s prudence compromises his claim to the rewards of military victory, while the Numantians surrender themselves to furor and rabia, in an exercise of direct force. Cervantes presents an epic world in which force suffers furor and the violent take the rewards of honour and fame.

¹⁷ Oestreich 1984 is the standard study of neo-Stoicism in the political thought and statecraft of early modern Europe.

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4 Love and War Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (from Caxton until Today) Alison Keith

Many English versions of Virgil’s Aeneid have been essayed since Geoffrey Chaucer inaugurated the form with his epitome of Aeneas’s arrival in North Africa and meeting with Dido at Carthage, in The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women.¹ Both works are, indeed, highly appropriate venues for Dido’s entry into the English tongue. But later English translators of Virgil have not always shared Chaucer’s well-documented interest in women in classical myth and literature. Most seem to have been drawn to translation of the Aeneid because of the poem’s political and military commitments; for many enjoyed public careers of some sort, principally as politicians, bureaucrats, and diplomats, and many also saw military service (see the Appendix to this chapter).² Chaucer himself may have served in the military in 1359–60 with Edward III’s army in France, during the Hundred Years War, before undertaking diplomatic missions later on (1367–78) and sitting as a justice of the peace and member of parliament (from 1385), while William Caxton, author of the earliest complete English version of the Aeneid (albeit a prose paraphrase rather than a poetic rendering, and from a French translation of the Aeneid—Le Liure des Eneydes—rather than from the original), worked as a wool merchant, diplomat, translator, author, and printer. In this chapter I explore the reception of gender in Virgil’s Aeneid as a poem of ‘arms and a man’ by analysing the relationship drawn by Virgil’s English translators between ‘arms’ and a ‘woman’. In order to limit my compass appropriately for this volume, and in an effort to offer new findings, I focus on the representation of Lavinia in Aeneid 7 rather than on the career of Dido, queen of Carthage, in Aeneid 1, 4, and 6; and I restrict myself to translations of the complete poem.³ By investigating ¹ Baswell 1995, pp. 220–69; Gransden 1996, pp. 1–4. ² See Frost 1982. ³ Dido’s appeal has endured through the ages: English highlights include Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Dido’ in The Legend of Good Women (first published c.1372–80), Marlowe’s 1594 Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (first performed in 1680). On the reception of Dido in European art, literature, music, and translation, see e.g. Semrau 1930; Martin 1990; Reid 1993: 1,

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ALISON KEITH

Virgil’s introduction of Lavinia—the promised Italian bride of Aeneas—together with Juno’s characterization of this Italian princess as another Helen (and of Aeneas as another Paris), we may examine the reception of the amatory pretext of Virgil’s Italian war narrative. The focus on Lavinia’s presentation in English reveals both the problems and the possibilities that her characterization entailed for students of the poem, whether translators or critics. I begin with the translation of Thomas Phaer (whose Aeneid 7 was completed on 7 December 1557) and Thomas Twyne, who completed Phaer’s translation, which had been left unfinished at his death in 1560, and published their jointly authored complete version in 1573 (see Phaer 1987).⁴ I pass next to Dryden’s (1697) Æneis and to William Morris’s Aeneids of 1876, before working through some exemplary twentieth-century translations of the poem—those of C. Day-Lewis (1952), Robert Fitzgerald (1983), and Robert Fagles (2006). By way of conclusion, I consider the first female-authored translations of the Aeneid, by Sarah Ruden (2008) and Patricia A. Johnston (2012). Thomas Phaer (c.1510–60) trained as a lawyer and doctor and authored medical and legal treatises in addition to his translation of the first seven books of the Aeneid, which he dedicated to Queen Mary Tudor a few months before her death in November 1558. The royal dedication, as Colin Burrow notes, implies the translator’s Catholicism, along with a monarchist politics congenial both to the Aeneid and to an earlier ‘age, when Virgil’s Rome could be used to evoke the universal authority of the Church’ (Burrow 1997, p. 24). Phaer’s grand (and, to our ear, ponderous) fourteen-syllable line, an iambic heptameter, well conveys the weighty matter of savage wars to which the poet turns in the seventh book of the epic. And it is perhaps in accordance with the gravity of the martial material that Phaer does not name the Muse whose inspiration the poet seeks, when he translates Virgil’s second proem:⁵ nunc age, qui reges, Erato, quae tempora, rerum quis Latio antiquo fuerit status, aduena classem cum primum Ausoniis exercitus appulit oris, expediam, et primae reuocabo exordia pugnae. tu uatem, tu, diua, mone. dicam horrida bella, dicam acies actosque animis in funera reges, Tyrrhenamque manum totamque sub arma coactam Hesperiam. maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo, maius opus moueo. (Verg. A. 7.37–45) pp. 48–58, 346–7; Desmond 1994; Gransden 1996, pp. 39–42, 81–6, 91–6, 100–2; Bungarten 2005; Knox and Thomas 2014; Pop 2014. ⁴ I do not consider the translation of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (?1476–1522) into Scots, which— although descended from northern English—was the official language of sixteenth-century Scotland and was chosen by Douglas as distinct from the English spoken in the England of his day and also perhaps in reaction to the loose English version of the Aeneid published by William Caxton in 1490. As Douglas says in his Prologue (I.102–4): ‘this book I dedicate, / Written in the language of Scottish nation, / And thus I mak my protestation’ (English translation from Kendal 2011, p. 3). ⁵ I quote Virgil’s Aeneid from Mynors 1969.

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Now muse, now let vs sée, what gouernment, what state of thinges, In Italy that time there was, what captaines great, what kings, Whan first this straungers fleete in Latium land did ships ariue I will setfurth, and causes first of fight I shall descriue. Thou goddesse giue mée might, of gastly warres now must I sing. (Phaer, Aeneid, 7.36–40)⁶

In an otherwise close rendering of Virgil’s Latin, Phaer’s invocation of an unnamed Muse strips the second proem of any hint of erotic colouring (to say nothing of the intertextual relationship to Apollonius of Rhodes, which may not have been apparent to Phaer, who had no Greek),⁷ just as it also suppresses Virgil’s intimation of the amatory motivation of the action of the second half of the poem.⁸ Phaer’s introduction of Lavinia and Amata slightly later in the book similarly bypasses erotic resonances, even though such nuances are in evidence in Virgil’s introduction of the women of Latinus’s household: sola domum et tantas seruabat filia sedes iam matura uiro, iam plenis nubilis annis. multi illam magno e Latio totaque petebant Ausonia; petit ante alios pulcherrimus omnis Turnus, auis atauisque potens, quem regia coniunx adiungi generum miro properabat amore. (Verg. A. 7.52–7) One doughter did remaine, and all that house susteining helde, Now husbandripe, now wedlockable full, of lawfull yeeres. From large Italia land, full many a lord, and princely peeres Full glad for her did sue, but ouer all, of beauty most, King Turnus lusty prince (of kingly stock that best might bost) Aboue them all was chiefe, and him the Quéene did sée most meete, And wondrously did hast, to ioyne with him her doughter sweete. (Phaer, Aeneid, 7.51–7)

Phaer’s ‘Now husbandripe’ is undoubtedly faithful to Virgil’s iam matura uiro, but it proleptically situates Latinus’s unmarried daughter in the legal estate of marriage. This effectively emphasizes the dynastic marriage that is her father’s goal, but at the cost of diminishing the stress on the princess’s awakening sexuality in the original. Phaer’s translation draws out the agricultural origins of maturus, applied to crops in the sense of ‘ripe’ (OLD s.v. maturus 1), but foregoes the connotation of ‘readiness for’, in this case, sex or breeding (ibid., 5). His continuation of the line in ‘now ⁶ I quote Phaer’s translation of Aeneid 7 from Lally 1987. ⁷ The editio princeps of the Argonautica was published in Florence in 1496. The first Latin translation, published side by side with the Greek text, appeared in 1550 in Basel; the Greek was edited by Oporinus and translated into Latin by Hartung. For further information on the editorial history of Apollonius’s epic in Europe, see Mooney 1912, pp. 61–3. ⁸ My appreciation of the erotic resonances of the second proem has been enhanced by Lyne 1983 and McCallum 2012.

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wedlockable’ (the latter word, like husbandripe, also apparently a hapax legomenon) likewise lacks the undertone of sexual appeal (see OED s.v. ‘wedlockable’) implicit in both Latin nubilis (OLD s.v.) and the later English cognate ‘nubile’ (OED s.v. 1, 3), which first appears in the seventeenth century.⁹ The English author’s reference to her ‘lawfull yeeres’ further dampens Virgil’s hints at Lavinia’s sexual desirability, not only in the Roman poet’s application of nubilis to her (54) but also in the repeated forms of peto (54–5), which, in conjunction with the collocation of multi illam (53), allude to Catullus’s highly erotic flower simile in Carmen 62. In that poem, which was an epithalamion, the simile describes a bride’s desirability: vt flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, ignotus pecori, nullo conuolsus aratro, quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber; multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae: idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, nulli illum pueri, nullae optauere puellae: sic uirgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est; cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem, nec pueris iucunda manet, nec cara puellis.¹⁰ (Catullus 62.39–47) As a flower is engendered in a remote part of a fenced garden, unknown to the herd and plucked by no plough, which the breezes soothe, the sun strengthens, and rain rears; many boys desired it, many girls: when the same flower has been plucked, cut down by a slender nail, no boys desired it, no girls: so is a maiden, while she remains untouched, while she is dear to her kin; when she has lost her chaste bloom with the corruption of her body, neither does she remain pleasant to boys nor dear to girls.

Phaer’s translation of peto, in his reference to the Italian princes who ‘for her did sue’, bears the legal meaning of bringing a suit ‘in respect of which a claim is made’ (OLD s.v. peto 21b), underlining once again the dynastic import of Lavinia’s prospective marriage, but neglecting the amatory resonances of the Latin verb rather than registering its erotic connotations.¹¹ The legal and dynastic cast that Phaer imparts to Virgil’s lines in his translation presumably reflects his legal training and interests, as well as (perhaps) the fraught legal and dynastic manoeuvrings that first revoked and later enabled Mary Tudor’s claim to the throne. Phaer’s neglect of Virgil’s suffusion of erotic undertones in this passage is most especially striking in his failure to render Virgil’s amore (57) into English. The first half of the relevant line, ‘And wondrously did hast’ (57), is scrupulously faithful to the Virgilian miro . . . properabat (Aen. 7.57), but omits altogether the noun that miro ⁹ See Adams 1982, pp. 159–61. ¹⁰ I quote Catullus from Mynors 1958 with my translation. As is well known, at Carmina 62.42, Catullus alludes to the story of Acontius and Cydippe in Callimachus (Call. Aet. 3 frr. 166.9–10M and 168M). Ovid appropriates the Catullan phrase, with its full eroticism, in his description of Narcissus (Ov. Met. 3.353–5). ¹¹ OLD s.v. peto 10c. Cf. Pichon 1966, s.v.; Adams 1982, pp. 159, 212 n. 1; and Fedeli 2005, p. 291 (ad Prop. 2.9a.23–4).

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modifies in Virgil’s Latin, amore. The omission may be seen to parallel Phaer’s earlier suppression of the Muse’s name, Erato, and confirms the English translator’s preoccupation with law in his version of the Italian narrative instead of any engagement with the literary conventions of erotic love that the second-generation neoteric poet Virgil briefly adumbrates in these lines. Phaer’s treatment of Juno’s statement of purpose later in the book likewise focuses on the homosocial dynastic relations allying Aeneas’s stock to Latinus: Let passe Lauinia wedded needes shalbe by destnie tolde. Yet still prolong the time, and discord foule betwéen them bréede, And peoples both distroy, were in my minde a worthy déede. The stepson and the father both, shal haue their loueday fée, With Troians and with Rutils blood, this wenche endowde shalbée. This Venus goodly broode, and second Paris, fine and nice, Shall bring againe to dust this second Troy, by mine aduise. (Phaer, Aeneid, 7.327–33)

More attuned to Virgil’s attribution of an erotic motivation to the Italian conflict was John Dryden, author of a celebrated translation of the Aeneid that appeared in 1697 (second edition in 1698). A royalist Catholic whose loyalty to the exiled King James II occasioned his loss of the Poet Laureateship in 1688, Dryden was a professional author and court poet who held a succession of political offices (first as Cromwell’s secretary of state, 1654–8; then as Poet Laureate, 1668–88, and as Historiographer Royal, 1670–88) until James II was deposed and the Protestant William of Orange acceded to the throne as King William III, along with his wife Mary, James II’s daughter. It should come as no surprise that Dryden, the most celebrated author of the bawdy Restoration, names precisely, as Erato, the Muse whom Virgil invokes in his second proem (Dryden, Æneis 7.52–61):¹² Now, Erato, thy Poet’s Mind inspire, And fill his Soul with thy Cœlestial Fire. Relate what Latium was, her ancient Kings: Declare the past, and present State of things, When first the Trojan Fleet Ausonia sought; And how the Rivals lov’d, and how they fought. These are my Theme, and how the War began, And how concluded by the Godlike Man. For I shall sing of Battels, Blood and Rage, Which Princes, and their People did engage:

It is noteworthy that Dryden also imports into his translation of the second proem a reference to an amatory rivalry between Turnus and Aeneas for Lavinia’s hand (‘And how the Rivals lov’d’, 57), although that is nowhere to be found in the Latin original. His attentiveness to erotic causation in the narrative continues in his introduction of Lavinia and Turnus (ibid., 7.79–87): ¹² I quote Dryden’s Æneis from Keener 1997.

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ALISON KEITH

One only Daughter heir’d the Royal State. Fir’d with her Love, and with Ambition led, The neighb’ring Princes court her nuptial Bed. Among the Crowd, but far above the rest, Young Turnus to the Beauteous Maid address’d. Turnus, for high Descent, and graceful Meen, Was first, and favour’d by the Latian Queen: With him she strove to joyn Lavinia’s Hand: But dire Portants the purpos’d Match withstand.

Yet the English poet’s amatory emphasis here diverges quite strikingly from Virgil’s, for Dryden portrays Turnus as consumed with love for Lavinia (l. 80) rather than Amata as driven by a remarkable passion for the Italian prince. While his translation brings to light the undercurrents of desire that motivate the Virgilian plot, he outlines them rather more emphatically than the Latin poet and shifts the emphasis from Amata to the young couple. Dryden’s Amata may favour Turnus’s handsome face, but she does not act on the astonishing passion that animates her Virgilian model (miro amore, Verg. A. 7.57). Dryden may thus be said to normalize the role of love in the Italian conflict as between prince and princess, while at the same time he suppresses the disturbing desire that Virgil attributes to Latinus’s queen. Dryden (Æneis 12.100–11) sketches the same erotic dynamic at the opening of Book 12 in his rendering of the exchange between Amata and Turnus that prompts Lavinia’s blush: At this, a Flood of Tears Lavinia shed; A crimson Blush her beauteous Face o’respread; Varying her Cheeks by Turns, with white and red. The driving Colours, never at a stay, Run here and there; and flush, and fade away. Delightful change! Thus Indian Iv’ry shows, Which with the bord’ring Paint of Purple glows; Or Lillies damask’d by the neighb’ring Rose. The Lover gaz’d, and burning with desire, The more he look’d, the more he fed the Fire: Revenge, and jealous Rage, and secret Spight; Rowl in his Breast, and rowze him to the Fight.

Dryden well catches the emotional wellspring of Lavinia’s blush in Virgil and its impact on Turnus, although in the original Turnus’s love is both more directly stated and more circumspectly treated. Moreover, ‘jealous Rage’ goes unmentioned in the Italian prince’s recourse to arms (Verg. A. 12.64–71): accepit uocem lacrimis Lauinia matris flagrantis perfusa genas, cui plurimus ignem subiecit rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit.

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Indum sanguineo ueluti uiolauerit ostro si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa alba rosa, talis uirgo dabat ore colores. illum turbat amor figitque in uirgine uultus; ardet in arma magis paucisque adfatur Amatam:

Twyne’s more pedestrian (if more accurate) rendering points out all the more forcefully the erotic emphasis of Dryden’s version (Twyne, Aeneid, 12.68–75): Lauinia then with teares her mothers talke did vnderstand, With burning blushing chéekes, whom colour much had out of hand With heat inflamed, vp which to her face fꝏrthwith did spred, Like as when Ivery white by chaunce is staind with scarlet red, Or purple roses pure with Lilies white lie mixt in place, Such was the virgins hue, such were the colours in her face. Him loue disturbeth much, and on the mayde his eyes he stayes, And burnes to battell more, and to Amata shortly sayes.

Both these early translators, however, obscure the more troubling undercurrents of eroticism on the part of Amata. T. W. Harrison (1967, p. 91) has discussed well the disintegration of the seventeenthcentury royalist reception of the Aeneid—given its most powerful form by Dryden—in the eighteenth century’s ‘insistence on the criteria of the sublime and the pathetic’ along with its ‘concentration on intense but small pieces’, as English poetry was moving ‘towards a lyric norm’. Harrison further connects this shift in taste to the nineteenthcentury innovation of translating Virgil into prose.¹³ Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a new interest in the Middle Ages and medieval balladry, does sustained verse narrative enjoy popular appeal again. In this context, William Morris (textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian socialist) provides a telling contrast with both Phaer and Dryden through his socialist political commitments, which emerged from humble beginnings in 1876—the very year in which his Aeneids of Vergil was published. While Morris first became publicly active in that year, taking part in the opposition movement inspired by the war with Russia (1876–8) proposed by Disraeli’s Tory government, his translation of the Aeneid may illustrate an earlier political conservatism, conveyed in part through his consciously archaizing style, which contrasts with the self-consciously contemporary idioms employed by both Phaer and Dryden in their translations. Yet Morris’s treatment of the complicated erotic dynamic that underpins Virgil’s introduction of Lavinia is faithful to the Latin poem, beginning with his robust invocation of Erato (Morris, Aeneids, 7.37–44): To aid, Erato! while I tell what kings, what deedful tide, What manner life, in Latin land did anciently abide

¹³ We may note, however, that the mid-eighteenth century had already seen the first prose translation of the Aeneid, prepared by Joseph Davidson (it was first published in 1743, then reprinted in 1754 and 1790).

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ALISON KEITH

When first the stranger brought his ships to that Ausonian shore; Yea help me while I call aback beginnings of the war. O Goddess, hearten thou thy seer! dread war my song-speech saith: It tells the battle in array, and kings full fain of death, The Tyrrhene host, all Italy, spurred on the sword to bear: Yea, greater matters are afoot, a mightier deed I stir.

The invocation of an erotically named Muse occasions no other hint of the amatory motivation behind the Italian war, but Morris is the first of the translators I consider here to lay bare the affective entanglements on the Latin side in his introduction of Lavinia, Turnus, and Amata (ibid., 7.52–7): A daughter only such a house, so great a world sustained, Now ripe for man, the years fulfilled that made her meet for bed: And her much folk of Latin land were fain enow to wed, And all Ausonia: first of whom, and fairest to be seen, Was Turnus, great from fathers great; and him indeed the queen Was fain of for her son-in-law with wondrous love of heart:

Morris restores Virgil’s focus on the princess’s emergent sexuality in the phrase ‘now ripe for man’ (not rendered by Dryden and assimilated by Phaer to a marital context in his striking hapax ‘husbandripe’); and he captures the Latin nubilis pertinently, in the phrase ‘meet for bed’, which underlines Lavinia’s sexual appeal rather than the mere fact of her marriageability. Consonant with his characterization of the princess’s desirability is Morris’s emphasis on Turnus’s good looks (‘fairest to be seen’, ibid., 7.55), which is rather underplayed by Dryden (though he acknowledges Turnus’s ‘graceful Meen’, Dryden, Æneis 7.84). Morris can also be differentiated from Phaer and Dryden through his accurate rendering of the love that motivates Latinus’s queen to promote Lavinia’s marriage with Turnus, though the archly medievalizing expression (‘and him indeed the queen / Was fain of for her son-in-law’) functions in such a way as to strip any currents of illegitimate eroticism from her conduct. To pass from William Morris in the nineteenth century to C. Day-Lewis in the twentieth is to offer the sharpest break we have yet seen, but also to enter the realm of personal and, latterly, professional reflection on my own encounters with Virgil’s translators. Thus my first exposure to Virgilian translation came in the late 1970s, when I bought a paperback edition of C. Day-Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (first published in 1952) for C$3.10. C. Day-Lewis—English schoolmaster, poet, novelist, professor of poetry at Oxford (1951–6), and Poet Laureate (1968–72)—came to the Aeneid after successfully translating the Georgics into English verse, and it was his experience with the Georgics (published in 1940) that seems to have led him, out of pietas, to the Aeneid next (Day-Lewis 1952, 1953), and finally to the Eclogues (published in 1963).¹⁴ In the late 1930s, his first wife’s brother, who was teaching at Winchester, asked him to translate a ¹⁴ Ziolkowski 1993, p. 111, ascribes Day-Lewis’s ‘lifelong preoccupation with Virgil’ to pietas.

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short piece of the Fourth Georgic that had been set as an examination passage. Day-Lewis, newly removed to a cottage on the border between Devon and Dorset, was running the local Home Guard and took as an epigraph for his translation of the Georgics a passage from the Latin poem itself, which in his translation runs (Verg. G. 1.505–11): there’s so much war in the world, Evil has so many faces, the plough so little Honour, the labourers are taken, the fields untended, And the curving sickle is beaten into the sword that yields not. There the East is in arms, here Germany marches: Neighbour cities, reaking their treaties, attack each other: The wicked War-god runs amok through all the world.

The contemporary resonance of Virgil’s account of a world at war, with the East under arms and Germany on the march, may have stimulated Day-Lewis to turn to the Aeneid after completing the Georgics. In the Aeneid as in the Georgics, Day-Lewis employed a six-stress metre, which enabled him ‘to protract a line to at least 17 syllables or contract it to 12—the range between a full Latin hexameter line and an alexandrine’ (Day-Lewis 1953, p. 8). Like Phaer and Morris, moreover, he offers a line-by-line rendering of Virgil’s Latin, in an English idiom in which he aimed, like Phaer and Dryden, to be ‘consonant with a style based on modern speech rhythms’ (ibid., p. 9). Sensitive to the waning knowledge of classical myth and literature, Day-Lewis glosses Virgil’s allusions within the text itself, so that in the second proem of the Aeneid the Muse Erato becomes ‘the Muse of Love’ and, still unnamed, the ‘Spirit of Song’ (ibid., p. 157): Come, Muse of Love, let me rehearse the kings, the phase of History, and the conditions that reigned in antique Latium When first that expedition arrived upon the beaches Of Italy: I’ll recall what first led to the war there. Speak through me, then Spirit of Song! Grim wars I’ll tell of, And battlefronts, and princes courageous unto death, The levies of the Etruscans, aye, all Hesperia mustered In arms. A grander train of events is now before me, A grander theme I open.

By translating Erato’s name as ‘Muse of Love’, Day-Lewis alerts his readership to the amatory motivation of the Italian war without having to impose an anticipatory reference to the rivals for Lavinia’s hand, as Dryden had done. Ziolkowski assesses Day-Lewis’s translation of the Georgics in terms that seem appropriate, mutatis mutandis, for his achievement in the Aeneid, where Virgil had already reused so much of his earlier imagery of the Georgics: ‘Day-Lewis . . . uses a basically Anglo-Saxon vocabulary that has an effect analogous to that of Virgil’s Latin, which clearly betrays its rural origins in vocabulary and agricultural metaphors.’¹⁵ ¹⁵ Ziolkowski 1993, p. 112.

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This observation is especially relevant to Day-Lewis’s introduction of Lavinia in Aeneid 7, where he amplifies the agricultural resonances of Virgil’s Latin (Day-Lewis 1953, p. 157): Latinus, by fate’s decree, had no son now; his male Succession was no more, cut off in the bloom of first youth. One daughter he had, sole prop of his house and heir of his ample Estate, a girl fully budded now and ripe for marriage. Many sought her hand, from all over Latium, from all Italy: the handsomest by far of these wooers was Turnus— He had the prestige of a splendid pedigree and the backing Of the queen, who had set her heart on getting him as a son-in-law.

Day-Lewis’s sensitivity to the georgic cast of Virgil’s introduction of Lavinia is not matched by a similar ear for the erotic resonances of the Latin here, so that the remarkable love that motivates her mother’s support of Turnus’s suit is transmuted, in his translation, into the English idiom ‘had set her heart on’. The phrase undoubtedly has the virtue of retaining the connotation of ‘her heart’s desire’, though it may be felt to neutralize the erotic undertones of the Latin phrase. Day-Lewis is devastatingly accurate, however, in his rendering of Juno’s prediction of the cost of the dynastic marriage of Lavinia to Aeneas (ibid., p. 165): ‘And you, Lavinia—Italian and Trojan blood shall be your / Marriage portion, and War your bridesmaid’ (sanguine Troiano et Rutulo dotabere, uirgo, / et Bellona manet te pronuba, Verg. A. 7.318–19). When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1983, a new version of the epic appeared from the American poet Robert Fitzgerald, who had earlier translated the Odyssey (published in 1961) and the Iliad (published in 1974), and in between edited Dryden’s Æneis for Macmillan (in 1965). This—Fitzgerald (1983)—is the translation of the Aeneid that I have spent most of my career teaching, in courses on classical literature in translation; and even now, rereading it in the august company of its tradition, I find its merits easy to extol. The second proem, for example, both specifies Virgil’s Muse Erato by name and glosses the meaning of this name (Fitzgerald, Aeneid, 7.47–59): Be with me, Muse of all Desire, Erato, While I call up the kings, the early times, How matters stood in the old Land of Latium That day when the foreign soldiers beached Upon Ausonia’s shore, and the events That led to the first fight. Immortal one, Bring all in memory to the singer’s mind, For I must tell of wars to chill the blood, Ranked men in battle, kings by their own valor Driven to death, Etruria’s cavalry, And all Hesperia mobilized in arms. A greater history opens before my eyes, A greater task awaits me.

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The American poet employs a higher, more ‘poetic’ lexical register than Day-Lewis and a taut, often shortened, iambic pentameter. I have found the energy that this shorter line imparts to the poem helpful for my teaching of Virgil’s epic in English, even though Fitzgerald balances his shorter line against the need to write more of them, to capture the full sense of the Latin while glossing obscurities and allusions as he goes. Still, I think Fitzgerald gets the balance just right here, with the gloss on Erato’s name announcing the amatory motivation of the Italian war that lies ahead, and requiring no undue amplification of the theme in English. Rather he reserves the expression of erotic desire for the introduction of Lavinia, Turnus, and especially Amata (ibid., 7.70–6): A single daughter held that house’s hopes, A girl now ripe for marriage, for a man. And many in broad Latium, in Ausonia, Courted her, but the handsomest by far Was Turnus, powerful heir of a great line. Latinus’s queen pressed for their union, Desiring him with passion for a son,

I applaud Fitzgerald’s careful attention here to the carnal resonances of Virgil’s introduction of the Italian players—Lavinia’s ripeness for marriage, Turnus’s good looks, and Amata’s passionate desire for him as her son-in-law. Fitzgerald does not shrink from rendering into English the unsettling indications Virgil gives of Amata’s remarkable love (miro amore) for Turnus, and I particularly like the way his translation of the verb properabat (l. 75) with ‘pressed’ contributes to the erotic undercurrent of Amata’s actions. This is not to say that I admire everything about his introduction of Lavinia and the state of affairs in Latium in Book 7. For example, his rendering of Virgil’s description of the Italians’ reaction to seeing flames play about Lavinia’s head is distinctly unhappy: ‘No one could hold that sight / Anything but hair-raising, marvelous’ (ibid., 7.100–1; Verg. A. 7.78, id uero horrendum ac uisu mirabile ferri). But he regains my admiration for his translation of Juno’s curse on Lavinia’s marriage: ‘In blood / Trojan and Latin, comes your dowry, girl; / Bridesmaid Bellona waits now to attend you’ (Fitzgerald, Aeneid, 7.435–6; Verg. A. 7.318–19, already quoted). I want to close, however, by considering the presentation of Lavinia in three very recent translations of the Aeneid, among them the first two female-authored translations of the epic. Before we reach the two female-authored translations, we may consider Robert Fagles’s (2006) Aeneid, which received glowing reviews from scholars and critics alike.¹⁶ Robert Fagles was, like Robert Fitzgerald, another American poet, scholar, and translator; and he, too, came to Virgil after a distinguished career of classical translation, having won particular success with his translations of the Iliad in

¹⁶ Donoghue 2007; Feeney 2007, pp. 37–8; Jenkyns 2007; Leithauser 2006; Stallings 2007; Wilson 2007.

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1990 and Odyssey in 1996. There is much to admire in his Aeneid too. His line is longer than Fitzgerald’s, more ‘capacious’, and closer to the classical hexameter— with roughly six beats of its own.¹⁷ His idiom is also more contemporary and less poetic than Fitzgerald’s, though not so georgic as Day-Lewis’s. It is in some ways more classically restrained than both, however; as, for example, in the second proem, where Fagles invokes Virgil’s Muse by name but neither glosses its meaning nor identifies Erato as a Muse (Fagles, Aeneid, 7.39–50): Now come, Erato—who were the kings, the tides and times, how stood the old Latin state when that army of intruders first beached their fleet on Italian shores? All that I will unfold, I will recall how the battle first began . . . And you, goddess, inspire your singer, come! I will tell of horrendous wars, tell of battle lines and princes fired with courage, driven to their deaths, Etruscan battalions, all Hesperia called to arms. A greater tide of events springs up before me now, I launch a greater labor.

I especially like his introduction of Amata (ibid., 7.57–65): One daughter alone was left to preserve the house and royal line— ripe for marriage now, a full-grown woman now. Many suitors sought her all through Latium, all Ausonia too, and the handsomest of the lot was Turnus, strong in his noble birth and breeding. The queen mother burned with a will to wed him to her daughter, true, but down from the gods came sign on sign of alarm to block the way.

Fagles’s emphasis on Lavinia as ‘a full-grown woman now’ seems to me to miss the freshness of her appeal, the precision of Virgil’s notice of the emergence of the maiden’s desirability, and therefore the explanation for her many suitors. This is particularly disappointing in conjunction with a nearby description of her as ‘the young virgin Lavinia’ (ibid., 7.79), which unnecessarily amplifies Virgil through the addition of an age qualification not present in the Latin (Lauinia uirgo, Verg. A. 7.72). By contrast, Fagles has completely captured the disturbing amatory undertones of Amata’s desire to see Turnus, her son-in-law, through his powerful use of enjambment: ‘The queen mother burned with a will to wed him’ (Fagles, Aeneid, 7.63), qualified almost (but not

¹⁷ So characterized by B. Leithauser in his review of Fagles’s translation (New York Times Sunday Book Review, 17 December 2006).

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quite) immediately in the next line by ‘to her daughter, true’ (64). His version of Juno’s curse on Lavinia’s marriage is also right on the mark (ibid., 7.371–3): ‘Yes, / Latin and Trojan blood will be your dowry, princess— / Bellona, Goddess of War, your maid-ofhonor!’ Here Fagles helpfully glosses the ancient Italian goddess’s central role in warfare for a contemporary readership. The last two translations I consider here are the first two complete femaleauthored versions of the Aeneid to have appeared in English—or, indeed, in any language.¹⁸ Yale University Press, which published Sarah Ruden’s (2008) translation of the poem, publicized the fact that she was the first woman to offer a full translation of the epic, probably as a sales strategy to secure readers for the new version. When Steve Donoghue, however, asked Ruden, in an interview on the online forum ‘openlettersmonthly.com’, whether she felt any genuine correspondence with Virgil’s female characters or with Virgil’s sympathy for them, she responded by disavowing any particular interest in the women of the epic and proclaiming rather her absorption in Virgil.¹⁹ In fact she claimed to view translation itself as ‘a woman’s game’, because of the necessity of devoting oneself ‘to an author who’s basically unavailable’. Elsewhere, moreover, in an online interview with Rod Dreher on ‘beliefnet.com’, she has disparaged the women’s studies’ orthodoxy of the importance of intersectional analysis to cultural, historical, social, and scientific study.²⁰ Her line-by-line translation is very plain, aiming to suggest the length of the Latin verses while paring away the Latinate expressions of translators such as Dryden and Fitzgerald, in order to offer instead, like Day-Lewis and Fagles, a contemporary idiom based on an English lexicon that makes sparing use of Latin derivatives. Since the volume includes only a minimal glossary of names and no explanatory notes at all, it is likely to attract those already familiar with the epic but to daunt the neophyte. Thus, while her rendering of the second proem is admirably clear and precise, it assumes some prior knowledge of the players (Ruden, Aeneid, 7.37–45): Erato, come, let me explain the times, The rulers, and what ancient Latium was When the foreign army first brought ships to land In Italy, and how the quarrels started. Goddess, direct your poet. Savage warfare I’ll sing, and kings whose courage brought their death; The Tuscan army; all Hesperia rallied To arms. This is a higher story starting, A greater work for me.

¹⁸ While in no way a translation of the Aeneid, Ursula Le Guin’s 2008 nearly contemporary novel Lavinia both draws on and reflects upon the second, Italian half of Virgil’s epic, as it also gives voice to the mostly silent women of the Aeneid. For Roman women’s silence, see Finley 1977; Scheidel 1995, p. 215 n. 18; and cf. Scheidel 1996. ¹⁹ Visit http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/interview-aeneid-translator-sarah-ruden. ²⁰ Visit http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/02/the-iconoclastic-sarah-ruden.html.

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The spare simplicity of her lines is very attractive, though she has had to sacrifice the twentieth-century translators’ practice of glossing allusions and proper names in the translation to achieve this precision. Her invocation of Erato in line 37 alerts the informed reader of the potentially amatory narrative that lies ahead but gives no hint to the uninitiated, and there is no entry for Erato in the glossary from which one could recognize her as a Muse (and that could thereby assist the beginner). Her introduction of Lavinia, Turnus, and Amata, however, beautifully anticipates the marriage plot that enlivens the Italian books (ibid., 7.52–7): An only daughter, sole hope of that great house, Was now grown up and ready for a husband. Many from spacious Latium, from the whole Of Italy sought her. Handsomest was Turnus, Of a powerful dynasty. Latinus’s consort Was ardent, wild to have this son-in-law.

Especially powerful is her translation of Amata’s remarkable passion in pressing for the marriage of Turnus to her daughter (ibid., 7.57). Ruden’s line captures the unsettling passion with which the Latin endows Amata—in addition to the queen’s unseemly haste, which she conveys through enjambment, following Virgil (quem regia coniunx / adiungi generum miro properabat amore, Verg. A. 7.56–7). The most recent translation of the epic, by Patricia A. Johnston, appeared in 2012 from the University of Oklahoma Press. A classical scholar who has long specialized in Virgilian studies, Johnston explains that she undertook this translation out of a love for her poet and a desire ‘to capture some of the effect of the original poem by approximating dactylic hexameter’ (Johnston 2012, p. xv). The results can be disconcerting, but her translation is certainly a thought-provoking experiment. The second proem is a case in point (ibid., 7.37–40): Now, Erato, shall I reveal the kings of ancient Latium, and what was the state of affairs when first the fleet of these foreign forces came to Ausonian shores, and what caused the first clash of arms. Guide this poet, O goddess, I ask you!

Instead of glossing Erato as the Muse of love in her translation, Johnston explains Virgil’s invocation of the Muse in a footnote at the bottom of the text (ibid., p. 146 n. 3): ‘Apparently Erato, the Muse of love, is invoked because the great conflict that will follow comes about after Turnus refuses to give up his bride, Lavinia, to the Trojan stranger.’ Johnston thus acknowledges, in her volume’s scholarly apparatus, the undercurrent of desire that motivates the plot of the second half of the poem; but it is noteworthy that she restricts its application to Turnus. Her introduction of Lavinia, Turnus, and Amata reflects this understanding of Turnus’s motivations

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but ignores almost all the other erotic resonances of Virgil’s diction in the passage (ibid., 7.50–7): Only a daughter, now ready for marriage, could preserve his home and his kingdom, for all his sons had been snatched from life in their youth. Many suitors had come from Latium, and many from the whole of Ausonia, seeking her hand in marriage. Most handsome of all the suitors was Turnus, scion of a powerful family. The queen, too, was anxious to make him her son-in-law, and Turnus wanted this match.

Lavinia is prosaically ‘ready for marriage’, while Latinus’s wife is merely ‘anxious’ to gain Turnus for a son-in-law. Even Turnus’s desire seems tepid in this rendering, as it does again later in Book 12, in his response to Lavinia’s blush (ibid., 12.69–71): Aroused by his love, he fixes his gaze on her, burning all the more for arms, and speaks to Amata these words:

Johnston’s translation and explanatory notes present Turnus’s battle frenzy as arising out of amatory passion, but neglect Virgil’s subtle evocations of erotic desire on the part of Latinus’s wife and daughter. Thus Johnston’s Turnus burns explicitly for arms, only implicitly for Lavinia. This study of the introduction of the Italian war narrative and its erotic motivation in English translations of the Aeneid has ranged widely, both temporally (from Phaer to Johnston) and geographically (from England to America), though I have trained my focus tightly on a few short passages in Book 7. On this focused reading, individual translators’ emphases have revealed as much about their own class backgrounds and military, political, and professional commitments as they have about the plot and characters of Virgil’s epic. It is a salutary exercise to consider the changing perspectives of the Latin poet’s translators across nearly five centuries and to confront our own interpretational biases in the process. Similarly productive is the opportunity to consider the array of translations, from Dryden to Johnston, that are currently available for teaching the Aeneid in translation. Latin epic is read and taught in widely different contexts and the choice of a translation should respond to particular personal and pedagogical goals. Dryden’s translation is illuminating for its awareness of the long tradition of erotic verse and for its place in the history of English poetry. But, from the perspective of this writer, who is a feminist classicist, Fitzgerald supplies a translation in a modern idiom that captures Virgil’s literary complexity and continues to provide the best translation for teaching the Aeneid in the context of Roman history and culture.

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Appendix: Table of the profession(s) of English translators, including military experience Name of Translator (Date of Translation)

Profession

Ahl, Frederick M. (2007)

Academic

Alexander, Caleb (1796)

Clergyman, author of grammar books; translated Virgil into literal English prose

Andrews, Robert (1766)

English dissenter, minister

Ballard, Harlan Hoge (1908)

Educator

Beresford, James (1794)

Clergyman, author, satirist

Caxton, William (1490)

Merchant, diplomat, printer, author, translator

Conington, John (1867)

Academic, journalist

Copley, Frank Olin (1965)

Academic; member of the University of Michigan’s Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (though without military experience himself)

Davidson, Joseph (1743; 1st prose translation)

Schoolmaster

Day-Lewis, C. (1952)

Poet, novelist; worked as publications editor for the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War

Douglas, Gavin (1513)

Scottish poet, translator, cleric (bishop of Dunkeld) and statesman

Dryden, John (1697)

Professional author and court poet; he held a succession of political offices (Cromwell’s secretary of state 1654–8; Poet Laureate 1668–88; Historiographer Royal 1670–88)

Fagles, Robert (2006)

Academic

Fitzgerald, Robert (1983)

Poet and critic; during the Second World War served in the US Navy, in Guam and Pearl Harbour

Jackson Knight, W. F. (1956)

Academic; during the First World War served with the Royal Engineers until wounded out at the rank of lieutenant in 1918; trained the school cadet corps (1925–31) at All Saints’ School, Bloxham and received promotion to brevet major on stepping down; moved on to the University College of South West England in Exeter and there founded and took temporary command of the University College (Exeter) Contingent, Senior Division, Officer’s Training Corps (November 1936)

Johnston, Patricia (2012)

Academic

Kennedy, Charles Rann (1849)

Lawyer, classicist

Melmoth, William Henry (1788)

Scholar

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Morris, William (1876)

Textile designer, artist, writer, libertarian socialist

Ogilby, John (1675)

Translator, impresario, cartographer

Phaer, Thomas (1558)

Lawyer, paediatrician, author

Pitt, Christopher, and Warton, Joseph (1753)

Pitt: poet and translator; Warton: academic, literary critic

Richard, Earl of Lauderdale (1716)

Politician; present at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) on the (losing) side of King James II

Ruden, Sarah (2008)

Writer, editor, Quaker pacifist

Rushton Fairclough, H. (1916)

In the First World War he served overseas in the American Red Cross and advanced to the grade of lieutenant colonel, the highest rank in this branch of the service. He was in command of the American Red Cross commission to Montenegro

Singleton, Robert (1855)

Educational reformer

Sisson, C.H. (1986)

Writer, civil servant; served in the British Army during the Second World War, in India

Strahan, Alexander (1767) Symmons, Charles (1817)

Poet, priest

Taylor, Edward Fairfax (1903)

Clerk in the House of Lords

Trapp, Joseph (1735)

Clergyman, academic, poet, pamphleteer

Vicars, John (1632)

Chronicler and poet; fervent Calvinist and Presbyterian; in his sixties when the Civil War broke out; he based his four chronicles of the Civil War on eyewitness accounts

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Susanna Braund for the invitation to participate in the Vancouver Vergil Translation Workshop in September 2012, and to Susanna Braund and Zara Torlone for comments on my chapter; to my then Research Assistant, Jen Oliver, for help with bibliography and biographical notes; and to Stephen Rupp, for his comments on an earlier version.

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5 The Passion of Dido Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 Gordon Braden

Beyond its literary virtues and inherited prestige, the Aeneid is a work of special relevance to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, as the English language emerges on the European and global scene together with the country itself. The subject of Virgil’s epic is itself the heroic transplanting of the ‘power’ of a civilization from one site to another—a translatio imperii—to the start of a new and unprecedentedly authoritative civilization; and his poem rhymed with a range of early modern national ambitions, of which England’s proved the most successful, to establish a successor to Rome’s own empire. A part of this enterprise in England is one of translatio in the vernacular sense of the term—even though the Aeneid was a work that a large part of the educated public did or at least could read in the original Latin. By my count, by 1700 there were twenty-six English engagements with Aeneid 4, the part of the poem with which I am concerned; twenty-two of these count as translations, as usually understood (twenty of the entire book; eight as part of a complete Aeneid), and the other four are specific involvements with the original text.¹ These twenty-six items are listed in the Appendix. All the Virgilian texts quoted in this chapter come from these editions; an indicator at the end of each entry in the Appendix identifies the corresponding entry in this volume’s Bibliography. The entries in the Appendix are listed in chronological order. ¹ Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage is the oddest item on the list: in our critical lexicon there isn’t really a term for what Marlowe does with the Virgilian text. I have, as it happens, nothing to say about it here, but I endorse Sheldon Brammall’s treatment of it as a creative translation of Aeneid 1 and 4 into dramatic form; see his cogently argued chapter on the subject in Brammall 2015, pp. 55–77. I do not put on my list Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (first performed in 1689), though its major change to the plot—beholding Dido’s misery, Aeneas decides to stay, but she won’t let him—is of considerable interest in connection with some of the themes I talk about here. Nahum Tate’s libretto (unlike Marlowe’s script) makes no particular use of the text of Book 4, but the conclusion of Dido’s dying aria, ‘Remember me, but ah! forget my fate’, does sound like a twist on Aeneas’s counsel to Ascanius in Book 12: disce, puer, uirtutem ex me uerumque laborem, / fortunam ex aliis (‘learn manly excellence and hard work from me, boy, but luck from others’, 12.435–6).

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There is a good deal of ongoing self-consciousness in this effort. Two translators (John Denham and John Ogilby) significantly revise their own work, and internal evidence shows that most of the translators consulted and sometimes borrowed from their predecessors. In some cases they made (and published) explicit judgements on those who had come before them; Gavin Douglas gets things started in some prolonged flyting with William Caxton. The last item in the Appendix, John Dryden’s translation of the entire poem, is rightly regarded as one of the most distinguished productions of English Augustan poetry, along with Pope’s Homer the most successful use of the heroic couplet to specifically heroic (rather than satiric) effect. The story of Virgilian translations over these two centuries is, among other things, a search for an English metre and idiom that could claim the same epic gravity as the dactylic hexameter in classical Greek and Latin (a literary ambition mirroring the country’s political ambition). What study the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Aeneids have received as a group has until recently been only a background to Dryden, who may be said to bring to fulfilment what their authors were gradually working out. This teleology is not outrageous, and I do not dismiss it; the arc it traces has a clear integrity and importance. But grand narratives in literary history go against the contemporary grain, and I want in any case to avoid ‘Augustan’ and similar stylistic and conceptual categories as much as possible, in hopes of fending off the preconceptions and simplifications that they inevitably bring with them. As my own way into the story, I will be giving close attention to the handling of three key passages (two sentences and one verse paragraph) from translators across the two centuries of interest here—three core samples of the endless local decisions that English translators of Virgil’s poem made over these two centuries.² My choice of Book 4 is motivated most obviously by the book’s popularity: it was chosen for stand-alone treatment more often than any other part of the poem and immediately gives a wider range of evidence than other choices would. But the reason for this popularity is an issue of its own. Book 4 is where the hero’s imperial mission is most seriously threatened, and that threat is presented in great part from Dido’s point of view, with prolonged and memorable expression given to her pain, despair, derangement, and anger. Whatever role the poem’s celebration of its hero’s greater mission may have played in its staying power, the part of it that attracted the most attention is what most troubles that celebration; Dido goes to her death unreconciled to that mission and laying a curse upon it.³ The complexity that her ² Among recent discussions, there is an excellent overview, with particular attention to this period, by Burrow 1997. For the period up to 1660, see also Braden 2010. Brammall 2015 breaks new ground by paying serious and detailed attention to the translators from Phaer to Heath and coming up with some perceptive observations on the last part of the seventeenth century as well. On previous English Aeneids from the perspective of Dryden, see Proudfoot 1960 and William Frost’s extensive commentary to Dryden’s translation in Dryden 1987. ³ That curse, especially ll. 615–20, acquired a special topicality in royalist circles in the seventeenth century as a result of the Civil War. John Aubrey preserves an anecdote about Abraham Cowley translating those lines for the future Charles II in 1648; see Aubrey 1957, pp. 75–6.

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story and the way Virgil tells it add to the poem is one of the things that most impress us now; a sense that hers is a subversive counternarrative to the imperial theme is not so much an affront to Virgil’s epic as the bringing out of a potential already there. It is still possible to square Book 4 with the larger celebratory purpose, as scholars and critics until the twentieth century generally do, but the simple abstracting of it for treatment on its own—a tradition that begins as early as Ovid’s Heroides—suggests a preemptive sympathy, and more, with Dido’s love for Aeneas, a love that within the fiction of the Aeneid would have forestalled the existence of Roman civilization. The Renaissance is heir to an allegorical tradition in which Dido represents lusts of the flesh that the hero must learn to overcome, and a more indulgent tradition in narrative romance. The first entry on my list is an extreme representative of the latter: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. In his earlier House of Fame, he reports a dream in which he finds what was apparently the text of the Aeneid inscribed in brass on the wall of the titular building; after translating from the first three lines, he sets out to summarize the rest but mostly tells the story of Book 4, which he remembers as the story of how Aeneas ‘betrayed’ Dido (Chaucer, House of Fame, l. 294). In the ‘Legend of Dido’ in the later work, Chaucer acknowledges Virgil as his primary source and paraphrases Books 1 and 4 closely enough for us at times to compare the wording. When we come to the cave where the love affair is consummated, though, Chaucer shifts gear: This was the firste morwe Of here gladnesse, and gynnyng of hir sorwe. For ther hath Eneas ykneled soo, And told hir al his herte and al his woo, And swore so depe to hir to be trewe For wele or woo and chaunge for noo newe, And as a fals lover so wel kan pleyne, That sely Dido rewed on his peyne And tok hym for housbond and became his wyf For evermo while that hem laste lyf. (Ibid., ll. 1230–39)

The first line and a half are a direct quotation (Virgil, Aeneid, 4.169–70, translating leti, ‘death’, as if it were laeti, ‘happy’, as do Gavin Douglas and the Earl of Surrey), but the scene that follows is new. Virgil’s hero denies having made any such promise; Chaucer (Legend of Good Women, l. 1259) makes it clear that the man in this case will be, like so many other men, ‘forsworne’ when he leaves. The visit from Mercury ordering him to go is attested only in what Aeneas tells Dido; his real motivation is much more ordinary: This Eneas that hath thus depe yswore Is wery of his craft within a throwe, The hoote ernest is al over-blowe. (Ibid., ll. 1285–7)

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His final leave-taking is a male cliché: For on a nyght sleping he let hir lye, And staal awey unto his companye, And as a traytour forthe he gan to saile Toward the large contree of Itayle. (Ibid., ll. 1326–9)

We move from the world of Virgil to the world of Ovid. As in the Heroides, Dido says she is pregnant (ibid., l. 1323, contradicting Verg. A. 4.327–30); the story ends with a brief quotation from Dido’s letter to Aeneas and a referral to Ovid for the rest of it. The use of Virgil is considerably abbreviated after the scene in the cave. Chaucer begs off, finding this part too painful (‘So grete a routhe I have hit for t’endite’, Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, l. 1345), and in the process removes most of Dido’s anger and threats. There is no curse; what stays is piteous but dignified resignation: ‘I have fulfilled of Fortune al the cours’ (ibid., l. 1340, from Verg. A. 4.653). Virgil’s Dido addresses Aeneas as ‘perfide’ (ibid., 4.366); Chaucer’s narrator makes that judgement his own, and, as the undeserving victim of a forsworn traitor, Dido becomes one of the poem’s ‘good women’. William Caxton’s Eneydos, an English translation of an expansive French paraphrase of the Latin poem, effects a similar shift in a messier way. The expansion is particularly aggressive where Dido is involved; her part of the story takes up well over half of the whole. Much of that expansion goes into framing the story, to Dido’s distinct advantage. Possibly prompted by Virgil’s passing reference to her blond hair (flauum . . . crinem, ibid., 4.698), the French author dilates the account of her death with a detailed description of her physical beauty: ‘the hede well sette by mesure upon the nek, fayre heerys and long yelowe tresses, hangyng betwene two sholders to the heles of her’ (Caxton, Eneydos, p. 112). On her first entry into the story, he postpones Virgil’s version to summarize the alternative account in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, where she never meets Aeneas but lives a life of chaste widowhood that her eventual suicide, motivated by a combination of sexual virtue and patriotic duty, makes heroic. Boccaccio’s version circulates widely in the Renaissance in what has been called the tradition of the ‘two Didos’. This is the tradition Ariosto alludes to in Orlando furioso (35.28), where he flatly says that Virgil lied because he had it in for Dido. The claim serves Ariosto’s turn for two of the subversive agendas of his epic: its feminist polemics on behalf of heroic women shamefully neglected by generations of male poets, and its archness about the truth value of panegyrical poetry such as the Aeneid (and, for that matter, Orlando furioso). Caxton’s Eneydos has none of Ariosto’s finesse, but it does, in its uncoordinated way, offer up Virgil’s epic to the dawn of English Renaissance literature with a revisionary twist that pivots on Dido. It meets with a vigorous pushback from the first English translator of the poem in the strict sense of the term. Douglas is also annoyed with Chaucer, whom he acknowledges

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as ‘My mastir’ (Douglas, Aeneid, p. 14) but whose reference to Aeneas as ‘forsworne’ and ‘traytour’ he cannot let pass: Certis Virgill schawys [shows] Ene dyd na thing From Dydo of Cartage at hys departyng Bot quhilk [what] the goddis commandit hym beforn. (Ibid., p. 15)

Douglas chalks the mistake up to Chaucer’s notorious philogyny: ‘For he was evir (God wait) all womanis frend’ (ibid., p. 16). On Caxton’s liberties with Virgil (whose authoritative status is not up for discussion) Douglas unleashes the full force of his Scottish annoyance: ‘Hys ornate goldyn versis mair than gilt [more than gold] / I spittit [spit] for dispyte to se swa spilt [ruined] / With sych a wyght . . . ’ (ibid., p. 7). The list of Caxton’s crimes is long, but making Book 4 ‘[t]he twa part [half] of his volume’ (ibid.) comes early in the indictment. Partly in response to such precedents, Douglas adds a ‘Preambill’ to his own translation of Book 4 to set Dido’s story firmly in its right context as the tragedy of her own ‘brutell appetite’ and ‘wild dotage’: Danter of Affryk [conqueror of Africa], queyn foundar of Cartage, Umquhil [while] in rychess and schynyng gloyr ryngyng, Throw fulych lust wrocht thine awyn ondoyng. (Ibid., p. 153)

A late medieval soft-heartedness towards Dido is being rolled back. How evident is such a move in the translations that follow? My first two quotations, the two harshest comments on Dido in Virgil’s text, are chosen with that question in mind. That both are missing from Denham’s drastically shortened second effort— the one he published—is of a piece with what seems to be his general intent, to have Dido herself control the stage.⁴ He pares things down, eliminating the Roman agenda almost entirely (Mercury’s two speeches are gone), concentrating on Dido’s own speeches, which take up more than half his text (it’s tempting to call them arias), and giving her notably more dignity: the fainting after her final meeting with Aeneas (Verg. A. 4.391–2), is elided—‘from his hated sight she fled; / Conducted by her Damsels to her bed’ (Denham II, 4.106–7)—and heu furiis incensa feror, ‘alas, I am carried away, incensed with fury’ (Verg. A. 4.376), deleted from the speech that precedes it. Most of the translators avoid such dramatic alterations of the original, but important nuances of course reside in small choices of diction and phrasing. My first text is the poet’s own pronouncement when Dido and Aeneas become lovers: coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam, ‘she calls it marriage, and with this word covers her shame’ (ibid., 4.172). Culpa—the word Dido herself had used for her possible yielding (ibid., 4.19)—is unambiguous in its disapproval, but it is one of the milder terms that

⁴ Denham’s changes are closely scrutinized in Sowerby 2010, pp. 145–60, though Sowerby’s interpretation differs somewhat from mine.

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could have been chosen, and one consistent with the poignancy that characterizes Virgil’s telling of the story generally; the deceit Dido practises is mostly self-delusion, belief in a pact that Aeneas will deny ever having made. Douglas (Aeneid, p. 164) intensifies the accusation to ‘hir cryme of oppyn schame’, as if Virgil’s word were crimen or scelus. Seven decades later Richard Stanyhurst (Books I–IV, p. 69) is even fiercer: ‘With thee name of wedlock her carnal leacherye cloaking’. Stanyhurst is famously unhinged as a translator, his programme a bizarre combination of classicizing metre with recklessly downscale diction; when he has Dido herself rant like a guttersnipe—‘shal a stranger geve me the slampam? / With such departure my regal segnorye frumping?’ (ibid., p. 82) for nostris inluserit aduena regnis?, ‘will the foreigner have made a mockery of our kingdom?’ (Verg. A. 4.591)—he could just be doing what he does. But the misogynistic billingsgate is consistent; Dido’s behaviour is ‘raynebeaten harlotrye’, ‘rutting bitcherye’ (Stanyhurst, Books I–IV, p. 70), and even the limping of the aged Barce attracts gratuitous sarcasm: ‘shee trots on snayling, lyk a tooth shaken old hagge’ (ibid., p. 83; for illa gradum studio celebrabat anili, ‘she hastened her step with an old woman’s eagerness’ Verg. A. 4.641). Book 4 turns into Virgil’s Juvenalian satire against women (as Ariosto slyly implies it indeed was). Early in the seventeenth century, William Mure, in his ‘Dido and Aeneas’, a youthful conflation of Books 1 and 4, inserts seven stanzas of his own to relate what Virgil skips: the events in the cave. Aeneas is stunned by Dido’s beauty, then aggressive. She is initially demure—‘With faint repulses and denialls sweet, / Lo! how she shrinking, strives his sutes to shune’ (Mure, ‘Dido and Aeneas’, 2.325–6)—but when he persists she does more than just yield: ‘This wrought to sin, anone she waxeth bold, / And mutually her mate doth entertaine’ (ibid., 2.337–8). By the time the storm has passed, the loss of chastity has fully corrupted her: Loe! how her strict embraces him enfold, Whil as they issue frome the cave againe, Nothing asham’d to come in open sight, Thus use in sinning soone maks sin seame light. (Ibid., 2.339–42)

Her culpa is ‘this foule offence’ (ibid., 2.348). Stanyhurst and Mure, however, are anomalies in their own time. Surrey, Douglas’s immediate successor, who frequently adopts Douglas’s phrasing, translates culpa as ‘faut’ (Surrey 4.222; Caxton had ‘falle’, Eneydos, p. 57). This is milder than ‘crime’ or ‘offence’, about the same register as the Latin—and sets a pattern that lasts until the mid-seventeenth century. Thomas Phaer (4.184), Ben Jonson (Poetaster 5.2.73), Dudley Digges (Didos Death, sig. A7v), Robert Stapylton (Dido and Aeneas, sig. B6v), Denham in his first version (Denham I, 4.190; he uses the plural), Richard Fanshawe (‘On the Loves of Dido and Æneas’, l. 203), Robert Heath (Aeneid, p. 60), and John Lewkenor (‘Deserted Queen’, p. 96) follow his lead (Digges heightens it to ‘foule fault’); John Vicars has ‘faulty fact’ (Aeneid, p. 94). An anonymous sixteenth-century translator

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downgrades culpa to ‘negligence’ (Anon. 4.250; possibly guided by ‘lustes negligence’ in one of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarchan translations).⁵ The eccentric James Harrington leaves the word out (‘nor could the name / Of Hymen ever stop the mouth of Fame’, Books III–IV, p. 24). Surprisingly, Paul Scarron’s ‘travesty’—as Charles Cotton brings it from French into English—despite its general commitment to taking the dignity out of everyone’s behaviour, makes Dido’s sin seem perhaps the lightest of all: Her Majesty now no more nice is; Nor seeks she now by fine devices, To hide her shame, but leads a life, As if they had been man and wife. (Cotton, Book IV, pp. 37–8)

‘Fault’ is for a century the standard reading; only Stanyhurst and Mure want something stronger. In 1649, however, Ogilby reverts, knowingly or not, to Douglas’s choice—‘She stiles it wedlock, gives her crime that name’ (Ogilby I, p. 280 second pagination; the word survives revision in 1654)—and is followed by Sidney Godolphin and Edmund Waller (Passion of Dido for Æneas, l. 181),⁶ Robert Howard (‘Of the Loves of Dido and Æneas’, p. 148), the Earl of Lauderdale (4.202), and Dryden. Lewkenor, publishing in 1693, is now the one who looks out of place (though he darkens his ‘fault’ with a new reference to ‘the wicked Act’, ‘Deserted Queen’, p. 96). Dryden is the most emphatic, recovering Douglas’s doublet of crime and shame: his Dido ‘call’d it Marriage, by that specious Name, / To veil the Crime and sanctifie the Shame’ (Dryden, Aeneid, 4.249–50). The intensification is not isolated; less than a hundred lines later, Dryden is even more emphatic when Jupiter cast his Eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful Pair, in lawless pleasure drown’d: Lost in their Loves, insensible of Shame; And both forgetful of their better Fame. (Ibid., 4.322–5)

For this Virgil has only oculosque ad moenia torsit / regia et oblitos famae melioris amantis, ‘he turned his eye to the royal fortifications and the lovers oblivious to their good reputation’ (Verg. A. 4.220–1). Dryden has the poet speak on his own behalf the scandalized language that Virgil reserves for the reports of Fama. The speech Jupiter goes on to make to Mercury also contains a reference to ‘sloathful Riot, and inglorious Ease’ (Dryden, Aeneid, 4.331) attested in the Latin only by ⁵ The poem, a translation of Canzoniere 140, heads the selection from Wyatt in Richard Tottel’s famous anthology Songes and Sonettes (see Tottel 1557, sig. D4v), which was widely read in Elizabethan times and had eight or more subsequent editions. Brammall 2015, pp. 84–8 thinks the Aeneid translation notably courtly in its treatment of the love story. ⁶ The translation was published in 1659, but a manuscript reading possibly dating from before Godolphin’s death in 1643 does not use the word ‘crime’. Sowerby 2010, pp. 177–83, emphasizes the ‘gallantry’ of the translation’s depiction of Dido, which he attributes to Godolphin.

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exspectat, ‘waits’ (Verg. A. 4.225). (Not even Stanyhurst seizes these occasions.) These long rhythms of authorial mitigation and severity are among the most clearly marked patterns as we move from Chaucer to Dryden. In the dedication of his translation Dryden discusses what he takes to be Virgil’s intent. He argues that Mercury’s uxorius, when he addresses Aeneas the first time (ibid., 4.266), implies that we are meant to understand the bond between Dido and Aeneas to be, just as Dido calls it, coniugium; Virgil had it so ‘to make way for the Divorce which he intended afterwards’ (Dryden, Aeneid 1987, vol. 5, p. 302). Denham in his revision seems of a similar mind; he has Aeneas speak to Dido of his departure as ‘our sad Divorce’ (Denham II, 4.58; Dryden’s translation does not use the word) and omits the lines where the Trojan protests that he and Dido were never married. But, for Denham, the innuendo seems to be part of his ennobling of Dido, a wronged wife rather than a discarded mistress. Dryden speaks of no such benefit for her in her marital status, but thinks that Virgil was just making a crafty move in the poem’s contemporary politics: ‘he had in his eye the Divorce which not long before had pass’d betwixt the Emperour and Scribonia’ (Dryden, Aeneid 1987, vol. 5, p. 303)—and, in consequence, a divorce to be celebrated.⁷ The theory (which Dryden had from Jean Regnault de Segrais) is a contorted one, not very credible historically, and we may wonder how serious Dryden is being; but it follows up on something simpler: Virgil ‘thought himself engag’d in Honour to espouse the Cause and Quarrel of his Country against Carthage. He knew he cou’d not please the Romans better . . . than by disgracing the Foundress of that City. He shews her ungrateful to the Memory of her first Husband, doting on a Stranger’ (ibid., p. 298). The poem’s intended readers would welcome Aeneas’s desertion of her: ‘It was their Enemy whom he forsook’ (ibid., p. 299). And, in this connection, Dryden is particularly impressed with the second passage I want to track, the most overtly misogynist sentiment in Book 4: uarium et mutabile semper / femina, ‘always a variable and changeable thing, woman’ (Verg. A. 4.569–70). So Mercury, sufficiently alarming Aeneas on a second visitation (‘It seems he fear’d not Jupiter so much as Dido’) that he drastically speeds up his departure. Dryden admires the economical nastiness of the god’s aphorism: it ‘is the sharpest Satire in the fewest words that ever was made on Womankind; for both the Adjectives are Neuter, and Animal must be understood, to make them Grammar’ (Dryden, Aeneid 1987, vol. 5, p. 299). From one of the masters of English verse satire, this is impressive praise. Yet Dryden’s version of the line is merely adequate: ‘Woman’s a various and a changeful Thing’ (ibid., 4.819). He settles for preserving the scornfulness of the neuter gender; in doing so, he once more parallels Douglas: ‘Variabill and changeand thyngis beyn wemen ay’ (Douglas, Aeneid, p. 185). But not even Dryden finds an economical way to keep the implicit animality or any new effect that may ⁷ In this he resembles Douglas, who has Dido herself speak of the prospective affair as ‘a cryme of secund mariage’ (p. 156).

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compensate for its loss. Nor do any of the other translators really rise to the occasion. Caxton makes the sentiment almost unrecognizable (‘a woman is founde evermore subtylle in alle her dedes / As sayth the fable’, Eneydos, p. 94), Stanyhurst puts on his usual show (‘a wind fane changabil huf puffe / Always is a woomman’, Books I–IV, p. 81), and Fanshawe adds a graceful rhetorical turn (‘Fly with the wind, / Trust that, but doe not trust a womans fickle mind’, ‘On the Loves’, ll. 648–9). If the modern intonation is to be trusted, Surrey’s demonstrative pronoun (‘full of change these women be alway’, 4.762) puts the sentiment interestingly in character: dialogue for a barroom commiseration between two guys with the same trouble. Mure expands it to three lines: ‘A woman wav’ring formed is by nature; / Now bent to love, to hate inclyn’d anone, / In only inconstancie a constant creature’ (‘Dido and Aeneas’, 3.200–2). But no one comes up to the sting of the Latin: ‘a divers minded thing, and full of chaunge / Is woman kinde alway’ (Phaer 4.626–7); ‘A womans made of much inconstancy / Their mindes are full of mutabilitie’ (Anon. 4.803–4); ‘A woman strange, false fickle thing / Still is’ (Digges, Didos Death, sig. B9v); ‘Most light and loose thou’lt finde a womans will’ (Vicars, Aeneid, p. 110); ‘women are unfix’d’ (Stapylton, Dido and Aeneas, sig. D3r); ‘Women are false, inconstant and untrue’ (Denham I, 4.635); ‘light Womans mind / Still changing is’ (Heath p. 70); ‘still inconstant is a womans minde’ (Ogilby I, p. 292 second pagination and Ogilby II, p. 283); ‘The minds of women never yet were fix’t’ (Howard, ‘Of the Loves’, p. 163); ‘nothing changes more than Womans mind’ (Lauderdale 4.622); ‘Nothing so’ inconstant as a Woman’s Mind’ (Lewkenor, ‘Deserted Queen’, p. 121). (The gathering consensus that a woman’s mind is her variable part looks like a cumulative group decision by the translators; it renders no word in the Latin.) The moment is simply missing from Godolphin and Waller, from Harrington, and—once more surprisingly—from Cotton, who substitutes a wisecrack about the ‘woman-stealing rabble’ of the Trojans (Book IV, pp. 121–2). When it comes to a showcase moment of misogynistic wit, the translators’ heart isn’t in it or their talent isn’t up to it—or both. My third passage is longer, and exemplifies a more traditional streak of the poetry of Book 4. It is a famous set piece, an evocation of Dido’s insomnia: nox erat et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, siluaeque et saeua quierant aequora, cum medio uoluuntur sidera lapsu, cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque uolucres, quaeque lacus late liquidos quaeque aspera dumis rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti lenibant curas et corda oblita laborum. at non infelix animi Phoenissa, neque umquam soluitur in somnos oculisue aut pectore noctem accipit: ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens saeuit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu. (Verg. A. 4.422–32)

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It was night, and across the land tired bodies took hold of calm sleep, and the woods and savage seas were quiet, when the stars turn halfway in their course, when every field is silent, and the beasts and the colourful birds, the ones that far and wide inhabit the liquid lakes and the ones that inhabit the rough and thorny countryside, settled in sleep in the silent night, eased their cares and hearts forgetful of their labours. But not the unhappy Phoenician woman, nor does she ever relax into sleep or receive the night into her breast; her cares double, and again resurgent love rages and seethes with a great storm of anger. [My translation]

Earlier there had been a briefer passage in which it was the prospect of love that made her sleep impossible; the torment at that point had been inseparable from sweet fantasy: post ubi digressi, lumenque obscura uicissim luna premit suadentque cadentia sidera somnos, sola domo maeret uacua stratisque relictis incubat. illum absens absentem auditque uidetque. (Ibid., 4.80–3)

Surrey does well by these lines: And when they were al gone And the dimme mone doth eft withold the light, And sliding starres provoked unto sleepe, Alone she mournes within her palace voide, And sets her down on her forsaken bed. And absent him she heares, when he is gone, And seeth eke. (Surrey 4.100–6)

The later passage comes when all attempts to keep Aeneas from leaving have played out and Dido faces the completeness of her loss. It is preceded by what she pretends to be a ceremony of witchcraft either to win Aeneas back or to wipe him from her affections, but actually is a ritual preparation for suicide; and it is followed by a speech that runs through the possibilities before her in a logic of mounting despair and ends reaffirming her devotion to Sychaeus. Of the eleven lines that concern me here (line 528 is bracketed in many modern texts, but seems to have been in front of our translators), seven are used to set up a contrast—the rest of the world could rest—that is also an emptying out of the universe, the conjuring of a void that is Dido’s to fill. There is nothing but her anguish in this cosmos (no other human beings at all, except as implied by corpora, ‘bodies’). Darkness and silence summon her pain and rage and give them new force and scope, with a power that turns out to be supernatural in its reach. In the sequence of the action, it is this speech that rouses Mercury to wake Aeneas and tell him that he faces danger if he does not sail at once. Aeneas cannot, of course, sail beyond the reach of her final curse, which she pronounces as she sees his fleet leaving. With its continuity of stillness and passion, the passage is widely admired and imitated in the Renaissance. Tasso copies it at the end of Canto II of Gerusalemme liberata, to catch the mood in the crusader camp—sleepless in anticipation of seeing

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Jerusalem at dawn. It is the subtext of a number of Petrarch’s widely imitated love lyrics, which dominate Renaissance love poetry with their picture of a love for which impassioned solitude is the norm: Or che’l ciel et la terra e’l vento tace et le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena, notte il carro stellato in giro mena et nel suo letto il mar senz’ onda giace, vegghio, penso, ardo, piango; et chi mi sface sempre m’è inanzi per mia dolce pena: guerra è’l mio stato, d’ira e di duol piena, et sol di lei pensando ò qualche pace. (Petrarch, Canzoniere 164.1–8) Now that the heavens and the earth and the wind are silent, and sleep reins in the beasts and the birds, Night drives her starry car about, and in its bed the sea lies without a wave, I am awake, I think, I burn, I weep; and she who destroys me is always before me, to my sweet pain: war is my state, full of sorrow and suffering, and only thinking of her do I have any peace.⁸

(This sonnet is among those translated by Surrey: ‘Alas, so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace’.)⁹ Love such as this is torment, but also a source of authoritative poetic utterance. In the pun at the heart of Petrarch’s sequence, the unattainable woman Laura is also the laurel crown of poetic glory, which Petrarch did acquire quite literally in 1341. Both the symbolism of that ceremony and the poetry connected with it animate centuries of literary ambition in Europe; Petrarch’s appropriation of the Virgilian passage offers an intense picture of the inspiration needed for such ambition as something achieved in radical withdrawal from the usual business of life—and almost from external reality itself. The most extreme personalization of it comes in the second invocation in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (3.40–55),¹⁰ where the role of night is taken by the poet’s own literal blindness: with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine; But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair Presented with a Universal blanc Of Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d,

⁸ Text and translation from Petrarch 1976. On this poem and its Virgilian subtext, see Greene 1982, pp. 115–18. ¹⁰ I quote from Milton 1998. ⁹ Tottel 1557, sig. B1v.

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And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather thou Celestial light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Uncanny strength is called forth from the depths of deprivation, a memory of Dido’s fearsome vindictive empowerment in the Aeneid. Denham in his second effort (Denham II) removes the moment and doesn’t even attempt to render it into English. Everyone else (except Chaucer) leaves it in, but two translators do not really try. The shortest is Harrington’s; he seems impatient with Virgil’s scene-setting, in a hurry to get to the following speech: ’Twas dead of night, nor stirr’d at land an hair, A fin at sea, a feather in the air: Dido alone by sleep cannot be bound; The Stars had wander’d half their azure round, When thus she argued with untamed thought . . . (Harrington, Books III–VI, p. 39)¹¹

(Dryden nevertheless thought well enough of Harrington’s incipit to appropriate it.) The longest of the versions is Cotton’s travesty, twice as long as it needs to be to cover the sense (as the reader is invited to notice from bits of the Latin printed at the bottom of the page). The first verse paragraph makes the deflationary point that Dido’s sleeplessness is basically a matter of gastro-intestinal distress: ‘Her stomach now was piping hot, / It boyl’d and bubbled like a pot’ (Cotton, Book IV, p. 115). The second goes an extra mile with a bestial metaphor: she was like a poor jade with the botts (‘that terrible disease’). The others do try to do justice to the moment in Virgil, though I would not single any of them out as the kind of success that puts the rest of them into perspective. Ogilby’s second version may stand for the group: ’Twas Night, when gentle Sleep weak Mortals blest, The murmuring Groves, and raging Sea at rest, When half-nights Starrie Ensign up was furl’d, And Silence held her Empire o’re the World; Beasts, Wild and Tame, and gaudy Fowl, which take In Wood-lands pleasure, or the Crystal Lake, In Sleep, by quiet Night protected were, Of Toyl forgetfull, and Heart-eating Care.

¹¹ Harrington’s translation awaits close study. It falls outside Brammall’s chosen limits, but Brammall touches on it briefly for its unique lack of veneration for the original. He thinks of it as a ‘part travesty’ that reflected a conviction that Virgil’s epic ‘needed taking down a notch’ (Brammall 2015, p. 187). In an introductory poem, the republican Harrington addresses Virgil directly: ‘Virgil, my Soveraign in Poetry, / I never flatter’d Prince, nor will I thee’ (Harrington 1659, sig. A5r).

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But then no Rest unhappy Dido found, Her Eyes ne’re clos’d, her Sorrows more abound: Rebellious Love now desperately engag’d, And with a Deluge of mad Passion rag’d. (Ogilby II, p. 282)

Here the occasion shows Dryden to special advantage. He sets the moment off as a verse paragraph (not everyone does), and seizes its operatic potential with more assurance than anyone else: ’Twas dead of Night, when weary Bodies close Their Eyes in balmy Sleep, and soft Repose: The Winds no longer whisper through the Woods, Nor murm’ring Tides disturb the gentle Floods. The Stars in silent order mov’d around, And Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground. The Flocks and Herds, and parti-colour’d Fowl, Which haunt the Woods, or swim the weedy Pool, Stretch’d on the quiet Earth securely lay, Forgetting the past Labours of the day. All else of Nature’s common Gift partake; Unhappy Dido was alone awake. Nor Sleep nor Ease the Furious Queen can find, Sleep fled her Eyes, as Quiet fled her mind. Despair, and Rage, and Love, divide her heart; Despair and Rage had some, but Love the greater part. (Dryden, Aeneid, 4.757–72)

Dryden’s signature alexandrines (‘Pindaricks’) strengthen the grand sweep from silence to turmoil as no other translator quite does. Lauderdale uses alexandrines too, but not here. Dryden generally uses them to round off triplets (to end Book 4, for instance); the more delicate effect of the pentameter alexandrine couplet may have been suggested by Fanshawe’s Spenserean stanzas, which are usually seen as something of a curiosity but help to give the moment a tranced lyric grandeur: ’Twas night, and conqu’ring sleepe, With weari’d bodies the whole earth did strew; When woods are quiet, and the cruell deep, When stars are half way down, when fields stil silence keep. (Fanshawe, ‘On the Loves’, ll. 601–4)

Dryden also may take from Fanshawe a poetic flourish that corresponds to nothing in particular in the Latin. The latter’s ‘Nuzling their cares beneath sleepes downy wings’ (ibid., l. 607) looks to be behind Dryden’s first alexandrine. ‘Nuzling’ is more intimate and has some connection to Virgil’s pictae uolucres (‘painted Birds’, two

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lines earlier); Dryden’s more portentous ‘brooding’ attaches to an abstraction not in the Latin (Virgil’s painted birds appear in the next line as ‘parti-colour’d Fowl’). The addition fits in with a decorative texture in which nouns persistently attract adjectives. There is some of this in Virgil—in addition to the pictae uolucres, the lacus are liquidi and the rura are aspera (‘liquid Springs’ and ‘bushy Lands’ in Fanshawe, ‘On the Loves’, ll. 605–6)—but Dryden suavely enhances the custom: ‘balmy Sleep’, ‘soft Repose’, ‘murm’ring Tides’, ‘gentle Floods’, and ‘quiet Earth’ accompanying ‘weedy Pool’. (He actually skips rura aspera, but you hardly notice.) The cushioning softens the moment, making the stillness less taut and ominous, but it does contribute to a more unified effect than does the diction of earlier translators. Dryden’s bravura conclusion, though, brings a curious innovation: ‘Despair, and Rage, and Love, divide her heart; / Despair and Rage had some, but Love the greater part.’ As far as the sense of the Latin is concerned, the translation could have stopped with the pentameter, but the alexandrine insists that what might otherwise look like a passing gesture is an analytic claim: Dido’s heart is at war with itself, but one of the hostile factions is dominant. Those factions are presumably Virgil’s curae (despair), amor (love), and irae (rage), but the syntax of the Latin doesn’t specifically cast them as antagonists fighting with each other, nor does Virgil identify any as the strongest. A take similar to Dryden’s may be seen in Denham’s first pass at Book 4—‘diversely distraught with love and rage’ (Denham I, 4.598)—and more distinctly in Fanshawe—‘Love rose againe / And fought with wrath, as when two Tydes do thwart’ (‘On the Loves’, ll. 611–12)—evoking Dido’s psychomachia as a neoclasscial debate between opposed abstractions, though without predicting a victor. It isn’t obvious why Dryden awards the palm to Love; Dido dies cursing Aeneas and his line, and when she reappears in the underworld definitively reaffirms her love for Sychaeus. We may gain some understanding from Dryden’s assertion, in his dedication, that ‘Love was the Theme of [Virgil’s] Fourth Book’, designed to show ‘the whole process of that passion’. That process is a predictable course of things, sounding surprisingly like Chaucer: ‘possession having cool’d his Love, as it increas’d hers, she soon perceiv’d the change’ and so on (Dryden, Aeneid 1987, vol. 5, pp. 297–8). Dido’s emotional confusion follows a commonplace scenario. But that is to turn away from an alternative, more unnerving sense of what is happening: that Dido’s disparate emotions don’t fight one another but converge and work together, becoming something more powerful than any of them could be alone—a perfect storm. Or aestus: Virgil’s last word, capping hints of a tempest already there in resurgens and fluctuat, does not make it into Dryden’s translation but is picked up on by several of his predecessors: ‘fellon stormys of ire’ (Douglas, Aeneid, p. 183); ‘swellyng stormes of wrath’ (Surrey 4.715); ‘surges wylde of wrath’ (Phaer 4.587); ‘a rough Sea toss’d by the winde / Of rage’ (Stapylton, Dido and Aeneas, sig. D2r); ‘a great flood of wrath’ (Ogilby I, p. 291 second pagination); ‘a Deluge of mad Passion’ (Ogilby II, p. 282); ‘storms of anger’ (Howard, ‘Of the Loves’, p. 162); and even

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(a new possibility from the West Indies) ‘Hurricans of Grief ’ (Lauderdale 4.585). Dryden’s discrimination between Love and Rage is frequently denied: ‘love doth rise and rage againe’ (Surrey 4.714); ‘with raging love in brest she boyles’ (Phaer 4.586);¹² ‘Loves fury kindled in her raging breaste’ (Anon. 4.748); ‘Love rag’d’ (Digges, Didos Death, sig. B8v); ‘her raging love reboiles’ (Vicars, Aeneid, p. 109); ‘love rising rag’d’ (Ogilby I, p. 291 second pagination); ‘Rebellious Love now desperately engag’d, / And with a Deluge of mad Passion rag’d’ (Ogilby II, p. 282). Mure unifies Dido’s diverse passions in a Petrarchan oxymoron: ‘now, inflamed, she burnes in furiows fire, / Now foorth with freeӡeth in revenge and ire’ (‘Dido and Aeneas’, 3.137–9). Even in Caxton, who offers the least stormy Dido at the climax of this passage, there is a similar coursing of the various currents into one another, to cumulative effect: ‘she, fenyce, elysshe, or dydo, that thenne abydeth desolate and alone wythoute companye, can not by no wyse induce herself to gyve a reste unto her eyen by a lityll slepe, wherby she myghte aswage the presente anguysshes that she bereth atte her herte / but redoublen her sorowes, and her trystesses enforce more upon her / the fore love reneweth hym selfe, that torneth soone to madnes, whan it can not be recovered’ (Caxton, Eneydos, p. 90). Anger is not mentioned; instead we have madness, presented as more piteous than menacing. I think the most fearsome of these Didos, very possibly in direct and angry reaction to Caxton, is Douglas’s: The hevy thochtis multipleis ever on ane; Strang luf begynnys to rage and ryss agane And fellon [fierce] stormys of ire gan hir to schaik. (Douglas, Aeneid, p. 183)

What these contrasting portraits still have in common is that neither evokes a divided self or conflicting motives; Dido’s misery is, if anything, all too unified and beyond appeal. Virgil’s English translators manifest a near consensus on that point, from which Dryden bids to diverge. His unprecedented stylistic assurance offers a Dido less frightening than disordered, not so much dangerous as troubled. The rest of Dryden’s Aeneid does not necessarily trend this way, but in his hands Dido’s famous passion is nuanced towards a world where the unhappy course of her love is business as usual and her Roman divorce something ordinary.

¹² Phaer’s ‘boyles’ is characteristic of what looks, to modern readers, like his unsteady diction; in the poem’s invocation this verb is used of Juno’s divine anger: ‘may heavenly mindes so sore in rancour boile?’ (1.14). That the word is used for female emotional turmoil by other translators as well—not just Vicars, but also Mure, Denham, Ogilby, and Lewkenor—suggests that it may not have seemed as off-key even in the later seventeenth century as it does now. Cotton, however, also goes for it, and it is in his version that it now seems to find its proper home: ‘Dido for love in woful wise, / Bubbles, and boyls, and broyls, and fries’ (p. 15).

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Appendix: English translations of or from Aeneid 4 before 1700 Dates in italic are dates of composition, when known to be significantly earlier than those of print publication. Dates in roman type are dates of print publication. When an edited Virgilian text is quoted, the edition it comes from is the one listed here. All the items listed in this Appendix can also be found in this volume’s Bibliography. Since the presentation of the same item can be very different in the two places, a bracket at the end of each entry here helps the reader to find the corresponding entry in the general bibliography. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Legenda Didonis martiris, Carthaginis regine’, in Legend of Good Women. Decasyllabic couplets. 1385–86, 1532. Ed. John H. Fisher in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York, 1977). [= Chaucer, G. 1977 [1385–86].] William Caxton, Eneydos. Translation of an anonymous French paraphrase. Prose. 1490. Ed. W. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society (London, 1890). [= Caxton 1962 [1890].] Gavin Douglas. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. 1513, 1553. Ed. David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1957–64). All quotations are from vol. 2. [= Douglas 1957–64 [1553].] Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Books II and IV. Blank verse. Before 1547, 1554. Ed. Emrys Jones in Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1964). [= Howard 1964.] Thomas Phaer. Books I–VII. Fourteener couplets. 1556 (Book IV), 1558. (Completed by Thomas Twyne, 1584.) Ed. Stephen Lally (New York, 1987). [= Phaer 1987.] Richard Stanyhurst. Books I–IV. Unrhymed quantitative hexameters. 1582. [= Stanyhurst 1582.] Anon. Book IV. Sixain pentameter stanzas. MS British Library. 1580s–90s? Ed. Sheldon Brammall, Translation & Literature 23 (2014): 68–109. [= Brammall 2014.] Christopher Marlowe. Book IV.206–18, 265–76, 305–87, 416–36 paraphrased in blank verse; 317–19, 360–1, 628–9, 660 quoted in Latin. The Tragedie of Dido. 1587? 1594. [= Marlowe 1968.] Ben Jonson. Book IV.160–89. Poetaster 5.2.56–97. Decasyllabic couplets. 1601. [= Jonson 1995.] William Mure. ‘Dido and Aeneas’. Books I and IV. 1614. Sixain pentameter stanzas. MS University of Edinburgh Library. Ed. William Tough in The Works of Sir William Mure of Rowallan, 2 vols., Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1898). [= Mure 1898 [1614].] Dudley Digges. Didos Death [sic]. Book IV. Decasyllabic couplets. 1622. (Published anonymously; Latin text en face.) [= Digges 1622.] John Vicars. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. 1632. [= Vicars 1632.] Robert Stapylton. Dido and Aeneas. Book IV. Decasyllabic couplets. 1634. [= Stapylton 1634.] John Denham I. Books II–VI. Decasyllabic couplets. 1636. MS in Nottinghamshire Archives. Ed. (in modernized spelling) Robin Sowerby, Early Augustan Virgil (Lewisburg, PA, 2010). [= Denham 2010 [1636].] Robert Heath. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. 1644–46. MS in the form of a printed book, Clark Library (UCLA). [= Heath 1644–6.] Richard Fanshawe. ‘On the Loves of Dido and Æneas’, in an augmented edition of Il Pastor Fido. Book IV. Spenserean stanzas. 1648. Ed. Peter Davidson, The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, 2 vols. Oxford, 1997). [= Fanshawe 1997.]

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John Ogilby I and II. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. 1649, 1654. [= Ogilby 1649, 1654.] Sidney Godolphin, with Edmund Waller. The Passion of Dido for Æneas. Book IV. Decasyllabic couplets. 1658. (Variant readings in two manuscripts and one subsequent publication.) In Sowerby, Early Augustan Virgil. [= Godolphin and Waller 2010 [1658].] James Harrington. Books III–VI. Decasyllabic couplets. 1659. [= Harrington 1659.] Charles Cotton. Book IV. Imitation of Paul Scarron’s Virgile travestie. Octosyllabic couplets. 1665. (Extracts from the Latin at the bottom of the page.) [= Cotton 1665.] John Denham II. ‘The Passion of Dido for Æneas’, in Poems and Translations. Book IV. 276–449, 474–503, 584–629, 645–705. Decasyllabic couplets. 1668. Ed. Theodore Howard Banks in The Poetical Works of John Denham (New Haven, 1928); also in Sowerby, Early Augustan Virgil. [= Denham 1928 [1668].] John Lewkenor. ‘The Deserted Queen’, in Metellus his Dialogues. Book IV. Decasyllabic couplets. 1693. [= Lewkenor 1693.] Richard Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. Before 1695. 1709. [= Maitland 1709.] Robert Howard. ‘Of the Loves of Dido and Æneas’, in Poems. Book IV. Decasyllabic couplets. 1696. [= Howard 1696.] John Dryden. Complete Aeneid. Decasyllabic couplets. 1697. Ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing as vols. 5 and 6 in The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley, 1987). [= Dryden 1697.]

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6 An Amazon in the Renaissance Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2 Fiona Cox

The field of translation studies is witnessing extraordinary times. In 2008 Sarah Ruden became the first woman ever to translate the Aeneid in its entirety into English, creating to great acclaim a poem that recounted its heroic exploits and seething passions with devastatingly quiet restraint.¹ This milestone was followed in 2015 by Caroline Alexander’s Iliad, the first to be translated into English by a woman, while Emily Wilson has just published the first Odyssey to be translated into English by a woman, which Charlotte Higgins declares ‘will change our understanding of it forever’.² Moreover, these monumental achievements are not isolated; they are a small part of a much wider trend of women writers turning to classical works and making them their own. In the field of translation studies alone, this has led to such landmarks as Marie Darrieussecq’s version of Ovid’s Tristia: Tristes Pontiques (published in 2008), Jane Alison’s translations of Ovid’s love poetry (Change Me, published in 2014), Josephine Balmer’s ‘transgressive’ translations of the Tristia (published in 2010 under the title The Word for Sorrow) and Anne Carson’s searingly beautiful meditation on loss, translation, and Catullus, Nox (see Carson 2009). That this is a twenty-first-century phenomenon is indicated by Balmer’s observation: Towards the end of the twentieth century, women poets were still fascinated by classical literature but, unlike their male counterparts, their work tended towards the use of archetypal female figures from classical mythology rather than direct translation or versioning, as, for example, in the work of Judith Kazantzis (1980) [sc. The Wicked Queen] or Carol Ann Duffy (1999) [The World’s Wife].³

Furthermore, this is a phenomenon that accompanies new and groundbreaking studies of the figure of the female translator of the classics,⁴ as well as of the pioneering work done by female classical scholars. From our current vantage point in a landscape of ¹ See Cox and Theodorakopoulos 2012. ² Higgins 2017. ³ Balmer 2013, p. 48. ⁴ For studies of translations by women and interviews with women translators, see Balmer 2013 and Cox and Theodorakopoulos 2013. For a study of female classicists, see Wyles and Hall 2016.

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classical reception that has learned to welcome female voices, it is both instructive and fitting to look back across the centuries to those earlier women translators and scholars who so often fought a lonely and alienating battle to engage with classical literature, risking reputation and prospects for the chance to make their own the foundation texts of Western civilization. Within these studies of earlier translators certain names recur more frequently than others; for example, the translations into French by Anne Dacier (1647–1720) are well documented,⁵ as is Lucy Hutchinson’s achievement of translating Lucretius’s De rerum natura in the seventeenth century.⁶ Balmer vividly depicts Hutchinson’s conflicted emotions towards her enterprise: In her preface she recalls how she carried out the work in a room where her children were themselves working on their tutor’s Latin homework, numbering syllables of her translation ‘by the threds of the [tapestry] canvas I wrought in’. Nevertheless, she exhibits anxiety about her position as a translating woman, whose ‘more becoming vertue is silence’, condemning her finished work as ‘one long fault’.⁷

It is telling that Hutchinson should exercise her craft while wielding tools that are traditionally the preserve of women. Her apparent desire to undo, to unravel the work of her translation allows us to glimpse the figure of Penelope behind her; but, more importantly, it reveals the urgency of her passion for learning and for translating. Her entire enterprise of translating Lucretius is underpinned not only by doubt, but also by guilt, emotions that point to the complex alchemy between classical text and female translator. Within this burgeoning of interest in female translators, the name of Marie de Gournay (1565–1645) has received scant interest. She is mentioned in a brief aside in Wyles’s study of Dacier and Van Schurman, but as a woman of letters generally rather than as a translator.⁸ Even within studies specifically devoted to translations of Virgil during the French Renaissance, her name is unmentioned,⁹ although she is currently enjoying rekindled interest, in part through her philosophical and feminist writings and in part through her role as champion of the writings of Michel de Montaigne, who

⁵ See Balmer 2013, pp. 24 and 43, as well as Wyles 2016 and Fabre-Serris 2016. ⁶ Balmer 2013, pp. 42 and 49, and Hall 2016, pp. 103–31. Hutchinson’s translation was published for the first time in 1996, edited by Hugh de Quehen. ⁷ Balmer 2013, p. 42. The complete works of Lucy Hutchinson, including her translation of Lucretius, are being produced by Oxford University Press. The first volume—her translation of Lucretius—appeared in 2011. This project is further evidence of a renewed interest in the classical tradition and women translators. ⁸ ‘From this point of view, van Schurman was a far more obvious candidate for the role of exemplum in these tracts since she had placed herself at the centre of an international network of women (such as Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Bathsua Makin, and Birgitte Thott) who were actively thinking and writing about female education (a debate intrinsically linked with access to Latin and Greek)’ (Wyles 2016, p. 73). ⁹ See Worth-Stylianou 2012, who examines seven French Renaissance translations of Virgil, one of them by a woman—Hélisenne de Crenne.

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adopted her as his fille d’alliance.¹⁰ Her first meeting with the writer with whose intellect she had fallen in love is a famous episode of literary history, which reveals a young woman crazed with the frustration of her unfulfilled intellect and zest for knowledge. In the 2008 novel in which she recreates Marie de Gournay’s life, Jenny Diski beautifully imagines the young woman reading and learning Montaigne’s words, so that they should enter her life and become her own language and her own narrative: ‘after the first time she read them they belonged to her heart and mind and became a joint work between Michel Yquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, and la Demoiselle Marie de Gournay’.¹¹ Not only does Diski provide here a vivid image of the process of creative translation, but she also highlights the gulf between the social and literary status of the two of them. Of course, in Renaissance France there could be no question of any kind of equivalence (even if Marie de Gournay had been Montaigne’s intellectual peer) and, on meeting Montaigne, the young woman flew into a passionate fury, worthy of Maggie Tulliver, through her desperation to be taken seriously by him. Diski (2008, pp. 89–90) reimagines the scene: As she spoke, she stabbed at the inside of her forearm repeatedly with the pointed end of the hairpin, until, to Montaigne’s horror, rivulets of blood flowed freely down to her wrist and dripped to the floor from the tips of her fingers. ‘I devote my intellect to you . . . ’ she cried, now in a trance of classical drama. ‘I dedicate my blood and my life to you, I am your lifelong disciple. Where you go, I will follow . . . ’, the drama taking a biblical turn. ‘Teach me, make me your pupil, your disciple.’

The scene catches the great poignancy of the clash between the young Marie’s fierce ambition and the tired language she employs, as she borrows her passion inevitably from classical drama and then resorts to the Bible, borrowing her words from Ruth, who vows never to leave her mother-in-law Naomi.¹² It is telling, also, that these second-hand words should be accompanied by an act of self-harm in which she uses a quintessentially female accoutrement. De Gournay’s urge to mutilate herself with a hairpin while citing the words of others is a mirror image of Lucy Hutchinson using the threads of her tapestry to measure out the metre of her Lucretian translation.¹³ ¹⁰ See Reiss 1992, p. 111: ‘Gournay herself suffered the familiar fate of Renaissance women writers in a masculine culture: scornful and often scurrilous mockery in her lifetime, silence and total neglect after her death (the same would be true for such later writers as Madeleine de Scudéry and Aphra Behn, Delarivière Manley and Eliza Heywood, despite the great popularity of their work during their lifetimes).’ ¹¹ Diski 2007, p. 63. All references will be to this edition. ¹² ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried.’ Ruth 1:16–18. ¹³ Wyles quotes Anne Dacier, who also turns to the lexicon of female accoutrements, in her fear that her translation of the Iliad might be found wanting: ‘Occasional hints of engagement with the issue of gender appear in the paratext to her translations; for example, at the end of her note about Andromache being sent back to her loom by Hector in Iliad 6, she says: “I am rather afraid that many people, reading this work and finding it far above my capacity, will send me back to my distaff and spindles” ’ (Dacier, quoted in Wyles 2016, pp. 74–5). On the metaphors and practices of female translation, see Simon 1996, p. 2: ‘Gender difference has been played out not only in the metaphors describing translation, but in actual practices of translation, in the specific social and historical forms through which women have understood and enacted their writing activities.’

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In her review of Diski’s novel, Patricia Duncker summarizes the warning lessons of de Gournay’s life: Diski’s compelling, beautifully crisp fictional reconstruction of this bizarre and uncompromising woman’s life serves as a warning. Beware of flattery and never flatter others. Never believe your own publicity. Hold the obsequious reader at a distance. And if you are a woman, longing for education and independence, never underestimate the forces ranged against you.¹⁴

De Gournay’s impassioned beseeching of Montaigne was fired not only by her love of his writing, but also by her realization that his public endorsement and recognition of her would ease acceptance into the world of Parisian savants that she thought of as her spiritual home and from which she dreaded exile.¹⁵ Both she and Hutchinson knew of the ‘forces ranged against’ them and recognized that translation was one of the very few means available to female writers to secure an entrée into the maledominated world of literature and thought.¹⁶ De Gournay had been practising translation from an early age, when she taught herself Latin (to her mother’s chagrin) by comparing a copy of the Aeneid from her father’s library with the translation of its text. Once again, Diski vividly conveys the excitement of the child who has discovered a secret way into a world from which she had believed herself to have been barred: She did not know Latin. No-one thought it a necessary skill for a female child. She spelled out a title: A . . . e . . . n . . . e . . . i . . . d. One day, on another shelf she discovered a second copy with the title Aeneid and wondered why there were two. When she got it down, she saw that only the title was in Latin and that the text was in French. . . . Translation was an unknown idea to her, but if it was possible to take a book and turn its words into another language, then each word must have its counterpart in that language, in every language. She imagined Latin as a code, like the codes her siblings sometimes devised for keeping things from the adults and from her. Latin was a secret writing to which she believed she might have found the key. If the two books were the same, apart from their language, then if she read them side by side, word by word, sentence by sentence, she might learn Latin all by herself.¹⁷

¹⁴ Duncker 2008. ¹⁵ Diski imagines de Gournay’s grief over Paris as exceeding the grief she felt at her father’s death. Her description of Marie’s sense of loss of the city recalls Ovid’s laments for Rome, once he had been sent into exile: ‘At 12 she was sorry to lose the opportunity of knowing him for longer, but at the age of 15 losing him was nothing compared to her loss of Paris. It was the brilliant centre of the world, where everything was available and life’s possibilities appeared to her endless when she watched men and a few women moving with such deliberation through the streets as if they all knew exactly where they were going and what there was to be done. She always tried to imagine herself, free of the constraints of childhood, joining them, and debating fiercely in the fashionable salons, which were surely the destination of the bright-eyed purposeful ones, where knowledge and wit—she had no doubt—soared back and forth like sweetly hit tennis balls’ (Diski 2008, p. 27). ¹⁶ ‘We must recall that to publish or to appear in print was considered aggressive behavior for females during this period in Western culture [the Renaissance]. . . . Translation offered women an involvement in literary culture, as both producer and consumer, that did not immediately challenge male control of that culture’ (Simon 1996, p. 46). ¹⁷ Diski 2008, pp. 34–5.

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De Gournay’s translation is, as we shall see, scarred by imprecisions and diffidence, but her pride in even undertaking the task, in breaching the literary stronghold of men, fires her Preface. She depicts herself as une Amazone in her daring to undertake a translation of Virgil. As she inserts herself into the lineage of French translators of Virgil in 1626 (decades before Molière parodied France’s attitudes towards its bluestockings in Les Femmes savantes of 1672), the conflict of her emotions and of her attitude towards her enterprise is heightened still further. At the start of the translation she addresses a letter to the king, Louis XIII, on whom she depended for a small pension for her livelihood. In her justification of her enterprise, she figures her translation as a spindle, which she pits against existing translations produced by eminent male scholars that she likens to a stick: Quelle temerité, SIRE, une quenouïlle attaque une crosse, et la crosse illustre d’un Bertault duquel à parler sérieusement neantmoins, je ne m’approche, qu’afin de porter en reverence le Livre apres luy; bien qu’il fust raisonnable que soubs un Monarque si brave et si magnanime que LOUIS treiziesme, les Dames osassent entreprendre des gestes d’Amazone. Je presente donc a votre Maiesté le sac de Troye: afin que voyant en autruy l’effect piteux des imprudens conseils, et des guerres, elle espanouisse son cœur de joye, des conseils prudents et de la paix qui la font regner avec tant d’heure et de gloire. Or, SIRE, reduicte à la solitude et rangée à l’escart, en mon Siecle, je choisis en ce lieu, suivant le train de mon sort, une voye escartée et sauvage à vous abborder, ne vous presentant point de loüanges, parmy tant de gens qui vous en dorent le frontispice des Escrits qu’ils vous offrent.¹⁸ What temerity, Sir: a spindle pits itself against a crozier, and the illustrious crozier of a Bertault, whom, in all seriousness, I am only approaching in order to follow in his footsteps and raise up the Book reverently; even though it is reasonable that during the reign of so valiant and openhearted a monarch as Louis XIII ladies should dare to assume the gestures of Amazons. And so I offer to your Majesty the sack of Troy: that, seeing the pitiful consequences in another of reckless counsel, and of wars, it might make his heart swell with joy to think of the prudent counsel and of the peace which mean that your Majesty reigns with such good fortune and glory. And so, Sir, reduced to solitude and cast aside in my century I choose in this place, following the course of my fate, a remote and wild path from which to approach you, offering you no praises at all amidst so many people who gild for you the frontispieces of the Writings which they offer to you.

There is a great deal going on in this Preface. De Gournay’s captatio benevolentiae is to laud the peacefulness of Louis XIII’s reign by contrasting it with the fall of Troy, depicted in Aeneid 2. However, her enterprise of translating the second book of the Aeneid establishes her as a warrior. She opens her translation by figuring herself as an Amazone and closes it with an untranslated tag from Aeneid 1, line 493: audetque viris concurrere Virgo¹⁹ (‘This virgin warrior dared to fight ¹⁸ De Gournay 1634, p. 682 (visit http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30529270j, accessed 25 December 2016). ¹⁹ Colin Burrow meditates upon this phrase in his analysis of gender dynamics within the Aeneid: ‘The Latin word order ensures that the very last word used in the description of the picture is virgo, a virgin. That

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with men’).²⁰ Through her identification with Penthesilea, the virgin warrior who led the Amazons into battle, de Gournay uses her translation as part of the war she is waging for the cause of sexual equality, a cause for the sake of which she wrote a treatise that ensured her lasting fame: Apology for the Woman Writing. The loneliness and sense of exile that she experiences within her century are highlighted by the fact that she is enlisting fictional characters as her companions in this battle, a strategy that anticipates Monique Wittig’s depiction of herself as a guérillère in her 1969 reworking of the Iliad.²¹ This intellectual war is played out on the pages of her translation. Her own version is frequently interrupted by her insertion of Bertault’s translation of the same lines, a strategy that she employs as early as the first twelve lines of her translation of Aeneid 2.²² The start of her own translation reads as follows: Chaqu’un est attentif à ces tristes recits, Everyone is attentive to these sad tales, Tenant la bouche close et le geste rassis: Keeping the mouth closed and the mien sedate: Lors que le Prince Aenée en ces termes comence When the Prince Aeneas in these terms begins Du haut bout de son lict regardant l’assistance. From-the high point of his couch looking-at the assembled-company. Faut-il, Reyne sans pair, que le flux de mes pleurs Must it-be, Queen beyond compare, that the flow of my tears Par un accez nouveau celebre nos douleurs? In an onset new should-commemorate my sorrows? Traictant de ce grand jour dont l’Orient souspire, Speaking of that remarkable day when the East sighed, Que le Grec raza Troye et son illustre Empire, When Greece razed Troy and its illustrious Empire, marks a shift in focalization from the man who looks at the representations of Troy towards the woman, Dido, Queen of Carthage, who ordered their construction. Epic is a literary form traditionally dominated by men, but in Virgil’s epic gender dynamics do not always move in predictable ways. He does not simply associate males with fighting and females with emotion and contemplation. At the moment the imperial hero Aeneas is self-absorbedly zooming in on the parts of the image and the story of Troy that most concern his fate, Queen Dido enters from the hunt, like Diana bearing a quiver on her shoulder, or like the vigorous Amazon Penthesilea, bringing joy, delivering judgements, and instans operi regnisque futuris, driving on the work and the future kingdom. That is a shocking reminder of how passive Aeneas has become, and in traditional terms how “feminine” he is’ (Burrow 2013, pp. 59–60). ²⁰ Ruden 2008. All translations from the Latin Aeneid directly into English will be from this translation. Translations of de Gournay’s French translation into English are my own, and appear following citations from de Gournay. ²¹ Wittig 1969. ²² conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant; / inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto: / infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem, Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum / eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi / et quorum pars magna fui (‘All faces now were fixed on him in silence, / Father Aeneas spoke from his high couch: / ‘Must I renew a grief beyond description, / Telling how Greeks destroyed the power of Troy, / That tear-stained kingdom – since I saw the worst, / And played a leading role?’, Verg. A. 2.1–5; Ruden’s translation).

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Lamentable accident que la rigueur des Dieux Lamentable event which the sternness of-the Gods Pour aigrir mes regrets a faict voir à mes yeux: To sharpen my sorrows compelled to-see my eyes. (De Gournay, Aeneid 2, pp. 684–5)²³ Everyone paid attention to these sad tales, Keeping quiet and maintaining a reflective mien, When Prince Aeneas, looking down from aloft his couch At those gathered there, began to speak with these words: ‘Peerless Queen, must I commemorate my sorrows With a new flow of tears? Must I speak of that remarkable day when the East sighed, When Greece razed Troy and its illustrious empire. A lamentable event which the sternness of the Gods Compelled me to behold, sharpening my sorrow’.

De Gournay employs the twelve-syllable alexandrine, which is an indication of serious literary enterprise in seventeenth-century France.²⁴ The constraints of the metre have perhaps contributed to a certain flaccidity in her translation. She has invented Aeneas’s description of Dido as sans pair and missed an opportunity to highlight the resonances of infandum—a word whose lexical field is central to the Aeneid with its repressed, unspoken undercurrents of deep emotion. Moreover, by transferring Virgil’s adjective lamentabile from regnum to accident, she diminishes the horror of the last night of Troy, made more chilling by the fact of having been calculated so minutely. Her translation is punctuated by insertions of Monsieur Bertault’s translations of the same lines (also written in alexandrines). It is unclear why de Gournay felt the need to include his work, since his translation is not particularly vivid or resonant. Such inclusions perhaps betray a diffidence that she was not quite able to dispel, in spite of what she asserts in the letter to the king and in her footnotes. However, although she appears hampered throughout the translations, there are glimpses of real sensitivity and imagination. On several occasions she employs highly physical, corporeal imagery to depict a scene. Her translation of lines 265–6—portisque patentibus omnis / accipiunt socios atque agmina conscia iungunt (‘They swarmed a city sunk in wine and sleep, / Slaughtered the guards, opened the gates, and let / Their comrades in, uniting ranks as planned’)—expands the original to depict the treacherous ships vomiting up Greek soldiers onto the beaches: Ils reçoivent leurs gens à porte large ²³ I am quoting de Gournay’s text from de Gournay 1634 (visit http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k70463d/f17.image.r=marie%20de%20gournay%20eneide, accessed 12 March 2018); the translations from de Gournay’s work are my own. In what follows, numerical references should be assumed to refer to line numbers in Virgil’s original Book 2 when they accompany Latin text and to page numbers in de Gournay’s translation when they accompany French text. ²⁴ See Shaw 2003, p. 72: ‘[S]ome meters and genres have historically been deemed higher in their rhetorical register than others—in the seventeenth century, the alexandrine is nobler than the heptasyllable’.

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ouverte / Et joignent en ce lieu les escadrons amis / Que le sein des vaisseaux sur l’areine a vomis (‘They received their people through the gate that they open wide / And in this place join the friendly companies / Whom the ship’s belly had vomited onto the sand’, p. 696). A couple of lines further on, she emphasizes the fatally bewitching properties of sleep. The lines tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris / incipit et dono divum gratissima serpit (‘It was the time when that first, sweetest sleep, / A gift from gods, slips into weary mortals’, ll. 268–9) become Le sommeil, don du Ciel, se glissant en nos veines / Commençoit à charmer nos miserables peines (‘Sleep, heaven’s gift, gliding into our veins / Began to beguile our wretched hardships’, p. 696). The French word charmer, a derivative of the Latin carmen, retains the double meaning of ‘to enchant’ and ‘to bewitch’. In de Gournay’s hands sleep glides like a potion into the Trojans’ veins, ensuring that they will be unprepared. Tellingly, de Gournay also employs very vivid imagery for the depiction of anger. She renders furiata mente ferebar (‘My ranting fury carried me along’, l. 588) as Le bouillon de ma rage en ces discours ondoye’ (‘The boiling current of my rage surges in these speeches’, p. 712), catching the currents of rage and bile that course through the Aeneid and ensure the destruction of hopes and dreams. Yet her instinct is to shrink from the image and to apologize for it. On the same page she inserts a footnote that offers an alternative to any reader who might have found her too bold: Si ce vers semble hardy on lui peult substituer celuiy-ci ‘D’une rage emportée ces mots’ (‘If this verse seems bold, one could substitute this one for it: “These words [spoken] in possessed fury” ’). Occasionally the justifications that she gives in her footnotes sharpen the imagery that she employs. Depicting the sounds of grief heard on the last night in Troy, diverso interea miscentur moenia luctu (‘Confusion and distress spread through the fortress’, l. 298), she offers Un orage de plaints hurle parmy les airs (‘A storm of laments shrieks through the air’, p. 698), and justifies her decision with the following observation: Plaints, malgré les censeurs, est un mot légitime que les meres le disent des enfans gemissans (‘Whatever the censors say “laments” is a legitimate word which mothers use to talk about whimpering children’, note ad loc.). Her note changes the way in which we imagine the sounds of grief that emerge from the burning city—a chorus of childlike wailing heightens the feeling of helplessness that holds the doomed city in its grip. A few lines further on, she responds to the synaesthesia of clarescunt sonitus (‘the din kept growing clearer’, l. 301) with le bruit s’esclaircit plus poignant et plus haut (‘the noise grew clearer, more sorrowful and higher’, p. 698)—a phrase that conveys the idea of high, sharp sounds piercing the air. De Gournay is also able to mirror some of Virgil’s stylistic devices. The ‘p’ alliteration in pueri circum innuptaeque puellae / sacra canuntur (‘Young boys and girls around it / Sang hymns’, ll. 238–9) is mimicked by the ‘f ’ and ‘l’ alliterations in Fils et filles autour chantent mainte Himne saincte (p. 695). A similar effect is achieved when she translates fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens / gloria Teucrum (‘Troy, the Trojans, and our glory / Are gone’, ll. 325–6) with C’est faict de nous, chetifs, c’est faict de la

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Patrie, / De Troye et des Troyens la splendeur est perie (‘It’s over for us weaklings, it’s over for the fatherland, / The glory of Troy and of the Trojans has perished’ (p. 698). The repetition of c’est faict matches the repeated verb forms of fuimus and fuit, but also exacerbates the feeling of absolute hopelessness that is being conveyed. And by introducing the adjective chetifs (‘puny’ or ‘weedy’) de Gournay indicates that the worst has already happened—the Trojans have irrevocably lost their heroic qualities. Although de Gournay’s translation offers these flashes of sensitivity, it remains nevertheless rather pedestrian. Within the history of Virgilian translation it could not bear scrutiny when compared with the translations produced by Douglas or Dryden, Klossowski, Ahl, or Ruden. It is largely through her paratextual observations that de Gournay brings her translation to life; and there she uses it to put before us the particular challenges facing the female translator in ways that are immensely moving. Through her letter to the king and her footnotes she reveals to us the loneliness and corrosive diffidence that beset her as she embarked, untutored, upon this audacious enterprise. Many of her footnotes are barbed with an aggressively defensive tone. Indeed, her very first footnote suggests that, were it not for the impatience of her readers, she would do things differently: L’impatience de certains esprits à prendre la peine de chercher à s’esclaircir en un Advertissement qu’on pourroit faire au Lecteur, me force de ranger quelques advis en marge de ses versions (‘The impatience of certain intellects who take pains to seek enlightenment in an address that could be made to the reader has forced me to relegate a few observations to the margins of the translations’, p. 684). A few of these observations betray her lack of a classical education. For example, early on, she comments on her translation of infandum dolorem (l. 3) and observes: quand nostre langue ne peut exprimer un plurale comme icy, les habiles gens ne trouvent aucun danger d’en substituer quelque autre pertinente au suject et bonne en foy (‘when our language can’t convey a plural like this one, adept people see no danger in substituting another word which relates to the subject and is faithful’, p. 684). Quite apart from the fact that infandum dolorem is not a plural, de Gournay weakens her authority by invoking these nameless habiles gens. On other occasions, though, she draws upon the long days she spent reading in her father’s library in order to justify her decisions. At lines 36–7—aut pelago . . . praecipitare iubent (‘urged us to hurl . . . into the sea’)—she plumps for Veulent qu’on precipite en l’Helespont vagueux (‘wants someone to throw into the choppy Hellespont’ (p. 686), pointing out in a footnote on that page that Homere appelle partout ceste mer Helespont par droict de voisinage (‘Homer always calls this sea the Hellespont by virtue of its vicinity’). Despite the prickliness of de Gournay’s tone, despite occasional slips, she betrays painstaking and detailed research behind the decisions she makes. It took nearly four hundred years for a female translator, Sarah Ruden, to publish a translation of the Aeneid in its entirety. And, even four hundred years later, Ruden, too, remains acutely aware that female translators of classical literature are much

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more likely to feel that they have to compensate for inadequate training—but she argues that, paradoxically, this can enhance their work.²⁵ Marie de Gournay is enjoying renewed popularity in the twenty-first century. In France she is the subject of a biography by Michèle Fogel (2004) and her Égalité des hommes et des femmes suivi de Grief des dames came out in a new edition in 2008. In Britain she was, as we have seen, the subject of Jenny Diski’s novel, and in the United States her own work Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works appeared in 2002 as part of Chicago University Press’s series ‘The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe’, devoted to women writers. In his Introduction to Apology for the Woman Writing, Richard Hillman defines de Gournay’s achievements thus: Taken all in all, and especially with regard to her disadvantaged position as an intellectually ambitious woman in a masculine world, Gournay’s literary achievement, however sprawling and fragmented, stands as a monumental challenge to patriarchal attitudes and structures— hence Élyane Dezon-Jones’s title for her edition of selected works: Fragments d’un discours féminin (Fragments of a feminine discourse).²⁶

It is through her life story and works, which anticipate and foreshadow so vividly the ongoing struggles of ambitious intellectual female writers, that de Gournay is capturing our interest today. It is in this capacity that she created a translation that is compelling because it foreshadows so strongly the conflicts and dilemmas facing women writers who translate and engage with the classical tradition today. Long before Wittig imagined her island of female guerillas, long before Marie Darrieussecq engaged with the figure of Penthesilea, long before Hélène Cixous used the imagery of Virgilian warfare in ‘Sorties’, de Gournay was figuring herself as a female Penthesilea, leader of the Amazons, an identity that fortified her for the enterprise of translation.²⁷ She embarked upon a new and distinctive enterprise in undertaking a translation of a classical text, forging a course that prefigures the experiences of later women writers, who are still negotiating their own dialogues with classical literature.

²⁵ See Balmer 2012, p. 268: ‘as Sarah Ruden has noted, a lack of ability to read by sight—the result of many women’s more truncated classical education, in particular—can necessitate many visits to the lexicon and scholarly commentaries’. ²⁶ Hillman and Quesnel 2002, pp. 3–4. ²⁷ Darrieussecq 2004; Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Cixous and Clément 1975.

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7 Virgil after Vietnam Susanna Braund

And you know that peace can only be won When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come. Country Joe and the Fish ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag’ (1965)

The scope of this chapter is the major American verse translations of the Aeneid published during the past fifty years. The translators more or less explicitly position themselves vis-à-vis Virgilian scholarship of the period, a period during which discussions of the Aeneid in the United States have centred upon Virgil’s attitudes to empire and war and have often been framed in terms of opposition to the Augustan regime—an opposition associated with protests against the ‘illegal and unjust war in Vietnam’.¹ The five major verse translations to be discussed here are those of Allen Mandelbaum (1971), Robert Fitzgerald (1981), Stanley Lombardo (2005), Robert Fagles (2006), and Sarah Ruden (2008).² My aim is to situate these translations in a broader context of tendencies in American classical scholarship. I shall proceed in chronological order, since the translators may reasonably be considered to be in dialogue with their predecessors. There were plenty of Virgil translations available to scholars, students, and readers during the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside H. R. Fairclough’s 1916 Loeb prose translation and the British Poet Laureate C. Day-Lewis’s 1953 line-for-line verse translation, which remained a persistent choice for decades throughout the English-speaking world, there were verse translations by the American poets and scholars Rolfe Humphries (1951),

¹ I take the phrase from Richard Thomas’s Prologue to his crucially important study of the reception of Virgil’s Aeneid and its support or otherwise for the Augustan regime (what he calls ‘Augustan Virgil’; Thomas 2001b). Thomas starts with Virgil’s own contemporaries and proceeds chronologically, down to the end of the twentieth century. Quotations are from p. xi. ² Considerations of space compel me to exclude the verse translations of Edward McCrorie 1995, Frederick Ahl 2007, Patricia Johnston 2012, and Barry B. Powell 2015, as well as prose translations. Ahl is actually British but has spent his long career teaching in the United States.

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James Mantinband (1964), and Frank Copley (1965). So what inspired Mandelbaum and others to turn their hand to the task?³ I shall propose that the Vietnam War was a crucial factor for the first four translators and that the fifth moves us into another phase. Outside the academy, the anti-Vietnam War movement created a momentum for classical scholars and translators (or at least some of them) to revise their attitudes to Virgil as ‘the classic of all Europe’—as T. S. Eliot famously put it in a presidential address delivered to the Virgil Society in 1944 and published one year later.⁴ For Eliot, the Aeneid was (in Lombardo’s words) ‘the exemplar of classic style, by which he meant mature, conservative, morally elevated, sure of its civilized values in language as well as politics’, a view that had held sway since the bimillennial celebrations of Virgil’s birth in 1930–1, if not since much earlier.⁵ Stephen Harrison provides an excellent account of ‘the Aeneid in the twentieth century’ in an essay of that title that opens the Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, edited by him.⁶ There he teases apart the traffic between German, British, and American scholarship. He sketches the position taken by the so-called Harvard School, especially Adam Parry, Wendell Clausen, and Michael Putnam, who, in reaction against German triumphalist–imperialist readings, held that the Aeneid ‘presented a pessimistic view alongside the surface glory of Aeneas and Rome . . . The dark side of political success and the cost of imperialism, a cost felt by the victor as well as victim, was the essential message’.⁷ He rightly goes on to say that ‘it is difficult to separate such an interpretation from the characteristic concerns of US (and other) intellectuals in these years: the doubt of the traditional view of the Aeneid has at least some connection with the 1960s questioning of all institutions, political, religious, and intellectual, and in particular with attitudes towards America’s own imperialism’.⁸ The context, in other words, is provided by the Vietnam War (1955–75), the activities of the civil rights movement from the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of the anti-war movement in the mid-1960s, the free speech movement on the campus at Berkeley during 1964–5, student activism across American campuses, and the Woodstock Festival in 1969, complete with the memorable performance of the song in my epigraph. Against this backdrop, if there is one single scholarly intervention that shifted our view of the

³ Erich Segal, in a celebratory New York Times review of Mandelbaum’s 1971 Aeneid, pungently writes that ‘recent translations have been incomprehensible to students, inconvenient for teachers and downright insulting to the English language’ (Segal 1972). This is probably overstated. ⁴ It was published under the title ‘What Is a Classic?’ (Eliot 1957, p. 70) and is now readily available in numerous venues. ⁵ Lombardo 2005, p. xi. ⁶ Harrison 1990, pp. 1–20. ⁷ Ibid., p. 5. One should not regard the antithetical positions as absolute. As Kallendorf (2006, pp. 76) says: ‘It is worth noting that the distinction between the two approaches is not absolute—the “optimists” certainly recognize that success comes at a price in the Aeneid, while the “pessimists” in turn do not argue that the cost is so high that Rome should never have been founded—but for the sake of clarity and brevity, it is important to recognize a basic difference in what the two groups of readers choose to emphasize.’ ⁸ Harrison 1990, p. 5.

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Aeneid, it was surely Adam Parry’s essay ‘The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, published in Arion in 1963.⁹ In a nutshell, Parry claims: [Virgil] insists equally on the terrible price one must pay for this glory. More than blood, sweat and tears, something more precious is continually being lost by the necessary process; human freedom, love, personal loyalty . . . are lost in the service of what is grand, monumental and impersonal: the Roman State.¹⁰

Hence: ‘We hear two distinct voices in the Aeneid, a public voice of triumph, and a private voice of regret.’¹¹ Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011), professor of English and comparative literature, published poet, and energetic translator of epic poetry, was working on his translation of the Aeneid in precisely these years.¹² In his Introduction, penned in 1970, he indicates the way in which Virgil spoke to him so compellingly during the 1960s. He talks of his ‘personal discontent’ and says that, during the years when he worked on the translation, this personal discontent widened: ‘this state (no longer, with the Vietnam war, that innocuous word “society”) has wrought the unthinkable, the abominable’. So it is no surprise that, echoing Parry, he distinguishes two voices, all the while affirming Virgil’s humanity: ‘Virgil is not free of the taint of the proconsular; but he speaks from a time of peace achieved, and no man ever felt more deeply the part of the defeated and the lost’ (Mandelbaum 1971, p. xv). He insists that Virgil’s ‘humanity is constant—and vital, not lumbering, not marmoreal’ (ibid.). Mandelbaum’s translation, published in 1971, was heralded as a big leap forward in Erich Segal’s review.¹³ It won the National Book Award in 1973 in the category ‘translation’ and was reprinted in 1981 in a deluxe edition, with a new preface and thirteen drawings by the illustrator and engraver Barry Moser. Why did it strike such a chord with readers? Clearly Mandelbaum valued Virgil’s humanity and presumably wished to convey that in his translation. Segal suggests that it ‘will enable a wide new audience to realize that Virgil’s epic is not the paean to humanitas that legions of tendentious critics would have us believe’ but that ‘Virgil is essentially depicting the brutal, dehumanizing effects of war’. He clearly agrees with the premise of Mandelbaum’s project, even though he emphasizes Virgil’s representation of the dehumanizing

⁹ Parry 1963, most easily accessed in Commager 1966, pp. 107–23. Thomas 2001b, pp. 276–7 is of course correct to point out that Parry’s article dates from when the United States only had ‘advisers’ in Vietnam and that his attitudes were formed by the crisis in Europe (Parry was born in 1928); yet Parry clearly not only provoked a violent response but clearly spoke to the Zeitgeist (Thomas 2001b, pp. 223–4). ¹⁰ Parry in Commager 1966, pp. 120–1. ¹¹ Parry in Commager 1966, p. 121. ¹² Besides the Aeneid, Mandelbaum translated Dante’s Commedia (published in 1980–4), the Odyssey (published in 1990), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (published in 1993)—a finalist in the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. ¹³ Segal 1972.

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effect of war—where, for Mandelbaum, Virgil’s sense of humanity actually embraces the horrors of war.¹⁴ Humanity, then, is the central issue. To pursue the question of Virgil’s humanity as reflected in modern translations, I determined to examine passages most likely to offer touchstones of the translator’s attitude, namely where the most brutal actions and effects of war are depicted.¹⁵ Immediately one thinks of the lament of Euryalus’s mother in Book 9 (Verg. A. 9.481–97); of Aeneas behaving as a berserker after Pallas’s death in Book 10 (Verg. A. 10.513–605); and of the opening of Book 11, which includes the human sacrifice on the pyre of Pallas and the pathos of Pallas’s warhorse’s tears (Verg. A. 11.1–138). Most of the examples I use in this chapter will be drawn from these passages; the references to my translations of choice are simple line references, sometimes accompanied by the translator’s name, and followed by a complete reference to the corresponding passage in Virgil’s original Latin. The Latin text itself appears at the end of the chapter (using Fairclough’s text). Mandelbaum’s anti-war stance emerges frequently. He does not stint on pathos when Aeneas sets eyes on the corpse of young Pallas (Mandelbaum lines 51–4 = Verg. A. 11.39–41)— When he saw the pillowed head of Pallas, his white face, and the Ausonian spearhead’s yawning wound in his smooth chest

—nor in the description of his horse (lines 116–18 = Verg. A. 11.89–90): Next, Aethon, Pallas’ warhorse, weeping, comes, his trappings laid aside, his muzzle wet with heavy tears.¹⁶

Here the jerkiness of the English conveys a sense of cosmic dissonance; and the choice of ‘muzzle’ for the blander Latin ora conveys empathy. Then he has Aeneas despairingly return to combat (lines 125–7 = Verg. A. 11.96–8): The same black fate of war calls me from this to other griefs. I hail you now forever, great Pallas; and forever, my farewell.

Mandelbaum has here captured precisely the important repetition of aeternum; his deployment of alliteration, as elsewhere and often (along with other self-consciously ¹⁴ Like many reviewers, Segal 1972 does not devote much of the review to the translation, but uses the platform to discuss Virgil’s poem itself and to situate Mandelbaum’s contribution in the wider context of the translation history of the Aeneid. Of the fourteen paragraphs of his review, only one is devoted to Mandelbaum and another compares Mandelbaum favourably (and rightly so) with Dryden. On the phenomenon of reviewers avoiding the task, see Steve Donoghue’s pointed remarks, which arise from reviews of Fagles’s Aeneid (Donoghue 2007). ¹⁵ The approach taken by Zara M. Torlone in Chapter 22 of this volume is very similar. ¹⁶ Pallas’s warhorse was Moser’s choice of an illustration for Book 11 on page 284 of the 1981 deluxe edition of Mandelbaum’s translation.

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poetic features), acknowledges the powerful music of Virgil’s Latin. My final example, taken from Aeneas’s rampage in Book 10, shows Mandelbaum tellingly emphasizing the effects of war more explicitly than Virgil does by spelling out Aeneas’s brutal kick to the corpse, at lines 764–7 (= Verg. A. 10.554–6): as Tarquitus prays helplessly, wanting to say so much, Aeneas strikes his head to earth and kicks the warm trunk over, cries with hating heart.

As Segal notes in his review, Mandelbaum does not shirk the element of ‘brutal grief ’ (saeui . . . doloris, Verg. A. 12.945) in the poem. In the words of Richard Thomas, Mandelbaum’s translation has been particularly popular with instructors ‘who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet’.¹⁷ The next Aeneid translation by an American is that of Robert Fitzgerald (1910–85), published in 1981. Like Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald was a poet, a critic, a translator, and a professional academic, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1965 until 1981. Before translating Virgil, Fitzgerald had translated the Odyssey and the Iliad (published respectively in 1961 and 1974). His Odyssey was ‘at once recognized as a tour de force’.¹⁸ Richard Howard, who reviewed his Aeneid in The Washington Post, sets Fitzgerald alongside Mandelbaum, the two forming a complementary pair: ‘This retrospective Virgil comes to us from a great Homeric translator, and must occupy our attention along with Mandelbaum’s prospective Virgil who led his translator on to Dante’ (Howard 1983).¹⁹ Unlike Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald does not present his work as a protest against war. The tenor of his translation is more elevated, grand, and formal than Mandelbaum’s, in ways that will be discussed next. While in the Postscript he makes an explicit connection between ‘the exterminations and abysses of our century’ (Fitzgerald 1981, p. 413) and the circumstances that shaped Virgil’s world, where ‘war . . . had . . . gone fratricidal and got out of hand’ (ibid., p. 414), he closes by celebrating the positive aspect of Virgil’s poem (ibid., p. 417): ‘At the core of it is respect for the human effort to build, to sustain a generous polity—against heavy odds. Mordantly and sadly it suggests what the effort may cost, how the effort may fail. But as a poem it is carried onward victoriously by its own music.’ His translation focuses more on Aeneas’s achievement than on its cost.²⁰ Whether or not this attitude is connected with his experience in active service in the US Navy during the Second World War must remain a matter for speculation.

¹⁷ Quoted in Jennifer Howard’s 2008 review essay of Sarah Ruden’s 2008 translation. ¹⁸ Thus Eric Havelock in a review essay titled ‘Fitzgerald’s American Aeneid’ (Havelock 1984, p. 483). ¹⁹ The fascinating question of translators’ careers I shall deal with elsewhere; for now, I note that Fitzgerald, Lombardo, and Fagles all translated Homer and Virgil; Mandelbaum and Lombardo, Virgil and Dante. ²⁰ Thus he writes of both Aeneas and Augustus as ‘waging war to end war’, clearly quoting the phrase penned by H. G. Wells to describe the First World War and associated with President Woodrow Wilson (Fitzgerald 1981, p. 414).

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What we do know is that the first time he read the entire poem was in 1945, when he was stationed on an island in the Pacific, having seen action at Pearl Harbor; he was soon to participate in the attack on Honshu.²¹ He writes in his Postscript (ibid., p. 414): ‘More than literary interest, I think, kept me reading Virgil’s descriptions of desperate battle, funeral pyres, failed hopes of truce or peace.’ In other words, his attitude towards the Aeneid was shaped many years before he came to translate it, years before Vietnam and the protests. Fitzgerald’s greatest achievement is probably the onward movement of his translation.²² This is rightly linked with his unobtrusive language: ‘[Virgil’s] language, strikingly original though it is, does not draw attention to itself. Nor does Fitzgerald’s, and this is one of the greatest triumphs of his translation: one reads without fatigue or distraction or manipulation, through multiple changes of tone.’²³ While Fitzgerald certainly achieves the rhythms of speech, his diction is a little grander and more formal than natural speech.²⁴ Examples from the opening 190 lines of Fitzgerald’s Book 11 include ‘to thee’ (l. 9), ‘cuirass’ (l. 11), ‘Twelve times cut and breached’ (l. 12), ‘cumber’ (l. 28), ‘not discomposed’ (l. 93²⁵), ‘inweaving / Golden thread’ (ll. 99–100), ‘mantling’ (l. 103), ‘bedew’ (l. 110), ‘war cars’ (l. 117), ‘a-glisten’ (l. 118), ‘chaplets’ (l. 137), ‘your godly nobleness’ (l. 172), and ‘groaning wains’ (l. 190). Sometimes this elevated diction works well to attain, or to hint at, an epic plane (Fitzgerald lines 11.130–3 = Verg. A. 11.96–8): More of the same drear destiny of battle Calls me back to further tears. Forever Hail to you, my noble friend, my Pallas, Hail and farewell forever.

At other times it fails. Consider Aeneas’s words in Fitzgerald’s lines 148–53 (= Verg. A. 11.108–11): What unmerited misfortune, Latins, Could have embroiled you in so sad a war That you now turn your backs on us, your friends? Do you ask peace from me for those whose lives Were taken by the cast of Mars? Believe me, I should have wished to grant it to the living.

²¹ His vivid description of his surreal experience of waiting for action during 1945, ‘in our fresh khakis, laundered and pressed’, with little to do but read Virgil, is well worth reading (e.g. ‘staff officers had little to suffer but boredom off duty, and Virgil remedied that for me’, ibid., p. 414). ²² Commented upon favourably by reviewers Richard Howard (‘perhaps more speed than we think of as “Virgilian” . . . more speed, certainly, than Day Lewis supplies in his hexameters’, Howard 1983) and Gordon Williams (‘striding pentameters’, Williams 1984, p. 632). ²³ Williams 1984, p. 633. ²⁴ As observed by Howard 1983. I shall discuss elsewhere the issue of attention to the rhythms of speech at the expense of metre. ²⁵ This coinage is unwarranted by the simple Latin, nec dum sua forma recessit (Verg. A. 11.70).

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The phrase ‘unmerited misfortune’ seems too Latinate and ‘cast of Mars’ runs the risk of not being understood at all. Better, because less pretentious, are Fitzgerald’s lines 10.759–62 (= Verg. A. 10.540–1): Over the field Aeneas drove him till the man went down, Then stood, his mighty shadow covering him, And took his life in sacrifice.

A key insight into the two translators examined so far is provided by their (poor) translations of the word iuuenem, used by Virgil of the dead Pallas (A. 11.67): Mandelbaum (l. 89) makes him ‘the soldier’, while in Fitzgerald (l. 90) he is ‘the prince’. These choices reflect clearly Mandelbaum’s interest in the losses brought by warfare and Fitzgerald’s more elevated and formal register. These two translations, along with the older, established version by Cecil DayLewis (1953), held the field for some time, until the remarkable phenomenon of four new American verse translations appearing in four consecutive years in the new century: those of Stanley Lombardo (2005), Robert Fagles (2006), Frederick Ahl (2007), and Sarah Ruden (2008).²⁶ The rest of this chapter will be devoted to three of these twenty-first-century translations, with a focus on how they position themselves in relation to the question of the treatment of war and the justification of imperialism for an American audience thirty years on from the end of the Vietnam War.²⁷ In terms of Virgilian scholarship, there had been, in the intervening years, no significant advance on the debate between ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ readings, but numerous restatements and refinements of the terms of the debate. Scholars such as Hardie, Cairns, and Galinsky have insisted on the imperialist context of Virgil’s poetic,²⁸ while Putnam reiterates and expands his earlier ‘pessimistic’ position and Lyne develops that reading into an argument about polyphony and ambiguity.²⁹ This inertia is reflected in the translators’ positions too. Stanley Lombardo (b. 1943), another professor with extensive experience in translating epic, seems to position his translation for his American readers before they even open the book. His choice of cover image is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Washington, DC. It’s an eloquent choice, not only for the explicit reference to the Vietnam War but also for the simple, egalitarian presentation

²⁶ I leave aside the Penguin and Loeb prose translations, respectively by David West 1990 and G. P. Goold’s revision of Fairclough 1999, which are utilitarian but certainly popular. ²⁷ Limitations of space preclude my discussing Ahl’s translation here, but I do regard it as a major intervention; see my discussion in Braund 2010. ²⁸ Hardie 1986; Cairns 1989; Galinsky 1994. ²⁹ E.g. Putnam 1995 and, most recently, 2011; Lyne 1987. Welcome twenty-first-century contributions to Virgilian scholarship privilege other aspects, e.g. Alison Keith’s interest in models of masculinity (Keith 2000) and Julia T. Dyson’s interest in religion (Dyson 2001).

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of the soldiers’ names, which are given without any information about rank, unit, or decorations. Simplicity of language is perhaps the keynote of Lombardo’s translation.³⁰ Lombardo’s three-page Translator’s Preface spells out his interpretation of Virgil. He starts with a clear and succinct overview of the debate on the different voices in the Aeneid, in which he seems to lean towards a position that detects oppositional and subversive elements in the poem. Then he asks (Lombardo 2005, p. xii): ‘Is the poem Augustan, anti-Augustan, or reluctantly Augustan? Is there one poetic voice in the Aeneid, or is it radically polyphonic?’ His stated answer seems to sidestep these questions. He says that Virgil’s posture is essentially ‘contemplative’; it may be no accident that Lombardo has been a practising Zen Buddhist for about thirty-five years and was a founder member of the Kansas Zen Center. He continues, ‘there is at its core a profound stillness, and a subdued light’, which, in the next sentence, he labels ‘a darkness visible’. His use of this phrase pointedly invokes an important 1976 study of the Aeneid by W. R. Johnson entitled Darkness Visible, which Lombardo says ‘remains for me the most telling study of the Aeneid’ (ibid., p. xiv). Suitably, W. R. Johnson is the author of a fifty-seven-page introduction to Lombardo’s translation; and one of the subheadings in that introduction, ‘Anthems for Doomed Youth’ (ibid., p. lii), seems to circle back to Lombardo’s choice of cover image. Despite Lombardo’s characterization of Virgil as ‘contemplative’, his version shares with Fitzgerald’s a powerful energy and onward momentum. His translation is spare, lean, and austere and, in the words of its reviewer, Hayden Pelliccia, it tends to ‘let Virgil be Virgil’.³¹ That is intended as praise; but Pelliccia goes on to criticize Lombardo’s imposition of ‘a distinctly demotic turn of phrase’ in passages of direct speech where there is no element of colloquialism in the Latin.³² Pelliccia is right to detect this feature, and it is not confined to direct speech. Examples of Lombardo’s ‘striving for topicality’ include ‘the combat zone’ (Lombardo line 10.693 = in medios Verg. A. 10.576), ‘as he pumped his spear’ (line 10.698 = aduersa . . . hasta Verg. A. 10.579), ‘bailed out’ (as if from a helicopter, line 10.712 = curru delapsus Verg. A. 10.596), ‘Well done, men’ (line 11.15 = maxima res effecta, uiri Verg. A. 11.14), and ‘so that . . . we will not be delayed / By poor logistics or lack of resolve’ (lines 11.20–3 = ne qua mora ignaros . . . impediat segnisue metu sententia tardet Verg. A. 11.19–21).³³ Particularly striking is the phrase he puts into Turnus’s mouth at 9.878–9 (= Verg. A. 9.741–2, incipe, si qua animo uirtus, et consere dextram, / hic etiam inuentum Priamo narrabis Achillem): ‘Bring it on, if you have the guts. You can / Tell Priam there is

³⁰ As Monica Gale sees it in her review (Gale 2006, p. 516). ³¹ This is in fact the title of his review (Pelliccia 2007; cf. Gale 2006, p. 516: ‘remarkably successful in capturing the cadences of Virgil’s Latin’). Similarly Farrell 2010b, p. 442 praises Lombardo’s translation as ‘the sparest in terms of style’. ³² Farrell 2010b, p. 442 rightly asks: ‘Must the translator simply forget about Vergil’s celebrated mastery of poetic language in order to produce an Aeneid that succeeds on other terms—for instance, as a good story?’ I will address this issue elsewhere. ³³ As a striking example of the same phenomenon, Gale 2006, p. 516 selects ‘you faithless bastard’ (for perfide: Dido to Aeneas at Verg. A. 4.366).

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another Achilles here.’ This reprises US President George W. Bush’s inflammatory speech during the Iraq War delivered on 2 July 2003³⁴ and clearly indicates a desire for the reader to find topicality in the situation in the Aeneid. The same goes for his use of the phrase ‘shock and awe’ (line 8.807) to translate eo terrore (Verg. A. 8.705). It is hard not to read this as a reprise of anti-war protest, despite Lombardo’s determination to portray Virgil as ‘contemplative’. Longer passages illustrate well how simple and spare Lombardo’s translation is. Here is the anguished opening of Euryalus’s mother’s reaction to the news of her son’s death in Book 9 (Lombardo lines 577–85 = Verg. A. 9.481–7): Is this you I see, Euryalus, you, My last and only comfort in old age? How could you leave me alone like this? And when you were sent into danger, Not even to tell your poor mother good-bye! Now you will lie in a strange land, Prey to the dogs and birds of Latium, And I, your mother, did not bury you, Or close your eyes, or bathe your wounds.

Here is Aeneas on the rampage in Book 10 (Lombardo lines 668–72 = Verg. A. 10.554–6), where we see Lombardo handling truncum . . . tepentem / prouoluens less melodramatically and more faithfully than Mandelbaum (cf. p. 110 in this chapter): and as the boy tried To get some words of supplication out, He sent his head whirling to the ground. Then, as he rolled the warm torso over, He said in a voice without a trace of pity . . .

And here is Aeneas’s adieu to Pallas in Book 11 (Lombardo lines 113–15 = Verg. A. 11.96–8): War’s grim duty calls me to other tears. Hail for evermore, most noble Pallas, And forever farewell.

This is closer to the Latin than Fitzgerald’s version (p. 110 in this chapter) and more spare than Mandelbaum’s, though Lombardo neglects the exact repetition of aeternum that Mandelbaum achieves.³⁵ Where Mandelbaum is self-consciously poetic, for example in his deployment of alliteration, Lombardo prioritizes naturalness in diction. Robert Fagles (1933–2008), like Fitzgerald and Lombardo, came to the Aeneid after translating Homer; his Iliad was published in 1990, his Odyssey in 1996. Fagles

³⁴ For an intelligent discussion, see e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-mcelvaine/bring-emon—the-fifth-a_b_110233.html. ³⁵ I wonder why Lombardo did not simply repeat ‘evermore’; it would have sounded great.

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was professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton, and his translations of Homer are widely acclaimed.³⁶ His Aeneid (Fagles 2006) is a large, handsome volume and, like his Homer translations, it was published by Viking and equipped with a substantial introduction by Bernard Knox. Given that the translations of Lombardo and Fagles were published within months of each other, it is not surprising that reviews tend to compare them; Joseph Farrell (2010a, p. 205) even describes them as ‘locked in sibling rivalry’.³⁷ But, whereas Farrell perceives more similarities than differences between the two, it seems to me that Lombardo makes fewer missteps than Fagles. Fagles’s choice of a longer line than Lombardo’s or Fitzgerald’s, along with his penchant for explanation of the text, leads to an unnecessary degree of expansion and a slower unfolding of the story.³⁸ For example, he provides titles for the individual books—such as ‘Captains Fight and Die’ (Book 10), or ‘The Sword Decides All’ (Book 12). He editorializes: Aeolus haec contra (Verg. A. 1.76), where ‘Aeolus replied’ would suffice, Fagles has ‘Aeolus warmed to Juno’s offer’ (line 1.89–90).³⁹ He unpacks niuei (line 11.46 = Verg. A. 11.39), said of Pallas’s corpse, as ‘his face bled white’. Two longer passages from Aeneas’s brutal rampage in Book 10 illustrate the phenomenon further. First, he renders tum latebras animae pectus mucrone recludit (Verg. A. 10.601) as ‘Then / with his blade he carved wide open Liger’s chest, / his hidden cache of life’ (Fagles lines 708–10). Here he expands by explaining both the literal and the metaphorical meanings of the phrase latebras animae. The second passage is one we have already seen in Fitzgerald’s translation (p. 113 here): the passage in Book 10 where Aeneas kills a priest (Fagles lines 634–40 = Verg. A. 10.537–41): Hard by, the son of Haemon and priest of Phoebus and Diana, his temples wreathed in the consecrated bands, all white in his robes, brilliant in his array— Aeneas confronts him, coursing him down the field and rearing over him as he stumbles, slaughters him, shrouding his brilliant robes with a mighty shade.

At the moment of the priest’s death, Fagles expands on the Latin to remind us of the brilliance of the priest’s robes by repeating the words; he evidently does not want us to miss Virgil’s image of brightness quenched by shadow, while other translators leave that

³⁶ Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey won the 1996 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 he received the PEN/Ralph Mannheim Medal for his lifetime achievement in translation. He also received the National Humanities Medal in 2006. ³⁷ Farrell 2010a is in fact a thoughtful review of Sarah Ruden’s 2008 translation. Curiously, there are many more reviews of Fagles’s translation than of Lombardo’s, though several pay attention to both. ³⁸ I shall discuss elsewhere the effect of choice of metre on the two; suffice it to say here that Fagles’s choice leads to a certain shapelessness. ³⁹ My example comes from Pelliccia’s review (Pellicia 2007). Farrell 2010a, pp. 209–10 makes a similar point about ‘unnecessary doubling’ in Fagles.

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work to the reader.⁴⁰ Poet Alicia Stallings gets it right in her review: ‘In expanding for clarity, compression is lost, the spring that sets Virgil’s poem into its relentless motion.’⁴¹ But perhaps the essential problem with Fagles’s translation is inconsistency of tone. While his language is generally more formal, more elevated, and more poetically self-conscious than Lombardo’s, there are some awful tumbles into the colloquial register.⁴² His choice of words such as ‘burnished’, ‘steeds’, ‘foe’, and ‘war-car’ and of phrases such as ‘into the melee / chariot-borne by two white steeds’ (Fagles lines 10.682–3) and ‘deck with funeral gifts those heroes’ souls’ (line 11.30) betokens a striving for epic diction. So too his repeated coinage to describe the action of tears, ‘rivering’, though nothing in the Latin motivates it. The lofty ‘magnanimous’ (line 10.669) for magnanimo (Verg. A. 10.563) is just lazy, as the Latin word means something different from the English. In the other pan of the scale, to have the suppliant Magus ‘hugging Aeneas’s knees’ (line 10.619 = Verg. A. 10.523) does not work, and ‘cocking back his spear’ for reducta . . . hasta (lines 10.654 = Verg. A. 10.552–3) tries too hard to be user-friendly. The nadir might be in another passage from Aeneas’s brutal rampage (lines 656–60 = Verg. A. 10.554–7): Then as Tarquitus begs him, struggling to keep on begging, all for nothing, Aeneas dashes his head to the ground and rolling the man’s warm trunk along and looming over him vaunts with all the hatred in his heart: “Now lie there, you great, frightful man!”

Emily Wilson (2007, p. 31) has already identified Fagles’s misstep in translating metuende so as to make Aeneas ‘sound like a hoity-toity Mitford sister’. In the Translator’s Postscript (Fagles 2006, pp. 389–405), tucked away as the first item in a section entitled ‘Notes’, the balancing acts involved here are described: the translation needed to have ‘a performative cast’ while achieving ‘certain more literary effects’; the voice needed to be ‘more intimate’ for Virgil than for Homer, ‘and yet at the same time more formal too’ (ibid., p. 389); there needed to be a ‘blend of grandeur and accessibility, of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity’ (ibid., p. 390).⁴³ Above all, Fagles uses his Postscript to situate himself firmly in the ‘two voices’ camp, citing the work of Parry, Putnam, and Clausen,⁴⁴ but then he proposes that the two ‘dissonant’ voices might be ‘moving . . . toward a state of harmony’ (ibid., p. 401) and ⁴⁰ At the same time, he introduces the irrelevant image of hare ‘coursing’ for the relatively unmarked phrase agit campo and completely misses the important idea of sacrifice in the verb immolat, in contrast with Fitzgerald’s ‘And took his life in sacrifice’. (Mandelbaum and Lombardo both translate this, also inadequately, as ‘slaughter’.) I shall discuss elsewhere the way in which Fagles rides the English present participle too hard, but this is visible even in this short extract. ⁴¹ Stallings 2006. ⁴² See Wilson 2007, p. 31 on the ‘unfortunate comic lapses’. ⁴³ Fagles 2006, p. 395 also claims to have drawn on his own translations of the Iliad and Odyssey to suggest echoes and adaptations, though comparison of cognate passages does not seem to support this claim. ⁴⁴ Fagles had collaborated with Adam Parry on the translation of Bacchylides, which was first published in 1961 (his first published translation); and Parry wrote the Introduction and Notes. In his Aeneid, Fagles acknowledges the profound influence and assistance of Michael Putnam (Fagles 2006, p. 401).

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might reinforce each other so as to make us ‘more accepting of uncertainties, and so perhaps more seasoned and humane’. That ‘perhaps’ is telling. It seems to me that, thirty years after the ignominious US withdrawal from Vietnam, Fagles wanted to express optimism, but hesitated to do so. The last American translation I shall consider here, poet-translator Sarah Ruden’s, achieves the marvel of rendering the Aeneid in the same number of lines as the Latin, in a concise iambic pentameter (Ruden 2008). This version has been widely feted, both as the first translation of the entire poem by a woman⁴⁵ and as ‘the first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in its own right’.⁴⁶ Her translation has received more attention from reviewers than any of her immediate predecessors’, both in the number of reviews and in the depth and engagement of their analysis, and it is typically praised for ‘the remarkable fluidity, the revelatory concision’.⁴⁷ I suppose this is partly due to the novelty value: many of the reviews treat her translation as a curiosity on the grounds of her being a woman, or a Quaker, or both. I shall discuss both issues, in reverse order. Given the pacifist beliefs of Quakerism, one might expect to find a translation by a Quaker to reprise the anti-war sentiments of Mandelbaum and others. But I don’t see that Ruden either sanitizes or brutalizes Virgil’s scenes of carnage. She nails exactly Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s ruthlessness here through the device of stripping the victim of personhood (‘it’ and ‘its’) at lines 10.554–6 in her translation: The head was slung to earth before it finished Its pleading, the warm body was kicked over, And from his hardened heart Aeneas spoke.

⁴⁵ This is indeed the first full translation of the Aeneid by a woman. Besides Ruden, we know of Hélisenne de Crenne’s 1541 translation of Books 1–4 into French prose; and of selections from the Aeneid published between 1594 and 1619 by another French woman, Marie de Gournay, under the influence of Montaigne. Ruden’s version was followed by Patricia Johnston’s hexameter translation (Johnston 2012). Beyond the Aeneid, we have translations of the Georgics by the Dutch poet Ida Gerhardt (1980) and by three American women in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Kristina Chew (2002), Janet Lembke (2005), and Kimberley Johnson (2009). ⁴⁶ This is the last sentence in Wills 2009. Comparisons with Dryden’s achievement recur in reviews; I shall discuss this phenomenon elsewhere. ⁴⁷ Donoghue 2009a. I have found eleven reviews, all but one (that of Furst 2009) favourable, some in scholarly venues (Translation & Literature—twice: Krisak 2009 and Farrell 2010a; Vergilius: Cormier 2009; Latomus: Sharrock 2011), others aimed at a wider audience in the United States (The New Criterion: Garner 2008; New York Review of Books: Wills 2009), and in the United Kingdom (The Telegraph: Wilson 2008). The Chronicle of Higher Education (Howard 2008) presumably targets academics in and beyond a specific discipline; and so do the online sites of Open Letters Monthly (Donoghue 2009a) and Harvard Review (Kates 2010). We also have two interviews, Donoghue 2009b and Cox and Theodorakopoulos 2012, as well as Ruden 2006, an article on the process of translation. Three reviews of modern American translations of the Aeneid stand out as especially worth reading: Emily Wilson’s ‘Passions and a Man’ (Wilson 2007), ostensibly a review of Fagles but actually a thoughtful exploration of the translation history of the Aeneid that considers Auden, Pound and Eliot, Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, and Lombardo, as well as Fagles; Jennifer Howard’s fine and wide-ranging ‘Measuring the Aeneid on a Human Scale’ (Howard 2008); and Joseph Farrell’s intelligent nine-page ‘The Aeneid: A New Translation’ (Farrell 2010a).

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And she neither exaggerates nor diminishes the pathos of Virgil’s Latin in her lines 11.85–92: Men led along Acoetes, wrecked by old age. He clawed his face and bruised his chest with pounding And then fell forward, sprawling, on the earth. Rutulian chariots filed by, soaked in blood, And then came Pallas’ warhorse Aethon, stripped Of insignia, his face wet with his great tears; Then the youth’s spear and helmet—Turnus claimed The rest.

She aptly pitches her diction at a level higher than ordinary speech, for example in the opening lines of Book 11: ‘great souls’ (l. 24), ‘engulfed’ (l. 28), ‘squire’ (l. 31), ‘to win a great realm’ (l. 47). Her poetic sensibility emerges in phrases such as ‘your torn corpse’ (l. 9.491), ‘He reaped his furious way’ (cf. metit . . . ardens, 10.513–14) and ‘Pallas’ ivory face’ (11.39, perhaps the best translation yet).⁴⁸ She achieves a compelling simplicity thanks to her concision and her mastery of the iambic pentameter (e.g. ‘He slashed his chest, the hiding place of breath’ for tum latebras animae pectus mucrone recludit at 10.601).⁴⁹ It seems clear that she took on the task of translating the Aeneid not for ideological (pacifist) but for pragmatic reasons: in an interview with Steve Donoghue (2009b), managing editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly, she says explicitly: ‘I wanted to translate a well-known work, with some assured sales and attention attached to its title.’ In other words, the choice of the Aeneid was an entirely deliberate career move. Ruden (b. 1962) is a trained classicist and a professional translator: she wrote a PhD dissertation on Petronius at Harvard and has published translations of the Satyricon (in 2000), Lysistrata (in 2003), and the Homeric Hymns (in 2005). Then, while she was working at the Yale Divinity School, she was commissioned by Yale University Press to translate the Aeneid. She hesitated; she saw the opportunity to boost her career as a translator, she saw the advance, much larger than the others, but, in her own words, ‘I started out with great guilt in this arranged marriage, unsure how dedicated I should be, worried about insincerity toward this being I did not love’.⁵⁰ (She had been ‘an Ovid fiend’ at Harvard.) She need not have worried because, once she started on the work, she ‘learned the joys of devotion’. Ruden’s Quaker beliefs do seem to me relevant when we consider the tension between her faith and the message of the Aeneid, which is ‘about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it’s about submission to

⁴⁸ Cf. Mandelbaum: ‘white’; Fitzgerald: ‘snow-white’; Lombardo: ‘white as snow’; Fagles: ‘bled white’. ⁴⁹ Contrast Fagles’s wordiness, discussed above. ⁵⁰ Ruden 2006, p. 36; likewise the next two quotations.

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divine will’. She says: ‘This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will. People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better.’⁵¹ To handle this potential conflict, Ruden had to give way to Virgil and learn ‘the joys of devotion’. I will return to this matter in a moment. But first let me consider the relevance (or not) of Sarah Ruden’s gender. Regrettably, the spectre of sexism raises its head in many of the reviews, especially in comparisons between translators. Ruden’s reviewers think that it is relevant to mention her personal beliefs. Yet, though Stanley Lombardo makes no secret of what has been his Zen Buddhist practice and teaching for over thirty-five years, reviewers do not make a connection between his pacifist beliefs and his translations of Homer, Virgil, and Dante.⁵² How come Ruden’s Quakerism warrants mention and Lombardo’s Buddhism not? Another manifestation of sexism lies in the gendered language deployed to characterize Ruden’s translation. Krisak describes her diction as ‘almost unfailingly chaste’. (Can we imagine the word ‘chaste’ being used in reference to a male translator?) A. N. Wilson contrasts ‘the quiet line-by-line modesty of Sarah Ruden’ with Fagles, who is ‘earthy and impressive’. The word ‘quiet’ crops up several times more, in Garner, Wills, and Donoghue.⁵³ And Cormier calls the translation ‘as captivating as a spider’s web’. Would the reviewers have spoken like that if the translator had been a man?⁵⁴ And then a real oddity: two reviews use the word ‘wispy’ to describe Ruden’s translation.⁵⁵ This, despite the fact that in interviews Ruden has explicitly denied any kind of feminist agenda in tackling the Aeneid. She entirely rejects any idea that she be ‘expected to rescue women characters in the Aeneid, or Roman women, or women in general’.⁵⁶ She seeks to be taken seriously for her skills as a translator and for no other reason.

⁵¹ Ruden, quoted in Howard 2008. ⁵² It’s possible that reviewers have actually missed something important about Lombardo’s practice: Lombardo has written: ‘I had been trying most of my adult life to lock eyebrows with Homer, trying to attain the mind of the great master of European poetry, and now that mind, and the voice, was beginning to appear’ as he worked on his Homer translations (‘Homer’s Light: The Odyssey Koan’, p. 2 [oral paper shared with me by Lombardo, for which I am most grateful]). ⁵³ Garner 2008: ‘the poetry also echoes the great quiet descriptions of the constellations [in Thomas Hardy]’; Wills 2009: ‘a kind of quiet power’; Donoghue 2009a: ‘And into this Olympian fracas has quietly slipped a new contestant’. ⁵⁴ Cormier 2009, p. 137. ⁵⁵ Wills 2009 talks about the ‘disjointed rhythmic wispiness’ of Ruden’s version of aut uidet aut uidisse putat per nubila lunam (Verg. A. 6.454): ‘as a person sees the new moon / through clouds—or thinks he sees it—as it rises’ (Ruden line 54). Cormier 2009, p. 133 says of Venus’s meeting with Aeneas (Verg. A. 1.327) that ‘Ruden wispily renders virgo as “young girl” ’. ⁵⁶ Quotation from Donoghue 2009b (interview with Ruden). Contrast Ursula K. Le Guin’s project in her novel Lavinia (Le Guin 2008), which deliberately sets out to rework the second half of the poem by giving Lavinia a voice, a feisty personality, and an unexpected relationship with the poet Virgil himself, whom she has wonder at his own neglect of the character he created.

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So wherein lie her skills? The reviews rightly praise Ruden as a very fine poet with brilliant mastery of the iambic pentameter and as an extremely attentive reader. Perhaps her greatest skill is her willingness to give herself up to her author. Steve Donoghue astutely praises her ‘unassuming manner’, implicitly criticizing her rival translators, who impose too much of their own personalities and voices on Virgil.⁵⁷ This reflects Ruden’s own views on the role of women translators: she thinks that female translators have ‘an edge over their male counterparts’ because they develop ‘a sense of personal connection’: ‘Women get more involved. The authors are more real to us. We develop relationships with them.’⁵⁸ At the same time, she commends Edith Grossman, translator of Don Quixote and of works by Gabriel García Márquez and author of Why Translation Matters, for her warning about the dangers of imposing the self on the alien author.⁵⁹ The ideal translator achieves a form of self-effacement, the self-effacement necessary for a translator to hold back from imposing his or her own personality on the author. This, I think, is the ‘devotion’ Ruden talks about, the ‘devotion’ she soon developed towards her author, Virgil, even though she initially considered that she was entering ‘an arranged marriage’. Perhaps, at the risk of committing essentialism, if female translators embrace this more readily than male translators, gender is relevant, after all. In conclusion, Ruden marks the distance from the Vietnam-era translation of Mandelbaum and the intervening translations, which reprise the ‘two voices’ debate, inspired by American reactions to the Vietnam War. I have tried to show that the male translators, all professors and all thus imbued inescapably in the scholarly debates, all situate themselves, more or less explicitly, in relation to those debates. But Ruden, as a professional translator on the periphery of the academic world, has a different and more distanced perspective, which she plausibly attributes to her experience of living and working in South Africa. That, she says, helped her understand ‘the brutality of civil war’.⁶⁰ Ruden gently but inexorably moves us past the binary of the ‘two voices’ analysis and I give her the last, wise, word: the question of whether the task is ultimately ‘worth it’ feels rather empty. Have human beings ever had a choice about struggling for land, livelihood, and security for the next generation? . . . It is particularly strange for present-day Americans to offer pious criticisms of Vergil’s praise of imperialism, praise which is blended with forthright sorrow over necessity, and not to see that the tragedies and failures he depicts come mainly from characters being alive and belonging to society.⁶¹

⁵⁷ ⁵⁸ ⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ ⁶¹

Donoghue 2009b. These and the following quotations are from Howard 2008. Grossman 2010, pp. 82–3 describes her experience of translating Cervantes along these lines. Howard 2008, Howard’s phrase. From her brief Translator’s Preface (Ruden 2008, p. xi).

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Appendix: Latin text of passages quoted above Verg. A. 9.481–7: hunc ego te, Euryale, aspicio? tune ille senectae sera meae requies, potuisti linquere solam, crudelis? nec te sub tanta pericula missum adfari extremum miserae data copia matri? heu! terra ignota canibus date praeda Latinis alitibusque iaces! nec te, tua funera, mater produxi pressiue oculos aut uolnera laui. Verg. A. 10.537–41: nec procul Haemonides, Phoebi Triuiaeque sacerdos, infula cui sacra redimibat tempora uitta, totus conlucens ueste atque insignibus armis: quem congressus agit campo, lapsumque superstans immolat ingentique umbra tegit; Verg. A. 10.554–60: tum caput orantis nequiquam et multa parantis dicere deturbat terrae truncumque tepentem prouoluens super haec inimico pectore fatur: ‘istic nunc, metuende, iace. non te optima mater condet humi patrioque onerabit membra sepulchro: alitibus linquere feris aut gurgite mersum unda feret piscesque impasti uolnera lambent.’ Verg. A. 10.601: tum latebras animae pectus mucrone recludit. Verg. A. 11.39–41: ipse caput niuei fultum Pallantis et ora ut uidit leuique patens in pectore uolnus cuspidis Ausoniae, lacrimis ita fatur obortis: Verg. A. 11.85–92: ducitur infelix aeuo confectus Acoetes, pectora nunc foedans pugnis, nunc unguibus ora, sternitur et toto proiectus corpore terrae. ducunt et Rutulo perfusos sanguine currus. post bellator equus positis insignibus Aethon it lacrimans guttisque umectat grandibus ora. hastam alii galeamque ferunt; nam cetera Turnus uictor habet.

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Verg. A. 11.96–8: ‘nos alias hinc ad lacrimas eadem horrida belli fata uocant: salue aeternum mihi, maxime Palla, aeternumque uale.’ Verg. A. 11.108–11: ‘quaenam uos tanto fortuna indigna, Latini, implicuit bello, qui nos fugiatis amicos? pacem me exanimis et Martis sorte peremptis oratis? equidem et uiuis concedere uellem.’

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8 Translations of Virgil into Esperanto Geoffrey Greatrex

8.1 Introduction The international language Esperanto was invented by a Jewish ophthalmologist, Ludwig Zamenhof, in Byalistok. Today this is a city in Poland, but in 1887, the year when the first manual of Esperanto was published, it was part of the Russian Empire. The language that Zamenhof created, which took its name from the pseudonym under which he published the first textbook, Dr Esperanto (‘the one who hopes’), is built up of words on roots that derive mainly from European languages, in combination with a regular and logical grammatical system.¹ From the outset Zamenhof realized that, in order to succeed, the language would have not merely to allow people of different nations to communicate with ease about everyday matters but also to demonstrate a capacity for producing works of great literature, at the very least in translation. He himself undertook a large number of translations, from the Old Testament and Hans Christian Andersen to Shakespeare (Hamlet) and Goethe (Iphigenia in Tauris).²

8.2 The Context of Early Esperanto Translations It is in this context that the first translation of the Aeneid was undertaken by a disabled French doctor, Henri Vallienne (1854–1908), a tall, broad-shouldered man

¹ Brief analyses of the language may be found in Eco 1992, pp. 324–30; see n. 18 in this chapter. On Zamenhof himself, see Privat 1931, Boulton 1960, Ludovikito 1982, and Korzhenkov 2009; and compare now Schor 2016, pp. 28–34, 60–75. I am grateful to my colleague Ray Clark for help in the preparation of this article and to Gerrit Berveling and Humphrey Tonkin for a number of references. ² For Zamenhof ’s views on the importance of translation, see e.g. Waringhien 1956, pp. 48–9 (with references), Richardson 1988, pp. 31–2, Sutton 2008, pp. 24 and 30, Tonkin 1993, Tonkin 2010, pp. 173–4, and n. 8 in this chapter. On Zamenhof ’s translations, see Privat 1931, ch. 10; and compare Boulton 1960, pp. 167–77 (with some English translations of Zamenhof ’s own poetry).

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with piercing eyes and a severe countenance. He learnt the language in 1902 and, when he became confined to his room as a result of heart problems in 1905, he decided to devote himself entirely to Esperanto literature. His translation of the whole Aeneid was published in 1906; two original novels and other translations followed before his death just two years later.³ Vallienne explicitly justified his translation work by appeal to the idea of endowing the language with the prestige it required: ‘Esperanto will triumph and conquer only when it has become a literary language’, he declared.⁴ Thus Esperanto conforms to the proposition advanced by the Tel Aviv group, according to which cultures insecure of their own status tend to expend more effort in undertaking translations than those that are more confident.⁵ A close parallel in the Virgilian context would be the Eneados, the Scots translation of Gavin Douglas, about which Christa Canitz has observed: ‘The Eneados as a whole thus helps make the claim that “Scottis” is a full-fledged national language capable of producing a body of literature of its own and thus of supporting its own culture.’⁶ Moreover, like the early Esperanto translations, Douglas’s also had a role in building the word stock of the language—Scots and English.⁷ It is worth underlining the degree to which Zamenhof and many other pioneers of the language insisted, like Vallienne, on the importance of producing translations of great works of world literature. Even if, in the early days, many Esperanto enthusiasts were motivated by more practical considerations, such as ease of communication or the furtherance of peaceful relations among peoples, they were aware that, in order to gain ground, this new project needed to be able to demonstrate its credentials. The more refined converts to the language, just like Zamenhof himself, realized equally that it was essential for the development of the language to build up a large repertoire of translated works on which later authors—whether other translators or creators of Esperanto literature—could draw. Numerous Esperanto figures emphasize the challenge involved in producing such translations, arguing that the task is far harder than the composition of original works. Yet without this basis, as French literary scholar Gaston Waringhien (1901–91) points out, the creation of an Esperanto literature would have been impossible. In such a context, Vallienne’s translation of the Aeneid, which was published by the well-known press Hachette, had an important role to play, although in the long term it was

³ A second edition of the translation of the Aeneid appeared in 1910. For the description of Vallienne, see Waringhien in EdE 2, p. 556; Bourlet 1908, p. 219; also Neves 1993. For an assessment in English of his works, see Sutton 2008, pp. 48–50. ⁴ Esperanto nur tiam triumfos kaj venkos, kiam ĝi estos literatura, cited in Bourlet 1908, p. 219; see also Neves 1993. ⁵ Noted by Bassnett 1991, p. xii (but not in the more recent edition of 2002) and cited by Burrow 1997, p. 23. A similar point was made by Benjamin 1992, p. 74. Cf. Tonkin 2010, p. 178, referring to Zamenhof ’s efforts ‘to construct a past for his newly constructed language’. ⁶ Christa Canitz 1996, p. 37; cf. also pp. 31–2. ⁷ So Fowler 2012, p. 5. More generally, see Burrow 1997, pp. 22–3 on Douglas; and Braund 2014, p. 1287.

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overshadowed by more skilful renderings (such as Zamenhof ’s of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Kalocsay’s of Dante’s Inferno).⁸ We shall examine some lines of Vallienne, but for the moment it is sufficient to note the propagandistic aspect of his work. It is for propaganda that he deliberately kept as close as he could to Virgil’s hexameters. Indeed, he translated the whole work into Esperanto hexameters, every line of which consists of five dactyls and a trochee; he avoided spondees because in Esperanto every word is stressed on the penultimate syllable, and so it would have been difficult to have two stressed syllables next to each other. The consequence is somewhat monotonous, as later critics pointed out, although, unlike other rather literal translations into Russian and French discussed by Susanna Braund, it generally remains easy to follow the sense. Of course, Vallienne was able to exploit the fact that Latin and Esperanto share some of their main vocabulary and that Esperanto, like Latin, is an inflected language and thus allows for much flexibility in word order.⁹ For these reasons Vallienne’s attempt is perhaps more successful than the comparable one, made very recently by Patricia Johnston, to render the whole poem into English hexameters, where all too often the verse ends in a preposition or other monosyllable and where there is a conflict between the metrical beat and the English word’s natural accent, which should govern its pronunciation.¹⁰ Vallienne himself was aware of the limitations of his work; he was, after all, hardly a classical scholar. He wished, he states, to popularize Virgil among the Esperanto-reading public, being aware—quite presciently—that, as the century progressed, literature would take second place to the sciences and that knowledge of the ancient languages would recede.¹¹ ⁸ On the importance of early translations, see Minnaja and Silfer 2015, pp. 4, 562 (citing Kalocsay), and compare Waringhien 1956, pp. 48–9, Kalocsay 1968, p. 68 (Kalocsay stresses the importance of Zamenhof ’s translation of Hamlet, on which see also Tonkin 2010, pp. 176–8), Hagler 1971, pp. 85–6, and Forster 1982, p. 69. Zamenhof ’s clear insistence on the preparation of a series of translations of great works, which should form a specific collection or library, may be found in Zamenhof 1929, pp. 202–3. Right from the start, Zamenhof and early Esperanto speakers—such as his fellow Poles Antoni Grabowski (1857–1921) and Kazimierz Bein (1872–1959), the latter better known as Kabe—deployed a particular effort in the translation of verse. See Minnaja and Silfer 2015, p. 17 (on Zamenhof ’s techniques) and ch. 4 as a whole; also Hagler 1971, p. 100. ⁹ Vallienne 1910 [1906], pp. 4–6 discussed his translation style only briefly; as he explains, he sometimes treated monosyllabic words as stressed. See Braund 2010, pp. 451–60, on the translations by Briusov 1933 and by Klossowski 1964; and compare Martin 1978 on the latter. In EdE 2, p. 556 Waringhien is damning in his criticism of Vallienne’s translation, noting its ‘lack of rhythm’ and the too frequent gallicisms in the Esperanto, although M. Butler, in the same work, is more positive, while Théophile Cart 1906, p. 380 is almost ecstatic in his review. For a more sober assessment, see Sutton 2008, pp. 49–50, and also Minnaja and Silfer 2015, p. 575. See further Janton 1989, pp. 212–15, for a consideration of the advantages of Esperanto for the translation of poetry, with emphasis on Shakespeare’s sonnets; also Tonkin 2010, especially p. 178 n. 7. ¹⁰ Johnston 2012, despite her arguments at pp. xv–xvii. The second line of Aeneid 4 contains eighteen syllables, while lines 3 and 4 end respectively in ‘the’ and ‘His’. ¹¹ Vallienne 1910 [1906], p. 6, picked up by Berveling 1998, vol. 1, p. 10. Vallienne was undoubtedly typical of his generation in holding Virgil in high regard; see Ziolkowski 1993, pp. 57–64 on other French writers of this period. Other French non-Latinist translators of Virgil, such as Marcel Pagnol, are discussed in Martin 1978, pp. 515–16. See also chapter 25 in this volume.

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8.3 Later Translations Whether Vallienne’s translation of the Aeneid into Esperanto advanced the language’s cause is doubtful. The French Esperanto world was in any case soon overwhelmed by the schism caused by Louis de Beaufront’s attempts to reform the language and render it more similar to French. His new project, known as ‘Ido’ (‘Offspring’) and launched in 1908, failed to gain widespread adherence;¹² nonetheless, translation work into Esperanto continued apace, although relatively little of Greek and Latin literature was translated. It was not until the closing decades of the twentieth century that Esperanto speakers made further advances in the field: the British classicists Douglas B. Gregor (1909–95) and Albert Goodheir (1912–95) translated for example Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Euripides’s Bacchae, Trojan Women, and Iphigenia in Tauris, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and Plato’s Apology and Crito, as well as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, while the Australian Donald Broadribb (1933–2012) translated Plato’s Republic.¹³ The Dutch teacher and pastor Gerrit Berveling (b. 1944), who is a Remonstrant, has for his part translated numerous classical authors, including Sallust, Catullus, Seneca, and Lucian. His Antologio Latina (Latin Anthology), which has five parts so far, offers a selection of translations from Latin authors, in chronological order; his extracts from Virgil’s poems are to be found in the second volume (of 1998); the most recent volume, the fifth, covers the literature of the third and fourth centuries and was published in 2013.¹⁴ The most remarkable translator of Virgil, however, as well as one of the leading figures of original Esperanto literature, was the Hungarian doctor and poet Kálmán Kalocsay (1891–1976). In his posthumously published two-volume Tutmonda Sonoro (The Whole World Resounds), he compiled an anthology of translations of poems from thirty languages that range from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Strindberg, Poe, and Tagore. Among the poems he presents are lengthy extracts from Aeneid 4, as well as shorter ones from the Eclogues and Georgics.¹⁵ Kalocsay was a serious and accomplished poet who spent many years determining how best to render the hexameter into Esperanto, a language that, according to Waringhien’s calculations, sorely lacked dactylic words. In consequence, as Kalocsay put it, the most fiendish enemy of the hexameter, the amphibrach, took over, just like phylloxera, eating away the feet of verses. In his lengthy discussion of the subject, he describes

¹² See e.g. EdE 1, p. 41 (on de Beaufront), Boulton 1960, pp. 122–35, Schor 2016, pp. 96–9. ¹³ Gregor 1960; Goodheir 1975, 1982a, 1982b, 1981, 1984; and Broadribb 1993. Goodheir was in fact born in the Netherlands but spent most of his life in Britain. Gregor studied classics at Exeter College, Oxford; see Greatrex 2010. Broadribb also translated Plato’s Cratylus, according to his Wikipedia entry. ¹⁴ A partial bibliography of Berveling’s numerous translations may be found in the Wikipedia articles (in English or Esperanto). The volumes of Antologio Latina are all published in Chapecò, Brazil. See my review of volume 5 in Greatrex 2014, pp. 129–34. Further translations continue to appear; see e.g. my review of two dialogues of Seneca in Greatrex 2016, pp. 152–7. ¹⁵ On Kalocsay himself, see EdE 2, pp. 276–8 (by Waringhien). Kalocsay also produced an acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno in 1933; see Csiszár 1994, pp. 34–5 and Sutton 2008, pp. 73–4.

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how he long sought a solution and developed a way to produce hexameters free of amphibrachs; in the end, however, he remained dissatisfied with the result. Eventually he took an indirect route and resolved the issue by coming up with a new metre altogether: the octameter. In each verse he included one dactyl, always in the last hemistich, albeit not necessarily in the penultimate foot (as in the hexameter).¹⁶ Kalocsay’s justification for his new metrical form is elaborate and sophisticated, born of his extensive knowledge of various literatures, from the classical to German and French, from Sanskrit to Hungarian. His octameter comprises seventeen syllables—the maximum length, he notes, of a Greek or Latin hexameter, but its two hemistichs are asymmetric, unlike those of the hexameter: the first one ends on the seventh or eighth syllable. He argues that the dactyl, always in the second hemistich, causes anticipation in the reader and avoids monotony; he imposes strict rules for this dactyl, insisting for example that the short syllables should not be followed by two consonants—a requirement more stringent than those applied by either Vallienne or Berveling. The remaining feet are trochees. Finally, as he points out, the metre is not unduly hard to compose in, and yet there are no precedents for such a metre; he indicates instead parallels with the Sanskrit sloka, a verse that contained sixteen syllables with a strict metrical scheme in part of the line, whereas elsewhere it was much more flexible. He also cites the unusual hexameters of the Latin poet Commodianus, who regularly broke the conventions of hexameter scansion in the first four feet of his poems. The octameter was subsequently taken up by other Esperanto poets in original works of their own.¹⁷ The final translator to be considered is Gerrit Berveling, who prefers to retain the hexameter in his version. He too discusses the issue of how to render the ancient metre into a modern language. His conclusion is to maintain the hexameter form, as both German and Dutch have done, and to concentrate on the word stresses rather than the quantities of the syllables: it is sufficient for his purposes thus that each line should have, in the right place, an accented word six times, which was essentially also the solution of ¹⁶ Kalocsay 1981a, vol. 2, pp. 574–8 (the analogy with phylloxera is at p. 574). Waringhien 1956, pp. 60–1, offers calculations of the adjustments that need to be made to the length of lines in other languages in order for these lines to be rendered into Esperanto; he was less troubled by the amphibrachs than Kalocsay, however (ibid., p. 59). He demonstrates that Esperanto translations of texts generally have more syllables than translations in other languages—1.15 times more than French, for instance, and 1.35 more than English. On this basis he proposes that a French decasyllable line should convert to a dodecasyllabic one in Esperanto, and so forth. It is therefore natural that Kalocsay’s octameter should generally be longer than the Latin hexameter (since it has more syllables). For a brief analysis of these points in English, see Boulton 1960, p. 173. For a parallel discussion of the position of French in relation to Latin, see Martin 1978, pp. 521–2, who concludes that the French ten-syllable alexandrine is far too short to render the Latin hexameter; he actually considers the notion of a verse of sixteen syllables, although he rejects it in the end. ¹⁷ Kalocsay 1981a, vol. 2, pp. 578–80, where he also reports the favourable reaction of various eminent Esperantists of the time; see also Kalocsay, Waringhien, and Bernard 1984, pp. 56–7, noting its later adoption; and Sutton 2008, p. 82. On the sloka, see further Jacobi 1885, a reference I owe to Dominic Goodall (École française de l’Extrème Orient). On Commodianus’s metre, see most recently Poinsotte 2009, pp. xlii–xliii, who argues that it is a deliberate technique of the poet.

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Vallienne.¹⁸ It is worth noting, in passing, that the Scottish Nobel Prize nominee William Auld (1924–2006) incorporated into his own poem cycle, La infana raso (The Infant Race), a translation into elegiac couplets of the Copa of the Appendix Vergiliana.¹⁹

8.4 A Comparison of the Three Translations It will be useful at this point to compare the three translations mentioned. All three translate Aeneid 4, in part or in whole, and I shall quote here the first nine lines of this book. The Latin is followed by two English renderings, from Fairclough’s (1916–18) standard modern version and from Dryden’s (1697) classic translation, and then by three Esperanto renderings of the corresponding passage in the authors of my choice. Given the classical roots of Esperanto, the meaning should be fairly clear. It is worth noting that ĉ is pronounced ‘ch’ (as in ‘church’), c ‘ts’ (as in ‘rats’), ĝ ‘j’ (as in ‘just’), j ‘y’ (as in ‘yes’—the way j is pronounced in German), ĵ as ‘zh’ (as in ‘measure’), ŝ as ‘sh’, and ŭ as ‘w’ (as in ‘now’; so e.g. laŭ, which means ‘according to’ in Esperanto, sounds exactly like the final syllable in English ‘allow’). All nouns end in -o, although this ending may be elided in poetry, as we observe particularly in Kalocsay’s translation (he sometimes elides the definite article la as well); all adjectives end in -a; and adverbs in -e. A final -n is used in the accusative, a final -j marks the plural; if both suffixes are needed, the latter precedes the former. The present tense of verbs is marked by the suffix -as, the future by -os, the past (globally) by -is.²⁰ As noted earlier, the accent always falls on the penultimate syllable of a word. Finally, the language is phonetic, so that each grapheme is pronounced by the corresponding phoneme. At regina graui iamdudum saucia cura uulnus alit uenis et caeco carpitur igni. multa uiri uirtus animo multusque recursat gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore uultus uerbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem. postera Phoebea lustrabat lampade terras umentemque Aurora polo dimouerat umbram, cum sic unanimam adloquitur male sana sororem: ‘Anna soror, quae me suspensam insomnia terrent!’ (Verg. A. 4.1–9) ¹⁸ Berveling 1998, vol. 1, pp. 11–18. Berveling 1998, vol. 2, pp. 282–329 translates extracts not only from the Aeneid, but also from the Eclogues and Georgics, as well as from the Appendix Vergiliana. Of course, with a Latin hexameter there is a clash (and a play) between word accent and the six metrical beats, but always in such a way that the last two metrical beats—sometimes in order to create a special resolution at the end of each verse—coincide with the word accent, which makes the Latin hexameter so difficult, if not impossible, to imitate in languages that do not have vowel quantity. I am grateful to Ray Clark for advice on this point. ¹⁹ Auld 1956, pp. xix, 79–80. The work itself contains numerous classical allusions and has been translated into English and Gaelic. ²⁰ For full details, see Zamenhof ’s own introductory work in Zamenhof 1889. Wells 2010, pp. xv–xxxix, offers a model summary of the language’s structure; see also Richardson 1988, p. 34.

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But the queen, long since smitten with a grievous love-pang, feeds the wound with her life-blood, and is wasted with fire unseen. Oft to her heart rushes back the chief ’s valour, oft his glorious stock; his looks and words cling fast within her bosom, and the pang withholds calm rest from her limbs. The morrow’s dawn was lighting the earth with the lamp of Phoebus, and had scattered from the sky the dewy shades, when, much distraught, she thus speaks to her sister, sharer of her heart: ‘Anna, my sister, what dreams thrill me with fears?’ But anxious cares already seiz’d the queen: She fed within her veins a flame unseen; The hero’s valor, acts, and birth inspire Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire. His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart, Improve the passion, and increase the smart. Now, when the purple morn had chas’d away The dewy shadows, and restor’d the day, Her sister first with early care she sought, And thus in mournful accents eas’d her thought: ‘My dearest Anna, what new dreams affright My lab’ring soul!’ (Dryden, Æneis, 4.1–12) Vallienne, Eneido, 4.1–9 Tamen reĝino, de grava amego de longe borita, Yet queen, by serious a-great-love since long-time drilled Vundon nutradas en vejnoj, kaj fajron profunde kovantan. Wound [ACC.] continues-to-nourish in veins, and fire [ACC.] deeply brooding [ACC.]. Granda kuraĝo de viro kaj lia glorega nacio Great courage of man and his very-glorious nation Pensojn okupas : vizaĝo kaj vortoj en koro fiksitaj Thoughts [ACC.] occupy: face and words in heart fixed Restas, dum dolĉan ripozon el membroj elprenas timeto. Remain, while sweet [ACC.] repose [ACC.] from limbs removes a-little-fear Hele al tero lumigis lampego sekvanta de Febo, Brightly to earth lights-up great-torch [NOM.] following of Phoebus, Kaj el poluso malsekan ombraron dispelis Aŭroro, And from pole damp assembly-of-clouds [ACC.] dispelled Aurora [NOM.] Kiam al kara fratino ŝi tiel malsaĝe parolas: When to dear sister she thus unwisely speaks: ‘Anjo, fratino, min kiaj teruraj turmentas sonĝegoj? Annie, sister, me [ACC.] what-sort-of terrible torment big-dreams [NOM.]? (Vallienne 1910 [1906], p. 68) Kalocsay, Aeneid 4.1–9 Sed jam la reĝin’ delonge, de ĉagreno grava lezite, But already the queen for-a-long-time, by distress serious harmed nutras vundon en la brusto, konsumate de brul’ sekreta.

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nourishes wound [ACC.] in the breast, being-consumed by burning secret. Ŝia pens’ revenas ĉiam al la granda brav’ de la viro, Her thought returns always to the great courage of the man granda glor’ de lia gento. Lia bild’ kaj voĉo ne lasas, great glory of his people. His picture and voice do-not allow fiksiĝinte en la koro, milde ripozi ŝiajn membrojn. having-become-fixed in the heart, gently to-rest her [ACC.] limbs [ACC.] Kiam la Aŭror’ prilumis jam per Feba torĉo la teron When the dawn has-lit-up already by Phoebus’s torch the earth [ACC.] kaj humidan ombron noktan pelis for de l’ volbo ĉiela, and damp [ACC.] cloud [ACC.] of-night [ACC.] has-driven away from the vault heavenly ŝi, malsana, al fratino kunsentema jene parolis: she, ill, to sister empathetic thus spoke: ‘Franjo Anna! Kiaj sonĝoj min teruras, angoriĝintan! Dear-sister Anna! What-sort-of dreams me [ACC.] terrify, having-becomeanguished [ACC.]! (Kalocsay 1981b: 1, p. 183) Berveling, Aeneid, 4.1–9 Sed la reĝino, delonge lezita de am’ serioza, But the queen, for-a-long-time injured by love serious, nutras persange ĉi vundon, per blinda fajr’ konsumiĝas. nourishes through-blood this wound, through blind fire she-is-consumed Ofte de l’viro la virto en pens’ kaj ofte revenas Often of the man the virtue in thought and often returns grando de ties popol’; glufiksiĝis enkore la vortoj greatness of his people; has-become-stuck-with-glue in-heart the words kaj la mien’, kaj la amo ne lasas ripozi la membrojn. and the countenance, and the love not it-allows to-rest the limbs [ACC.]. Sekva Aŭrora per torĉo de Feba la landojn prilumis Next Dawn by torch of Phoebus the countries [ACC.] lit-up kaj de l’ ĉiela volbaĵ’ Ŝi forigis la ombron malsekan, and from the heavenly vault-thing she removed the cloud [ACC.] damp [ACC.] kiam ŝi la unuaniman fratinon despere alvoĉis: when she the of-one-soul [ACC.] sister [ACC.] desperately addressed: ‘Anna fratin’, kia sonĝo inkuba min premas terure! ‘Anna sister, what-sort-of nightmare me [ACC.] oppresses terribly!’ (Berveling 1998: 2, p. 313)

As I have already noted, both Vallienne and Berveling retain the hexameter form; but, whereas the former uses dactyls exclusively, the latter does incorporate some spondees (as in l. 2, blinda, or in l. 3, pens’ kaj). Vallienne’s version shows several signs of the relatively primitive state of Esperanto poetry at the time: as we have seen, Zamenhof and others undertook translation work precisely in order to extend its range and to endow it with a vocabulary and with expressions adequate

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to the task.²¹ Vallienne thus had no elisions in his translation, whereas both Kalocsay and Berveling make extensive use of this technique. Overall, Vallienne’s effort is somewhat pedantic, as one might expect; he translates the Latin quite closely, but the result reads awkwardly in places and is occasionally incorrect. Thus granda kuraĝo (‘great courage’) in line 3 feels odd without a definite article, while the augmentative -eg in sonĝegoj (‘big dreams’, l. 9) is equally unsatisfactory. Indeed, it is noticeable that there are five uses of augmentative and diminutive suffixes (-eg and -et respectively) in nine lines, often piled up rather clumsily, as if in an effort to make the right number of syllables; there is no reason why Phoebus’s torch should be characterized as ‘enormous’ (l. 6). Although there is some alliteration in the second line (the repeated v), Vallienne fails to translate the Latin carpitur, while malsaĝe (‘unwisely’, line 8) is a rather weak equivalent for Virgil’s male sana. In the first line, borita (‘drilled’ or ‘bored’) is an odd choice for rendering the Latin saucia, while in line 6 Vallienne makes Phoebus’s torch the subject, quite incorrectly. The word order in the last line is extremely unnatural, especially the separation of adjective from its noun at the end of the line—even if it reflects the Latin version accurately. One should not be unduly harsh, however. For the most part the translation succeeds in rendering the Latin line by line; lines 3–5 are the only exception. Vallienne also manages to preserve the alliteration effect not only in line 2 (as noted), but also in lines 4–5 (e.g. vizaĝo kaj vortoj) and 6 (lumigis lampego). Kalocsay’s version is clearly much more poetic; as we have seen, he had laboured for a long time to develop a suitable metre. Moreover, he succeeds in staying as close to the Latin as Vallienne; sometimes, indeed, he is closer, as in the second line, where he translates carpitur as konsumate (‘being consumed’). He also retains Virgil’s repetition of multa . . . multusque in line 3, which he renders by ‘granda . . . granda’ (ll. 3–4). On the other hand, Latin cura in line 5 is omitted: it is rather the image and voice of Aeneas that give Dido no rest. Kalocsay’s Esperanto is altogether more developed than Vallienne’s, as is reflected in a wider choice of words, for instance humida for umentem (‘damp’) rather than the more prosaic malseka.²² Perhaps because of his longer verses, he is able to follow the Latin line by line, more closely than Vallienne does; only in lines 4–5 does he diverge from the original. Another notable coup in Kalocsay’s version is his use of a familiar form when Dido addresses her sister Anna (l. 9). While his predecessor had used a hypocoristic form of Anna’s name (the equivalent to using ‘Annie’ for ‘Anna’ in English), he retains the proper name but employs a hypocoristic form for the word ‘sister’; the English ‘sis’ would not render the nuance of the Esperanto term, however. Finally, also worth mentioning

²¹ So Waringhien 1956, pp. 48–9, 58; and see notes 2 and 8 in this chapter. ²² NPIV p. 452 notes that the Esperanto academy only formalized the use of the word in its eighth collection of additions. There is always a tension in the language between those seeking to create more roots and words, often for poetic reasons, and those who wish to ensure that the language remains as easy to learn as possible and who do not needlessly create synonyms.

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are his superior translation of male sana (l. 8) by malsana (‘not healthy’, i.e. ‘sick’) and his skilful use of a past participle, angoriĝintan, ‘having become anguished’, to render Virgil’s suspensam (l. 9). Like Vallienne, Berveling structures his hexameters so that the word accent always coincides with the first element of each foot. But his translation is clearly closer to Kalocsay’s than to Vallienne’s, for example in his use of lezita (‘wounded’) in line 1 or of konsumiĝas (‘is consumed’) in line 2. Berveling attempts to be as faithful to the Latin as possible, even at some cost to a smooth word order: his lines 3–4, literally translated into English, give this: ‘Often of the man the virtue in thought and often (they) return / greatness of his people.’ The result is still correct Esperanto, albeit somewhat awkward; on the other hand, it is hard to conceive of a more faithful translation, which renders accurately each line of the Latin text, with the exception of lines 4–5.²³ Alone of the three translators presented here, he repeats the same noun in lines 1 and 5 for Vergil’s repeated cura; and he translates it simply as amo (‘love’). He preserves at least some alliteration, notably in line 3, where he nicely brings out the link between vir and virtus (de l’viro la virto, ‘the virtue of the man’). Likewise, he translates postera in line 6, which was omitted by Kalocsay, and mirrors precisely the contents of lines 6–7. His Hungarian predecessor, on the other hand, actually inserts an extra adjective, noktan, so that Virgil’s umentemque . . . umbram becomes ‘a damp shade of night’. Only in the last line is Kalocsay perhaps closer to Virgil in his use of a past participle, since Berveling makes no attempt to translate suspensam. Finally, it is worthy of note that Berveling’s vocabulary is more restricted than Kalocsay’s: instead of the poetic word humida he prefers the more usual malseka (for ‘damp’ or ‘wet’). Some of his lexical choices are happier than others: while unuaniman works in Esperanto as well as unanimam (l. 8) does in Latin, serioza is perhaps more pedestrian than grava (preferred by Vallienne and Kalocsay)—or even than profunda, which also exists in Esperanto. In order to stress how Aeneas’s appearance and words penetrate to the core of Dido’s being, he uses the participle glufiksiĝis (‘have become stuck by glue’), a somewhat prosaic image. At the same time he resorts to a rather questionable term, despere (‘hopelessly’, l. 8, translating male sana), a word condemned by Esperanto purists, which hardly conveys the sense of the Latin in any case.²⁴

²³ Berveling 1998, vol. 1, p. 16, defends this practice, arguing that it offers a more authentic experience of the original Latin. It recalls the jarringly literal translation of Klossowski (see n. 9 in this chapter), but does not distort the language to anything like the same extent; see Martin 1978, p. 517 and Braund 2010, p. 457 on Klossowski’s attempt to maintain the sentence structure of the Latin. Cf. Camacho 2001 for criticisms of Berveling’s poetic style (a reference I owe to Berveling). ²⁴ The word despere can be found in the standard Esperanto dictionary, NPIV, but it is strictly redundant, since the compound word malespero means ‘despair’. Despite this, already in 1910, the early Esperanto poet Schulhof (see p. 134 in this chapter) published a collection entitled Per espero al despero. At least one critic, however, strongly criticized the word, insisting that it did not exist in Esperanto. See Minnaja and Silfer 2015, pp. 71–3.

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GEOFFREY GREATREX

8.5 Conclusion In conclusion, one may note, first, the importance of Virgil to Esperanto literature. Homer, by contrast, has received less attention: the Iliad was translated only indirectly (from German and Russian translations), although the Odyssey, on the other hand, was rendered into Esperanto from the Greek in 1932, by the Dutch philologist W. J. A. Manders (1910–98).²⁵ Indeed, such has been the interest in the Latin poet that a Slovenian Esperantist, Vinko Ošlak (b. 1947), recently translated Theodor Haecker’s Virgil, Vater des Abendlands (Virgil, Father of the West, first published in 1934) under the title Vergilio, la patro de la Okcidento.²⁶ Moreover, a recent science fiction epic poem in Esperanto alexandrines (of fifteen syllables), the Epopeo de Utnoa, by the Catalan Abel Montagut (b. 1953), has been found, at least by one critic, to display influences of Virgil and Homer (among others). Perhaps the fact that the New Zealand poet Brendon Clark chose the hexameter for his epic poem La vojaĝo de la Maorioj al Nov-Zelando (The Voyage of the Maoris to New Zealand ) is another sign of such links, although the critical reaction was harsh.²⁷ Already in the years following publication of Vallienne’s work, a Czech dentist called Stanislav Schulhof (1864–1919) set about composing a large-scale epic poem that described the struggle between internationalism (of the sort Zamenhof advocated) and nationalism; the work was rediscovered in 1999 and only fragments survive. It is therefore conceivable that Vallienne’s translation and his adoption of the hexameter stimulated the production of original Esperanto epic in the following years: it is natural that the first generation of speakers of the language should want to bring forth epic and heroic accounts of their own times and experiences.²⁸ Second, it is significant that all three translations of Virgil are in verse, a phenomenon paralleled by the early translations of Virgil into other modern languages; prose translations, like those of Jackson Knight and Fairclough, are a more recent phenomenon. Because of resemblances between Esperanto and Latin, this choice is not

²⁵ See EdE 1, p. 239 (on the Iliad), and 2, p. 290, by the Russian bookkeeper A. Kofman; and compare Minnaja and Silfer 2015, p. 46. Waringhien 1969, p. 363 praises Manders’s translation highly; the Dutch philologist was an expert in artificial languages. See EdE 2, p. 58, and Waringhien 1969, pp. 363–75 (giving the conclusions of Manders’s doctoral thesis). ²⁶ Ošlak 1998. ²⁷ On Montagut’s poem, see Sutton 2008, pp. 553–8; at p. 554 he notes that Christian Declerck compares it to Homer and Virgil (and others). See also Minnaja and Silfer 2015, p. 501. The poem has been translated, in whole or in part, into Bengali, Catalan, and Italian. On Clark, see Sutton 2008, pp. 302, and also 242–3 (Clark’s theories of metre). ²⁸ See Minnaja and Silfer 2015, pp. 71–3 (although their claim that the verses are hexameters is not borne out by the extracts they cite). Cf. a 14,000-line epic in hendecasyllable verse by the Franciscan missionary Giovanni Ricci (1875–1941): it was entitled the ‘Uranogedio’, was composed between 1916 and 1926, and recounted the history of the universe from the rebellion of Lucifer to the foundation of the League of Nations. See Minnaja and Silfer 2015, p. 93. This poem has yet to be published in its entirety.

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surprising: as we have seen, hexameters, albeit relying on word accent rather than syllable length, are quite easy to produce.²⁹ Lastly, there is an isolation at various levels in the Esperanto translations. Each translator made use of the work of his predecessor, to be sure, and strove to improve on it. Reviews, generally favourable, appeared.³⁰ But there is no obvious trace of an impact of translations into other languages on translations into Esperanto: Kalocsay, so widely read and so interested in metre, nonetheless fails to discuss other translations of the Aeneid. At the same time, the translations into Esperanto do not seem to have had any impact on the wider world of Virgilian studies, no doubt partly because of a general ignorance of Esperanto literature tout court—a situation that Geoffrey Sutton’s Concise Encyclopedia of Esperanto Literature should do something to remedy. It is my hope that this modest contribution may help to make these interesting translations better known.

²⁹ See Burrow 1997, pp. 21–3, on early translations into English (and Scots). Cf. Martin 1978, p. 520, citing Jacques Perret on the unjustifiability of prose translations. ³⁰ Cart 1906 on Vallienne; cf. Camacho 2001 on Berveling’s first two volumes (Berveling 1998). The comments on the dust jacket of vol. 2 of Berveling 1998 by Auld express the opinion that Berveling has succeeded where Kalocsay failed.

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9 Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek Michael Paschalis

This chapter traces the two-thousand-year tradition of translating Virgil into ancient Greek. It examines verse translations composed in late antiquity (Oratio Constantini) and in the Renaissance (Scaliger and Heinsius), as well as translations from the period of the modern Greek Enlightenment (Voulgaris) down to nineteenth-century Greece (Philitas and Ioannou). It investigates the elements of continuity and change in relation to translation techniques, adaptation to the conventional dialect required by the genre, metrical and verbal equivalences between translation and original, the kinds of audience to which translations are addressed, and the role of ideology in determining the character of the translation. Reports of Greek translations of Virgil go back to the first century CE: Polybius, Seneca’s freedman, produced a Greek version of Virgil, probably the Aeneid; a certain Arrian, of whom we know nothing else, translated the Georgics. The most famous instance of a Greek translation of Virgil surviving from antiquity is a speech ascribed to Emperor Constantine and presumably delivered before the Assembly of the Saints: Βασιλέως Κωνσταντίνου λόγος ὃν ἔγραψε τῷ τῶν ἁγίων συλλόγῳ (‘The Speech of Emperor Constantine, which he wrote for the Assembly of the Saints’; Oratio Constantini ad sanctorum coetum). It is preserved among the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea and dates to the second or third decade of the fourth century AD, before the first ecumenical council of Nicaea.¹ It contains quotations in Greek hexameters covering the greatest part of the fourth eclogue, which is adduced as an important pagan testimony to the coming of Christ. The reader of the Oratio Constantini is faced with interrelated riddling questions: the Latin text on which the translation was based cannot be established with certainty; the translator at times translates and at times paraphrases; there are occasional incongruities between

¹ See Baldwin 1976, Fisher 1982, Floyd 2001, Geymonat 2001 (against Constantinian authorship).

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translation and exegesis; and no clear line can be drawn at any point between paraphrase and textual difference or error. Furthermore, if this is the speech mentioned in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, chapter 4.32, it was presumably written in Latin and translated into Greek by a professional interpreter (μεθερμηνευτής).² This was not uncommon with Constantine’s letters and orations, though the emperor wrote both in Latin and in Greek. At several points, however, the Greek translation is adapted to Constantine’s allegorical line of interpretation, which raises the important question of who manipulated the translation, since a professional translator could not have taken such initiatives.³ The suggestion that this is a preexisting free translation done by another translator creates more problems than it solves. Over the next centuries Greek translations of Latin texts were occasionally produced in Byzantium, but these served mostly practical purposes, as did for example the translations of religious works pertinent to theological debates with the West. Translations of Latin literary works appeared in Constantinople in a variety of genres after the restoration, in 1261, of Byzantine rule in the city, which had been occupied by the crusaders in 1204.⁴ Most of them are attributed to the famous polymath Maximos Planoudes (c.1255–1305). They include four prose translations of Latin texts that represented ‘bestsellers’ in the medieval West: Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with Macrobius’s Commentary, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, and Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses. Older scholarship treated these translations as mere literary exercises, but in recent years it has been argued that, despite occasional errors and questions about his grasp of Latin, Planoudes was a competent translator and expected his Greek audience to consider these texts worthy of serious study and scholarly investigation.⁵ I quote, in parallel with the original, his Greek translation of the opening lines of the Daphne episode in Ovid (Ov. Met. 1.452–60):⁶

² See Cameron and Hall 1999, p. 165: ‘However that may be, Latin was the language in which the Emperor used to produce the text of his speeches. They were translated into Greek by professional interpreters. By way of example of his translated works I shall append immediately after this present book the speech which he entitled, “To the assembly of the saints”, dedicating the work to the Church of God, so that none may think our assertions about his speeches to be mere rhetoric.’ ³ For instance, iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna (4.6) is turned into ‘Ἥκει παρθένος αὖθις ἄγουσ’ ἐρατὸν βασιλῆα’ (‘The Virgin has come bringing back the long-desired king’). ⁴ See Fisher 2010 on the role of bilingual Franciscan and Dominican monks who introduced the Latin language and Latin texts into Byzantine culture through their teaching activities, and cf. Fisher 2014. ⁵ See Fisher 2002–3, 2004, and 2011. For an overview of Planoudes’s translations, see Fodor 2004. ⁶ The Latin text is quoted from Tarrant 2004 and the translation from Martin 2010 [2004]. The Greek is adapted from Megas 1999. The editio princeps of Planoudes’s translation of the Metamorphoses is Boissonade 1822. There are three recent critical editions of Planoudes: Tsavari 1997 and Megas 1999, for Books 1–5; and Papathomopoulos and Tsavari 2002 for the entire Metamorphoses. In the Introduction to their text, Papathomopoulos and Tsavari argue that translation differences are mainly due to different manuscript readings and are rarely the result of a misunderstanding on Planoudes’s part (Papathomopoulos and Tsavari 2002, pp. 7–10).

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MICHAEL PASCHALIS

primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia, quem non fors ignara dedit, sed saeua Cupidinis ira. Delius hunc, nuper uicta serpente superbus, uiderat adducto flectentem cornua neruo ‘quid’ que tibi, lasciue puer, cum fortibus armis?’ dixerat; ‘ista decent umeros gestamina nostros, qui dare certa ferae, dare uulnera possumus hosti, qui modo pestifero tot iugera uentre prementem strauimus innumeris tumidum Pythona sagittis.’

Πρῶτος ἔρως τοῦ Φοίβου ἡ Πηνειὰς γέγονε Δάφνη, ὃν οὐ τύχη ἀτέκμαρτος ἔδωκεν ἀλλ’ ὀργὴ τοῦ Ἔρωτος χαλεπή. Τοῦτον γὰρ ἄρτι νενικημένου τοῦ δράκοντος σοβαρώτερον ὁ Δήλιος εἶδε τῆς νευρᾶς ἐμβληθείσης τῷ τόξῳ τὰ κέρα κάμπτοντα καὶ ‘Τί σοι, βλὰξ παιδίον, καὶ τοῖς γενναίοις’ ἔφησεν ‘ὅπλοις; Ταυτὶ τὰ φορήματα τοῖς ἡμῶν ὤμοις προσήκει, οἵπερ εὔστοχα τραύματα καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ ἐχθροῖς διδόναι δυνάμεθα, οἳ νῦν καὶ τὸν τῇ ἰοβόλῳ γαστρὶ τόσα πλέθρα πιέζοντα κατεστρώσαμεν Πύθωνα βέλεσιν ἀναριθμήτοις ἐξῳδηκότα.’

Daphne, the daughter of the river god Peneus, was the first love of Apollo; this happened not by chance, but by the cruel outrage of Cupid; Phoebus, in the triumph of his great victory against the Python, observed him bending back his bow and said, ‘What are you doing with such manly arms, lascivious boy? That bow befits our brawn, wherewith we deal out wounds to savage beasts and other mortal foes, unerringly: just now with our innumerable arrows we managed to lay low the mighty Python, whose pestilential belly covered acres!’

[Translation of Planoudes:] Daphne daughter of Peneus was Phoebus’s first love, given not by inconsistent chance but by harsh anger of Love. The Delian god after vanquishing the serpent had recently seen him attaching the bowstring to the bow and bending the ends and said, ‘What are you doing with noble weapons, stupid boy? These accoutrements suit my shoulders, I who am capable of giving well-aimed wounds both to wild creatures and to enemies, I who just now laid low even the Python who was pressing so many plethra with his venomous belly, swollen with countless arrows.’

The masculine noun τοῦ δράκοντος suggests that Planoudes read uicto serpente, an alternative manuscript reading. The form σοβαρώτερον makes sense only as an adverb with εἶδε, otherwise it would be an error. It is not always clear whether certain differences from the Latin original have a textual origin or are mistranslations. For instance, instead of ‘bending’ the bow (adducto . . . neruo), Cupid ‘attaches the bowstring to the bow’ (τῆς νευρᾶς ἐμβληθείσης τῷ τόξῳ), and ‘wanton boy’ (lasciue puer) becomes ‘stupid boy’ (βλὰξ παιδίον).⁷ The tradition of translating Latin works into Greek continued in the West during the Renaissance and later centuries and included Virgil’s works. While Planoudes ⁷ As regards the first of these two differences, Boissonade 1822 had raised the question whether Planoudes read inducto instead of adducto, then dismissed the idea: puto legisse quod legimus, sed non intellexisse (‘I think he read what we read but did not understand’). Tsavari 1997 and Papathomopoulos and Tsavari 2002 leave Boissonade’s question open, and Megas does not mention it. The point about the translation of βλάξ (‘stupid’) is not discussed by the editors.

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had translated in verse only when he was obliged to (as in the Disticha Catonis, or in Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, in order to distinguish prose from embedded verse), now verse translations became common. As a rule, Planudes translated ad uerbum, word by word, and this practice continued in the verse translations of Virgil. Apparently both Planoudes and Renaissance translators of Virgil inherited this practice from the Latin translations of Greek texts, which included the venerable tradition of Old Latin translations of the Bible and Jerome’s Vulgate. In the early Renaissance, translation ad uerbum became the issue of a debate. In 1470, at the age of fifteen, Angelo Poliziano translated Book 2 of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. This made a highly praised Latin verse translation of Homer. It was actually a paraphrase in very elegant Virgilian style. On the occasion of Leontius Pilatus’s first Homeric translations in prose, Petrarch had repeatedly advised against literal translations in prose, quoting Jerome’s famous words to Pammachius that these would ‘make a most eloquent poet scarce able to speak at all’ (poetam eloquentissimum uix loquentem, Jer. Ep. 57.5; Letter 57 is ‘Ad Pammachium, De optimo genere interpretandi’). Yet in the years to come, despite the fact that Virgil and his successors had provided an outstanding and highly influential model for Latin hexameter epic, the overwhelming majority of Latin translations of Homer would be of this very same kind: ad uerbum prose translations. The humanists pronounced themselves on the subject in a confusing and contradictory way: on the one hand, they claimed that Homer was impossible to translate in verse (as did Pier Candido Decembrio); on the other, they argued that Latin possessed greater expressive and rhetorical power than Greek (so Lorenzo Valla).⁸ An original feature of ancient Greek translations of Virgil was the adoption of the dialect of the corresponding Greek genre, as when the Eclogues were translated into Doric hexameters. In 1603 Joseph Scaliger and Daniel Heinsius published facing translations of Virgil’s Eclogue 10 in Doric Greek, in what was a contest of erudition and linguistic skills. The next year the two scholars printed revised versions of their own translations, thus entering into a further contest with their own earlier achievement.⁹ Here are the opening lines of the tenth eclogue (Verg. Ecl. 10.1–8):¹⁰ extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem: pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, carmina sunt dicenda; neget quis carmina Gallo? sic tibi, cum fluctus subterlabere Sicanos, Doris amara suam non intermisceat undam, incipe; sollicitos Galli dicamus amores, dum tenera attondent simae uirgulta capellae. non canimus surdis, respondent omnia siluae.

⁸ See Pertusi 1964, pp. 21–2; Botley 2004; Taylor 2014. ⁹ Heinsius 1603, pp. 128–31; 1604, pp. 424–6. ¹⁰ The translation is from Kline 2001a, available online at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/ Latin/VirgilEclogues.htm (accessed 24 April 2017). The two pairs of translations into Greek are quoted from Heinsius 1603, pp. 128–33 and Heinsius 1604, pp. 422–6.

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‘Arethusa, Sicilian Muse, allow me this last labour: a few verses must be sung for my Gallus, yet such as Lycoris herself may read. Who’d deny songs for Gallus? If you’d not have briny Doris mix her stream with yours, when you glide beneath Sicilian waves, begin: let’s speak of Gallus’s anxious love, while the snub-nosed goats crop the tender thickets. We don’t sing to deaf ears, the woods echo it all.’ Scaliger 1603 Τόνδ’ Ἀρέθοισα πόνον χαρίσαιό μοι ὑστάτιόν περ, This [ACC.] Arethusa task [ACC.] grant to-me last [ACC.], Παῦρά τιν’ ἀείδωμες (ἀναγνοίη δὲ Λυκωρίς) A-few things that-we sing (and may-recognize Lycoris) Γάλλῳ ἐμῷ
τίς κ’ εὖνιν ἀοιδέων Γάλλον ἐάσσαι; For-Gallus mine; who would bereft [ACC.] of-songs Gallus [ACC.] allow? Οὕτω Σικελίδος τοι ὑπερχομένᾳ βυθὸν ἅλμας Thus Sicilian [GEN.] to-you going-beneath depth of-salt-sea [GEN.] Μὴ ἑὰ συμμίσγοι πικρὰ νάματα Δωρὶς ἀδευκής. May-not her mingle bitter waters Doris cruel. Εἴπωμες, φέρε, Γάλλῳ ἀμηχανέοντας ἔρωτας, Let-us-speak, then, for-Gallus unmanageable loves [ACC.], Σιμαὶ ἕως θαμνῶνος ἀποτρώγοισι χίμαιραι. Snub-nosed [NOM.] while shrubs [GEN.] browse she-goats [NOM.]. ᾌδομες οὐ κωφοῖς
ᾄδουσι γὰρ ἄλσος ἐπαχεῖ. We-sing not to-deaf-people; to-those-singing grove echoes. Heinsius 1603 Τὰν πυμάταν Ἀρέθοισα φίλα συνάεισον ἀοιδάν, The final [ACC.] Arethusa dear sing song [ACC.], Τυτθὸν ἐμῷ Γάλλῳ, τὸ καὶ ἀνγνοίησι Λυκωρὶς, Small-thing for-my Gallus, which also may-recognize Lycoris, Τυρίσδην ἐπέοικεν
ἔπη τίς ἀνῄνατο Γάλλῳ; To-pipe it’s-fitting; words [ACC.] who would-deny to-Gallus? Οὕτω τὶν, Σικελοῖς ὑπὸ κύμασιν ὅκκα φέροιο, Thus for-you, Sicilian beneath waves whenever you-are-carried, Μη πόχ’ ἑὰν Δωρὶς πικρὰ μίσγοιτο θάλασσαν. Not ever her-own [ACC.] Doris bitter may-mingle sea [ACC.]. Ἄρχεο, δειλαίως Γάλλω εἴπωμες ἔρωτας, Begin, pitiable [ACC.] of-Gallus let-us-speak loves [ACC.] ὄφρ’ ἁπαλὰς σιμαὶ τρώγοντί μοι αἶγες ἐρίκας. while tender [ACC.] snub-nosed browse for-me she-goats heath [ACC.]. Οὐ κωφοῖς λεγόμεσθα
ποτικρίνονται αἱ ὕλαι. Not to-deaf-people we-speak; answer-back the woods.

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TRANSLATIONS OF VIRGIL INTO ANCIENT GREEK

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Scaliger 1604 Ὑστάτιον χαρίσαιο πόνον μοι τόνδ’ Ἀρέθοισα. Last [ACC.] grant task [ACC.] to-me this [ACC.] Arethusa. Παῦρά τιν’ ἀείδωμες (ἀναγνοίη δὲ Λυκωρὶς) A-few things may-we-sing (and may-recognize Lycoris) Γάλλῳ ἐμῷ
τίς κεν Γάλλῳ φθονέσειεν ἀοιδᾶς; For-Gallus mine; who would to-Gallus begrudge a-song [GEN.]? Οὕτω Σικελίδος σοὶ ὑπερχομένᾳ βυθὸν ἅλμας Thus Sicilian [GEN.] to-you going-beneath depth of-salt-sea [GEN.] Μή ποτε συμμίσγοι ἑὰ κύματα Δωρὶς ἀδευκής. May never mingle her waters Doris salty. Εἴπωμες, φέρε, Γάλλῳ ἀμηχανέοντας ἔρωτας, Let-us-speak, then, for-Gallus unmanageable loves [ACC.] Σιμαὶ ἕως θαμνῶνος ἀποτρώγοισι χίμαιραι. Snub-nosed [NOM.] while shrubs [GEN.] browse she-goats [NOM.]. ᾌδομες οὐ κωφοῖς
ᾄδουσι γὰρ ἄλσος ἐπαχεῖ. We-sing not to-deaf-people; to-those-singing grove echoes. Heinsius 1604 Τὸν πύματον χαρίσαιο πόνον μοι τόνδ’ Ἀρέθοισα
The final [ACC.] grant task to-me this [ACC.] Arethusa; Μικκὸν ἐμῷ Γάλλῳ, τὸ καὶ ἀνγνοίησι Λυκωρὶς, Small-thing for-my Gallus, which also may-recognize Lycoris, Μελπέμεν ἐν καλῷ εἴη
ἔπη τις ἀνῄνατο Γάλλῳ; To-sing for good may-it-be; words [ACC.] who would-deny to-Gallus? Οὕτω τὶν, Σικελοῖς μετὰ κύμασιν ὅκκα φέροιο, Thus for-you, Sicilian beneath waves whenever you-are-carried, Μή ποχ’ ἑὸν Δωρὶς συμμίσγοι ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ. Not ever her-own [ACC.] Doris may-mingle salty water [ACC.]. Ἄρχεο, δειλαίως Γάλλω εἴπωμες ἔρωτας, Begin, pitiable [ACC.] of-Gallus let-us-speak loves [ACC.], Μέσφα νέως σιμαὶ θάμνως τρώγοντι χίμαιραι. While new [ACC.] snub-nosed [NOM.] shrubs [ACC.] browse she-goats. Μέλπομες οὐ κωφοῖσι
ποτικρίνονται αἱ ὕλαι. We-sing not to-deaf-people; answer-back the woods.

The samples given above from Scaliger’s and Heinsius’s translations could serve as an introduction to Greek verse translations of Latin poetry composed in modern times. The cardinal rule is that the translation should have the same number of lines as the Latin original. Most commonly there is a line-to-line correspondence, in the sense that each line of Latin is rendered in a single line of Greek. Lines 2–3 of Scaliger’s translations do not keep this second rule. Proof of superior skill is to be able to render each line with the same number of words. In the two 1603 versions there are respectively two lines (ll. 4 and 6 in Scaliger, ll. 1 and 6 in Heinsius) that contain

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the same number of words. In the 1604 versions this number increases to four and three respectively (ll. 1, 3, 4, 6 in Scaliger, ll. 6, 7, 8 in Heinsius). The translator also displays his skill in creating half or whole lines that are metrically equivalent to the Latin original. Scaliger produced only one instance (first half of line 8) in both versions of his translations; Heinsius presents two instances—before the main caesura (ll. 2, 7)—in both versions. Finally, there is the question of the kind of Doric used, which is not necessarily Theocritean Doric and may not be Doric at all. For instance, Scaliger renders pauca (‘a few things’, l. 2) with παῦρα, which is not found in Theocritus and is not Doric but has the linguistic advantage of being a cognate of the Latin epithet. Heinsius in 1603 uses the epic τυτθόν (‘a small thing’), found also in Theocritus; and in the 1604 version he changes it to the Doric μικκόν (‘a little thing’), which occurs in Theocritus too. On the whole Heinsius, as editor of Theocritus, tends to use more idiomatic and rare vocabulary (each of his two versions is introduced as ‘translated into Doric Greek’, Dorice reddita). Τυρίσδην for συρίσδην (Heinsius 1603, l. 3, ‘to pipe’) is a hapax: this form is mentioned only in the treatise De dialectis attributed to Theodosius Grammaticus. Ποτικρίνονται (l. 8) in the sense of ‘reply’ (3rd person pl.) for respondent is found in some manuscripts of Theocritus 9.6. The first translations of Virgil in modern Greece were not in modern Greek of any variety, but in ancient Greek hexameters. Eugenios Voulgaris (Ευγένιος Βούλγαρις, 1716–1806), a leading figure of the Greek Enlightenment, published a translation of the Georgics in ‘heroic hexameters’ in 1786 and one of the Aeneid in 1791–2, also in ‘heroic hexameters’, on which he had worked for twenty years. These are the first complete (ancient and modern) Greek translations of the Georgics and the Aeneid. The editions have facing Latin text and Greek translation and are richly annotated. The translation is written in a form of epic Greek and the notes in Attic Greek. Both translations were published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.¹¹ Voulgaris came to Russia in 1771, at the invitation of Catherine II, and remained there until the end of his life. At the time of his arrival, interest in things Greek, both ancient and modern, was very prominent. Among other things, Empress Catherine II promoted the translation of classical authors into Russian. Politically, Russia presented itself as the potential liberator of Orthodox Greeks from Ottoman rule—a Muslim empire. The translation of the Georgics¹² is dedicated to Grigorii Aleksandrovich

¹¹ For further discussion of Voulgaris in Russia, see Chapter 10 in this volume. ¹² It bears the following title, in Greek and in Latin: Τῶν Γεωργικῶν Πουβλίου Οὐϊργιλίου Μάρονος τὰ Δ΄ Βιβλία ἐν ἡρωικῷ τῷ μέτρῳ ἑλληνιστὶ ἐκφρασθέντα καὶ σημειώσεσι διηνεκέσι διευκινηθέντα Σπουδῇ καὶ Πόνῳ Εὐγενίου τοῦ Βουλγάρεως. [enumeration of offices held], τύποις νῦν πρῶτον ἐκδοθέντα, εἰς χρῆσιν τῶν Ἑλληνο-Ρώσσων νεανίσκων τῶν ἐν ταῖς ὑπὸ τῷ Ῥωσσικῷ Κράτει Ἑλληνικαῖς ἀποικίαις ἀνατραφησομένων, κηδεμονίᾳ καὶ δαπάνῃ τοῦ Ὑψηλοτάτου καὶ Ἐκλαμπροτάτου Πρίγκιπος Γρηγορίου Ἀλεξάνδρου τοῦ Ποτεμκίνου· τοῦ τῆς Ἑλληνίδος Μούσης ἐραστοῦ διαπύρου, καὶ ἑτοίμου ταύτης προστάτου. Georgicorum P. Virgilii Maronis Libri IV. Graeco carmine heroico expressi, notisque perpetuis illustrati, studio ac labore Eugenii de Bulgaris. [enumeration of offices held], qui typis nunc primum, ad usum Helleno-Rossicae iuuentutis, Graecorum in Russiaco Imperio coloniarum, educandae, sunt excusi auspiciis liberalitateque Serenissimi, Sacri Romani Imperii, Principis, Gregorii Alexandridae Potemkini, utpote Graecae literaturae

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TRANSLATIONS OF VIRGIL INTO ANCIENT GREEK

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Potemkin (1739–91), who was for a time Catherine’s lover and favourite, statesman and commander of the Russian armed forces. In the seventy-six-line dedicatory letter, which was composed in elegiac couplets and addressed to Potemkin as prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Russia is compared to Rome, Catherine is deemed a ruler superior to Augustus, and Potemkin is identified with Maecenas, to whom Voulgaris offers his services as another Virgil. I quote a passage from the dedication (ll. 13–22), in which Voulgaris talks about the relation of his translation to the Virgilian original:¹³ Τῷ Σοι μηδὲν ἔχων ἐμὸν ἄξιον ὅττι προσοίσω, Ἥκω δωροφορῶν ἀλλοτρίους πραπίδας. Αὐσονίδος Μούσης ἀγλαὸν τέκος υἱοθετήσας, Ἀμφιπεριστείλας θ’ εἵμασιν Ἑλλαδικοῖς. Ἦπου δ’ οὐδ’ ὁ τεκὼν τοίας κεν ὀνόσατο χλαίνας, Εἵμενα εἰσορόων εἷο γένεθλα φρενός. Κ’ εἰ γὰρ τὰκ’ Δαναῶν πέρι κεῖνος δείδιε δῶρα, Οἷα τ’ ἄδωρα τίθει, ὡς ἀπὸ δυσμενέων
Ἀλλὰ τὰ τῆς φωνῆς μέγα ἅζετο, ἠδὲ τε τῖεν, Ζηλῶν νωλεμέως γήρυμα θεσπέσιον.

Not having something worthy that is mine to offer You I am bringing as gift the work of another mind. I adopted the glorious child of the Ausonian Muse, Covering it all around in Greek clothes. Surely not even the father would blame this cloak, Seeing the offspring of his mind dressed. It is true that he dreaded gifts coming from Greeks And did not deem them gifts because coming from enemies. But he greatly respected and honoured their speech, And ceaselessly emulated the divine sound.

What was the intended audience of the Georgics’ translation? According to the title page it was written ‘for the use of the Greco-Russian youth to be educated in the Greek colonies that are under Russian rule’, by which Voulgaris means the thousands of Greeks who settled in southern Ukraine after the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks. If ‘Greco-Russian youth’ refers to students at the seminary that Voulgaris established in Poltava in 1778, when he served as archbishop of the newly established Russian Orthodox Diocese of Kherson and Slavyansk, early records indicate that few Greeks attended it.¹⁴ Regardless of that, the aim was too ambitious, because teaching Latin with the aid of a translation composed in epic Greek amounted to teaching ignotum per ignotius. Peter Mackridge correctly points out about the translations of the Georgics and the Aeneid: ‘one wonders what the intended readership of these demanding achievements might have been, and indeed how many people read the translations from end to end’.¹⁵ amatoris fautorisque munificentissimi (‘The Georgics of Publius Virgilius Maro in Four Books. Translated into Greek heroic hexameters and zealously and laboriously annotated in full by Eugenios Voulgaris, [enumeration of offices held], printed here for the first time, for the use and education of the GrecoRussian youth in the Greek colonies of the Russian Empire, with the auspices and generosity of the most serene Prince of the Holy Roman Empire Grigorii Aleksandrovich Potemkin, a most munificent lover and patron of Greek literature’). ¹³ The Greek text quoted here comes from Voulgaris 1786, vol. 1, pp. 2–3. On Voulgaris’s activities in Russia and on the reign of Catherine II, see Batalden 1982; on the translation of the Georgics, see further Papaioannou 2009. ¹⁴ Batalden 1982, pp. 54–5. ¹⁵ Mackridge 2009, p. 85.

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Voulgaris was an archaizing translator, who believed that works of philosophy and science should be written in ancient Greek.¹⁶ His translation of Virgil into epic Greek and the commentary in Attic Greek were not favourably received either by purists or by supporters of the vernacular. Reactions should, however, be viewed with caution. For instance, the criticism raised by Athanasios Psalidas (Αθανάσιος Ψαλίδας, 1767–1829), that ‘every line contains an error, as most poets of our times say’, is patently inaccurate.¹⁷ The most damning reaction to the translation is quoted by André Papadopoulo Vretos (Ανδρέας Παπαδόπουλος Βρετός, 1800–76), Voulgaris’s biographer, and came from Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison: Elle est détestable. Je n’avois jamais rien vu de si mauvais, jusqu’à ce que vous m’eussiez envoyé l’Enéide¹⁸ (‘It is detestable. I had never seen anything so dreadful until you sent me the Aeneid’). This was not, however, a public statement but a comment included in private correspondence.¹⁹ A more balanced view was pronounced by Adamantios Korais (Αδαμάντιος Κοραής, 1748–1833), the most important figure of the Greek Enlightenment. Korais recognized the zeal, effort, and erudition of Voulgaris but questioned the usefulness of his translations.²⁰ Finally it should be noted that Voulgaris’s translations had a great impact upon classical studies in Russia, exerting their influence on generations of Russian translators of Greek and Latin classical authors, and that their rich notes served as an encyclopaedic foundation for subsequent work.²¹ I quote a sample of Voulgaris’s Georgics translation (Verg. G. 4.485–502):²² iamque pedem referens casus euaserat omnis, redditaque Eurydice superas ueniebat ad auras pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem), cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes: restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa immemor heu! uictusque animi respexit. ibi omnis

¹⁶ On Voulgaris’s linguistic arguments in favour of the use of ancient Greek, see briefly Mackridge 2009, pp. 85–7. ¹⁷ Psalidas 1795, p. 20. ¹⁸ Vretos 1860, p. xxiv. ¹⁹ Villoison 1817, p. 404. ²⁰ Korais 1803, p. 13: Ce dernier travail, qui atteste, par les notes qui l’accompagnent, le zèle, les efforts et le savoir du traducteur, et qui auroit pu même avoir du succès, comme ouvrage littéraire, s’il étoit possible de transporter les beautés d’une langue morte dans une autre langue morte, doit d’autant moins être oublié par un observateur impartial, qu’il est un des symptômes les plus caractéristiques de la fermentation actuelle des esprits en Grèce, et qu’il annonce que l’heureuse révolution qui s’opère dans ce pays a pris une telle direction que rien ne sauroit plus l’arrêter (‘This last work of his—which, by the notes that accompany it, testifies to the zeal, the effort and the erudition of the translator and which could have even gained success as a work of literature if it were possible to transfer the beauties of one dead language to another—should not be forgotten by an impartial observer, all the more as it is one of most characteristic indications of current intellectual ferment in Greece and predicts that the fortunate revolution at work in this country has taken a direction that nobody would be able to stop’). ²¹ Batalden 1982, p. 80. ²² Virgil’s Latin is from Mynors’s 1969 OCT edition of the Georgics; the corresponding translation is from Kline 2001b, which is available online at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ VirgilGeorgicsIV.htm (accessed 24 April 2017). The Greek is from Voulgaris 1786, vol. 4, pp. 90–5.

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TRANSLATIONS OF VIRGIL INTO ANCIENT GREEK

effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni foedera, terque fragor stagnis auditus Auernis. illa ‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, quis tantus furor? en iterum crudelia retro fata uocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus. iamque uale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte inualidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas.’ dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenuis, fugit diuersa, neque illum prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa uolentem dicere praeterea uidit. ‘And now, retracing his steps, he evaded all mischance, and Eurydice, regained, approached the upper air, he following behind (since Proserpine had ordained it), when a sudden madness seized the incautious lover, one to be forgiven, if the spirits knew how to forgive: he stopped, and forgetful, alas, on the edge of light, his will conquered, he looked back, now, at his Eurydice. In that instant, all his effort was wasted, and his pact with the cruel tyrant was broken, and three times a crash was heard by the waters of Avernus. “Orpheus,” she cried, “what madness has destroyed my wretched self, and you? See, the cruel Fates recall me, and sleep hides my swimming eyes, Farewell, now: I am taken, wrapped round by vast night, stretching out to you, alas, hands no longer yours.” She spoke, and suddenly fled, far from his eyes, like smoke vanishing in thin air, and never saw him more, though he grasped in vain at shadows, and longed to speak further.’ Voulgaris, 1786 Καί νύ κεν εἷρπε πόδας γε παλίσσυτος ἐξυπαλύξας
And now he-dragged feet back-rushing [NOM.] having-escaped; Ἔσπετο δ’ Εὐρυδίκη βαίνουσα κατ’ ἴχνια κείνου, And followed Eurydice [NOM.] walking in the-footsteps of-him Οὐ θεατὴ τὸ τέως
(ᾗ ξύνθετο Περσεφόνεια) Not seen as yet; (thus decreed Persephone) Ἐξάπιν’ ἀφραδίη δὲ ἐρῶντα παρείλετο μῆτιν
Suddenly madness loving [ACC.] seized mind [ACC.]; Τὸν κ’ ἐλέηρέ τις, αἴκ’ Ἀΐδης ποτὲ εἶχ’ ἐλεαίρειν. Him would have-pitied anyone [NOM.], if-only Hades ever were-able to-pity. Καὶ γὰρ ἐπεὶ ῥα φόως δε ἀφίκετο, φεῦ! ἐπιλήσμων, And for when the-light [ACC.] he-reached, alas! forgetful, Καὶ γλυκεροῖο πόθου ἡσσημένος, αὐτίκα ἔστη. And by-sweet desire overcome, straightaway he-stopped.

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Στρέψε δ’ ἐς Εὐρυδίκην ἐρατεινὴν, ὄσσε τ’ ἐφῆκεν. He-turned towards Eurydice lovely, where she-had-come. Ὤχετο μὰψ δὲ πόνος
καὶ ἀπηνέος ὅρκια λῦντο Went in-vain labour [NOM.]; and of-pitiless [GEN.] pacts [NOM.] were broken Πάντα τυράννου
τρὶς σμαράγησαν ἕλη δὲ Ἄορνα. All [NOM.] of-king; three-times resounded marshes [NOM.] Underworld [NOM.]. Ἡ δὲ ῥὰ
τίς με τάλαιναν, ἔφη, σὲ τ’ ἀπώλεσεν Ὀρφεῦ; And she-spoke: Who me [ACC.] miserable, she-said, and you [ACC.] has-destroyed, Orpheus? Τίς δ’ ἡ τοσσατίη μανίη; πάλιν ἠνὶ δ’ ὀπίσσω, What [is] such-great madness? Again I-go back, Μοῖραι ἀπηνέες, αὖθι καλεῦσι παλίσσυτον ἕρπειν. Fates pitiless, back they-summon [me] back-rushing [ACC.] to-go. Ὕπνος μεῦ πάλιν αὖθι δονούμενα φάεα κρύπτει. Sleep of-me again back whirling eyes [ACC.] hides. Ἀλλ’ ἤδη, χαίροις σὺγε
ἀμφὶ με νὺξ περιβάλλει But already, farewell you; around me night surrounds Χευομένη, οὐ σὴν φεῦ! αὕτως χεῖρ’ ὀρεγνῦσαν. Wrapping [me], not yours alas! thus hand [ACC.] stretching-out. Ἦ, καὶ ἀπ’ ὀφθαλμῶν ἕο, ἠΰτε καπνὸς ἐς αὔρας She-spoke, and from his-eyes went, like smoke to breezes Λεπτὰς αἶψα κέδαστο, καὶ ᾤχετο
οὐδ’ ἔτι εἶδεν Thin [ACC.] suddenly scattered, and was-gone; and-not anymore she-saw Ἀμφὶ ῥὰ δρασσόμενον μὰψ εἰδώλοιο ἀμαυροῦ, Around him-grasping vainly of-ghost shadowy [GEN.], Ἱέμενόν περ πολλὰ ἐνισπεῖν
Desiring though much to-say:

Voulgaris’s Greek translation is less strict than the ones we have looked at so far and the ones to follow. For instance, the opening two and a half lines paraphrase instead of translating Virgil. The lines Καὶ γὰρ . . . ἐφῆκεν paraphrase and expand in length Georgics 4.490–1 restitit . . . respexit. It is the pivotal moment when Orpheus forgets Proserpina’s strict rule and turns his gaze towards Eurydice. The hero’s passion and the drama of the couple probably caused Voulgaris to temporarily ‘forget’ the strict rule of equal numbers of lines.²³ Since line-to-line correspondence is abandoned early in the translation, it is impossible to conduct a thorough comparison of metrically equivalent cola. For the same reason, a thorough comparison as regards the ²³ Cf. the conclusions of Papaioannou 2009, pp. 101–4, which are based on the study of other passages of the Georgics translation. The 514 lines of Georgics Book 1 are rendered in 594 lines, the 542 lines of Book 2 take up 636, the 566 lines of Book 3 take up 672 lines, and the 566 lines of Book 4 are rendered in 678 lines.

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correspondence in the number of words is possible only for the opening section, where lines 2 and 3 have an equal number. Ancient Greek translations of Virgil were produced also in the nineteenth century and preceded modern Greek translations.²⁴ In 1847 Christophoros Philitas (Χριστόφορος Φιλητάς, 1787–1867) published a translation of Aeneid 2 in ‘heroic hexameters’. Philitas was a scholar with a doctorate in medicine. He taught at the Ionian Academy and in schools in Corfu, Zante, and Meleniko, and in 1866, one year before his death, was appointed professor of Greek philology at the University of Athens. His writings include a Grammar of Latin published in Corfu in 1827. The translation has no preface, and so it is not clear what the intended audience was, but it is preceded by a brief prose summary of Aeneid 2 composed in Attic Greek. I quote the opening lines, along with Mynors’s corresponding Latin text (Verg. A. 2.1–13):²⁵ conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant; inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto: infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem, Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima uidi et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando Myrmidonum Dolopumue aut duri miles Vlixi temperet a lacrimis? et iam nox umida caelo praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos. sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros et breuiter Troiae supremum audire laborem, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam. ‘They were all silent, and turned their faces towards him intently. Then from his high couch our forefather Aeneas began: “O queen, you command me to renew unspeakable grief, how the Greeks destroyed the riches of Troy, and the sorrowful kingdom, miseries I saw myself, and in which I played a great part. What Myrmidon, or Dolopian, or warrior of fierce Ulysses, could keep from tears in telling such a story? Now the dew-filled night is dropping from the sky, and the setting stars urge sleep. But if you have such desire to learn of our misfortunes, and briefly hear of Troy’s last agonies, though my mind shudders at the memory, and recoils in sorrow, I’ll begin.”’ ²⁴ The first complete modern Greek translation of the Aeneid was composed by Iakovos Rizos Rangavis (Ιάκωβος Ρίζος Ραγκαβής, 1779–1855) and published posthumously in Constantinople in 1869–70, in two volumes. It was a verse translation in dactylic hexameters. ²⁵ The translation is from Kline 2002 and is available online at http://www.poetryintranslation. com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilAeneidII.htm (accessed 24 April 2017). Philitas’s Greek is from Philitas 1847, p. 7.

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Philitas 1847 Πάντες ἐσίγησαν, ἀτενεῖς τ’ ἐπὶ ὄμματα ἴσχον, All fell-silent, and staring eyes [ACC.] kept, κλισμοῦ δ’ ὧδε πατὴρ Αἰνείας ἤρξατ’ ἀπ’ ἄκρου. from-couch [GEN.] so father Aeneas [NOM.] began high [GEN.]. Ἄρ’ῥητον, βασίλεια, κέλῃ με νεοῦν πάλιν ἄλγος. Unspeakable [ACC.], queen [VOC.], command me repeat again pain [ACC.]. Τρώϊον ὅππως ὄλβον, ἀνακτορίην τ’ ὀλοφυδνὴν Trojan [ACC.] how happiness [ACC.], and rule sorrowful [ACC.] ἄντρεψαν Δαναοὶ, καὶ οἴκτιστ’ αὐτὸς ἃ εἶδον, overthrew Danaans [NOM.], and most-pitiable myself which [ACC.] I-saw, τῶν τε μέρος πελόμην μέγα
τὶς δέ κε, τοῖα πιφαύσκων and of-which part [ACC.] I-was great [ACC.]; who would, such-things [ACC.] uttering Μυρμιδόνων, Δολόπων τ’, ἢ Ὀδυσσέος αἰνοῦ ὀπάων, of-the-Myrmidons [GEN.] and Dolopians [GEN.], or of-Odysseus terrible [GEN.] soldier [NOM.], δάκρυ’ ἐπισχοίη; διερὴ δέ τε οὐρανόθεν νὺξ tears [ACC.] hold-back? And wet [NOM.] from-the-sky night [NOM.] οἴχεται, ἐν δ’ ὕπνους κατεπείγει δυσσόμεν’ ἄστρα
is-gone, and to sleep [ACC.] urge setting stars [NOM.]; ἀλλὰ τύχας ἡμέων δεδάασθ’ εἰ τόσσον ἐέλδωρ, but fortunes [ACC.] our [GEN.] to-know if so-great desire [NOM.], καὶ Τροίης πύματον βραχέεσσιν ἀκουέμεν οἶτον, and of-Troy [GEN.] last [ACC.] in-brief-words to-hear doom [ACC.], κ’ ἤν ῥιγῇ θυμὸς μνῆσθαι, γοόων τε ἀπέστη, even if shudders [my] mind to-recollect and from-grieving [GEN.] shrinks, ἄρξομ’. I-will-begin.

The translation keeps the line-to-line correspondence with the Latin original throughout. Lines 2, 4, 10, and 11 have the same number of words as Virgil’s text. Latin and Greek metrical cola coincide before the fifth-foot caesura in line 1 and after the thirdfoot trochaic caesura in line 3. Worthy of special note is the rendering of line 9: Philitas preserved the dactylic rhythm and created a triple s assonance (ὕπνους δυσσόμεν’ ἄστρα) analogous to Virgil’s triple s alliteration (suadentque sidera somnos); both relate to the drowsy effect of the setting stars and are arranged so that the last three words diminish syllable by syllable, exactly as in Virgil.²⁶ It is clear that Philitas did not just translate Virgil but occasionally imitated the Latin poet’s metrical and stylistic features. The most prolific translator of Latin texts into ancient Greek was Philippos Ioannou (Φίλιππος Ιωάννου, 1796–1880), who studied classics in Munich and became professor of philosophy at the University of Athens in 1839. In 1865 he ²⁶ Cf. Austin 1964 on Verg. A. 2.9.

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published a volume entitled Philologika parerga, which contained annotated ancient Greek translations of Latin works. The second edition, published in 1874, was double the size of the first (about 800 pages long) and contained ancient Greek translations of the following Latin works: Tacitus’s Germania; a selection of Catullus’s poems, including a translation of Poem 64 in ‘heroic hexameters’; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1–5, in ‘heroic hexameters’; Ovid, Heroides, 1 and 7, in elegiac couplets; Virgil, Eclogues, 5, 7, and 8, in ‘Theocritean Doric hexameters’ (the edition of 1865 contained only Eclogue 5); and Horace’s Carmen saeculare in pseudo-Aeolic Sapphics. The volume also contained ancient Greek translations of the poem Die Götter Griechenlands by Friedrich Schiller and of modern Greek folk poetry, as well original poetry composed in ancient Greek in various genres and for various occasions. In the dedicatory letter addressed to his brother Demetrios Ioannou and composed in Attic Greek, the author explains that the contents of the volume constitute a tribute to his homeland, parents and relatives, benefactors, teachers, and friends. Most of these dedications consist of ancient Greek funerary epigrams, and there is a long elegy in memory of Ioannou’s brother Rigios, who fell in the Battle of Drăgășani fighting the Turks on 19 June 1821. Only two instances concern Ioannou’s ancient Greek translations: Catullus 64, which is listed as a tribute to Thessaly, Ioannou’s place of birth; and the translation of Tacitus’s Germania, which is described as a tribute to Germany, the country that became Ioannou’s second homeland because there he ‘first saw the light of science’. The translation of Virgil’s Eclogues bears the title ‘Selected Eclogues of P. Virgilius Maro translated into verse in the Doric dialect’ (Π. Οὐϊργιλίου Μάρωνος βουκολικά τινα εἰδύλλια μετενηνεγμένα ἐμμέτρως εἰς δωρικὴν διάλεκτον). In a note, Ioannou specifies that he has imitated the dialect of Theocritus (κατὰ τὸ τοῦ Θεοκρίτου ἰδίωμα). Each translation contains a brief summary of the respective eclogue and notes, both composed in Attic Greek. I quote lines 20–3 from the translation of Eclogue 5, accompanied by Mynors’s OCT text:²⁷ exstinctum Nymphae crudeli funere Daphnin flebant (uos coryli testes et flumina Nymphis), cum complexa sui corpus miserabile nati atque deos atque astra uocat crudelia mater. ‘The Nymphs wept for Daphnis, taken by cruel death (hazels and streams bear witness to the Nymphs), when sadly clasping the body of her son his mother cried out the cruelty of stars and gods.’ Ioannou 1874 Νύμφαι ἀποιχόμενον μόρῳ αἰνῷ Δάφνιν ἔκλαιον. The-nymphs departed [ACC.] with-death terrible Daphnis [ACC.] lamented. μάρτυρές ἐστ’ ὔμμες, καρύαι καὶ νάματα, νύμφαις. ²⁷ Again, I am using here the translation in Kline 2001a. Ioannou’s Greek is from Ioannou 1874.

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Witnesses are you, hazels and streams, to-the-nymphs. εὖτ’ οἴκτιστον ἑῶ δέμας υἱέος ἀμφιχυθεῖσα when the-most-pitiable [ACC.] of-her [GEN.] body [ACC.] son [GEN.] embracing νηλειεῖς τε θεὼς καὶ τείρεα μέμφετο μάτηρ and cruel [ACC.] and gods [ACC.] and stars [ACC.] blamed mother [NOM.]

The translation sticks to the rule of equal number of lines. The same applies to linefor-line correspondence, with rare exceptions. Also, the same number of words is retained in more than half the lines of the translation. Occasionally Ioannou creates metrically equivalent lines. The most significant departures from Virgil are changes in syntax and changes made for metrical reasons. Omissions are rare. For Latin names not found in Greek, he uses substitutes. I will conclude with two final observations. The choice of heroic hexameters for translations of the Aeneid, and especially that of Doric hexameters for translations of the Eclogues, appears to have been an issue of scholarly concern and became an area for the display of erudition. Classical Latin had no dialects, and the analogue for Latin translations of Greek would be adaptation to a poet’s style. As regards the role of ideology in determining the tone and character of a translation, we encountered the following two instances: the Greek translation of the fourth eclogue was adapted to Constantine’s allegorical line of interpretation (Oratio Constantini); and Voulgaris chose ancient Greek because he was a convinced adept of the archaizing style and his translations of the Georgics and the Aeneid were assessed from a linguistic viewpoint, in the context of the language question in Modern Greece or the modern Greek language.

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10 Sing It Like Homer Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid Sophia Papaioannou

10.1 The Context After retiring from his post as archbishop of Cherson and Slaviansk in the Crimean Peninsula, Eugenios Voulgaris (Corfu 1716–St Petersburg 1806),¹ a leading figure of the Greek (or, more correctly, neo-Hellenic) Enlightenment,² completed and published, among other works, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.³ The translation was the first to render in Greek the great Latin epic, and Voulgaris’s motive for undertaking this task was certainly cultural—a product of the historical moment and of the society Voulgaris was living in at the time, though its primary mission was pedagogical. This is noted in the subtitle of his book and is evidenced, first, in the commentary that accompanied the text and the translation and, second, in the language selected for the

¹ On Eugenios Voulgaris’s work, see recently Aggelomati 2009 (in Greek). None of the 29 papers included in the volume, however, discusses Voulgaris’s Latin translations. The best introduction on Voulgaris in English is still Batalden 1982. All the biographical information given in this chapter relies primarily on Batalden. A biography and full list of Voulgaris’s works, and the most important bibliography up to the year 2004, can be found on the website of Hellenomnemon at http://dlab.phs.uoa.gr/index.php/ component/fabrik/list/5 (it mostly concerns publications in Greek). Hellenomnemon is the database of the Digital Collections of Hellenic Cultural Heritage, an important ongoing project that makes available online, free of charge, works of the Greek scholars of the Enlightenment, many of them little known today and most of them never published again after their original publication. To my knowledge no comprehensive study of Voulgaris’s three-volume translation of the Aeneid has been published, nor is there any modern edition (or even a reprint) of this work. Judging by the material on Hellenomnemon, Voulgaris’s list of translations is extensive, but he published only three translations of classical texts: Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid; and a collection of Anacreontea (this one into Russian). A complete list of Voulgaris’s translations has recently been compiled by Patiniotis and Spyropoulou 2009. ² Kitromilides describes Voulgaris as the ‘patriarch of the Greek Enlightenment’ and the first recognized leader of the Enlightenment in South-East Europe, even though his insistence on using ancient Greek gave his Enlightenment-influenced writings an ‘aristocratic character’; see Kitromilides 1996, pp. 62–3 and 195. Kitromilides 2013, pp. 43–51 offers an excellent brief introduction to Voulgaris’s multifaceted contribution to blending the European Enlightenment with Greek culture. ³ See Voulgaris 1791–2; the translation is preceded by a eulogy of the Russian Empress Catherine II, to whom this work is dedicated.

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latter: Homeric Greek. This odd translating enterprise produced a version not to be read independently from the source text. In consequence, Voulgaris’s translation poses a uniquely intriguing question about its mission and its target audience. Unlike other translations, Voulgaris’s work was not intended to be read widely: by choosing Homeric Greek—and not a spoken language that would readily disclose the identity of the intended audience—as the language of the target text, the Greek scholar made clear that he was writing for an audience who could read Latin too— that is, the source language (or was at least learning it). The modern critic’s perplexity increases at the realization that this translation of the Latin Aeneid into Homeric Greek took place in late eighteenth-century Russia and was designed for the pedagogical benefit of an intended audience that did not consist of Russians. And yet this is an interlingual pedagogical enterprise worth exploring, because it was inspired by political dynamics and was fostered within a distinct cultural framework. It belongs in the era of the first translations of the great epic poems of Homer and Virgil in Russia—a project tightly entwined with Catherine’s political and cultural aspirations to project Russia at once as a Western military power in the footsteps of Rome and as the heir to Greek Orthodox Byzantium. The translation of an ancient text is a literary process based on linguistic procedures. A literary translation needs to attain grammatical adaptability and find the appropriate semantic requirements to transfer best the idioms of the source language. In the case of Voulgaris’s translation of the Aeneid, this process is both complex and peculiar, mainly for two reasons. In the first place, Voulgaris’s translation was determined by reasons that differ drastically from those of contemporary translations. Hence its appreciation (and the appreciation of any eighteenth-century translation, for that matter) is best realized in light of the historical circumstances that motivated it and of the social, or even political objectives that it was intended to serve. This methodological approach is recommended by the theorist Anthony Pym, who specializes in the history of translation. Pym argues that premodern and early modern translations should be seen primarily as a cultural rather than linguistic phenomenon, since they are intended to serve a variety of broadly defined utilitarian objectives.⁴ In this context, the style of a translation is connected with the historical experience of the translator. This experience explains the choice of a particular text for translation; thus, when the source text is a famous literary work of classical antiquity, this parameter weighs heavily and should not be dismissed. The assessment of Voulgaris’s translation of the Aeneid depends on identifying these utilitarian objectives, which take further shape in connection with the translation’s various (usually intended) audiences. The second reason for the complexity of studying Voulgaris’s translation enterprise is the language of the target text. Not only is Homeric Greek not the native tongue of the

⁴ Pym 1998.

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translator; in fact it has never been a natural, spoken language at all. It was constructed for a specific literary genre, Homeric epic, and thereafter became the language of all Greek epic poetry throughout antiquity. This exclusive employment of the artificial ‘dialect’ of the Homeric poems resulted in its becoming (along with the dactylic hexameter) part of the essence and the definition of epic poetry. A language builds its own structure according to the world it reflects: language, even the language of translation, is a vehicle of communication of some sort, and as such it is situated in a social context—namely its literate environment and literate society—which determines and conditions a complex set of systems that are organized in concert (vocabulary, syntax, semantics) and that participants use. Obviously, Voulgaris’s choice and use of Homeric Greek as a language of translation for the Aeneid is not satisfactorily addressed by the various theories of translation elaborated around natural languages. Instead, it introduces a series of intriguing questions, to be addressed once we restore the experience of a translator who perceives the world very differently from the ‘speakers’ of his target language. I place the word ‘speakers’ in scare quotes because none of the original audiences of the original Homerids actually used Homeric Greek as a language of communication. And yet this very peculiarity of Homeric Greek—the fact that it is an artificial language not subject to evolution, as any natural language is—makes it easier to extract it from its cultural context. And this cultural decontextualization of Homeric Greek was further facilitated by the fact that it was the language of epic poetry: it identified, that is, with the literary genre for the composition of which it had been invented in the first place. A text in (nonspoken) Homeric Greek appealed equally to everybody who could read Homeric Greek, regardless of their mother tongue. In light of all this, Voulgaris’s experiment to ‘translate’ the Aeneid into Homeric Greek operates at several different levels. First, as just noted, it had a pedagogical mission. During his tenure in the Crimea, Voulgaris devoted himself to pedagogy: in 1779 he founded a school in Poltava, the capital of Cherson, primarily for the children of Greek expatriates in Ukraine.⁵ Voulgaris’s translations of Virgil’s epics, both the Aeneid and the Georgics, were directed at the Greek-speaking youth of Cherson. These were the children of hundreds of Greek families who migrated to the Crimea and Ukraine from mainland Greece in the 1770s, fleeing Turkish revenge after an abortive rebellion in the Peloponnese.⁶ Second, the experiment had a

⁵ Batalden 1982. ⁶ The choice of Ukraine and the Crimea for these Greeks was a logical one: from the sixteenth century onwards, Greek merchants and adventurers had established themselves in Ukraine and organized themselves into an important commercial community, as they were granted special privileges such as reduced tariffs. Once these territories, under the name ‘New Russia’, became part of the Russian Empire in 1774, after the official conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, Greeks from mainland Greece were urged to settle there, which they did in substantial numbers. See e.g. Kardasis 2001; Karidis 1981; Kerasidi and Illarioshkina 2011.

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political mission, for Voulgaris’s activity in Russia was connected with an aggressive promotion of Greek classicism in the country under Catherine the Great. As a rule, Voulgaris’s philological interests and translations did not involve classical texts. The two Virgilian epics along with the Anacreontea are the only works of ancient literature that he ever chose to translate. The translation of the Anacreontea was in Russian; it was composed in the early 1790s but was not published until the Russian poet and translator Nikolai L’vov (1751–1803) converted Voulgaris’s prose text into verse—specifically the anacreontic ode.⁷ This verse was a firmly established form of poetic composition in Russia, used by such well-known poets as Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Karamzin, and, later on, L’vov and Martynov. Voulgaris’s translation of this particular text had a clear political motivation: it showed, first, that Russian intellectuals were versed in Greek well enough to be able both to translate Greek poetry and to reproduce the metrical pattern of the original; and, second, that the appropriate Russian vernacular and the linguistic idiom required had developed sufficiently to make the translation of a classical text possible. The translation of the Aeneid was a much more challenging undertaking in linguistic terms, for the objective behind the translations of Virgil in Russian was during Catherine’s time a fundamentally political enterprise.⁸ On 9 September 1775, Voulgaris was appointed archbishop of the newly founded diocesan seat of Cherson and Slaviansk—a seat created especially for him. Many critics consider this appointment catalytic for Voulgaris, in that it caused him to focus on serving Catherine’s Greek Project (the decree by which Catherine appointed him archbishop proclaimed the Greek origins of Russian Orthodoxy) and, alongside that, on promoting his own political goals about the liberation of the Greek nation from Ottoman occupation in the context of Russia’s territorial expansion southwards. Throughout Voulgaris’s career, Voulgaris’s philological work was distinguished by its pedagogical orientation, just like his scientific work: it involved primarily translations of known, mostly contemporary, scientific treatises, accompanied by his own commentary. Once his educational mission was interrupted after his departure from Constantinople, Voulgaris took up more diverse translation projects. In Russia he resumed his pedagogical work with renewed zeal and a new mission. It was, after all, part of his role in the Greek Project, an ambitious scheme to take back from the Ottomans the territories in the Balkans and Anatolia and recreate the Christian Byzantine Empire. The accomplishment of this goal depended primarily on heavy military action. Apart from the great military and economic allure and promise of this territorial expansion, linking Russia to the heritage of Byzantium was expected to bring cultural benefits. The notion of Russia as a restored Byzantium was not new: it was rooted in the view that Moscow was destined to be the ‘Third Rome’, which had ⁷ Batalden 1982, pp. 81–2. ⁸ The Russian translations of the Aeneid since the eighteenth century are discussed in Torlone 2014, pp. 224–48.

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developed in the sixteenth century and was based on the fact the Russia was the sole Orthodox nation free from Ottoman domination.⁹ The strengthening of the links between Russian and Greek Orthodox communities in the Ottoman-occupied Balkans and around the Black Sea infused a strong religious dimension to Catherine’s Greek Project, for which Voulgaris would supply the Orthodox theology.¹⁰ Classical literature was generally unknown in Russia prior to Peter the Great, during whose time the Latin classics were imported into Russia. The reception of Virgil in particular assisted the Russian intellectuals’ effort for national and cultural self-definition, even self-determination,¹¹ and run simultaneously with the composition of the first major literary works in Russian in the eighteenth century.¹² Greek literature came later, during Catherine’s reign.¹³ One of Catherine’s cultural goals was to increase the connection to Greece and the Greek heritage, partly through the teaching of Greek and the commissioning of translations of classical Greek authors, but also through the discovery and promotion of actual ties between the Russians and the Greeks.¹⁴ The presence of a substantial Greek-speaking student body in Cherson allowed Voulgaris to found a school in Poltava, where Greek would be one of the main languages of instruction. To this school (soon to be renamed ‘the Poltava seminary’, the first seminary in Russia to offer Greek)¹⁵ he devoted his energy after his resignation from the post of archbishop in 1779. He taught there for two years, and then undertook the composition of textbooks for use in the school, among which were bilingual translations of the Greek and Latin classics. During the same period Voulgaris completed his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and began the translation of the Aeneid. The Georgics translation was published in 1786 and was dedicated to Grigorii Potemkin; it expressed Voulgaris’s enthusiasm for the Greek Project and his gratitude for Potemkin’s support for the revival of the Greek communities in the Russian Empire, especially in the new territories north of the Black Sea. The Georgics translation included a full commentary on all four books. The Greek language chosen for the translation was a close imitation of the Homeric language.¹⁶

⁹ On the representation of Moscow (and Russia) as the ‘Third Rome’, see concise recent discussions in Torlone 2014, pp. 17–19 and 124–43; and Kalb 2010, pp. 15–17. ¹⁰ The ‘Greek project’ was proposed to Catherine by Voltaire; see Torlone 2015, pp. 69–70. This may explain why Voltaire was the only French thinker to be translated by Voulgaris in Greek. ¹¹ The essential treatment of Virgil’s catalytic contribution to the formation of the Russian national identity is Torlone 2014. ¹² In Torlone’s words, ‘Virgil became, then, a part of solving the problem of Russian national identity in political, social, cultural, spiritual, and personal terms’ (ibid., p. 5). ¹³ See Segel 1973, p. 60: ‘Classical Antiquity and Hellenism, above all, never took hold of the Russian consciousness in the way it [sc.] did the German.’ ¹⁴ Batalden 1982, pp. 30–2. ¹⁵ The seminary soon began attracting many bright students from mainland Greece, but also non-Greek students from Russia. One of the finest graduates was Nikolai I. Gnedich (1784–1833), who attended the school in the late 1790s and would later translate the Iliad into Russian. ¹⁶ On Voulgaris’s translation of the Georgics, see details in Papaioannou 2008.

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The strangeness of this language aside, the Georgics seemed a very appropriate text for the students who were now living in the newly populated vast territory of rural Ukraine (significantly, until the mid-twentieth century, Virgil’s Georgics was considered an authoritative manual on agriculture and animal husbandry); besides, it reflected the predilection for agricultural themes in the ‘classicizing’ literature of eighteenth-century Western Europe. It is hardly accidental that Voulgaris’s Georgics translation was composed simultaneously with the first Russian translation of the Georgics, published in 1777 in St Petersburg under the title ‘Four Books on Agriculture’ and prepared by Vasilii Grigorievitch Ruban. In the same year, Ruban also published A Geographical, Political, Historical Account of Little Russia (‘Little Russia’ or ‘New Russia’ were names used at the time for Ukraine); for his part, Voulgaris was instructed by Potemkin to write an archaeology of the Crimea, but he never produced it.¹⁷ The same pedagogical and cultural–political motives prompted Voulgaris to repeat this strange translation experiment a few years later, with the Aeneid. Depending on the target audience of a literary translation, translation theory distinguishes four types of readers.¹⁸ The first is the reader who knows nothing at all of the original language; who reads either out of curiosity or from a genuine interest in a literature of which s/he will never be able to read one sentence in its original form. The second is the student who is learning the language of the original, and does so in part by reading its literature with the help of a translation. The third is the reader who knew the language in the past but who, because of other duties and occupations, has now forgotten almost all her/his early knowledge. The fourth is the scholar who knows the language of the original in depth. Voulgaris’s translation may address any of the four target audiences identified by translation theorists, and also a new, fifth one: readers who have some knowledge of both languages (the language of the original text and the one used in the translation), since both need to be taught and neither is a spoken or natural language.¹⁹ A better clue to identifying the character of these readers is provided by the accompanying commentary. The edition of the Aeneid followed the model of that of the Georgics: Latin text and Greek translation were set on facing pages in the upper half on both sides, while the lower half was reserved for the commentary: this commentary, as in the Georgics edition, was composed in fairly accessible (and thus readily comprehensible to a native Greek speaker) kathareuousa Greek. Kathareuousa was the archaizing version of the spoken Greek language—an artificial form of the Greek language (as opposed to demotiki, the Greek vernacular) that was constructed by Greek intellectuals of the diaspora in the eighteenth century and embraced as the language of instruction and

¹⁷ Torlone 2014, pp. 223–5. ¹⁸ Savory 1957, p. 56. ¹⁹ The intended readership of Voulgaris’s translation of Virgil is still an open question for modern critics: ‘one wonders what the intended readership of these demanding achievements might have been, and indeed how many people read the translations from end to end’ (Mackridge 2009, p. 85).

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expression in Greek schools throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.²⁰ The language of the commentary suggests that the primary audience of the Aeneid in this translation was most likely Voulgaris’s Greek students at the Poltava school, while the provision of a commentary in Greek underlines the pedagogical objective of the enterprise. Likewise, the translation of an ancient language into another ancient language, neither of them spoken, is pedagogically oriented: allegedly the addressees of these texts can (a) practice and review their knowledge of Homeric Greek, (b) silently translate the Latin text of the Aeneid and compare their silent translation to the one provided by Voulgaris; and also, importantly, (c) understand and feel that both texts belong to the same literary genre, had been composed in the same metre, and used similar structures (both in the Latin verse and in its Greek counterpart, word clusters follow similar patterns; in scansion, the caesura often falls in the same position; proper names, too, are found in the same position, thus both Aeneas and Αἰνείας are set nearly always before the penthemimeral caesura). On the other hand, the choice of Homeric rather than spoken Greek as the language of translation suggests that the work did not have any nationalistic mission for the Greeks, as is often the case with translations of the ancient epos in various national literatures at critical historical times.²¹ Still, the fact that Voulgaris’s Aeneid was published by the Russian Academy of Sciences suggests that the work was expected to appeal to a broader audience, far beyond his Greek students. The texts published or praised by the Russian Academy, which expressed the views of Catherine, were so chosen for their explicit contribution to the Russian cause. Voulgaris’s Aeneid, even though not in Russian, was included among those texts. The fact that the idiom of the target text was not the national language evidently did not pose a problem. Defining the ideal translations of Homer in eighteenth-century Russia, Egunov noted that it is ‘through the unusual, strange language of the translation that the reader is looking at something out of the ordinary and magnificent, and thus must be withdrawn from the sphere of the mundane and moved closer to Homer. In other words, either make Homer a contemporary of the reader or, the reader a contemporary of Homer.’²² This conclusion applies to Voulgaris’s Aeneid translation as much as to any translation of the great epics in Russian. The Greek scholar tried to reproduce the epic experience of the original Latin in its closest interlingual correspondent: the choice of Homeric Greek as the target language was ideally suited for this, because the epic diction of the Homeric poems was the oldest and most widely ²⁰ Because Western Europeans were familiar with, and valued, classical Greek, several of the leading representatives of the neo-Hellenic Enlightenment—such as Eugenios Voulgaris himself, Lambros Photiadis, Stephanos Commitas (1770–1832), and Neophytos Doukas—proposed that the vernacular Greek should be archaized so as to read and sound similar to ancient Greek. See Mackridge 2009, pp. xiv, 385. ²¹ According to Susan Bassnett’s theory, translations (especially of epic texts) are more commonly produced by cultures eager to forge a sense of national identity. She observes this, in effect, in the first French translations of the Aeneid in the sixteenth century. See Bassnett 1991, p. xii. ²² Egunov 1964, pp. 70–1 (quoted in Torlone 2011, p. 232). Egunov, in turn, is reiterating here Schleiermacher’s ideas about translation.

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known, studied and ‘felt’ as such. Admittedly, very few Russian intellectuals and members of the elite could enjoy the Aeneid in Homeric Greek. In this respect, the public recognition of Voulgaris’s translation by the Russian Academy concerns the accomplishment to render the leading epic of the Romans in the language of the leading epic of the Greeks. In theory, Voulgaris offers both an interlingual translation of the Latin epic and a new epic version of the Aeneid, in Homeric language, that is, another Homeric (or, rather, Homeric-sounding) epic. Obviously Voulgaris ignored the fact that Homer and Virgil pursued different literary agendas, because his main concern seems to be the translation process as an effective mechanism of epic composition, not the appreciation of the project of this translation as a literary piece. Vasilii Petrov’s translation of the Aeneid, the first translation of the Virgilian epic into Russian, was published around the same time, in 1786 (the first six books had already been published separately, in 1770), and offered a parallel experiment.²³ Petrov’s Aeneid, though in Russian, did not follow literally the original but intervened and, in a way, ‘modernized’ the text, especially those sections that involved Dido, who is directly compared to Catherine. Petrov’s work was received favourably, indeed praised by the Russian Academy of Sciences for its political–patriotic character, and it won the approval of Catherine, who often remarked on it.²⁴ But it was condemned by Petrov’s peers as non-literal on account of egregious violations of the original, both in metre and in content. Similarly, Voulgaris’s translation was favourably received by the Russian intelligentsia at the time, but it attracted little attention and hardly any praise after his death in 1806. The reason behind this is obvious: very few people could actually read it; as a result, it was useless for the wider purposes of Catherine’s propaganda. Another notable similarity between Petrov’s work and Voulgaris’s Virgilian translations is the dedicatory prologue to Catherine. Voulgaris prefaced his Georgics with a laudatory ode to Prince Potemkin, to whom the translation was dedicated. This ode concluded with a eulogy of Catherine and her reign, which were compared to Augustus and his ‘golden age’. In his turn, Petrov, in a Prologue of his own, dedicated his translation to Grand Duke Paul, Catherine’s son. Both projects were, in sum, different expressions of the Greek Project: they were idiosyncratic in the sense that their principal objectives were not literary or philological. Voulgaris’s mission was primarily pedagogical, while Petrov’s was political, but for both the ultimate objective was to produce a translation that would present itself as an original text in the target language. Not least, in their individual ways, both intellectuals used Virgil’s epic, a common point of reference in Western European culture, as means to connect Russia to the classical world and to underscore the importance of Catherine’s empire both as a European nation and as a leading nation. ²³ On Petrov’s translation, see Torlone 2011.

²⁴ See Torlone 2011, p. 238.

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10.2 The Text Translations of Latin literary texts into any Greek dialect are very few. The best known are those produced by the thirteenth-century monk and theologian Maximos Planudes, who translated from the Latin Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with Macrobius’s commentary; Julius Caesar’s Gallic War; Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses; Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae; and Augustine’s De trinitate.²⁵ Given that Latin had not been spoken or taught in Byzantium since the early days of the Eastern Roman Empire, Planudes’s translations were useful to Greek speakers, who could thus access famous literature otherwise unknown to them; and they were used widely in Western Europe as textbooks in the study of Greek. This primarily pedagogical mission of Planudes’s texts furnishes an important precedent for Voulgaris to follow. I quote the opening four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, along with Planudes’s translation: in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen! (Ov. Met. 1.1–4) My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed into new bodies: O gods above, inspire this undertaking (which you’ve changed as well) and guide my poem in its epic sweep from the world’s beginning to the present day.²⁶ Planudes, Metamorphoses, 1.1–5 τὰς εἰς καινὰ σώματα μεταμειφθείσας μορφὰς ὁ νοῦς με λέγειν διανίστησιν. Ὦ θεοί (καὶ γὰρ οἱ θεοὶ μετεβάλετε ταύτας), τῷ ἐμῷ ἐπιπνεύσατε ἔργῳ, κἀκ πρώτης τοῦ κόσμου γενέσεως εἰς τὸν ἡμέτερον χρόνον συνεχῆ κατάγοιτε τὴν ᾠδήν.²⁷

Planudes’s language was the archaizing language (λόγια γλώσσα, ‘scholarly speech’) used for sophisticated literature in the Byzantine era. This dialect follows lexical and morpho-syntactic structures used in Greek literature of the classical and Roman eras

²⁵ Planudes’s translations were products of the so-called Palaeologian renaissance during the last period in the history of the Byzantine Empire, which was known for its flourishing of culture. During this period a new revival of classical studies took place in the Byzantine East and several important works (mainly on theological subjects) were translated from Latin into Greek, owing to the escalation of the controversy about the union of Eastern and Western Churches. On the Palaeologian Renaissance, see Wilson 1996, pp. 228–68 and Mergiali 1996. For an overview of the Greek translations of Latin theological works during this period, see Nikitas 2001 (with extensive bibliography), Garzya 2004, and Bianconi 2004, pp. 249–65. ²⁶ The translation is from Martin 2010. ²⁷ The Greek text of Planudes’s translation of Ovid comes from Papathomopoulos and Tsavari 2002.

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(the Second Sophistic), long abandoned by the thirteenth century; for example, in Planudes’s time the optative, encountered here in line 5, was not in use any more.²⁸ Further, Planudes translates Ovid’s hexameter into prose but pays particular attention to translating the Latin text closely, by retaining the sentence structure and length established by Ovid. This is particularly helpful for a student reader, who needs the translation above all to have access to the full meaning of the Latin text. The absence of metrical restrictions inevitably produces a prosaic text, but the translator’s decision to avoid interlocking phrases and to translate the original by arranging the words in sense order (e.g. coeptis . . . adspirate meis ~ τῷ ἐμῷ ἐπιπνεύσατε ἔργῳ) is conducive to the needs of a reader who desires above all a close translation. Similarly, Latin compound words appear as parallel formations in Greek (e.g. ad-spirate, Ov. Met. 1.3 ~ ἐπι-πνεύσατε, Planudes, 1.3–4; per-petuum, Ov. Met. 1.4 ~ συν-εχῆ, Planudes, 1.5). Voulgaris was familiar with Planudes’s translations as well as with the long tradition of translating the Greek classics into Latin for educational purposes, given the subordinate position of the Greek language in the Latin-based curriculum and culture of the European West during the Renaissance and afterwards. The Latin translations of Homer, specifically, stemmed from an original ad verbum translation by Leontius Pilatus that dated from the 1360s, was initially corrected and printed in 1537 by Andrea Divus Capodistrianus, and underwent several revisions up to the late seventeenth century (more precisely in 1689).²⁹ These translations followed the original word for word, were printed opposite the Greek text in all editions from the sixteenth century onwards, and purported to offer as literal a rendering of the original as possible, for scholars whose Greek was poor or who were learning the language in schools and universities. The versio latina of the Homeric poems circulated widely in Western Europe and Voulgaris, probably inspired by the educational mission they served, was tempted to undertake the task in reverse: to compose a Greek version of the Latin counterpart (so to speak) of the Homeric epics—the Aeneid. The task was a challenging one, and the architecture of the translation shows that Voulgaris worked hard on rendering the original as faithfully as possible. His methodology of translation may be summed up as follows: first, translation in verse—in dactylic hexameter and in Homeric Greek. Second, the decision to compose in epic metre made the choice of Homeric Greek inevitable. The target audience, Voulgaris’s students, were to use the Greek text to read the Latin and at the same time to review their knowledge of Homeric Greek. To this end, the translation was to be (and to a considerable extent is) as literal as possible, often ad verbum. Third, Voulgaris made a conscious effort to follow the word order of the original Latin. Occasionally, an additional word or expression is needed to translate precisely a particular phrase, and this produces an extra line every now and again: thus, for instance, the translation of Aeneid 1 takes up 804 lines, while Virgil’s ²⁸ On Planudes’s translation of the Metamorphoses, see Fischer 1979. ²⁹ On the Latin translations of the Homeric epics (primarily the Iliad), see Sowerby 1994.

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original has only 756. Translation and text, printed on opposite pages, cover the upper half of each page. The bottom part is taken up by commentary: realia for a better understanding of the text, or explanations of cultural interest. In the commentary Voulgaris often copies a full excerpt of the Homeric passage that has influenced Virgil’s composition of the lines commented upon. The comments always refer to the text of the translation, never to the Latin original, and the lemmata taken from the translation are recorded in the commentary at the beginning of each entry. To look closely at the translation, I have selected two passages, from the opening of Aeneid 1 and 4 respectively, which are among the passages read frequently by students of the Aeneid. I quote Voulgaris’s translation right after each passage (his Greek text in both passages comes from Voulgaris 1791–2). Let us begin with the opening to the epic: arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram; multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem, inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum, Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae. (Verg. A. 1.1–7) I sing of arms and the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome.³⁰ Voulgaris, Aeneid, 1.1–7 Τεύχε’ ἀείδω ἄνδρα τε, ὃς πρῶτος δὴ Τροίης Weapons I-sing man and, who first indeed of-Troy ἔξορος Ἰταλίην δ’ ὑπὸ μοιρῶν ἦλθεν ἰδ’ ἀκτὰς exile to-Italy thanks-to fates came and shores Λαβινίους, ἀνὰ γῆν τ’ ἀνὰ πόντον πόλλ’ ἐπαληθείς, Lavinian, over land and over sea many-things having-wandered-about, δαιμονίῃ τε βίῃ διὰ θ’ Ἥρας μνήμονα μῆνιν divine and force through and Hera’s remembering anger νηλεέος· πολέμῳ πολλὰ τλάς κτίζεν ὅτ’ ἄστυ of-savage; in-war many-things having-endured he-founded at-the-time-when city ἐν δ’ εἰσῆγε θεοὺς Λάτιῳ, γένος ἔνθα Λατίνων, and he-brought-in gods to-Latium, race whence of-Latins, Ἀλβάνιοί τε πάτρες καί γ’ αἰπῆς τείχεα Ῥώμης. Alban and fathers and yes-indeed high walls of-Rome. ³⁰ The translation is from West 1990, both here and in the next passage.

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‘Weapons’ is retained as the opening word in the translation, and so is the first hemistich down to the caesura, but with ἀείδω/cano set before ἄνδρα/virum. The transposition assists the smoother transition to the relative clause immediately following, which modifies ἄνδρα. The Greek words for ‘arms’ and ‘sing’, being trisyllabic, result in completion of the first hexameter one word short of the original; thus the translation of oris is omitted—the phrase Troiae . . . oris has been reduced to Τροίης. The word ἀκτάς, ‘shores’, set at the end of line 2, however, even though it is a translation of litora at the opening of Virgil’s line 3, may also recall visually the oris at the end of Virgil’s line 1. In a way, the placement of ἀκτάς at the end of the line looks both backwards, to the end of line one, and forwards, to the opening of line 3 of the Latin original. In the opening couplet, Voulgaris also translates verbatim (and thus preserves) the Latin construction venire + accusative of location (Ἰταλίην δ’ . . . ἦλθεν ἰδ’ ἀκτὰς / Λαβινίους). Worth noting is the verbatim translation of saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram as διὰ θ’ Ἥρας μνήμονα μῆνιν, which retains in the Greek the Latin construction memorem . . . iram. Voulgaris does the same with the translation of altae moenia Romae in the last line: the adjective in Greek agrees with Ῥώμης, not with τείχεα, as is often inferred. I should note that the translation of lines 5–7 is nearly exact: the Greek text follows the Latin both word for word and in the order of the model (save for the presence of the adjective νηλεέος at the opening of l. 5, which translates saevae of Aen. 1.4 and produces an enjambment where there is none in Virgil). Finally, I should comment on Voulgaris’s invention of the term πάτρες in l. 7. The Greek nominative plural of πατήρ is of course πατέρες; the form *πάτρες is never attested in Homer; yet there is the dative plural πατράσι, and in Odyssey the genitive plural is attested twice in the form πατρῶν (Od. 4.687; 8.245). Voulgaris, then, presumably forged also a nominative πάτρες deliberately, in order to transfer into Greek precisely the Latin patres. Now let us look at the opening of Aeneid 4: at regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni. multa viri virtus animo multusque recursat gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore vultus verbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem. (Verg. A. 4.1–5) But the queen had long since been suffering from love’s deadly wound, feeding it with her blood and being consumed by its hidden fire. Again and again there rushed into her mind thoughts of the great valour of the man and the high glories of his line. His features and the words he had spoken had pierced her heart and love gave her body no peace or rest. Voulgaris, Aeneid, 4.1–6 Αἰνῷ δ’ οὐτηθεῖσα ἔρωτι πάλαι βασίλεια, With-dreadful but wounded love long-since the-queen

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τρῶμα φλεψί τρέφεν, πυρὶ αὐτὰρ μάρπτετ’ ἀδήλῳ, wound with-her-veins was-feeding, by-fire again she-was-seized hidden, οὕνεκα νωλεμέως φρεσὶν ἀμφιτρόχαζεν ἑῇσιν wherefore without-pause in-mind encircled her ἀνὴρ τ’ ἔξοχ’ ἄριστος ἰδ’ ἄπλετον ἔθνεος εὖχος· the-man and eminently best and ample of-his-nation boast. τοῦδ’ εἶδός τε ἔπη τ’ ἐν στέρνοις ἔμμονα πῆκται, his image and words and in chest steadfast are-nailed οὔτ’ ἐδίδου γυίοις μελεδώνη νήδυμον ὕπνον. nor was-offering to-knees the-care-of-love sweet sleep.

Voulgaris’s use of the dactylic hexameter conditions the word order, while his meticulous transference of every Latin word into its Greek equivalent results in a text of six rather than five lines. Virgil’s arresting opening with at, ‘but’, creates a sudden change of tone in the narrative and denotes the shift of focus from the narrator and acting hero Aeneas to his target audience Dido, but also strengthens the narrative bond with the end of Aeneid 3; and the transition from the one book to the next is effected seamlessly. This sudden transition is lost in Voulgaris. Virgil describes Dido’s emotional condition with the adjective saucia; Voulgaris chose a participle, οὐτηθεῖσα (< οὐτάω) an epic participle that occurs often in Homer but not in the feminine, unless the subject is the feminine noun ὠτειλή, ‘wound’, and specifically the ‘open wound’.³¹ As such it captures the double meaning of saucia and, importantly, qualifies its incurable status on all occasions. Dido’s figurative wound here, caused by Cupid’s arrows, will later become a real one: first when she is compared to the wounded deer by the ignorant hunter in the famous simile at 4.136–43; and, second, at the end of the book, of course, when she stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. Voulgaris’s πάλαι transfers successfully iamdudum, ‘for a long time now’. The time that has passed is actually short, just a long night, but it does seem long from Dido’s perspective. Πάλαι may be used for something that happened in the distant past (‘long ago’, ‘once upon a time’) but also with the opposite sense, of the present, of time just past (‘not long ago’); both these meanings are found in Homer (Il. 9.527; 9.105, respectively). The translation of carpitur by μάρπτεται is no less apt: the Greek verb has both a literal and a figurative meaning, and it is very often used in a hostile sense, as is the case here with carpitur. Voulgaris successfully achieves a line-by-line translation for the opening couplet, but he takes more space for the next line and a half, up to the semi-colon; he needs two full lines to translate one and a half of the original. The phrase νωλεμέως φρεσὶν ἀμφιτρόχαζεν ἑῇσιν translates animo . . . recursat. Voulgaris used four words to translate Virgil’s two. In seeking to render the Latin as precisely as possible, he uses φρένες for animus—an apt choice; for, like animus and its variety of meaning, φρήν may ³¹ See LSJ s.v. ὠτειλή A and Montanari 2013, s.v. ὠτειλή (α).

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refer both to the heart as the seat of passions and to the mind as the seat of mental faculties, and in the plural almost always describes one’s ‘wits’. The adverb νωλεμέως, which means both ‘without-pause, unceasingly’ and ‘firmly’, transfers the recurring presence of Aeneas in Dido’s mind (recurring until becoming firm and dominant), which is denoted by the re- prefix of recursat. Inventive, however, is the employment of ἀμφιτρόχαζεν for (re)cursat, ‘keep coming back with persistence’. Now ἀμφιτροχάζω, is not an epic word (at least it is not found in the extant epic texts); what is more, it is a hapax, occurring in Apollodorus 1.9.12, where it is said of a knife driven into the trunk of a tree, encompassed by the bark and hidden. Unless Voulgaris has in mind some other citation (unknown today), it is not easy to comprehend this particular choice of verb. Moving on to the third verse, virtus for Voulgaris is the equivalent of the epic ἀριστεία; and because it is the man, not the aristeia that Dido has fallen in love with, in Voulgaris’s translation ‘man’ (ἀνήρ) becomes the subject and centre of attention, and the noun virtus is rendered with an adjective modifier of ἀνήρ. Finally Voulgaris’s adverb ἔξοχα (‘outstanding’) is stronger than Virgil’s multa; and its placement right next to the superlative ἄριστος enhances Aeneas’s eminence in Dido’s mind. Virgil employs forms of the same adjective, multus, twice in the same line, but Voulgaris does not translate literally either of them; also, he uses two different words, by which initiative he dilutes the repetition, at the same time amplifying the sense of multus. The second multus, also an adjective—modifying honos, which Voulgaris renders precisely with εὖχος—in Voulgaris’s translation has become ἄπλετος, which does not just mean ‘much’, but ‘boundless, immense’. Virgil loves alliteration and uses it frequently to enhance the musical feeling of his verses: in the opening of Aeneid 4 we have caeco carpitur (l. 2) as well as vulnus . . . venis (l. 2), viri virtus (l. 3), and, in the next line, vultus / verbaque (ll. 4/5).Voulgaris realizes this and tries to observe it in his translation: thus he produces respectively πυρὶ αὐτὰρ μάρπτετ’ (l. 2) (notice, incidentally, that μάρπτετ’ retains the combination of the same consonant sounds of carpitur), τρῶμα . . . τρέφεν (l. 2), while the anaphora of consonants has been replaced with homoeoarctic vowel sounds in ἀνὴρ . . . ἄριστος (l. 4) (the translation of viri virtus), and εἶδός τε ἔπη (l. 5). In verse 6 of Voulgaris’s translation the adjective ἔμμονα, ‘lasting’, does not render the violence of Virgil’s infixi (4.5), a word usually defining weapons, but it conveys the permanence of a weapon’s strike—once again reminding the reader of the deer simile a little later and of the comparison between Dido and the wounded deer, who has been left to die with the arrow that hit it still driven into its body. Voulgaris’s option for στέρνοις to translate pectus is not a successful one: στέρνον, in both the singular and the plural, always refers to the male chest in Homer (στῆθος being the proper term for the female chest/breast); the word is used to refer to the female breast for the first time in tragedy (e.g. E. Hec. 563). Finally, the translation of cura (Virg. Aen. 4.5) with μελεδώνη (a hapax in Homer) is quite appropriate, for both words suggest the ‘care’ or ‘sorrow’ often caused by

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love or longing for one’s beloved; and, more importantly, μελεδώνη is the anxiety taking over one’s mind at night and preventing one from falling asleep. Thus, in the only Homeric attestation (in the plural) at Odyssey 19.517, Penelope’s sorrows and longing for the absent Odysseus prevent her from sleeping at night. The plural seems to have a similar meaning, that is, ‘sorrows of love’, in Sappho (fr. 17LP). Virgil uses cura twice in these opening lines of Book 4, both times referring to Dido’s growing love for Aeneas; Voulgaris translates the term with two different words, which are more explicit about the nature of this cura (anxiety). As he thus evokes the Homeric text, he casts Dido in the light of Penelope, which in turn preconditions the parallelism between Aeneas and Odysseus. Most appropriate is the selection of the adjective νήδυμος for placidam. Even though the Greek word means ‘sweet’, in Homer it is always the adjective that modifies sleep. To conclude: Voulgaris strove to reproduce Virgil’s voice in Homer’s language, not only because he wished to furnish the aspiring student of the classical languages with a model bilingual primer, but also because he saw in his Virgilian translations the first level of a dynamic cultural appropriation at the service of Catherine’s effort to project Russia as the successor of Byzantine Hellenism. An Aeneid that read like the Iliad may not have appealed widely to the Russian public, but in theory it showed the interrelation of the classical languages, and also the two great cultures behind them— the two cultures whose heritage Russia under Catherine was coming to champion and succeed.

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11 Farming for the Few Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil Marko Marinčič

The text that triggered me to write this chapter is the translation of Virgil’s Georgics into Slovenian by Jožef Šubic (1802–61). Šubic was a doctor who never aspired to a literary or scholarly career. He studied philosophy in Ljubljana, medicine in Vienna and Padua, and worked as a doctor in Celje and Maribor (Styria region, in the northeast of today’s Slovenia). Until the posthumous publication of his annotated translation of the Georgics in 1863, he was known mainly as a fervent liberal patriot who opposed the idea of merging South Slavic languages into one unitary idiom (the ‘Illyrian’) and vigorously attacked monks and celibate (Catholic) priests for not contributing to the preservation and expansion of the nation.¹ His version of Virgil’s poem, which was never republished and is today hardly known outside scholarly circles, is nevertheless historically important as one of the first substantial literary translations and the first full translation of a Greek or Latin classical text into Slovenian. The fact that such a pioneering translation was presented in the style of a farming manual might easily lead to simplified conclusions, especially since Šubic, in his Preface, imagines his ideal reader as a plain farmer on an evening stroll across the fields with a copy of Georgikon čvetere bukve (Four Books of Georgics) in his hand:²

¹ All relevant biographical and bibliographical data can be found on the website of Slovenski biografski leksikon (The Biographical Lexicon of Slovenia) at http://www.slovenska-biografija.si. The main source is Šubic’s own autobiographical sketch, which is published, together with an addendum by the editor Janez Majcinger, as a postscript to the Georgics translation; see Šubic 1863, pp. 116–18. ² The use of the Greek genitive plural, Georgikōn, in the title is in itself a signal that the ‘ideal’ unsophisticated rustic is not—or at least not the only—intended reader. The translation is philologically faithful and does not adapt ancient names or realia to the realities of the Slovenian farmer. This edition is the source of all my quotations from Šubic’s translation of the Georgics in this chapter.

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While translating the poetic work of the deathless Virgil, the reader I had in mind was, more than any other, a slightly cultured farmer at least to some degree acquainted with classical studies [!], a friend of ancient Roman literature, who, after the hard daily work, might sometimes take a stroll over the green meadows, sheltered by the pleasant coolness of old poetry, and hearken to the sweet song of the Latin Modrice [sc. ‘the Wise Ones’: local variant of the Muses].³

Šubic’s translation is not a literary masterpiece, much as the author may insist that the ten years of polishing it are evidence of a Horatian labour (cf. nonum prematur in annum ‘[a work] should be kept hidden until into the ninth year’ at Hor. Ars 388).⁴ To begin with, it is replete with rustic colloquialisms and neologisms. But its most disturbing deficiency, at least in the eyes of a modern reader, lies in its metrical form. It is not what the reader used to the twentieth-century convention of the ‘Slovenian hexameter’ would expect: a regular accentual pattern (–´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ – . . . ) that can be reproduced correctly by any speaker of the language. This is how the concluding lines of Šubic’s Georgics would have to sound if the accent-based regular pattern were strictly respected (ictus in bold; – and ⏑ mark stressed and unstressed syllables; metrical quantity does not exist in Slovenian): Mene Virgilija je Partènope lepa redila –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Tisti čas, in cvetel sem o mirnem učenji, –⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Pesme ki sem igral pastirske, pa mlad in pogumen –⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Titire, tebe prepéval v senci koščatega gabra.⁵ –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

The natural rendition of these lines, one that follows the word accent, is quite different (natural stresses in bold): Mene Virgilija je Partènope lepa redila –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Tisti čas, in cvetel sem o mirnem učenji, ⏑⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

³ Šubic 1863, p. 4. As a doctor, Šubic also published journal articles on practical matters such as domestic hygiene; they are written in a solemn didactic tone, which sheds some light on the naivety of his approach to Virgil’s ‘agricultural manual’. ⁴ Šubic 1863, p. 4. Šubic tells us that he started the translation on 10 October 1850 and finished it in 1860. ⁵ illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat / Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, / carmina qui lusi pastorum audax iuuenta, / Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi (‘And I, Virgil, was lying in the lap of Naples, quite at home / in studies of the arts of peace, I, who once amused myself / with rustic rhymes, and, still a callow youth, / sang of you, Tityrus, as I lounged beneath the reach of one great beech’, Verg. G. 4.563–6). Throughout this chapter I am quoting Virgil’s Latin text from Mynors 1972; its translation comes from Fallon 2004.

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MARKO MARINČIČ

Pesme ki sem igral pastirske, pa mlad in pogumen –⏑/⏑⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Titire, tebe prepéval v senci koščatega gabra. –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

From the point of view of the reader accustomed to the rigorous accentual pattern, unnatural stresses are required in order for the hexameter to work. In many cases, it is impossible to reproduce the rhythmical pattern ‘correctly’ without visualising the metrical schema, which is itself a reduction of the quantitative metre to the accentual scansion of Latin and Greek poetry practised in schools and does not have much to do with the ancient sound of the hexameter. In Pesme ki sem igral, the second foot (ki sem i-) is composed of three unaccented syllables; it is impossible to decide where to set the stress. In tisti čas in cvetel sem o, all metrical stresses except cvetel would be artificial; they would serve the sole purpose of enforcing a regular scheme. But is this really how Šubic wanted his versification to be reproduced? I think not. A curious passage in the Preface reveals the extent of his insecurity regarding the very possibility of imitating ancient metrical forms in Slovenian (Šubic 1863, pp. 6–7): Writing in Slovenian still requires the use of accents . . . especially in case of doubt. This is because the length and the shortness of particular words has not yet been established in Slovenian, as it is in ancient Greek and in Latin, and also in German. But once we have a significant number of poets and orators in Slovenian, when they enrich our literature with appealing fruits of their genius, which will contain the awareness of length and shortness of individual letters, then, I assert, the Slovenian language will not need any help from such accent marks: all readers will be able to read poetic creations correctly and will never again stumble over pronunciation. . . . While waiting for the Golden Age of a real and richer Slavic literature, every Slovenian poet and prose writer should dedicate himself to enabling people to read and pronounce, that is, also to scan [literally: ‘to draw’, according to the length], his writings correctly.

Šubic obviously believed that a more developed literary culture would spontaneously bring about a more sophisticated awareness of quantity of syllables; until then, writers should use accent marks in order to enable their readers to read a literary product as they, the writers, intended it to sound. Šubic himself often puts an extra accent over a vowel as a help for the reader. However, these accent marks never disagree with the natural (prose) accent; they are never used in places where unnatural accenting would be the only way of producing the ‘correct’ metrical form. Let us take another example (natural stresses in bold; unnatural stresses required by the metre with underlining): o fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas! quibus ipsa procul discordibus armis fundit humo facilem uictum iustissima tellus. si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis mane salutantum totis uomit aedibus undam, nec uarios inhiant pulchra testudine postis

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inlusasque auro uestis Ephyreiaque aera, alba neque Assyrio fucatur lana ueneno, nec casia liquidi corrumpitur usus oliui; at secura quies et nescia fallere uita, diues opum uariarum, at latis otia fundis, speluncae uiuique lacus, at frigida tempe mugitusque boum mollesque sub arbore somni non absunt; illic saltus ac lustra ferarum et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuuentus, sacra deum sanctique patres; extrema per illos Iustitia excedens terris uestigia fecit. (Verg. G. 2.458–74) ‘If they but knew! They’re steeped in luck, country people, being far removed from grinds of war, where earth that’s just showers them with all that they could ever ask for. So what if he hasn’t a mansion with gates designed to impress and callers traipsing in and out all morning long. So what if there’s no rabble gawking at the entrance with its gaudy tortoiseshell veneer, and tapestries with gold filigree, and bronzes plundered on a march to Corinth. So what if their wool’s merely bleached and not stained with Assyrian dyes, and the olive oil they use hasn’t been diluted with that tint of cinnamon— no, what they have is the quiet life—carefree and no deceit— and wealth untold—their ease among cornucopiae, with grottoes, pools of running water and valleys cool even in warm weather, the sounds of cattle and sweet snoozes in the shade. There are glades and greenwoods, lairs of game, young men wed to meagre fare but born and built for work. Here, too, is reverence for god and holy fathers, and it was here that Justice left her final footprints as she was taking leave of earth.’ Šubic, Georgics 2.458–74 O prebláženi kmetje zarés, ko lastno bi dobro –⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Cénili prav, katerim, vstrán neslóžnem’ orožju, –⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Lahko hrano daruje najpravičnejša zemlja. –⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Da–si tud zjutraj visoki dom ponòsnega vhóda –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Pozdravljávcev trúm iz klónice polne ne zliva, ⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Tud ne hlepê po veríjah, okínčanih z želvino ljusko, –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Ali po zlatih odevah in efirejskem bronovji; ⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

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Tud če ne bela se volna rudí v asirski nataki, –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Kasija tud ne vživánja grení prečistega olja: –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Pa neskerbni pokój in mirno nedolžno živetje, ⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Raznih bogato imánj; pa čas na zelenih livadah. –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Špilje in ribniki živi so tam; ne manjkajo hladne –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Pónikve, muk govéd in pod drevesnim osenčjem –⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Lahek drém; planinje je tam in ložišče zverinja; –⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Tudi dovoljna v tveg in malega vajena mladež; –⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Častje bogóv in sveti očetje; na kmetih je, préden –⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Popustila je svet, Pravíca pohájala zadnjič. ⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

There is no single instance in this passage of an accent mark motivated solely by the metrical scheme. In cases of words with alternative accenting (vživánja/vžívanja; pokój/ pôkoj; pónikve/poníkve), the mark is used to prevent ambiguity or to suggest the variant that fits the metre more closely. Elsewhere the accent mark coincides with a strong natural stress. This means that Šubic decided to tolerate three unaccented syllables in the position of the dactyl and two in the position of the spondee; he often starts a line with two weak syllables (pozdravljávcev; pa neskérbni; popustíla). But once one thinks away the requirements of the mechanical accentual schema, very successful passages can be found in this text, like the one on the advantages of pious rural life over (Lucretian) natural science (unstressed parts of the text that defy the metrical schema are underlined): sin has ne possim naturae accedere partis frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis, rura mihi et rigui placeant in uallibus amnes, flumina amem siluasque inglorius. o ubi campi Spercheosque et uirginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta! o qui me gelidis conuallibus Haemi sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari: fortunatus et ille deos qui nouit agrestis Panaque Siluanumque senem Nymphasque sorores. (Verg. G. 2.483–94)

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‘But if I am not the one to sound the ways of the world because my heart’s lack of feeling stands in the way, then let me be satisfied with rural beauty, streams bustling through the glens; let me love woods and running water—though I’ll have failed. Oh, for the open countryside along the Spercheus, or the mountains of Taygetus, its horde of Spartan maidens ripe for the picking! Oh, for the one who’d lay me down to rest in cool valleys of the Haemus range and mind me in the shade of mighty branches! That man has all the luck who can understand what makes the world tick, who has crushed underfoot his fears about what’s laid out in store for him and stilled the roar of Hell’s esurient river. Indeed he’s blessed, who’s comfortable with country gods— Pan and old Sylvanus, and the sorority of nymphs.’ Šubic, Georgics, 2.483–94 Ako pa teh okrájn prirode doiti ne morem, ⏑⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Ker merzlòtna se kri protivi v mojem oserčji, ⏑⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/⏑⏑⏑/–⏑ Naj so polja mi všeč in tekoče vodé po dolinah; ⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Reke ljubim in gozd neslávljeni! O, ve livade, –⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Ti, Sperhéj in homci, na kterih lakónske device –⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Rajajo! O, kdo pelje me tje v zavetje hladno –⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑ Bálkana, ter me krije z véj nezmernim osenčjem! –⏑⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Srečen, kdor izvir stvari spoznati je mogel, –⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Ki vesoljni je strah in nesprosljivo osódo ⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Spravil pod nogé ter hrup Aherónta premagal. –⏑/⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Blaženi tudi je on, priznava ki poljske bogóve, –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑ Pana in starčika ž njim, Silvana, in sèstrice Vile! ⁶ –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–⏑

Šubic’s ‘free’ use of the hexameter radically differs from the practice of Slovenian translators of the last century, who strictly observed the ictus (strong accent on the first syllable of each foot). Until Kajetan Gantar decided to start the line occasionally ⁶ The use of Vile (Slavic ‘fairies’) as a replacement for ‘nymphs’ is one of the few cases of adaptation in the style of Livius Andronicus, Homer’s first translator into Latin, who rendered the Greek ‘Muse’ as Camena. At 1.11, the Latin Fauni are accompanied by rusalke—an interpretatio Slavica for the Dryads.

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without a strong stress in his translation of the Odyssey (Gantar 1992), a casual group of classicists would be able to spend a whole evening making fun of the weak ki (‘who’) at the beginning of line 491. According to what they had been taught, every line should start with a cannon shot, even if that means describing the beauty of Nausicaä and not a march of soldiers. Yet this observance, as firmly rooted as it might have been, was nothing but a century-old and widely accepted convention. Moreover, it has serious limitations. The heavy ictuses (–´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ ⏑ ⏑) often produce a nervously mechanical waltz-like rhythm that is only occasionally softened by intervening spondees and rarely succeeds in conjuring up a rhythmic sensation of epic width. Anton Sovre, whose translations have become classics, insisted on the strong initial ictus in his renditions of Homer (Sovre 1950, 1951) to the point of using the archaic áko (‘if ’) instead of the unaccented če (‘if ’).⁷ Sovre banned this commonest of words, ‘if ’, almost entirely from Homer just because many sentences start with ‘if ’ and because beginnings of sentences tend to coincide with the beginning of the line. Despite the moderate quality of his translation, Šubic seems to follow a very different tradition with his ‘loose’, accentually flexible hexameter—a tradition that has brilliant representatives in Goethe and Schiller.⁸ As in other areas of culture, the Slovenians were heavily dependent on German influences in the theory and practice of literary translation in the nineteenth century.⁹ Attempts at a ‘quantitative’ versification that follows the ancient prosodic rules existed in both German and Slovenian: the rule of positional length was artificially applied to two languages that do not distinguish between long and short syllables in the way Greek and Latin do.¹⁰ The idea was to import ancient prosody into modern languages, but the result revealed the absurdity of this endeavour: since the verse rhythm of most modern languages is based on accent rather than on syllable quantity, the fiction of a ‘quantitative’ metre required putting some kind of accent where there is none and (at least partly) ignoring them where they should be heard. This eccentric vogue resembled (and actually followed) a scholastic tradition in the scansion of Greek and Latin poetry that purported to reproduce the original rhythm by replacing the word accent with the so-called ictus: Árma uirúmque canó. The futility of such metrical exercises was criticized as early as 1833 by the most

⁷ A word meaning ‘if ’ can never bear a strong accent by its very nature. The same went for ako, as long as it was used in everyday speech. Sovre obviously took advantage of the solemn sound of the archaic word and decided that it could be used to produce an awe-inspiring initial ictus. But ako was not archaic (or heavily accented) at the time of Šubic, who uses it to introduce a meditative passage (Sin has ne possim naturae accedere partis, Verg. G. 2.483ff.). Here a militant initial accent would spoil the effect. ⁸ For a thorough overview of the use of classical metrical forms in German poetry, see Habermann 1958. See also Trevelyan 1941, pp. 295–300 (on Goethe). ⁹ On the Slovenian hexameter, see Kravar 1979, 1981 and 1982 (in Croatian, with summary in German); Gantar 1999 (with summary in German); and Bjelčevič 2011. ¹⁰ This was not limited to the rule that two consonants after a short vowel produce a long syllable, but was extented to muta cum liquida as an exception. Neither the rule nor the exception are relevant to the length (or accentuation) of syllables in German and in Slovenian.

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prominent Slovenian critic of the nineteenth century and one of the leading intellectuals of the time, Matija Čop (1797–1835). In a reaction to his Czech friend F. L. Čelakovský’s criticism of some Slovenian poetry, Čop refused the idea of quantitative versification in Slovenian—and even in Czech, a language more sensitive to quantity of vowels. Ridiculing the claim that ‘verses should be measured according to quantity and read according to accent’, Čop pointedly asks: ‘What is the good of verses that may not be read in the way they are measured?’¹¹ If, then, Šubic follows the Goethean type of hexameter, loosely based on word accent, why does he envisage a future golden age, when poetry in Slavic languages will acquire a sense of quantity that German poetry already possesses? Why does the Slovenian nationalist Šubic feel the urge to acknowledge the superiority of quantityaware Germans, when he could simply refer to the authority of Goethe? Again, the explanation is to be sought in the developments that the theory and practice of versification à l’antique underwent in Germany after the Goethean era of the ‘free’ hexameter. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1826), probably the best-known German translator of Homer, whom Šubic certainly knew as a translator of Virgil’s Georgics, initiated a more rigorously classicizing vogue of imitating ancient metrical patterns, which presented itself as a mixture of accentual and quantitative approaches.¹² The bulk of Voß’s theory—which was initially presented in brief form in the foreword to his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and later elaborated upon in his widely read Zeitmessung der deutschen Sprache—was dedicated to the problem of the spondee.¹³ A true spondee, according to Voß, should consist of two ‘lengths’, usually in the form of composite words such as Meerflut.¹⁴ There is a good example of this in Voß’s translation of Georgics 2.470–1, which is part of a longer passage discussed earlier in this chapter (pp. 169–70). I am quoting from the 1789 edition of Voß’s translation (natural accents in bold): Rindergebrüll, und im Wehen des Baums sanftträumende Schlummer, Mangeln ihm nicht; Bergwälder sind dort, und Lager des Wildes.

Sanftträumende and Bergwälder are two typical examples of the so-called reversed spondee.¹⁵ In both cases, there is a clash between the quantitative pattern and the word accent: –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ –´ –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ x –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ –´ –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ – –´ ⏑ ⏑ –´ x ¹¹ Čop 1833, p. 30: Was sollen uns Verse, die man nicht lesen darf, wie sie gemessen sind? The article is in German and conveniently contains the German translation of Čelakovský’s contribution. Against the artificial constructions of positional length, Čop lucidly remarks that it is only too easy for the Slavs to pronounce a sequence of two or three consonants. ¹² Voß 1789. ¹³ Voß 1789 [Metrical Quantity in German], pp. xiv–xx; 1802. ¹⁴ Voß 1802, p. 129, provides the following example of ‘a length bearing a weaker accent that can be elevated by the rhythm of the verse’: Brausender steigt Méerflùt im Orkan. ¹⁵ Heusler 1917.

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Voß did not expect his reader to scan Sanftträumende and Bergwälder, of course. Quite the contrary: he used accented ‘lengths’ in the second part of the spondee as an antidote against the abhorred situation—a trochee (a strongly accented syllable, followed by an accentual deflation). In order to avoid this pattern, Voß and his followers tended to put, in the position of the spondee, two ‘lengths’ with a strong natural accent on the second, at the expense of starting the next foot in a weak syllable (in Bergwälder, -wäl- is weaker than berg-; nobody would pronounce Bergwälder). Goethe, who initially mocked some aspects of this theory as ‘Sibylline leaves’ (sibyllinische Blätter), remarking that Voß might have expressed himself ‘less mystically’,¹⁶ came later on (in his Achilleid and in revisions of his earlier works) to follow, at least in part, the classicizing metrical ideals of Voß, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and A. W. Schlegel.¹⁷ Voß lost some of his popularity in the following decades,¹⁸ and his artificial imitations of Homeric diction often make his translations obscure and even unintelligible to the modern German reader;¹⁹ but his metrical theories, which combine the aspects of ‘tone’, ‘length’, and ‘stress required by meaning [Begriff ]’, have recently been reappraised in a more favourable light.²⁰ Voß had a number of followers in other languages, especially Germanic and Slavic. Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846), a Hellenist and a Romantic poet regarded as the father of modern poetry in Sweden, addressed the following epigram to a Vossian zealot: Måtte dig Voss bistå´—förlåt jag menade: bístå! Máy Voß bé with yoú. So sorry, I meant: Voß be wíth you.²¹ The ‘underlying’ German version would go: Möge dir Voß beistéhn—verzeih, ich dachte an béistehn! The rules of the ‘modern’ Slovenian hexameter are in great part based on Voß. They rigorously obey the Trochäenverbot (‘trochee ban’), but the technique of ‘forging’ spondees is slightly different. In the absence of ‘two-length’ composite words, the only way to forge a spondee is to set a word with a strong accent on the final syllable (or a stressed monosyllabic word) before the second long syllable of the spondaic foot, thus producing a pause and ‘lengthening’ the second syllable. A classic example is the first line of the Iliad in the 1950 translation of Anton Sovre: Pesem, boginja, zapoj, o jezi Pelida Ahila –⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/––/–⏑⏑/–⏑⏑/–x The song, goddess, sing, of the anger of Peleus’s son Achilles.

¹⁶ See Häntzschel 1977, p. 57. ¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 224–61, esp. 255–7; Couturier-Heinrich 2015. ¹⁸ Especially due to the brilliant discussion of the ‘forged spondee’ by Heusler 1917, who insisted on the prevailingly accentual character of German verse. ¹⁹ See Holzberg, forthcoming; interestingly, Voß’s original translation of the Odyssey, which was published in 1781, is often much easier to understand and sounds more natural than the second, metrically ‘improved’ version of 1793, which follows strictly the newly invented spondee dogma. ²⁰ It is, according to Häntzschel 1977, p. 62, ‘a compromise between the requirements of the accent and those of quantity’, and ‘a practically useful solution’. See also Kitzbicher in Kitzbicher et al. 2009, p. 23. ²¹ Quoted in Heusler 1917, p. 74.

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The accented zapój produces a pause and lengthens the ‘o’. The trick actually works: it helps to avoid the mechanical monotony of dactyls, which is characteristic of the Russian hexameter translations of Virgil, and produces natural-sounding substitutes for the quantitative spondee without artificially creating fictions of quantity in a language that does not distinguish between single- and double-length syllables. This is not the place to speculate on why Šubic, who most probably read the theoretical foreword to Voß’s bilingual edition of the Georgics and perhaps also his Zeitmessung, decided rather to follow the ‘dissolute’ hexameter of the early Goethe. In any case, such a choice was accepted with much less prejudice at that time than it would be today. It should be borne in mind that the trochee ban and other metrical rules pedantically respected by the modern translators²² are a product of a local tradition. The influential poet and critic Josip Stritar, who first described the artifice of ‘forging’ good (pseudo-quantitative) spondees, would probably be the first to protest against imposing the phonetic fraud as a divinely revealed dogma, especially since he hardly thought that Voß wrote better hexameters than Goethe.²³ It would be unfair to confront Šubic’s groundbreaking work with the tradition of translation of classical texts that was to emerge after him. His rendition of Virgil’s poem is surprisingly faithful and contains no blatant mistakes. Still, it is not an important literary achievement. Its interest lies elsewhere. In the following pages, I will try to suggest an answer to the question ‘Why Virgil’s Georgics?’ Why did Homer have to wait until 1950, and why is Livy still waiting to be translated into Slovenian? The answer to these questions is far from obvious. At the time of Šubic’s translation, great poetry (for example, by France Prešeren, which will be discussed here) and some relevant prose fiction already existed in the language. The middle classes among the Slovenianspeaking population under the Austrian monarchy had the opportunity to learn Latin as part of their general education, and German translations of ancient and other classics were commonly accessible. There is no straightforward reason why Šubic should indulge, as late as between 1850 and 1860, in the highly unrealistic image of a local farmer reciting Virgil by way of relief from his daily efforts. I think Šubic’s Virgil is above all an extremely interesting phenomenon within the history of a national literature that has always nourished a love–hate attitude toward its own (alleged) agricultural roots.²⁴ I will suggest that the reception of Virgil, and especially of the Georgics, as an ambiguous model of both literary classicism and ²² Myself included. I only rarely started lines with če and strictly avoided trochees in my translations of Virgil and Ovid. Before approaching this historical material, I never questioned the spondee mantra. ²³ Stritar 1876. He uses the metaphor in a positive sense, probably as a reaction to criticism against Voß that culminated in Heusler’s 1917 treatise on the ‘false’ spondee. ²⁴ A characteristic example of simplification is A. J. P. Taylor’s classic book The Habsburg Monarchy, which counts the Slovenians among the ‘peasant peoples’ of the monarchy that had ‘more writers than readers’, and developed an innovating form of nationalism; according to Taylor, those nations for a long time existed only in the mind of literary authors who were ‘the outcome of the agrarian system which Maria Theresa and Joseph II had made’ (Taylor 1964, pp. 26–9). The romantic myth of a nation (and a state) born out of literature is still alive in Slovenia; for a critical discussion of the ‘Slovene cultural syndrome’, see Dović 2007.

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agrarian nationalism, is an ideal illustration of some fundamental ambivalences concerning the formation of Slovenian as a literary language and the self-definition of a marginal literature within the broader context of European and world literature. But, in order to do so, it is necessary to take a more detailed look at the role that Virgil and other ancient classics played in Slovenian literature during its early stages.²⁵ Poetry in the Slovenian language did not have any artistically ambitious representatives before Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), a Franciscan, teacher of Greek and Latin, journalist, and a supporter of the French occupation, which created the Illyrian Provinces (Provinces illyriennes, 1809–13), an autonomous province of the Napoleonic empire that included the western part of today’s Slovenia.²⁶ In general, Vodnik’s poems show a pronounced influence of French and German–Austrian Baroque and Enlightenment classicism. Good examples of this are the translation of a selection from the Anacreontea and a number of imitations of Horace’s Carmina. Both Anacreon (Vodnik believed that the Anacreontea were by him) and Horace were obvious choices, especially since the school curricula of the Austrian monarchy, to which today’s Slovenian territory belonged, were heavily marked by the aesthetic tendencies of the eighteenth century. At the same time, Vodnik’s typical addressee is—sometimes very incongruously—a simple Slovenian farmer. Vodnik did not and could not reach a wide audience in Slovenian with his poetry; it was only after his death that he became the object of a cult that involved public celebrations and various forms of almost saint-like worship.²⁷ There was, however, a short period during which Vodnik could actually hope for an institutional channel for the transmission of texts, literary ones included, in his mother tongue. During the French occupation of the region, German lost the status of (unique) official language of instruction in state schools and had to give this place gradually to local languages.²⁸ These cultural opportunities were probably the main reason why Vodnik greeted Napoleon with an enthusiastic ode in imitation of Horace’s Carmen saeculare. It was a poem entitled Illyria Revived (‘Napoleon speaks out: Rise, Illyria!’, etc.) and composed in 1809.²⁹ During the happy years of the Illyrian Provinces and before the return of the Austrians, who pensioned him off with a third of his salary, Vodnik wrote a number of textbooks and manuals on subjects ranging from grammar to cooking. The practical challenges of education in a language without its own

²⁵ On classical reception in Slovenia in general, see Gantar 2003, 2010; Simoniti and Gantar 2015; Marinčič 2017a. ²⁶ For an overview in English, see Luthar 2008, pp. 255–79. ²⁷ See especially Jezernik 2010 and Dović 2014, with further bibliographic references. ²⁸ That is, Slovenian and Croatian, the two main Slavic languages spoken in the so-called Illyrian Provinces. French authorities did not distinguish between the two; the official designation was ‘Illyrian’. The idea of (a creation of) a common ‘Illyrian’ language was also alive among some Slovenian intellectuals during the nineteenth century but was later abandoned. ²⁹ See Jezernik 2010, p. 22. The poem is engraved in golden letters on the monument to the Unknown Soldier that adorns the Square of the French Revolution (commonly known as Napoleon Square) in the centre of Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana.

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literature probably contributed to his gradual departure from the intellectualist, academic type of classicism in poetry; still, the use of rhythmic patterns of Alpine ditties³⁰ in poems that very often speak of springs of inspiration and of poetic immortality shows that Vodnik’s literary position remained ambiguously divided between two competing missions. As an ‘instructor’ of a semi-illiterate nation, he nevertheless aspired to the honours of the first Slovenian classic, the founder of a non-existent national canon.³¹ The result of this curious blend of exclusivist classicism and popular instruction is a strange ideological and aesthetic hybrid, in which it looks as if the commonsense and practical mentality of the Slovenian peasant has been elevated to the status of Enlightenment rationalism and Horatian aesthetics. The canonical honours Vodnik enjoyed after his death were in great part a result of deliberate gestures towards self-canonization.³² Vodnik was of course not the first Slovenian poet. His own literary beginnings are linked with the poetic almanac Pisanice (1779–81) published by the Anton Feliks Dev (1732–86), a friar of the order of the so-called Discalced (‘barefoot’) Augustinians.³³ Not only did Dev write classicizing verse before Vodnik, it was he who first performed the symbolic ritual of creatio ex nihilo of Slovenian literature, in two précieux poems in alexandrines that featured the Modrice, ‘the Wise Ones’, as a local version of the Muses invented on the model of Livius Andronicus’s Camena.³⁴ In the first poem, the choir of the Modrice bewails the overlong absence of Belin (the Celtic sun-god Belenus, assimilated as a Slavic Apollo), who is being held by the Muses as a captive in Italian lands. The second poem is an ecstatic celebration of Belin’s return to his Slavic ‘homeland’. In the final lines, the Modrice, who are now already represented in folkloric garb, gather in celebration around their long-missing idol (with my translation): O lube nas Bellin! gorezhe me lubile Te vsélej bodemo. Ovide, in’ Virgile Me bomo dale ti. Us Kraynz bode vesel zel v’kratkem o Bellin! Tvojo lubesn pejl, S’ njim usa Lublana bo zhast, hvalo Tebi pejla, De slate zhase je skus Te ona prejela. Nje tu ti bosh, kar je bil Rimu en August; En Ozhe teh Modriz, vsa zhast nje, vsa svitlust. Oh! our beloved Belin. We will always fervently love you. We will give you new Ovids and Virgils. The Carniolan will soon joyfully sing of his love for you. With him, all Ljubljana ³⁰ A typical pattern is ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ / ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ –, as in Napóleon réče, Ilírija, vstán (‘Napoleon speaks out: “Illyria, rise” ’). ³¹ The second name, Vodnik, actually means ‘leader’. On the nationalistic programme lying behind Vodnik’s strategies of self-canonization, see Jezernik 2010, p. 20. ³² See, again, Dović 2014. ³³ The title literally means ‘painted Easter eggs’, but it involves a metaliterary pun, as pisan can mean both ‘variegated’ and ‘written’. ³⁴ The poems were published in Pisanice in 1780 (Dev 1779–81, vol. 2), which is where I am quoting from in what follows. See also Juvan 2004, pp. 9–11.

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will honour and glorify you for bringing back the Golden Age. To her you will be what Augustus used to be to Rome: a father to the Wise Ones [‘Modrice’, the Muses], shining honour to herself.³⁵

The promise of new Ovids and Virgils is of course conventional, but the overambitious appropriation of Apollo as Belin, of the Muses as Modrice, and of the Augustan golden age shows a good sense of humour; the pattern of transposition, which amounts to a translatio imperii, was later followed by Vodnik, who went as far as replacing Mt Parnassus with the local mountain Vršac and the classical sources of inspiration with Savica, one of the sources of the Sava River. An indication that Virgil, together with Ovid, was a crucial reference in this programme of self-creation of a national literature can be found in Marko Pohlin’s (1768) Carniolan Grammar (Kraynska grammatika).³⁶ Pohlin, one of Vodnik’s teachers, was another Discalced Augustinian monk, and his manual was intended to replace an older grammar of Slovenian, written in Latin by the Protestant Adam Bohorič and published in 1584. Pohlin’s includes a short chapter on metre that contains a translation of the initial lines of Virgil’s first eclogue by Dev, in alexandrines, as an illustration of the use of caesura in Slovenian translation. For Dev, who saw the alexandrine as a universal metrical form, and for Pohlin, Virgil was an obvious choice of a classical poet to be translated or imitated in modern form. Dev probably produced other translations of Virgil and Ovid, which are now lost, but it seems significant that Virgil is omnipresent in those early literary exchanges. Already as a schoolboy, Vodnik assumed a Virgilian persona in an elegy dedicated to his teacher Pohlin, who had been removed to Vienna; the poem includes a recognizable variation on Virgil, Eclogues, 5.24–6 (the mourning of the shepherds and herds at the death of Daphnis, who is commonly identified as Julius Caesar).³⁷ Dev himself used the Virgilian line Nula [sic, for nulla] salus bello, pacem deposcimus omnes (‘There is nothing good about war, we all beg you for peace’, Verg. A. 11.362) as a motto to his versified Orthographia pure elementaris linguae Carniolicae.³⁸ After Vodnik, literature and journalism in Slovenian followed two opposed courses. The prevailing tendency was one of didactic utilitarianism, which could find some support in the writings of Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), an eminent grammarian and official censor for Slavic and Greek literatures in Vienna.³⁹ Kopitar’s

³⁵ The translation is literal. Even today’s Slovenian reader is clueless about how the contemporary audience might have felt about the use of a local Carniolan dialect in such an affected poem. ³⁶ Carniola includes the western and central parts of today’s Slovenia. Eastern parts of Slovenia belonged to Styria. The title of the grammar refers to the Carniolan dialect(s) and not to Slovenian as a unitary language. ³⁷ The poem was written in 1775 and published in Dev’s Pisanice; see Dev 1779–81, vol. 1. ³⁸ MS. 388, National and University Library of Slovenia. ³⁹ The function of censorship was highly political and contributed to the negative image of Kopitar in Slovenian historiography. On Kopitar’s work and influence, see Merchiers 2007.

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theory (his grammar was published in 1808) was based on extreme purism. In a narrowly linguistic vein, Kopitar insisted that the vocabulary of Slovenian should be limited to that of the simple farmer, without foreign, and especially without German elements. This involved, implicitly and sometimes very explicitly, strict and very restrictive limitations regarding subject matter. Kopitar had a paternalistic attitude towards his own nation and schematically distinguished between the culturally developed West and the underdeveloped south-eastern Slavs and Greeks. He hoped that ‘real’ literature would gradually evolve from the autarchic production of texts written in the ‘pure’ language of the ‘peaceful’ farmer. Together with his censorial function, Kopitar’s nativist ideology earned him the (prevalently negative) reputation of a Slovenian Cato the Elder. On the other hand, the lawyer and Romantic poet France Prešeren (1800–49), friend and follower of Matija Čop, embraced the idea of an artificial, ‘forcible’ creation of a classical code of poetry through systematic imitation of classical and contemporary European models.⁴⁰ This programme was largely inspired by the cultural universalism of the two ideologues of German Romanticism, August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, whom both Čop and Prešeren knew and admired. Prešeren’s strategy of self-canonization transcends by far the classicism of Dev and Vodnik. The task, according to Prešeren, was to construct, in the local idiom but also beyond its limits, the language and style not only of Ovid and Virgil but also of Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso, and to equip the reader of Prešeren with an illusion of a preexisting classical, medieval, and Renaissance tradition. An exemplary case of such a construction is Prešeren’s verse tale The Baptism at the Savica, which transposes the story of Virgil’s Aeneid, with its Christian appropriations and its ideological ambivalences, to eighth-century Carniola.⁴¹ The story is a fiction set against some historical background; it narrates the last battle, the frustrated love, and the baptism of the last Slav pagan warrior, Črtomir, during the German (Bavarian) occupation of the region in the eighth century. After the fall of the Pagan Fortress, the ‘Slovenian Troy’, Črtomir has to give up his earthly love for Bogomila, priestess of the Slavic Venus Živa, then silently accepts baptism and travels to Aquileia to become a missionary. The poem is formulated as an allegorizing variation on Virgil’s Aeneid as read by St Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso; at the same time it anticipates, in the manner of Maffeo Vegio’s Book 13 of the Aeneid (and of some other Renaissance works), the twentieth-century pessimistic interpretations of the Aeneid.⁴² ⁴⁰ See Juvan 2012. The standard critical edition is Kos 1966. The fundamental work on Prešeren, Paternu 1994, is accessible in German. For a general introduction in English, see Cooper 1981, who is also the co-author of an English translation (Cooper and Priestley 1999). ⁴¹ My own monograph on the topic, Marinčič 2011, is in Slovenian. See also Marinčič 2007 and 2017b. ⁴² On this theme, see Kallendorf 2007; Putnam and Hankins 2004. Maffeo Vegio’s Book 13 is an optimistic correction to the ending of Virgil’s poem: it supplements the Aeneid with the restitution of Turnus’s body (following the model of the Iliad ) and with a Renaissance-style ceremonial marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia.

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The converted Črtomir’s final journey to Aquileia⁴³ can be seen as a miniature replica of Aeneas’s journey to Italy after the fall of Troy.⁴⁴ A likely point of departure is the legend about the Trojan origins of Aquileia that had been known in the region since the sixteenth century. According to this ethnographic construction, the Eneti (Ἐνετοί), the Trojans’ Paphlagonian allies (Hom. Il. 2.851–2), migrated to the northern Adriatic region after the Trojan War (Livy 1.1.1–3; cf. Verg. A. 1.242–9). Since late antiquity they had been identified with the Veneti, confused with the Slavs (‘Wendi’; see Bratož 2011, pp. 3–6), and considered the founders of Aquileia.⁴⁵ The legend, which had been popularized through the Preface to Bohorič’s Protestant grammar, was probably operative in Prešeren’s project of self-canonization as a Slovenian Virgil. The symbolic translatio imperii from Troy and Rome to Carniola and Aquileia presents a sophisticated fulfilment of the promise of ‘new Virgils’ that Dev’s Muses of Carniola had once given to their beloved Belin. It gave birth to the anti-German ‘myth of Aquileia’, which linked the origins of Christianity in the Slovenian lands with the Romance South rather than with Salzburg and the German North. According to later, liberal nationalistic readings that have some support in the author’s own comments in his correspondence, the message of Prešeren’s poem is basically pessimistic and involves anti-German and anti-Christian agendas. This way of reading corresponds strikingly to some strands of twentieth-century criticism of the Aeneid that posit a repressed, disturbing ‘second voice’, which interferes with the superficially imperialistic discourse of the poem (Marinčič 2007). Yet the optimistic primary voice of Prešeren’s poem, however ambiguous, consoles Črtomir— who had to give up political autonomy and pagan religion—with a symbolic empire beyond the pagan classical world: as the reader is informed at the end of the poem, Aquileia is not the final destination but only a starting point for a new mission to ‘the Lands of the Morning’. Is this a Christian Reconquista of Virgil’s Troy?⁴⁶ Prešeren, in his own words, dedicated his literary project to the sole purpose of ‘bringing the Slovenian language to a higher level of culture’.⁴⁷ In the local context, this would necessarily have been understood as a polemical answer to the linguistic and political ideas of Kopitar. Prešeren’s most successful satire against Kopitar (whose name means ‘cobbler’) is Nova pisarija (New Writing, originally published ⁴³ Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic, was an important episcopal see during the Middle Ages and had a strong influence on the territory of today’s Slovenia. Prešeren exaggerates its role, probably because he sees the Latin Aquileia as a beneficent alternative to the Germanic rule of the bishops of Salzburg; see Maver 2003. ⁴⁴ See Marinčič 2011. ⁴⁵ Justinian, Novellae constitutiones, 29 (praefatio); Grilli 1991. ⁴⁶ Of course, Prešeren did not miss the opportunity to respond to Dev’s promise of ‘new Ovids’. His collection of poems in German, published in the local German journal Illyrisches Blatt, bears the Ovidian motto Getico scripsi sermone libellum (‘I wrote a little book in the Getic tongue’). In those poems, Prešeren styles himself as a Carniolan Ovid who, as a representative of a linguistic minority in the Habsburg monarchy, ‘forgot’ his mother tongue and, like Ovid at Tomis, started to write poems in a ‘barbarian’ language (i.e. in German); see Marinčič 2009. ⁴⁷ Letter to Stanko Vraz, dated 5 July 1837; Kos 1966, vol. 2, p. 197.

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in 1831). This is a mock didactic dialogue in verse, in the form of catechism (questions and answers), featuring a Scribe and a Student: a parodic version of Horace’s Ars poetica dressed up as a practical manual for the Slovenian farmer. Like Kopitar, the Scribe is an extreme purist, convinced that the basis of literary Slovenian is to be sought in the simple language of the peasant of Carniola, a language unpolluted by German, Greek, Latin, and other foreign influences. It becomes obvious, however, in the course of the poem that the Scribe is also fond of gross popular ribaldry (his ‘pure’ language slides into explicit vulgarity at times) and that his main resentment is directed against erotic subjects (e.g. Romeo and Juliet!). During the conversation the Student expresses relevant doubts, which reveal that the Scribe’s literary creed presupposes a truly rustic Virgil and a Horatian pragmatism devoid of Horatian urbanity. Nevertheless, the Student eventually succumbs to the authority of the Scribe, to his offer of three years’ advanced education in ‘hillbilly Athens’, and to the temptation of becoming ‘a second Orpheus’ and an ‘Apollo among the goatherds’ (an allusion to Verg. Ecl. 8.55–6: sit Tityrus Orpheus, Orpheus in siluis, ‘Let Tityrus be Orpheus, an Orpheus of the woods’). I am quoting the text from Kos 1966, vol. 1, p. 106. The translation is mine: UČENEC:

Bog ti zaplati uk, po tvoji volji bom pel: gosence kaj na repo varje, kak prideluje se krompir narbolji; kako odpravljajo se ovcam garje, preganjajo ušivim glavam gnide, loviti miš’ učil bom gospodarje. PISAR: O, zlati vek zdaj Muzam kranjskim pride!

STUDENT: God reward you for this lesson; following your commandment, I shall sing of: What repels the caterpillar from the turnip, how potatoes are best grown, what the best cure is for sheep-scab, how a lice-ridden scalp is cleaned of nits; I will give the landowners instruction in mouse catching. SCRIBE: Oh, the Golden Age is dawning for the Carniolan Muses!

Prešeren’s case for urbanity was not a trivial one. In the decades after his death, Kopitar the Censor’s ‘Catonian’ ideology of linguistic self-sufficiency actually developed into a peculiar form of programmatic provincialism. An example of this is the widely read Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (Farmers’ and Craftsmen’s News) edited

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by the veterinarian, conservative politician, and journalist Janez Bleiweis (1808–81), who was acclaimed as ‘father of the nation’ already during his lifetime. As a matter of fact, Bleiweis contributed enormously to the public use of the language and to the quality of life in the region; the widespread liberal prejudice against his activity is often based on wrong expectations, for example that he did not publish erotic poetry in his newspaper aimed at informing and educating farmers and artisans.⁴⁸ A far more damaging form of provincialism was espoused by some bourgeois critics who recognized Slovenian nationalism, together with the emerging ‘national’ literature, as a convenient emblem of class and as a source of symbolic power.⁴⁹ Their attitude to literary creativity in Slovenian was characteristically paternalistic. An extreme example of this is Josip Stritar (1836–1923), a classicist, writer, and critic, a neoRomantic fin esprit, and an admirer of Augustan poetry, Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo who, in his national incarnation as the editor of the Slovenian literary journal Zvon (Bell), published in Vienna (!), resisted publishing translations as a matter of principle. A number of champions of realist prose had nourished a similar deep-seated aversion to foreign influences and translation in the decades preceding Stritar. Prešeren’s idea of literature in Slovenian as a fully legitimate constituent of world literature had to wait to be revived at the beginning of the twentieth century. The ideology of linguistic and cultural autarchy of the Slovenians was the actual background for Šubic’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics. The paradox is revealing. We tend to associate Virgil’s poem and its reception with Cato the Elder, American nativism, and twentieth-century blood-and-soil ideologies.⁵⁰ Though a Romantic nationalist, Šubic had a very different motivation for translating Virgil. At the time, he was one of the few who saw translation of the classics as a convenient cure for the inferiority complex of a linguistic community caught in an illusion of agrarian selfsufficiency. Šubic is only apparently degrading Virgil in particular and poetry in general to the function of practical didacticism. The ridiculous, utopian idea of a ‘slightly cultured agriculturalist’ reading Virgil in translation on his evening walk across the fields suggests that language is the essence of culture and that translation is the best (if not the only) way of enriching the literary creativity of marginal linguistic communities. Paradoxically, and in spite of its mediocre literary qualities, Šubic’s ‘Virgil for the many’ can be seen as a groundbreaking statement in favour of Slovenian as a full-fledged language of élite literature.⁵¹

⁴⁸ Bleiweis would of course quite seriously quote Virgil’s Georgics in his veterinarian contributions, which were in themselves of very high quality. ⁴⁹ See Močnik 1983. ⁵⁰ See e.g. Thomas 2000. Landívar’s Rusticatio Mexicana is an interesting parallel, as it appropriates Virgil’s Georgics in an implicitly ‘anticolonial’ vein; see Laird 2006. ⁵¹ ‘I wanted to prove to myself whether the sweet-sounding Slovenian speech is in fact as poor and clumsy as its enemies and adversaries would like it to be . . . Cannot it stand the literary duel with the chivalrous Roman or with Greece, priding herself on her heroes? I believe it can’ (Šubic 1863, p. 4).

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12 Reviving Virgil in Turkish Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken

What does Virgil mean to Turkish readers? How, if ever, does his reception in Turkey differ in itself and from others at the cross-cultural level? What role have translators played here? These are the questions at the outset of this study, and we have addressed them with a threefold interdisciplinary perspective based on literary history, reception studies, and translation history. Whether we call it Asia Minor, Diyar-ı Rum (Roman land), Anatolia, or Turkey from different perspectives of historical geography, the unique feature of bridging the three continents and numerous different cultures has always set this region apart from the rest of the Mediterranean world. Therefore it is not always easy to determine the most appropriate methods to explore the complexities of its history. Restrictive and usually misleading interpretations based on politically charged East–West dichotomies have largely been abandoned in recent cultural studies. On the other hand, studies of the transmission of knowledge to and from Asia Minor via translations often require consideration of that constructed dualism’s history. This is even more critical when it comes to canonical texts, among which Greek and Roman classics constitute a distinct group by virtue of their textual history, their wide scope and coherence, and the centrality and often universality attributed to them.¹ The flourishing field of reception studies has shown that classics and politics, both chasing archetypes and ideals, can inspire each other,² and this relationship has proven strong enough to create new myths and to shift paradigms. One may think, for instance, of Quattrocento artists and humanists who portrayed the Turks as the descendants of the Trojans (or Teucri, as Virgil referred to them), led largely by their common territory and the resemblance of their names.³ They did in fact follow in the footsteps of the medieval Latin authors who viewed the Normans and the Turks alike as heirs of the Trojans.⁴ On the other hand, although Mehmed the Conqueror’s

¹ ² ³ ⁴

Lianeri and Zajko 2008, pp. 9–15; see Porter 2005. For an interesting case study, see Bebbington 2008. See Harper 2005; Bisaha 2004, pp. 89–93. See Balivet 1998; Runciman 1972.

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assumed self-portrayal as the avenger of Troy (right after the conquest of Constantinople), reported by the Byzantine chronicler Critobulus,⁵ and the spurious letter to Pope Nicholas V, attributed to the sultan, that claimed a common origin for Turks and Italians must have corroborated the myth about the Trojan ancestry of the Turks, Renaissance minds did not always agree about their origin and ethnic character.⁶ Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was a ‘multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural conglomeration’.⁷ Another interesting example of political use of the classics in a similar context is De fortitudine (read to Pope Clement VII in 1523) by Girolamo Balbi,⁸ who saw the Aeneid as an ethical and political guide to Europe’s liberation from the threat of the Ottomans and who delivered speeches calling for the Christian princes to unite against them.⁹ These introductory examples remind us that cultural identities, continuously manipulated by politics, are usually constructed through other cultures and that reciprocal identification between isolated nations that engaged in conflict is inherently more transformative. As might be expected, we have deliberately chosen these examples because of both their Turkish and their Virgilian allusions, in order to mark out some external factors that may have contributed to the Turkish reception of Virgil before and along with the translations of his poems, which we can now proceed to explore.

12.1 Distant but Not Apart While Turkish readers had to wait until the twentieth century for a full acquaintance with Virgil, we should not suppose that Ottoman learned circles, at least during the late empire, which roughly coincides with the long nineteenth century, were completely unaware of Virgil and his legacy. Their members, who were often exposed to a wide range of cultural encounters in various social settings both at home and abroad, can challenge us into reconsidering the definitions of some traditional categories.¹⁰ Therefore one should avoid drawing general conclusions about their literary knowledge and intellectual background. We should nevertheless note that classical Greek and Roman culture was generally known through French translations and adaptations, most of them philosophical compilations or didactic literature such as Aesopic

⁵ Critobulus 1983, p. 170. ⁶ Heath 1979; Poumarède 2009, pp. 59–63. ⁷ Volkan and Itzkowitz 2000, p. 228. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire reached its height in the sixteenth century, when the empire included the entirety of Asia Minor, Thrace, Crimea, the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Turkish, an agglutinative language, was introduced into Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century and later became the official tongue of the Ottoman Empire, then of the Turkish Republic. ⁸ Balbi 1792. ⁹ See Scott 2004. ¹⁰ Mardin 2000.

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fables or Fénelon’s neoclassical novel Les aventures de Télémaque, and that the mainstream reception was therefore heavily influenced by French culture. Due to the multitude of unedited Ottoman manuscripts and poorly catalogued materials in various libraries and archives, it is not yet possible to identify all of the early texts concerning Virgil, and therefore his first occurrence in Turkish literary history cannot be securely dated. The growing interest in him from the late nineteenth century on, in parallel with the general curiosity about European culture and lifestyle, suggests, however, an introduction rather than a rediscovery. The earliest mentions of Virgil we know of are found in newspaper columns, magazines, and histories of literature, along with personal correspondence, a dictionary of universal history and geography, all written in Arabic script and dating back to the fin de siècle. It can be easily observed that this early contact involved mostly self-appointed agents rather than a systematic programme of translation or cultural reform. These individuals, like their counterparts in many other countries, were promoting change in their society and significantly contributing to it by introducing, and translating from, authors they considered luminaries. Translation studies scholar Gideon Toury generically called them ‘agents of change’.¹¹ It seems that the Ottomans had them from early on, in a variety of ethnic origins, social and occupational statuses such as former prisoners of war turned imperial interpreters, renegades, Venetian permanent representatives known as baili, Phanariots (Greek officials in Constantinople under the Ottoman Empire), statesmen, poets, savants, scholars, writers, and journalists. Their activity, however, seems to have seldom involved Greek and Roman literature, despite the facility for Greek and Latin that some of them had. This does not mean, though, that translation was not fully institutionalized in Ottoman society. There were, after all, by the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, if not earlier, quite a number of state organizations for translation.¹² On the other hand, it is also worth asking whether a particular polarity may not have emerged between Virgil’s supposed ‘Christianity’ and the Islamic aspect of the Ottoman literary tradition that may have delayed recognition of his work by Turkish readers.¹³ Although one cannot expect to answer this satisfactorily without considering the Turkish reception of classical culture in its totality, which is certainly worthy of a larger study,¹⁴ we hope that the present study, which touches upon the microhistory of the early modern translations of Virgil into Turkish, may provide a new perspective on his status as ‘the classic of all Europe’.¹⁵

¹¹ Toury 2002, p. 151. ¹² Kayaoğlu 1998; Paker 2009. ¹³ See Haecker 1934, pp. 60–9, 82–91, 109–14; Eliot 1953, pp. 7–11; and compare Kermode 1983, pp. 25, 139. See also Comparetti 1895, pp. 99–103; Courcelle 1957; Kallendorf 1995; MacCormack 1998, pp. 21–31. ¹⁴ For preliminary works, see Ortaylı 1996; Açık 2004; Kranz 2017. ¹⁵ See Eliot 1945, p. 31; compare Prendergast 2007, p. 195.

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12.2 Virgil and His Silent Interlocutors The earliest Turkish text about Virgil we were able to find is a short translated biography published in the Ottoman newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat by Selma Rıza, who was among the first Turkish women journalists, if not the very first one.¹⁶ This well-educated young woman, versed in European culture, was encouraged by Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912), the founder and chief editor of the newspaper, who was also a prolific writer, translator, and publisher.¹⁷ He himself might have been thinking that Turkish readers should discover Virgil, given that in an anthology published a few years earlier he had oddly mistitled his translation of the opening lines from the first two books of De rerum natura as ‘A Translation from Virgil’.¹⁸ He must have fallen victim here to his boundless enthusiasm for teaching Ottoman people about all aspects of Western culture, as well as to the haste of journalism.¹⁹ Yet that very mistake may be the reason why he encouraged Selma Rıza to publish literary biographies of Latin and European authors such as Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. This should come as no surprise, as in the columns of the same newspaper a decade later Ahmed Midhat sparked a spirited exchange known as the ‘classics debate’ over the necessity and the most suitable source of a literary canon for Turkish culture in the process of change. To sketch the nature of this war of pens that swelled the columns for a few months, we can simply say there were at least three main positions: (1) Ahmed Midhat’s own claim about the necessity of translating and grasping European classics such as Dante, Shakespeare, Corneille, and Goethe; (2) hesitation regarding the universality of the classics; (3) and finally, rejection of that necessity. While Greek and Roman classics (not Virgil though) are mentioned only in passing, this debate nevertheless represents a milestone in the history of Turkish literary criticism.²⁰ The following years witnessed an increased interest in European, Greek, and Roman authors, including Virgil, that materializes in literary histories and universal dictionaries.²¹ Yet the knowledge of Virgil’s actual poetry, like that of many other classical poets, was still incomplete, not to say rudimentary. Within the framework of Virgilian reception, the cultural agents of this long initial stage might be called the ‘silent interlocutors’, a reversal of Raymond Schwab’s ‘invisible interlocutor’, which stands for Asia, and particularly western Asia, and its cultural impact on European thought.²² This metaphor, later adopted by Aziz Al-Azmeh, highlights the intensified dialogue between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the obscurity of Asia’s performative identity in it.²³ Our version, though, has the Virgilian tradition of Europe on one side and its Ottoman students, visible yet silent, on the other. This is not to be confused with the

¹⁶ ¹⁹ ²¹ ²²

Rıza 1888; see Toros 2000. ¹⁷ Midhat 1888. ¹⁸ Midhat 1886. See Demircioğlu 2009. ²⁰ Kaplan 1998; Paker 2012. See Gerçek 1890, p. 35; Sami 1898; Loliée 1901. Schwab 1984, p. 475. ²³ Al-Azmeh 2007.

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‘indifferent silence’ that Edward Said used to describe the passivity and obedience of the Orient vis-à-vis the West.²⁴ It seems fair to say that the ‘pensive’ silence of the Ottomans here was rooted in their lack of a thorough familiarity with things Greek, Roman, and, to a lesser degree, European, as much as in the social and political disparity with Europe. While Ottomans discovered Virgil, Europeans explored both the mythical settings of his poetry in Asia Minor and its Ottoman inheritors. Concerning the latter, envoys and travellers come first to mind, such as Busbecq, Sandys, or Lady Montagu. One can read in them how this dialogic encounter enlivens the Virgil they know.²⁵

12.3 The Early Turkish Translation History of Virgil To the best of our knowledge, the first Turkish translation from Virgil, like the first biography, appeared in an Ottoman periodical. That was the Eclogues, translated and published serially during 1928 by the Turkish journalist, writer, and politician Ruşen Eşref (1892–1959) in Türk Yurdu, a journal of ideas and culture.²⁶ After the adoption of the Roman alphabet, which became effective at the end of the same year, Eşref published in the same journal his translations of the first two books of the Georgics.²⁷ Türk Yurdu was the official organ of Türk Ocakları, a civil organization that was founded in 1912 to serve the Turkish nationalism and modernization movement and played a major role in the nation-building process. In 1929 Eşref published a revised version of his translation of the Eclogues as the initial book in a planned series of classics; it was one of the first Turkish books printed in the new Roman script.²⁸ The most interesting feature of this translation is certainly its paratextual material. The relatively long Preface opens with a eulogy of Virgil. Eşref declares there that he translated the Eclogues from an intermediary French text and compared it afterwards with another French translation. His source text is the 1859 translation by JeanPierre Charpentier, and the comparison text Henri Goelzer’s Budé edition.²⁹ He acknowledges that translating a piece of literature from a language other than the original detracts from it, and thus explains his doing so: I must confess that what I have managed to render here is nothing more than a pale and fleeting reflection of the eternal verse of this glorious poet, whose work stirs the soul of every modern nation and has remained more vibrant than the subject it celebrates, although his language has been forgotten and the realm whose deeds he praises has long gone. This translation is just a dim light on our horizon of that gleaming soul traversing time and space. How else could it be! I am unable to bring it from its original source. My hands could only collect its last drops, maybe slightly muddied by being transferred between vessels over and over again. . . . Virgil’s poems had not been heard yet in Turkish, while they were repeatedly listened to in all languages. I ventured to translate Virgil so that my endeavour might be ²⁴ Said 1979, pp. 94–5. ²⁵ See Pollard 2012. ²⁶ Eşref 1928. ²⁷ Eşref 1929a. ²⁸ Eşref 1929b. ²⁹ See Charpentier 1859 and Goelzer 1925.

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useful and might motivate the emergence of young Turks, trained in Greek and Latin, who are also interested in literature.³⁰

Next he focuses on the importance of translation in the making of a national literature. Reminding his readers that Turkish versions of European classics such as La Fontaine, Molière, and Victor Hugo were made already during the nineteenth century, Eşref criticizes Ahmed Midhat and his redoubtable debaters for wasting time with speculation on the ideal classics and their translatability into Turkish when they could just pick one text and try to translate it.³¹ To his disappointment, even great Persian and Arabic authors such as Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Saadi have not yet been translated. Eşref ’s remark here, which is also interesting in terms of the Ottoman cultural system, needs to be read within the larger framework of Turkish humanism on the horizon: Had we attached greater importance to translation and got involved with it earlier, we could have been aware and made use of the artistic manifestations that contributed to the intellectual awareness and spiritual strength of the nations surrounding the frontiers of the state a century ago. More importantly, we would thus have thoroughly learned the nature and reason of the national awakening of the various elements within the [Ottoman] imperial community of that time, each longing to become a free identity.³²

We should add that, although he finds fault with Ahmed Midhat, who initiated the ‘classics debate’ some thirty years earlier, Eşref regarded translation in much the same way. To begin with, the two seem to subscribe to similar norms. He asserts, for instance, the pointlessness of verse translation of poetry, along the classical line of argument that claims its impossibility, already adopted by Ahmed Midhat.³³ Moreover, they both emphasize translation’s role in civilization, condemn the Turkish belatedness in it, and try to actively promote its advance. In closing that general discussion, Eşref signals a change of stance regarding translation and celebrates Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), the leader of the Turkish War of Independence and founder of the Republic. To our surprise, perhaps, he does so by directly addressing Virgil and by using a striking metaphor, which compares his poems to Mustafa Kemal’s deeds, in a passage that deserves to be quoted at some length: O Virgil, the sweet voice whose words have been passing from mouth to mouth for two millennia! Your golden lines, more penetrating than all the spears and arrows of Roman armies, illuminate souls with ardour rather than extinguishing lives as they do; they should have celebrated the magnificence of Mustafa Kemal, who saved the glory and freedom of his own nation and brought the civilization of all centuries to his country as the laurels of his noble and humane triumph, instead of Augustus’s victory which you embedded in Aeneas’s tale and which became the calamity of other nations. Having written in triumph a new epic, a new

³⁰ Eşref 1929b, pp. 9–10. All translations belong to the authors, unless otherwise noted. ³¹ Ibid., p. 12. ³² Ibid., p. 13. ³³ Paker 2012, pp. 330–2; Eşref 1929b, pp. 12–13; Demircioğlu, 2009.

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Aeneid for a country, Mustafa Kemal is writing now a new Georgics on the land beside his abode, turning barren hilltops to golden fields and green groves. However, you still have no equal here, at this time. If it is not in the hope of one day having poets like you, for what reason do we venture, in spite of our incompetence and worthlessness, to put you and your peers, eminent poets and writers, into our language through intermediary translations? Is it not for the purpose of inviting the comprehension and sensibility of those children to nobler and more humane sources? Is it not in order to get them taught by reading you and your peers, by enriching their feelings and knowledge, as you were taught by reading Homer, Thucydides and Theocritus? That custom of the world has not changed since your day: most of the people who speak in an inventive and elegant way flourish by listening to the voices of their immortal predecessors, who once spoke alike. Indeed, the success of ignorant zeal is unpredictable, its fruit tasteless, its existence ephemeral.³⁴

Given the two major historical events of the period, namely victory in the War of Independence (1922) and the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923), with its new institutions, this passage directly refers to the changeover from a military and geopolitical campaign to a socioeconomic one, represented by the Aeneid and Georgics respectively. While the first analogy requires no explanation, the other is about the new agricultural programme, which had as its symbol the recently established Forest Farm near the presidential residence in Ankara. Despite the all-too-obvious ideological discourse in the preface, it appears that Eşref ’s main concern was to familiarize his readers with Virgil’s literary world and to show the excellence of his poetry, so he endeavoured to emulate in Turkish the charm and vividness of the original. Although they are typologically different languages, Turkish and Latin share some structural features, such as noun declension and preferential SOV (subject–object–verb) word order.³⁵ Furthermore, they both allow alteration of this default order for pragmatic purposes. As he translated from French, Eşref could not have ventured to use this similarity and reproduce the word order of the original Latin sentences. Nevertheless, he has effectively used this aspect of Turkish to create, for instance, a comparable colloquialism in the opening lines of Eclogue 1:³⁶ Hey Tityrus! Sen bu sık yapraklı kayin ağacının gölgesine uzanmış, Hey Tityrus! You this densely foiled beech of-tree in-the-shade lying, ince kavalında rustaî havalar çalıyorsun; biz ise yurdumuzdan sürülmüşüz; slender on-your-pipe rustic airs you-are-playing; we however from-our-country have-been-exiled; onun şirin ovalarını bırakıyor, vatandan kaçıyoruz. Halbuki, sen Tityrus, its sweet plains [we are]-leaving, from-[our]-country we-are-running-away. Whereas, you Tityrus, ³⁴ Eşref 1929b, pp. 15–16. ³⁵ Devine and Stephens 2006, pp. 79, 98, 137 n. 2. See also Göksel and Kerslake 2005, pp. 337–50. ³⁶ Eşref 1929b, p. 169, which was translated from the French version of Verg. Ecl. 1.1–5 in Charpentier 1859, p. 63. All references to Virgil’s Latin text are to Mynors’s (1969) Clarendon edition.

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gölgeye atılca yatmışsın, ormanlara şu aksisedayı öğretiyorsun: ‘Amaryllis güzeldir!’ in-the-shade idly you-have-lain-down, the-woods this echo you-are-teaching: ‘Amaryllis is-beautiful!’ The language of this prose rendering is clean and smooth; largely free from the elaborate Persian and Arabic compounds typical of Ottoman literary diction, it heralds the hastening of Turkish language reform (which ended by replacing nearly all the words from these languages with revived or newly created Turkish ones), whose supporters include the translator himself.³⁷ Indeed, throughout the late Ottoman and early Republican period in particular, translation was often seen as a means of reforming, often drastically, the language of the target culture. Not surprisingly, the peculiarities of a language in transition occasionally make themselves felt in the Eclogues translated by Eşref, who did not refrain from using synonyms of Persian–Arabic and Turkish origin in close proximity, with no apparent difference in meaning:³⁸ Köhne yıldız-bürçlerinin doğuşunu seyretmek-te nedenmiş ey Daphnis? old of-constellations at-the-rising of-staring what-is-the-point o Daphnis? Sen Venus’ün oğlu Sezar’ın sitaresinin ilerilemesine bak: hayırlı yıldız! you, of-Venus son of-Caesar of-the-star at-the-advance [should]-look: auspicious the-star!³⁹ Although they might have evoked different associations (Eşref probably meant to emphasize the uniqueness of Caesar’s star), yıldız and sitare, the former a native Turkish word and the latter a Persian loan, refer to the same thing: they both mean ‘star’, for which a single word was repeated in the French translations and in the Latin original. In fact, this and similar co-occurrences bear witness to the richness of Ottoman language as much as to the natural consequences of language planning. The fact that Eşref prioritized the cultural and literary value of Virgil’s poetry is also reflected in his decision to accompany the translation with Sainte-Beuve’s famous study on Virgil, along with the introduction and summaries of Henri Goelzer’s recently published Bucoliques, all translated into Turkish. He also appended an ad hoc dictionary of Greco-Roman mythology and biography. Nevertheless, one should keep in mind that he saw Virgil through the lens of European culture and largely observed foreign norms of translation.

³⁷ Sağlam 2004, pp. 52–8. Tendencies towards lexical purification and grammatical simplification of Turkish had already surfaced during the Ottoman centuries. An early but still important study is Levend 1960. See also Aytürk 2008. ³⁸ Levend 1960, p. 382 asserts that in the late 1920s many authors kept using Persian and Arabic loanwords, while they usually discarded the compounds borrowed from these languages. ³⁹ Eşref 1929b, p. 256. This line is translated from the French translation of Eclogue 9.46–8 in Charpentier 1859, p. 107, which reads: Pourquoi, Daphnis, contempler le lever des anciennes constellations? Vois s’avancer l’astre de César, fils de Vénus, astre bienfaisant.

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To complete this outline of Eşref ’s Eclogues, we proceed now with the reviews of this publication in order to locate it more exactly within the literary culture of the day. Appearing shortly after its publication in 1929, these reviews were unanimously positive. Like the translator himself, most of the reviewers belonged to the inner circle of Turkish modernists. Apart from the fact that they were united around the ideal of introducing a new Turkish diction and saw a reification of it in this translation of the Eclogues, they did not fail to recognize its translator’s literary skills. His prose rendering, in their view, was not short of poetic charm; his language was recognized as being lucid and graceful, his style spirited. One of the reviewers was the acclaimed writer and politician Yakup Kadri (1889–1974). He is arguably the one on whom the Eclogues exerted the greatest influence, so that he took it as a paradigm of Turkish translation from classical authors in a period where still very few, if any, were able to translate directly from Latin or Greek: In my thinking, such a useful effort has greater merit than any scholarly work. Ruşen Eşref has added a good deal to Virgil’s Eclogues from his own heart and soul. Therefore these two thousand-year-old poems read as if they were written for us yesterday. Virgil’s soul sings behind his. Even more interesting is that this prominent poet from the age of Augustus inspired a sensitive author of Mustafa Kemal’s time, which is also why this translation is so original and differs from others.⁴⁰

Briefly put, Eşref ’s Eclogues marks the beginning of a new era in more than one sense. It represents, above all, a turning point in the establishment of some new translation norms and, for us classicists, the beginning of a deepened awareness of the importance of classical philology and scholarship. While the Eclogues thus influenced the cultural life of the early Turkish Republic, the second full translation, namely the Aeneid of Ahmed Reşit (published in two volumes in 1935 and 1936), had a somewhat different background and fate.⁴¹ Once again, prose translation was chosen and a French version was used as source text, namely the bilingual Garnier edition of Maurice Rat.⁴² Ahmed Reşit (1870–1956), who was both a writer and a politician, complemented his translation with the introduction penned by the original French translator for his 1932 volume, in the manner of his young predecessor. However, his Aeneid differs from the Eclogues in many other aspects. To start with, the two translations sharply contrast in their Turkish usage. Reşit’s language immediately strikes the reader as elaborate, even high-flown. Here is the opening invocation to the Muse (Aen. 1.8–11, Reşit 1935–6, vol. 1, pp. 44–5): Ey ilham alihesi (Muse), bu vekayiin esbabını tahattur-ederek, bana söyle-ki o of-inspiration the-goddess (Muse), these of-events the-causes remember [and] me tell, ⁴⁰ Kadri 1929, p. 57. Having a broadly similar background, Kadri himself adheres strictly to the same approach in his own Horace compilation, published two years later. ⁴¹ Reşit 1935–6. ⁴² Rat 1932.

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alihlerin kraliçesi, alihiyetine karşı ika-edilmiş ne türlü bir tecavüze ve of-gods the-queen her-divinity against perpetrated what kind-of a violation and hangi hakarete ceza olarak, mukaddesata riayetle müştehir o kahramanı what insult the-punishment-of as, of-sacred-things for-[his]-reverence renowned that hero bukadar tehlükeler geçirmeye, bukadar beliyelere göğüs-germeye sevketti. such dangers to-undergo, such calamities to-endure she-made. Semavî alihlerin ruhunda bu derece hiddet olur-mu? heavenly of-gods in-the-soul[s] that much rage can-it-be? The language here seems to have arisen mainly from the translator’s attempt to convey the epic character of the original.⁴³ After all, having witnessed the culmination of the previous renewal efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, and having himself adopted a simpler diction in his earlier works, he was neither a language purist nor a radical reformist.⁴⁴ The translation strategies in Reşit’s Aeneid are also different. Although the singlepage Foreword does not reveal much about his approach or decisions, Reşit seems generally to follow the more old-fashioned nineteenth-century Ottoman practices. Those quasi-traditional norms are based upon a complex concept of translation, which does not always comply with modern notions of fidelity.⁴⁵ For instance, Reşit did not refrain from weaving into the main text sections from the explanatory footnotes of the French translator, as he does for instance here:⁴⁶ ‘Ganimed’in ‘Olenp’e kaçırılıp tebcil-edilmesi vakiasını kalbinin samimine hak-edmişti. Ganymede’s to-Olympus [of]-abduction [and] reception the-incident of-her-heart to-the-core she-had-inscribed. While the original of the corresponding part reads l’enlèvement et les honneurs de Ganymède (‘the abduction and the honours of Ganymede’), Reşit added from the original note the detail of location (Olympus), which, in this case, he kept at the cost of redundancy. A general observation about Reşit’s footnotes is worth mentioning here. He included almost all the notes to the French text, except some specific ones that may have seemed to require from the reader an extensive prior knowledge of the subject. Sometimes, on the contrary, he added his own notes when he considered that a short explanation would suffice. A remarkable example of the latter is his explanation of the French word chœur, which occurs in the context of Amata’s Bacchic revel ⁴³ See Erhat 1940, p. 90. ⁴⁴ See Reşit 2014, pp. 69–70. ⁴⁵ See Paker 2012; Demircioğlu 2005. ⁴⁶ Reşit 1935–6, vol. 1, p. 46. The Turkish translation renders the French translation of Verg. A. 1.26–8 in Rat 1932, vol. 1, p. 5, which reads: elle garde, gravé au fond de son coeur . . . l’enlèvement et les honneurs de Ganymède. This is not an isolated case, and this tendency of Reşit was seriously critized by Erhat 1940, p. 91, from a normative approach of translation.

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at 7.389–91: ‘The collective singing and dancing of people is called “Koro” (Chœur).’⁴⁷ Unnecessary as it may appear at first glance, this note was quite useful. Although the newly founded republic officially supported Western classical music, which had already been introduced during the Ottoman Empire, ‘chorus’ (absent from traditional Turkish music) must have still been an enigmatic term for the general reader in the mid-1930s. This illustrates well the translator’s concern to capture as much detail of the original as possible. Nevertheless, foreignizing was not the only strategy that Reşit adopted. There are occasions where he favoured a domesticating approach—as for example here:⁴⁸ Parklar tarafından bast ü izhar-edilen levhai takdirin hükmü böyleydi. the-Fates by spread-out and declared of-the-plate of-destiny the-command thus-was. In the Islamic symbolism of fate, which surfaces here, all future events, including human lives, are inscribed on a primordial plate. The interesting thing is that Reşit combined the symbol of the Roman Parcae with its Islamic counterpart by making them keepers of the plate. He did not fail, though, to add a brief note to explain the Greek and Roman origin of these divinities. In a similar case, however, Eşref had preferred foreignization by preserving the original concept and relying more on the explanation given in his appended dictionary:⁴⁹ Parques (Parklar) kaderin değişmez iradesiyle uzlaşarak: the-Fates (Parcae) of-destiny unchanging the-command by-agreeing: ‘Dönünüz iğler, bu bahtlı asırları iğiriniz!’ demişler. [go on]-turn spindles, these blessed ages spin they-said. The translation decisions of the two authors differ in some other respects as well. For the spelling of proper nouns, for instance, Eşref ventured to restore some of their Latin forms—unlike Reşit, who generally adopted the French forms, simply adjusting them to Turkish spelling (in fact someone unfamiliar with classics might mistake his Aeneid, at first sight, for a book by a French author, because the title page reads Virgile, L’Énéide). Likewise, Eşref seems to have pondered over the title page, which reads: Virgilius, Çoban Şiirleri: Bükolikler (‘Virgil, Shepherd Poems: Eclogues’). He also used the term türkü (‘folk song’), a derivative of the word Türk, which means ‘Turk’, for the title of separate eclogues. These indicate Eşref ’s tendency towards mild domestication of the original. The archaism throughout Reşit’s translation can also be seen as a deployment of his own particular cultural capital (to employ Bourdieusian terms), namely a remnant of his bureaucratic career. As a court scribe under Abdülhamid II for a decade ⁴⁷ Reşit 1935–6, vol. 2, p. 29. ⁴⁸ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 46, translating Aen. 1.22. ⁴⁹ Eşref 1929b, p. 208, translated from the French translation of Verg. Ecl. 4.46–7 in Charpentier 1859, p. 82, which reads: Tournez, fuseaux; filez ces siècles fortunés, ont dit les Parques d’accord avec l’ordre immuable des destins.

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and a half, Reşit had written thousands of official letters replete with grandiloquent expressions; at that time he was an active member of the progressive literary movement Edebiyat-ı Cedide (New Literature), until that movement was forbidden by the sultan.⁵⁰ Hence he acquired a good command of different styles and registers of language, and his strategies in the Aeneid, the linguistic ones at least, probably depended on his cultural background and ingrained habits as much as on the traditional translation norms that he consciously followed. Finally, it should be added that Reşit did not say anything about the importance of philological study or about future translations from the classics, whereas Eşref ’s prediction about young classical philologists had already begun to be fulfilled. This modern era, which we plan to study in another work on the modern reception of Virgil in Turkish, began in the 1930s, when Turkish university reform laid the foundation of classical studies. From then on, the field achieved diversity through various translations and grew to maturity thanks to thorough philological studies. Our initial question, ‘What does Virgil mean to Turkish readers?’, still waits to be answered and what we have presented here can provide, at best, no more than a general overview of a complex response concerning a remarkably different literary and cultural system. Nevertheless, we find the simplest justification for future work on Virgilian reception in a remark made by an important intellectual of the late Ottoman–early Republican era: ‘There are poets whose literary life lasts as long as their lifetime; or their poetic life covers some years, if not a chapter of their life. The works of some others endure as long as the languages in which they are written endure. A yet more fortunate group consists of poets whose works outlived their language; Homer and Virgil belong to this blessed band of poets.’⁵¹

⁵⁰ Reşit 2014, pp. 64–80. ⁵¹ Cited in Polat 2005, p. 198, these are the words of Celal Nuri (1882–1936), a well-known late Ottoman and early Republican intellectual, journalist, and politician, published in a literary magazine (Rübab) at a time when Ottoman publishing enjoyed an unprecedented florescence, right after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution that dethroned Sultan Abdülhamid II, restored the parliament, and ended the censorship aggravated by the sultan.

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13 Finding a Pastoral Idiom Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and the Politics of Language Mathilde Skoie

While the setting of the Eclogues is rustic and deals with the world of simple herdsmen, Virgil’s language and style are far from simple. On the contrary, the poems are examples of a highly refined art. How is one to render this complexity in a modern language? The case of Norwegian is perhaps particularly interesting, because this language exists in two official versions, one based on local dialects and one based on what one might call bookish Danish. These variants have very different stylistic connotations. For my present purposes, the two versions of Norwegian are also interesting to compare in relation to ideas about two complementary processes that recent theories of translation call ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’. In this chapter I shall look at three translations of Virgil’s Eclogue 4 in different versions of Norwegian and focus on what one might call the stylistic register or the pastoral idiom. These are the translations of Ernst Sørensen (1950), Bjørg Tosterud Danielsen, AnneKatrine Frihagen, and Kjell Gustafson (1975), and Matti Wiik (2016), and they exhibit, to different degrees, what Lawrence Venuti identified as domestication and foreignization. As any act of interpretation is, in a way, an act of translation, thinking through translation, and in particular through the lens of Venuti’s categories, might prove to be useful even when trying to place Virgil’s pastoral idiom within Latin textual culture. My hope is therefore that such an analysis might not only shed light on issues of translation, but also make us think afresh about the stylistic aspects of the Eclogues itself.

13.1 Norwegian Language and Ancient Texts Norway is a country where language and language reforms have been and continue to be a hot political subject. Language has been an important issue especially in debates about Norwegian identity and city versus countryside. The latter is a theme that marks a historically strong dividing line in Norwegian politics. There are today two

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official forms of written Norwegian—Bokmål (literally ‘book tongue’) and Nynorsk (literally ‘new Norwegian’). These two versions are constructions developed after the fall of the union with Denmark in 1814 and consolidated between 1880 and 1910, but have been reformed several times since then. They reflect two completely different strategies. If one is to put this in a simple manner, Nynorsk was developed on the basis of a mapping of Norwegian dialects (basically from the rural areas), while Bokmål was a ‘norwegianization’ of Danish. Today about 85–90 per cent of the Norwegian population use Bokmål. However, all students have to learn both versions at school, all exam papers have to be set in both versions, and civil servants have to respond to letters in the language of the addressee. Recent developments have made the two versions more similar. However, there are also two unofficial and more extreme variants of each; Riksmål (‘national Norwegian’) is a more conservative version of Bokmål, in other words more like Danish; and Høgnorsk (‘high Norwegian’) is a more purist form of Nynorsk. Each of these versions aims to maintain the language in its own original form and both reject most of the twentieth-century reforms that have brought them closer to each other. The main written language, then, is Bokmål, but the literary tradition of Nynorsk is much stronger and richer than the percentage of users indicates—not least in poetry and drama. The majority of authors writing in Nynorsk come from the countryside, and there is, traditionally, a preponderance of rustic themes. The original name of Nynorsk was Landsmål (‘country language’). This is an ambiguous term because ‘country’, as in English, can mean both ‘nation’ and ‘country’ as in countryside. Although anything one claims about Bokmål and Nynorsk might be considered controversial, it is fair to say that, while people rarely think twice about why a text is written in Bokmål, Nynorsk is still much more of a marked choice. When considering translations of ancient texts into Norwegian, it is important to bear in mind that, quantitatively speaking, this is not a great tradition in comparison with that of translations into English or French, or even into the other Scandinavian languages, though there are more Norwegian translations than is commonly acknowledged.¹ Nynorsk has held a strong position in this tradition. A. O. Vinje (1818–79), who is considered the ‘father’ of literary Nynorsk, had already been inspired by ancient texts as he developed his own literary idiom;² and translating the classics into Nynorsk was an important linguistic–political statement, which legitimized the

¹ For an overview of the situation, Oldtidens og middelalderens litteratur i skandinaviske oversættelser (OMLS) is an excellent resource. This is a database of ancient and medieval texts in Scandinavian translation and is financed by the Danske Sprog og Litteraturselskab (visit http://skandinaviskeoversaettelser.net/da). Much of the reason for creating this resource was that, while reading a text in a Scandinavian language is in principle easier for any Scandinavian than reading an English, German or French text, many of these translations are so obscure that students often consulted English translations first, without really grasping the nuances. ² On his classicism, see Skard 1938, corrected and nuanced by Haarberg 1985.

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idiom and welcomed it as part of European culture.³ The organization for the promotion of Nynorsk financed a series of translations (the series Nynorsk klassikarbibliotek),⁴ and the first complete translation of the Odyssey into Norwegian was a state-sponsored version in Nynorsk by the writer Arne Garborg.⁵ There is also a Nynorsk theatre where Nynorsk Greek tragedy is frequently performed in translation. While there is no Greek–Norwegian dictionary at present, there are two Latin dictionaries, one of them in Nynorsk and published by the Nynorsk publishing house Det norske samlaget.⁶ Today the choice of Nynorsk is less of a political statement, though the Nynorsk publishing house continues to offer translations of classical texts. Furthermore, the new series of Greek and Latin classics in translation, Kanon, includes translations in both Nynorsk and Bokmål on its list.⁷ Yet these two forms are still rooted in different literary traditions and have distinct connotations for the modern Norwegian reader. These connotations are important to bear in mind when looking at translations of the Eclogues from a stylistic perspective.

13.2 Pastoral in a Cold Climate The Eclogues was the first Virgilian work to be translated into Scandinavian in Denmark, in 1639.⁸ This was long before the first translation of parts of the Aeneid, which appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, let alone the first complete translation of this poem around 1800.⁹ This precedence of the Eclogues is, however, not unsurprising, as its translation coincides with the great period of pastoral poetry. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were thriving centuries for Nordic neo-Latin bucolic poetry, which was followed by pastorals in native languages in the eighteenth century.¹⁰ Both Denmark and Sweden had a flourishing pastoral tradition—the Swedish King Gustav III (1746–92) even hired a shepherd and shepherdess to live in the royal park at Drottningholm. Yet, when a much later editor of the first translation of the Eclogues reflects upon the translator’s task, he cannot but imagine the translator sighing when he looked around at the Scandinavian landscape and

³ There is so far no survey or analysis of the Nynorsk tradition of translating the classics. My assumptions here are superficial. This would be a great research topic in the future. ⁴ Skard 1988. ⁵ Garborg 1918. ⁶ Steinnes and Vandvik 1958. ⁷ The Kanon series is a joint project started in 2014—a collaboration between the publishing house Gyldendal and the Latinist Thea Selliaas Thorsen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The Eclogues is their first edition of a text in Nynorsk. ⁸ On this translation, see Skoie 2008. ⁹ Twist 1749 is the first translation of parts of the Aeneid into Swedish, while Adlerbeth 1804 is the first complete version in this language. The first complete translation of the Georgics into Swedish was Lindberg 1780. (This information is based on the OMLS-database.) ¹⁰ On Nordic neo-Latin literature, see Skafte-Jensen 1995 and the introduction to Sjökvist 2007. There is, to my knowledge, no overview of pastoral poetry in Scandinavia, but Lewan 2002 is excellent on the Swedish situation and Sejersted 2001 gives a glimpse of the Norwegian one.

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exclaiming: ‘How can this represent Arcadia? How can this ever be the home of nymphs and muses? The names of the workmen cannot even be latinised!’¹¹ While Danes, and especially Swedes, somehow found a way to make the pastoral popular despite the fact that one had to give shepherds and shepherdesses winter clothes, this genre was never received with much enthusiasm in Norway.¹² The most famous pastoral moment in Norwegian literature is a parody of the one acknowledged Norwegian pastoral poem.¹³ A plausible explanation for this state of things is the lack of a Norwegian aristocracy, as the pastoral tradition was very much an aristocratic response to nature. In consequence, Virgil’s Eclogues have never caught much attention in Norway. There are only two complete translations of this work, one from 1809 and the other from 2016.¹⁴ Apart from them, the database of Scandinavian translations lists two Norwegian versions of Eclogue 4.¹⁵ All of these, apart from the most recent one, are rather obscure. This is not surprising, given the state of the classical tradition in Norway in general and the amount of translation from ancient texts.¹⁶ Apart from Egil Kraggerud’s complete translations of the Aeneid and Georgics in the late twentieth century, the database has only seven entries for Virgil in Norwegian. However, I would argue that the lack of a pastoral tradition might not have helped. Norwegian translators of the Eclogues therefore do not have a national pastoral tradition to take into account. However, there is of course a literary tradition of writing about the Norwegian countryside, as well as a strong folk tradition that might be used. The age of national Romanticism (nasjonalromantikk) in Norway, 1840–60, was rich in literature set in the countryside.¹⁷ Edvard Grieg composed music based on traditional folk songs, typically herdsmen’s calls.¹⁸ Furthermore, the herdsman— or, even more frequently, the herdswoman or dairymaid (seterjente), typically residing in the summer in a secluded part of the mountains, with her flock—has become

¹¹ Rathlou 1909, pp. ii–iii. ¹² Lewan 2002, p. 76 refers to an inventory that includes woollen socks and gloves for the hired shepherds at the Swedish court. ¹³ This pastoral poem, the only proper Norwegian one, is ‘Majdagen’, penned by C. B. Tullin (1728–65). Its parody is ‘Vaaren’ (‘Spring’) by J. H. Wessel. Likewise, the most famous use of the Aeneid in Norwegian is the mock-heroic epic Peder Paars (1719–20) by Ludvig Holberg. ¹⁴ See Oftedahl 1809. The fact that it bears the word udvalgte (‘select’) in the title reflects an attempt to translate the Latin title (Lat. ecloga transliterates the Greek eklogē, which means ‘selection’); it does not indicate that this edition is a selection of Virgil’s pastoral poems. Oftedahl 1809 thus contains all the ten Eclogues. Though the book is printed in Norway and therefore counts as Norwegian, its language is pure Danish, and thus this work is less relevant in the present context. ¹⁵ Sørensen 1950 and Danielsen et al. 1975. The database also records an earlier version of Eclogues 1 and 4, translated by M. Wiik and published in 2001 in the journal Vagant. ¹⁶ On the classical tradition in Norway, see Skard 1980. On Virgil in Scandinavia, see Skoie 2014. ¹⁷ Good examples are Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Bondefortellinger (Peasant Stories, first published in 1872) and the nature poems of Vinje (who, as I already mentioned, is generally considered the ‘father’ of literary Nynorsk). ¹⁸ E.g. ‘Kulokk og Stabbelaat’ (‘Cow Call and Peasant Dance’). Grieg also set to music some of Vinje’s nature poems—most famously ‘Vaaren’ (‘Spring’).

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something of a national icon. Most famous is perhaps the dairymaid (seterjente) in Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt, which is based on a folk tale and set to music by Grieg; but dairymaids are also popular figures in Norwegian painting.¹⁹ The lives and stories of these shepherds and shepherdesses are in general far from idyllic. Shepherding is hard work and the countryside full of dangers. Another tradition relevant to discussing the quest for a Norwegian idiom for the representation of the literary topos of ancient Mediterranean herdsmen is that of biblical translations of the Christmas gospel. This is also an area where both a Nynorsk and a Bokmål tradition are attested. Within these traditions, the first Nynorsk versions of the Bible (from 1890 and 1929) go furthest in the process of linguistic domestication or acculturation of the figure of the herdsman: they use turns of phrase from folk tales, more technical vocabulary from real-life Scandinavian herding, as well as expressions from Old Norse.²⁰

13.3 The Selection The translations I will be dealing with in the following pages are, as I announced at the outset, three versions of Eclogue 4. The choice of Eclogue 4 for the investigation of a pastoral idiom is perhaps not the most obvious, since this piece explicitly sets itself apart from the pastoral world (and from the rest of the collection) when the narrator claims to be ‘singing a slightly more lofty song’ (paulo maiora canamus, Verg. Ecl. 4.1). Furthermore, many claim that originally the fourth eclogue was not written as a pastoral; Virgil would have added three lines of introduction when he included it in the Eclogues.²¹ However, if one wants to make a comparison, this is the only possible choice, as Eclogue 4 is the one poem translated by more than one translator.²² Furthermore, it is, inevitably, an important part of the collection— probably the most famous piece in it, beside Eclogue 1—and, as such, it is part of what makes up the idea of a Virgilian pastoral. The three translations reviewed here were written in very different contexts. Published respectively in 1950, 1975, and 2016, they represent three different generations. Ernst Sørensen’s (1950) version of Eclogue 4 appeared under the heading ‘Gullalderbarnet’ (‘The Golden Age Child’) in the anthroposophical journal Spektrum, where it was published among articles on Dostoyevskii, materialism, and atheism. The translation stands on its own, at the very end of the volume, accompanied only by an anonymous illustration and a few comments, together with the presentation of authors. The 1975 version of Eclogue 4 is part of a collection of translations of set texts on the

¹⁹ Herding girls are also famous in paintings by national Romantics such as Erik Werenskiold. The herding girl Synnøve Finden has become an icon and brand name for one of the most popular Norwegian cheeses. ²⁰ Amadou 2009, p. 7. ²¹ See e.g. Clausen 1994. ²² Although printed in Norway, Oftedahl 1809 is written in Danish.

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reading list for the entrance exam at the University of Oslo collectively prepared by Bjørg Tosterud Danielsen, Anne-Katrine Frihagen, and Kjell Gustafson (Danielsen et al. 1975). The translation is equipped with brief notes designed to help the students. Matti Wiik’s (2016) rendering of Eclogue 4 is part of a complete translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, published as a separate volume in the new Kanon series. The volume offers a comprehensive literary introduction and notes. While both Wiik and Danielsen et al. are professional Latinists teaching at university, Sørensen was a Rudolph Steiner pedagogue, a journalist, and a public intellectual. The three translations also differ in form: Sørensen’s and Wiik’s are poetic renderings composed in dactylic hexameters, and Wiik follows the rules more strictly than Sørensen.²³ Sørensen divides the poem into strophes of seven or eight verses each. Danielsen et al.’s version is a prose rendering with no poetic or literary ambitions whatsoever; the only goal is to help students with their Latin exams, within the framework of a basic language course. Finally and most importantly for this investigation, the three texts examined here use three different versions of Norwegian. Sørensen’s translation is written in a conservative version of Bokmål (close to Riksmål); Danielsen et al.’s is written in standard Bokmål; and Wiik’s is written in Nynorsk. Like Sørensen, Wiik uses a conservative version of the language. In fact some of his archaic elements turned out to be too conservative for his publisher. Given the series’ explicit aim to translate the ancient texts into a ‘living and modern Norwegian’, Wiik had to make several changes between the draft he kindly lent me in 2014 and the now printed version.²⁴ Quite a few of these changes affect the analysis of his register, and I will therefore in some cases refer to the older version as well.

13.4 Virgil’s Challenge An important element of the connotations of Nynorsk is linked to the rustic sphere and has played a significant part in the querelle between city and country in Norway; yet nuances are available in Nynorsk that make the language more literary, for example by incorporating elements of Old Norse. On the other hand, the more conservative versions of Bokmål, Riksmål in particular, might easily seem misplaced when dealing with rustic matters, as these versions were closely linked, originally, to the urban elite and to the civil service. Rusticity and the relation between city and countryside are also important issues in the reception of the Eclogues and the pastoral tradition.²⁵ One might say that the mixture of the urban and the rustic, the ‘real’ and ²³ Not all Sørensen’s verses are proper hexameters and he quite often uses an upbeat (adding an extra foot, as in the line Ikke alle kan gledes ved busker og krypende småkratt quoted further down, p. 203). He is thus not as restricted by metre as Wiik. ²⁴ The comprehensive Preface does not comment on the translation itself. The only comment on the Norwegian text is about the rendering of hexameters. ²⁵ For a brief overview of positions on the city–country opposition in relation to the Eclogues, see the Introduction in Skoie 2006.

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the literary is in many ways at the core of Virgil’s pastoral art. The herdsmen are rustic, the setting is the pastoral landscape, and animals are present, especially in the framing passages of the poems. Yet the herdsmen speak in perfect hexameters and fill their verses with erudition and literary allusions. Apart from the much discussed opening of Eclogue 3, whose obsolete use of cuium (in the phrase cuium pecus) had been much used in comedy and was already satirized in antiquity, according to Donatus (Vita Vergilii 43), the style of the Eclogues is characterized as elegant and civilized.²⁶ According to Horace (Saturae, 1.10.44–5), the Eclogues are delicate and witty: molle atque facetum / Vergilio adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae (‘to Virgil the Muses who rejoice in rural life have granted delicacy and elegance’). The translation of contemporary literary criticism is never straightforward, and there is a discussion about the extent to which facetus is related to humour.²⁷ What seems clearer, however, is the way this terminology is otherwise related to a sophisticated poetic style. Mollis had special connotations in the vocabulary of Augustan poetry—particularly in the elegiac programme.²⁸ In his discussion of the Horatian passage, Quintilian (Inst. 6.3.20) associates the name or designation (appellatio) facetus with ‘a certain grace . . . and cultivated elegance’ (decoris . . . et excultae cuiusdam elegantiae).²⁹ Servius catches this ambivalence in his commentary on Virgil. In the preface to the Eclogues he famously refers to the poems as written ‘in the humble style because of the quality of the business and personages’ (in bucolicis humilem pro qualitate negotiorum et personarum, Serv. Praef. Thilo). But, when comparing Virgil with Theocritus, he comments on how the allegories reveal a ‘poetic urbanity’—or, one may say, an urban(e) poetics (poetica urbanitate). This is a view shared by modern commentators; for instance, Clausen sees the essence of pastoral in the ‘disparity between the meanness of his subject and the refinement of the poet’s art’.³⁰ Likewise, though the genre of pastoral is a tricky literary category, the relationship between the complex and the simple is at its heart.³¹ Finding a Norwegian way of representing the literary figure of Mediterranean herdsmen so as to make it at once recognizable and (yet) foreign is a challenge in ²⁶ On this, see e.g. Currie 1976. ²⁷ Facetus, used by Cicero with reference to Bion of Borysthenes (Cic. Tusc. 3.26), clearly refers to humour or wit, while Quintilian modifies this (Quint. Inst. 6.3.20). ²⁸ The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae lists a separate meaning related to elegy (II.e.2 de poesi elegiaca); and, in Propertius, mollem componere versum is equivalent to writing elegy, as it is in Ovid too (see Prop. 1.7.19; Ov. Trist. 2.307). On the wider significance of mollitia, see Edwards 1993, pp. 63–97. ²⁹ Facetum non tantum circa ridicula opinor consistere; neque enim diceret Horatius facetum carminis genus natura concessum esse Vergilio. Decoris hanc magis et excultae cuiusdam elegantiae appellationem puto (‘Again, I do not regard the epithet facetus as applicable solely to that which raises a laugh. If that were so Horace would never have said that nature had granted Virgil the gift of being facetus in song. I think that the term is rather applied to a certain grace and polished elegance’). ³⁰ Clausen 1994, p. xv. ³¹ Most famously, Empson defined the pastoral as ‘putting the complex into the simple’. On this genre, see e.g. Alpers 1996 and Patterson 1987a.

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itself. One quickly faces the danger of making them look like Gustaf ’s Arcadians, who wear woollen socks. Finding a path that strikes a balance between the urban and the rustic, the simple and the complex, within the landscape of the Norwegian language(s) is a further challenge—not least on account of the strong connotations of urbanity and rusticity in the different versions of the language. However, as we shall see, it is not just the choice between Nynorsk and Bokmål that is important, but also the stylistic choices within the two idioms and their literarity.

13.5 Title and Terminology A first indication of stylistic register is the choice of title for the collection. While Danielsen et al. simply call the poem ‘Virgil’s fourth bucolic poem’ (bukoliske dikt), an otherwise not often used norwegianized version of the Latin, both Sørensen and Wiik provide the poem with a more Norwegian title, which includes a reference to shepherding. In Norwegian pastor may be translated either as hyrde/hyrding or as gjeter/gjetar. The first is almost exclusively used in a biblical or highly literary and artistic sense (e.g. in speaking about Rococo porcelain figures), while the second is the term used for real Norwegian shepherds. Sørensen, as I already said, entitles the poem ‘Gullalderbarnet’ (‘The Golden Age Child’), but also gives it a subtitle, ‘IV. Hyrdesang’ (‘The Fourth Herding Song’); and in a brief note he calls the Eclogues hyrdedikt. In their commentary, Danielson et al. also use the term hyrdedikt for the genre. Wiik on the other hand calls the collection Bucolica: Gjetarsongar (Shepherdsongs). While the other two use the biblical or literary term for shepherd, hyrde, Wiik uses the everyday term gjetar. Its occurrence in conjunction with song is quite normal, and the title Gjetarsongar could easily have been the name of a collection of folk songs from real Norwegian shepherds.³² However, Wiik balances this vernacular title by adding a Latin subtitle: Bucolica—a term that sounds distinctly foreign to Norwegian ears. In his earlier translation of the poems, Wiik also countered the ‘domestic’ element by using the biblical noun hyrding for pastor (e.g. he translated pastores at Verg. Ecl. 1.21 as hyrdingar), but in the final version this noun was replaced by the everyday noun gjetar. Another difference at the level of the title is the choice of song versus poem. While the more literal translation of Danielsen et al. sticks to the designation ‘poem’, the two translations with more poetic ambitions use ‘song’. To a modern reader, this might offer fewer literary associations, but on the other hand it might make the poems sound more ancient. At the same time, calling the poems ‘songs’ is of course in tune with the shepherds’ own designation of their activities. Returning to pastoral terminology, there is also a Norwegian noun for ‘flock’ that is exclusively found in biblical and formal literary texts: hjord, which occurs both in Nynorsk and in Bokmål (with the difference that in Nynorsk it has only a religious ³² A Google search for the term came up with a shepherd’s song from 1875 about not having enough money for clothes, but the url has in the meantime disappeared.

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use). Sørensen uses this biblical term to translate armenta in Virgil’s line 22, while Danielsen et al. use the more neutral kveg. Likewise, Wiik uses a more common term, buskap; and he translates pecus (Verg. Ecl. 1.74) with another everyday term, bøling, which is often found in more humorous contexts. In his earlier translation he also uses the biblical hjord for capellae (‘goats’); but, like the biblical shepherd, the biblical goats, too, get removed after a discussion with the publisher.³³

13.6 Setting the Scene The three first lines make up a pastoral prologue to the more Hesiodic part that follows. They thus work as a pastoral framing or scene-setting. I shall look here at the first five lines in order to see how the three translations render this prologue and the start of the first section, which introduces the theme. The English translations of the Latin are from Lee (1984). Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus. non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae; si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae. Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. (Verg. Ecl. 4.1–5) ‘Sicilian Muses, grant me a slightly grander song. Not all delight in trees and lowly tamarisks; Let woods, if woods we sing, be worthy of a consul. Now the last age of Cumae’s prophecy has come; The great succession of centuries is born afresh.’

Sørensen 1950: lines 1–5 Landlige muser, litt høyere nu vil vi synge! Rural muses, little higher now will we sing! Ikke alle kan gledes ved busker og krypende småkratt. Not all may be-amused by bushes and creeping shrubbery. Om storskogen synger vi nu, ti storskog er konsulen verdig. About the-bigwood sing we now, thus a-bigwood is the-consul worthy. Den tid som Sibyllen har talt om, vi står ved dens terskel That time which the-Sibyl has spoken about, we stand at its threshhold Mektig av moderskjød bryter de nye århundrer følge. Mighty from mother’s-womb break the new centuries following.

Sørensen strikes an enthusiastic note, but does not indicate where we are. He follows Virgil in opening with the Muses, but they are made into countryside or pastoral Muses (landlige muser) rather than being Virgil’s more specific ‘Sicilian’ Muses, in ³³ Personal communication.

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allusion to Theocritus. Likewise, he sticks to Virgil’s word order in line 2—which is easier to do in Bokmål than in Nynorsk, as passive forms can be used more frequently. The flora is here made general—bushes and lowly thickets. The first notion of this being an ancient Mediterranean setting comes in line 3, with the reference to the consul. This verse is nicely alliterating, and the repetition follows Virgil. The woods worthy of a consul, which make up both the alliteration and repetition, are also made literally bigger through an unusual but understandable compound storskog (bigwood). Though not so specifically Mediterranean, the voice of the prologue is distinctly not that of a real Norwegian shepherd. In the first and third lines Sørensen has introduced a ‘now’ (nu). Apart from being metrically convenient and good for marking out the start, this is also a very significant word in terms of language policy and stylistic register. Nu is a term that one would never think of putting in the mouth of a shepherd or farmer, or indeed of anyone outside the educated classes.³⁴ It has a distinctly urban and civilized sound. Nu rather than nå in Bokmål has been a topic of heated debate and has become a prime marker of the more conservative Riksmål.³⁵ Sørensen himself took part in these debates on the side of Riksmål, as he was chairman of the Riksmål Society and published several works on language issues.³⁶ When moving on to line 4, he does not use the more learned circumlocution ‘the Cumaean prophecy’, which only alludes to the Sibyl, but instead names the Sibyl directly. He also includes his readers in the narrative: ‘we are on the threshold’. In line 5 he takes nascitur rather literally and, with a powerful alliteration, lets the new centuries force their way from a mother’s womb (moderskjød). The term he uses for ‘womb’ here is, again, highly literary and biblical. Danielsen et al. are much more prosaic, apart from the use of exclamation marks, as one might expect from the purpose and context of the translation: Danielsen et al. 1975: lines 1–5 Sicilianske muser! La meg synge om noe større! Sicilian Muses! Let me sing about something bigger! Ikke alle gleder seg over kratt og lavvokste tamarisker Not all amused are by bushes and lowgrowing tamarisks

³⁴ Except in one dialect: Finnmark, the northernmost dialect. But this is not relevant here, as the poem is clearly not playing on dialects. ³⁵ In the debates that started in the aftermath of the 1938 reform of Bokmål, the conservatives came up with Riksmål, the alternative form of Norwegian where nu for ‘now’ was among the prime markers; see Løland 1997. ³⁶ Sørensen was chairman of Riksmålsforbundet during the period 1959–61 and wrote several articles and pamphlets on the development of the Norwegian language. Some of the titles convey a passionate commitment to the conservative cause, for example I kamp for sproget: Sprogutvikling eller avvikling? (In Battle for Our Language: Language Development or Termination?, published in 1952). Furthermore, he regarded the battle over language as part of a larger cultural framework, as the very title of one his pamphlets from 1945 indicates: Sprogstriden og dens åndelige baggrund (The Battle Over Language and Its Intellectual Background).

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Hvis jeg synger om skoger, la skogene være en konsul verdig. If I sing of woods, let the-woods be of-a consul worthy. Den siste tidsalder av sibyllens spådom er allerede kommet. The last age of the-Sibyl’s prophecy has already arrived Tidsaldrenes store syklus begynner på nytt. The-ages’ great cycle starts again.

This translation renders much more closely the Mediterranean context than Sørensen’s—the Muses are Sicilian and the shrubbery is specified as ‘tamarisk trees’ (myricae). It sticks to Virgilian word order in lines 2 and 3, but does not retain ‘the Cumaean prophecy’ in line 4: like Sørensen, the translators turn this phrase into the much more familiar ‘Sibyl’. Given that the piece comes with a commentary, this is perhaps odd. In line 5, nascitur is translated by the much less specific ‘begin’ (begynner). This is indeed quite representative of the rest of the translation as well, which is rather bland and generalizing. In terms of language, the translation stays within a rather neutral Bokmål. Wiik’s version, as one perhaps already anticipates, is richer in vocabulary and stylistic registers than that of Danielsen et al. His mixture of the Mediterranean and the vernacular is clear from the first two lines: Wiik 2016: lines 1–5 Lat meg få syngja om høgare emne, siciliske muser. Let me sing about higher topics, Sicilian Muses. Småkratt og låg tamarisk veks ikkje til glede for alle. Bushes and low tamarisks do not grow for the-amusement of everyone. Dersom vi syng om vår skog, lat skogane høva ein konsul. If we sing about our wood, let the-woods be-worthy a consul. Tida som spåddest i songen frå Cuma, er endeleg runnen. The time prophesied in the-song from Cuma, has finally arrived. Atter ein gong er den mektige rekkja av sekel i emning. Yet again the powerful row of centuries is in-the-making.

Like Danielsen et al., he retains ‘Sicilian Muses’ and uses tamarisker (‘tamarisk’) for myricae. But, unlike his predecessors, he retains the reference to a ‘Cumaean prophecy’ (Cumaei . . . carminis: songen frå Cuma). His form of Nynorsk in this final version, unlike that of the previous version, remains within the boundaries of the most recent Nynorsk dictionary, though it is still in the conservative register when it comes to the choice of forms. For nascitur he uses å være i emning (‘to become’)—a rather formal expression. The previous version also added an Old Norse dimension to this register by using the now rather obscure form Sikilsøy for ‘Sicily’.³⁷ Wiik is obviously very culturally ³⁷ This form occurs in the saga of Sigurd Jorsalfar, which is part of Snorri Sturlason’s well-known collection of kings’ sagas, Heimskringla (c.1230); and it also occurs in the old (probably medieval) folk song ‘Vognkjøreren på Sikilsøy’.

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aware when it comes to the name of the Muses. In Eclogue 3 he uses the more Norwegian term songmøyar for Virgil’s Camenae (l. 59), to distinguish the Italic goddesses from the Greek Muses. Already in the opening of the poem, the three translations display different strategies and give the reader very different impressions of the Virgilian mode.

13.7 Domesticating and Foreignizing In a classic, standard typology, translations may be considered as either domesticating or foreignizing the source text (and I am using here Venuti’s categories in a rather general sense).³⁸ In a Norwegian context, one might think that giving Virgil a voice in Nynorsk—the language made up of local dialects—would automatically acculturate the text or transport it home, render it more ‘domestic’. Bokmål is closer to Latin in syntax, and also in vocabulary. However, thanks to the words meaning ‘Sicily’ and ‘tamarisk’, the signalling of a Mediterranean context is much stronger in Wiik’s opening than in Sørensen’s. Other passages that deal more specifically with issues related to the pastoral that could be made more vernacular are lines 21–2 (the sheep with full udders who return by themselves; the cattle who do not need to be afraid of lions) and 42–3 (the multicoloured sheep). I have already commented upon the rendering of the Latin for ‘flock’ in lines 21–2, where Danielsen et al. use the neutral kveg, Sørensen the biblical hjord, and Wiik the biblical hjord in his first version and the more ordinary kveg in the printed version. For the other animals mentioned here, not that many choices are available. However, Sørensen uses a very archaic spelling of vedder (‘ram’) for the Latin aries in line 40. Similarly, as already mentioned, Wiik uses the most archaic forms available in the latest version of Nynorsk. Such practice is in tune with the older tradition, before the reforms made Nynorsk and Bokmål more similar to each other and more akin to everyday speech. Theirs is, precisely, a literary Nynorsk where the aim is to be able to display stylistic variety and richness.³⁹ Yet Wiik also employs a more ordinary vocabulary, as I pointed out (e.g. bøling). A final example of everyday usage is the address to the child at the end of Eclogue 4 (lines 60–3). Here Sørensen uses the more formal word for ‘mother’, moder, and the rather neutral word for child, barn. Wiik on the other hand uses respectively the more informal mor and the more common and endearing veslegut. The last one is, like the title ‘Gjetarsongar’, in tune with folk songs, particularly lullabies. The mixture of the endearing and everyday with archaisms and poeticisms gives stylistic complexity to the text. But Sørensen seems to adopt a highly literary and conservative style all the way through. Hence Wiik is the one who shows most ³⁸ See Venuti 1995. ³⁹ The fewer regulations of a language, the wider its range of possibilities. Spaans 2016 claims that this is part of the reason why the earlier Nynorsk translations of Shakespeare were so successful.

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stylistic complexity, and in a way that may be seen to do justice to Virgil’s complexity. His choice of style is also in tune with his own presentation of the Eclogues as ‘secretive’ (løyndomsfull, Sørensen 1950, p. 21), in the sense that it gives readers many meanings that go in different directions. Neither Wiik nor Sørensen seem to turn the narrator’s voice into contemporary Norwegian in any way, though Wiik’s final version is more vernacular than his 2014 draft. The most vernacular—that is, ‘domesticated’—version is clearly the standard Bokmål version by Danielsen et al.—not so much through the vocabulary, although that is ‘normalized’, as through the unpoetic character of the translation. Both Sørensen and Wiik are rich in poetic features such as repetition and alliteration, besides the rhythm. Sørensen also adds some highly poetic exclamations , like o at line 12 (in addition to the one in line 53, which is not an addition—it is present in the original too). When it comes to rendering the poetic qualities and the tone of the poem, this seems more important than the choice of idiom.

13.8 Rustic Urbanity and Urban Rusticity When embarking upon this analysis, I thought I would find clearer differences between the Nynorsk and the Bokmål versions with respect to their stylistic register, the urban–countryside distinction, and the foreignizing–domesticating axis. Although this is only a brief survey, the conclusion is that clear-cut distinctions are hard to find. While Sørensen gives his narrator a clearly urban voice (e.g. the repeated use of nu), uses exclusively literary terms for the technical vocabulary of shepherding, and makes some lines less specifically Mediterranean, he does not come across as domesticating Virgil. Nor does he sound utterly sophisticated. The content shines through in metaphors and comparisons, and the alliterations and repetitions make the poem sound like something special. On the other hand, Wiik does not make the poem sound like that of a Norwegian shepherd, despite the fact that he adopts a Nynorsk voice and, in his acknowledgements, thanks a real Norwegian sheep farmer for teaching him about the relationship between shepherding and poetry. Although he picks up some common words from the folk tradition, his way of mixing them with conservative forms and of sticking to Virgil’s circumlocutions gives his translation a learned tone, which one might call urban or sophisticated and civilized. This characteristic was even more striking in the earlier version, which also played with a biblical and Old Norse register. The prose translation in standard Bokmål is the one that comes across as neither rustic nor particularly urban—at least not in the sense of learned or witty. The prose translation certainly is the most domesticated of the three, but this seems to be due more to the fact that it is in prose than to the choice of Bokmål. What does all this tell us about Virgilian pastoral idiom transposed in a foreign language? A banal, but still important conclusion is that trying to render Virgil’s poetry in prose seems to yield the least idiomatic result and that the best way of finding a pastoral idiom is to follow what one might call ‘the poetic function’.

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One should therefore be less concerned with pastoral in city garb or with city folk in pastoral garb, be it Bokmål or Nynorsk. Although language politics might still be important as an impetus for translating the classical work in one version of Norwegian or the other, the actual result depends more on finding a poetic idiom. And this idiom may take several forms. As Venuti notes in his essay on poetic translation, ‘poetry translation tends to release language from the narrowly defined communicative function that most translations are assumed to serve . . . namely the communication of a formal or semantic invariant contained in the source text’.⁴⁰ He thus concludes that the practice of poetic translation is variation. Yet, as his essay bears the subtitle ‘An Ethics of Translation’, this is not a call for an ‘anything goes’ approach. It is a call for an ethical translation that is ‘neither arbitrary nor anarchically subversive, but rather determined to take responsibility for bringing a foreign text into a different situation by acknowledging that its very foreignness demands cultural innovation’.⁴¹ In this process the translator is dependent on what Venuti calls the interpretants, those factors that mediate between the source language and culture and the target language and culture.⁴² These can be either formal or thematic: they relate either to issues of genre and metre or to issues of cultural codes and values. On the basis of this brief analysis of the three Norwegian translations of Eclogue 4, I would stress the aesthetic aspect of this ethics—what I have called, with a nod to Roman Jakobson, the poetic function; and this function is, in itself, a foreignizing gesture. The place of Virgil’s shepherds is neither in the city nor in the country, but in poetry, whether looked at from an ancient or a contemporary perspective; and that is, after all, a foreign country.

⁴⁰ Venuti 2013a, p. 174.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 192.

⁴² Ibid., p. 181.

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14 The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’ Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret Séverine Clément-Tarantino Translated by Gillian Glass and Susanna Braund

Musa mihi causas memora: quo numine laeso quidue dolens regina deum tot uoluere casus insignem pietate uirum, tot adire labores impulerit. tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (Verg. A. 1.8–11)

Muse, tell me why. What stung the queen of heaven, What insult to her power made her drive This righteous hero through so many upsets And hardships? Can divine hearts know such anger? (Ruden 2008, Aeneid, 1.8–11)

Muse, apprends-moi les causes: pour quelle atteinte à ses pouvoirs, pour quelle blessure la reine des dieux précipita en un tel cercle d’infortunes, au-devant de tels travaux, un homme insigne en piété. Est-il tant de colères dans les âmes célestes? (Perret 1977–80, vol. 1, p. 5)

Muse, dis m’en les raisons: quelque divinité offensée? Quelque grief de la reine des dieux, qui aura amené un homme d’une piété insigne à parcourir un tel cycle de malheurs, à affronter autant d’épreuves? De pareilles rancunes en des âmes célestes? (Veyne 2013, vol. 1, p. 23)

From the very first page, Paul Veyne’s Aeneid sings its own tune, nimble and free. In these lines invoking the Muse, the translator clearly feels constrained neither by the necessity to render the syntax of the Latin phrasing exactly, let alone the precise words, nor by the intertextualities and deployment of key terms. A student still unsteady in his or her Latin could not rely upon this translation to reconstruct Virgil’s poetry and would need to weigh each word of the original or be guided by a commentary in order to react to the echoes created by the author in relation to the epic tradition. The sense of the lines would, however, be conveyed immediately, and curiosity would most certainly be piqued.

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This is not to say, on the other hand, that the translation of Jacques Perret is difficult and off-putting. It is more accurate and also more ‘useful’ for someone endeavouring to decode the Latin text. Above all else, this translation is rhythmical: it preserves the idea that the original is a poem, and a poem based upon metre. It displays a highly conscious distribution of stresses per sentence, dividing each one into micro-rhythmical groups of three or four syllables that might easily remind the French reader of those used in the classical alexandrine. Moreover, Perret’s attention to rhythm reflects closely Virgil’s variations in rhythm. Both these translations were published by Les Belles Lettres (Perret’s in 1977–80 and Veyne’s in two successive editions, in 2012 and 2013, the second one in two volumes). According to the few theoretical comments provided by Paul Veyne, it is philology that makes the difference between one Budé translation and another (that of Jacques Perret and his own 2012 one, which was published the subsequent year in the collection Classiques en Poche, facing the text established by Perret).¹ On our backwards walk from Veyne to Perret, we shall see that it is also poetry that makes the difference. If it took Veyne’s translation to make Virgil readable in French, Virgil also gains from being read in Perret’s translation, which deserves to be reread carefully for its artistic merits.

14.1 Paul Veyne’s Translation as a Necessary and Welcome Renewal The years 2012 and 2013 marked a small revolution in the study and contemporary reception of Virgil in France. As already mentioned, during these years a new translation of the Aeneid, composed by Paul Veyne, was published—first on its own (in a joint publication of Albin Michel and Les Belles Lettres), then with facing Latin text (in Belles Lettres’s series Classiques en Poche).² The earlier publication, now available in paperback,³ provides an Aeneid that one can assign, as a teacher, to ‘non-specialized’ students (students of modern literature, history, etc.), or that can be ¹ Veyne never uses the word ‘philology’, but he also makes it clear that his approach is not that of the ‘philologist’. When he lambasts the ‘humanist’, or rather ‘scholarly’, tradition and gobbledygook (charabia) in his Preface—Hélas, à moins d’avoir du génie, le traducteur en est réduit, comme je l’ai fait, à traduire en prose. Notre traduction, toutefois, a tenté de passer entre deux écueils: la tradition humaniste, ou plutôt scolaire, et le charabia (‘Alas! Unless he is a genius, the translator is reduced to writing a prose translation, as I did. Our translation, however, has attempted to avoid two pitfalls: the humanist, or rather scholastic, tradition and gibberish’, Veyne 2012, p. 15)—he could be thinking of the Perret translation or of an approach like Klossowski’s, where the ‘gobbledygook’ could stem from the desire to render the ‘strangeness’ of Latin; if we consider Perret’s writings on translation, as we shall below, and his own comments on philology, Perret could well be Veyne’s target. ² Since then, other translations have been published: a line-for-line translation by Olivier Sers, at Les Belles Lettres, and a combined translation by J. Dion, Ph. Heuzé, and A. Michel for the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, both in 2015 (a calendrical coincidence?). Veyne’s translation remains the one that promotes the greatest sense of regeneration, despite limitations owing to Veyne not being a Virgil specialist. ³ Veyne 2016.

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read by persons curious about ancient literature and without any prior knowledge of Latin. The later edition is an excellent instrument for teaching the Aeneid to Latin students: the series Classiques en Poche makes Budé texts accessible, at least financially, for this type of readership;⁴ and, even this is not an iron-clad rule, the habit of working with a bilingual edition persists when teaching an ancient author at the university level. This genuinely new translation solved a certain problem apparently experienced by French readers—and particularly young readers—with Virgil (at least epic Virgil) for several years: in the other available translations, the Aeneid was not appreciated and the text was even judged difficult to understand. Veyne’s translation stirred a rebirth of interest in Virgil and restored the taste for reading the Aeneid. I begin with several examples—taken from the translation itself, but also from the remarks added by Veyne in the Classiques en Poche version—so that the vivacity and clarity that are certainly two of the greatest characteristics of this new French Aeneid can be properly appreciated. In the second section I return briefly to the idea of the Aeneid that Veyne’s translation is supposed to illustrate, and indeed succeeds in illustrating.

14.2 Clarifications What makes the Aeneid more readable in Veyne’s translation? Generally speaking, this is a matter of clarity and fluidity, which are here greater than ever before because of his constant effort to choose more common words, and also more common and simple syntactical structures. Here is the end of the first book (Verg. A. 1.748–56; throughout this chapter I am using Ruden 2008 for English translations from the Latin Aeneid): nec non et uario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem, multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa; nunc quibus Aurorae uenisset filius armis, nunc quales Diomedis equi, nunc quantus Achilles.

Unlucky Dido spoke of various things, Drawing the night out, deep in love already. She asked so many questions: Priam, Hector, The armor of the son of Dawn, how good Diomedes’ horses were, how tall Achilles.

‘immo age et a prima dic, hospes, origine nobis insidias’ inquit ‘Danaum casusque tuorum erroresque tuos; nam te iam septima portat omnibus errantem terris et fluctibus aestas’.

‘Tell it from the beginning, friend—the ambush By the Greeks, your city’s fall, your wanderings. This is the seventh summer now that sends you drifting across the wide world’s lands and seas’.

Veyne 2013, vol. 1, p. 71 Ce n’est pas tout: la malheureuse Didon prolongeait tard dans la nuit ses entretiens et buvait l’amour à longs traits, tout en posant mille questions sur Priam, mille autres sur Hector: sous quelles armes était venu le fils de l’Aurore? Et puis, comment étaient les chevaux de Diomède? Et Achille, quelle était sa force? ‘Mais il y a mieux à faire, mon hôte: raconte-nous à partir du

⁴ As it happens, the semi-luxurious presentation in a two-volume box set, with its refined design and high-quality paper, drives up the cost of this Aeneid by comparison to that of the Classiques en Poche (e.g. €35 instead of €19.90 for Ovid’s Metamorphoses), which means that students cannot always afford it.

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commencement le piège que vous ont tendu les Grecs, les malheurs des tiens et tes propres errances: car c’est déjà la septième saison que tu es porté, errant, sur les terres et sur les mers.’ That’s not all: unhappy Dido extended the proceedings late into the night and drank in love in long draughts, all the while asking a thousand questions about Priam, a thousand more about Hector: under whose arms did the son of Aurora come? And then, what were the horses of Diomedes like? And Achilles, what was his strength? ‘But we can do better, my guest: tell us starting from the beginning the trap that the Greeks set for you, the misfortunes of your people and your own wanderings: as it’s already the seventh season that you have been carried, wandering, across the lands and across the seas.’

Structures or expressions like nec non and immo age had rarely been translated in such a vivid way (Ce n’est pas tout, ‘That’s not all’; Mais il y a mieux à faire, ‘But it’d be much better’), drawn from everyday language. The choice of mille (‘a thousand’) for multa, or of the expression boire à longs traits (‘to drink slowly in order to savour what one drinks’) for longum . . . bibebat is in the same category. Regarding the syntax proper, the substitution of direct questions—in what becomes free indirect speech— for the indirect questions in the original and in previous translations is very effective and expresses well the queen’s pressing curiosity. In this context the literal translation of aestas by saison (‘season’) is rather surprising,⁵ but does not affect at all the general impression of natural language.⁶ Veyne clearly looks to bring the Aeneid closer to the readers by writing in a language that is almost everyday language: he does include some words that sound like classical French, even some old-fashioned ones, but as a rule he favours the most common.⁷ Veyne’s concern for clarity also means that he continuously tries to understand what Virgil means and, in the case of concrete things or gestures, how we are supposed to visualize them. The clarification is often made in the translation or made explicit in a footnote: thus, on Aeneas’s gesture at the height of the storm, tendens ad sidera palmas (Verg. A. 1.93): tendant vers le ciel les paumes de ses mains the translator adds (Veyne 2013: 1, p. 28 n. 1): C’est l’ancien geste de prière (toujours usuel dans certains pays, dont le Népal): lever les bras au ciel, les mains repliées en arrière, à l’horizontale; voir par ex. Suétone, Vitellius, 7. ⁵ This precision is all the more surprising as the expression is problematic, rendered so by septima (see Servius, for whom this is one of the unsolvable Virgilian quaestiones). ⁶ The comparison with Perret’s translation is very telling; observe, in particular, Perret’s rendering (p. 34) of multa super Priamo rogitans in A. 1.750: Et cependant, reprenant cent fois l’entretien, l’infortunée Didon faisait durer la nuit, buvait un long amour, interrogeant de Priam, d’Hector sans se lasser, puis en quelles armes avait paru le fils de l’Aurore, puis les chevaux de Diomède, puis Achille et son poids dans la bataille’. Interroger de is not natural (I could not even find it in the Trésor de la Langue française), but the choice of de is surely meant to match the remarkable use of super in Latin (‘familiar in origin and common in Plautus’, writes Austin 1964 in his commentary ad loc.). ⁷ Here are some other examples taken from here and there: miroque incensum pectus amore (Verg. A. 3.298) (transl. in vol. 1, p. 45), rendered by je meurs d’envie (‘I am dying for’); certantibus (in uerrimus et proni certantibus aequora remis, Verg. A. 3.668) (transl. in vol. 1, p. 169) translated by à qui mieux mieux (‘over and over again’); ultro (in ultroque incluserit urbi, Verg. A. 9.729) (transl. in vol. 2, p. 165) translated by bel et bien (‘well and truly’).

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It is the ancient prayer gesture (still in use in some countries, such as Nepal): to raise the arms to the sky, with the hands bent back, horizontally; see e.g. Suetonius, Vitellius, 7.⁸

Another example, taken from a passage that often excites students’ curiosity (some want to understand precisely which movement each Cyclops makes and at what moment), is Aeneid 8.452–3, a passage describing the Cyclopes at work (illi inter sese multa ui bracchia tollunt / in numerum, uersantque tenaci forcipe massam, ‘Alternately they raise their powerful arms / In rhythm; with tight tongs they turn the ingots’). Veyne translates: Quant aux Cyclopes, ils s’accordent à lever en cadence leurs bras puissants et ils retournent la masse avec des tenailles mordantes.

Then he adds the following comment (Veyne 2013, vol. 2, p. 94 n. 61): Incudibus est un pluriel poétique, car il n’y a qu’une seule enclume, puisqu’il n’y a que trois forgerons proprement dits . . . aussi ne peut-on fabriquer qu’un seul objet à la fois . . . Ils lèvent les bras tour à tour puisqu’ils travaillent tous trois sur une seule et même enclume. Incudibus is a poetic plural: there is only one anvil, as there are only three actual blacksmiths . . . thus only one object can be worked on at once. . . . They lift their arms in turn since the three of them work on the same anvil.⁹

In other cases the footnote contains a justification of the new translation proposed. In fact there are a number of words whose meaning Veyne has reconsidered more or less deeply and for which he systematically offers an explanation, with slight variations or additions from case to case.¹⁰ One of these words is aduersus, ‘opposite’. Veyne emphasizes the fact that aduersus in Latin enables one to say that one is in front of something, a door for example, but that it also puts it the other way round: the thing in question, say, the door, is said to be aduersus the person. An annotated example is to be found at Aeneid 3.287, where postibus aduersis figo is translated thus: arrivé devant la porte du temple, je fixe aux jambages [un bouclier] (‘once arrived in front of the temple’s door, I attach to the jamb [a shield]’). In the footnote, Veyne adds a further element (Veyne 2013, vol. 1, p. 144 n. 27): De plus, aduersus permet de susciter la présence de l’espace autour du héros et de ses déplacements, par rapport à un repère ou à un but: ici, Virgile ne nous avait pas dit que son héros se rendait à un temple.

⁸ The gesture is not as clear in Perret’s translation (vol. 1, p. 8): tendant ses deux mains vers les astres (‘stretching his two hands towards the stars’). ⁹ ‘In turn’ is more explicit and more visual, perhaps, than en cadence in French. But it is not exactly the same thing either. On the Callimachean basis (and the Virgilian interpretation) of in numerum, see the comment on Verg. G. 4.174–5 in Thomas 1988, vol. 2. ¹⁰ An example upon which Veyne has insisted is ingemit, which—he underlines—does not essentially mean ‘to moan’ in classical Latin, but ‘to roar’ (like a lion; see Veyne 2012, p. 15).

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Moreover, aduersus enables the space around the hero and his movements to materialize, in relation to a point of reference or a goal; in this case, Virgil did not tell us that his hero was walking towards a temple.

Maybe in this precise case the translator goes too far, inasmuch as the translation includes elements that are in fact glosses—du temple at least looks like an (unjustified) addition; and ellipses are, after all, part of Virgil’s narrative technique. However, I think that Veyne thus makes a very thought-provoking point, which involves—and invites us to explore—Virgil’s poetic treatment of space.¹¹ Furthermore, the additions made are completely in keeping with the search for clarity; if I think back to my students, without such a specific translation they would not really grasp what is happening, what Aeneas is doing with Abas’s shield, or they would not stop and try to understand which temple the narrator is talking about. I am confident that Veyne’s translation has helped many readers to understand better or more quickly the meaning of the Aeneid in French. I am more worried about the fact that it does not always help readers to understand the Aeneid in Latin: I mean that Veyne departs from the original text more often than he himself declares,¹² essentially because of his strong intention of publishing a fluid, pleasant, and vivid narrative, and also because, as he declares, he does not want to write gibberish (du charabia) by trying to preserve the structure of Latin phrases.¹³ The desire to transmit the characteristics of Virgil’s poetic language that he specifically highlights— lucidity and grace—goes hand in hand with a deliberate distancing himself from the language of Virgil—his Latin. The text rarely ‘feels’ like a translation. But does it still feel like an epic?

¹¹ Other footnotes about aduersus can be found in Veyne 2013, vol. 1, p. 322 n. 66 (aduerso in limine at Verg. A. 6.636); and vol. 2, p. 144 n. 42 (aduersi in tergum Sulmonis at Verg. A. 9.412). ¹² See Veyne 2013, vol. 2, p. 349 n. 127. ¹³ See Veyne 2012, pp. 15–16: Chaque langue diffère d’une autre, n’a pas la même ‘structure’, si bien que traduire fidèlement, c’est trahir. . . . Cet ordre [sc. l’ordre des mots en latin] est rarement significatif d’une intention de l’auteur; il facilitait la tâche des versificateurs. Si donc par excès de vertu ou par esthétisme maniériste, on s’acharne inutilement, dans une traduction française, à suivre l’ordre des mots latins, on écrira (on a écrit plus d’une fois) un charabia, en trahissant ainsi son auteur, qui, s’il n’est autre que Virgile, est, dans sa langue, d’une exquise limpidité qui fait le tourment du traducteur. . . . Ce qui est dans une langue une façon banale de s’exprimer doit être traduit par ce qui est banal dans l’autre langue, même si le mot à mot ou l’ordre des mots sont très différents’ (‘All languages are different one from another, they do not have the same “structure” so that to translate accurately is to betray. . . . This order [sc. Latin word order] rarely expresses the author’s specific intention; it makes the task of versifiers easier. So, if by excessive virtue or by aesthetic preciosity one vainly persists in keeping Latin word order, one will write gibberish, as has often been the case, betraying one’s author who, if he is none other than Virgil, is, in his own language, of an exquisite clarity which is a torment for the translator. . . . What, in one language, is a common way of speaking, has to be translated by something common in the other language too, even if word-for-word and word-order are very different’).

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14.3 Like a Novel In its form, Paul Veyne’s Aeneid more closely resembles a novel and is, in fact, introduced as a ‘historical novel’ in the Classiques en Poche edition.¹⁴ In the earlier preface, Veyne (2012) explicitly distinguished the Aeneid from genuine epic, a genre essentially represented by the Iliad. For Veyne, the Virgilian work is fundamentally a ‘story’, and a type of story that no longer exists or, from his point of view, is no longer appreciated today, when seriousness dominates: it is a ‘novelistic’ story, and its poetic character makes it appear as secondary. Despite this assessment, Veyne does point out that the Mozartesque charm of this poetry is one of the manifestations of Virgil’s ‘genius’.¹⁵ The provocative nature of the main declarations found in the two prefaces of the Veyne translation, particularly that of the 2012 edition, is in no way surprising, coming from this scholar. It is, however, remarkable, even if not necessarily remarked upon, or obvious to all. It is especially uncertain whether or not the subtext and the opportune character of some of his declarations are clear to all readers. (I am, again, mainly concerned about the young readers likely to be using the Classiques en Poche edition.) In the preface to the 2012 edition, Veyne develops three major points: the Aeneid is not nationalistic; it is not religious; and, most important for the translation in and of itself, it is not grand. It seems clear to me that these points coincide with what has been viewed as faults of the poem related to its reception and appropriations. The most obvious fault undoubtedly concerns the uses to which Virgil’s work was put by patriotic and nationalist propaganda during the twentieth century. This can help explain a sort of defiance vis-à-vis the Aeneid on the part of readers in the relevant countries or, in a more positive light, the creation of a special link between Virgil and peace, for example, in the recent rewritings of the Aeneid in France that are destined for young people.¹⁶ Conspicuously, in the introduction to the second edition, where his argumentation about the Aeneid being un-nationalistic has become more straightforward and precise, Veyne tries to explain the reasons for Virgil’s ‘patriotism’ and seizes the opportunity to bring into question two other, related ideas: the concept of Virgil as a court poet; and his celebration of Augustus as mere flattery. These are, to my mind, necessary and very useful clarifications. The same could be said concerning the religious, not to say sacrosanct, character of the Virgilian œuvre: I wonder, actually, bearing in mind the long tradition over the course of which Virgil was Christianized, whether Veyne was not also thinking of the somewhat sacred aura that came to shroud Virgil in France during the last decades of the twentieth century,

¹⁴ This is the (sub)title of the introduction beginning on p. 7. ¹⁵ See Veyne 2012, p. 14, and, for the last assertion, p. 15. ¹⁶ I have two specific books in mind: Laporte 2010 (a rather strange rewriting, which begins as a paraphrase and then greatly simplifies and abbreviates the poem, especially as soon as war is engaged); and Hacquard 1992, where Virgil not only helps Meliboeus to get his land back but also does everything in his power to make possible the Peace of Brundisium.

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to the point that he became an ‘untouchable’ author, to whose study one could not apply certain modern theories and who required (in fact still requires, in the eyes of some) a special treatment.¹⁷ In particular, Virgil is humourless: some continue to deny him any playfulness in writing. In this context, we can also understand more easily Veyne’s third declaration (the 2012 preface even began with it), which gave rise to the almost maxim-like thought ‘L’Énéide est amusante à lire’ (‘The Aeneid is an amusing read’).¹⁸ In detail, Veyne aims at emphasizing that the Aeneid is not the monument many people undoubtedly imagine it is, with many negative connotations in their mind. In fact, the main reproach commonly made against the Aeneid—especially by non-specialist but educated readers—regards its allegedly ponderous grandeur. Veyne objects vigorously to the charge of ponderousness, but he goes as far as to deny the grandeur of the Aeneid, which thus finds itself distinguished not only from the Iliad, but also from the Divine Comedy and the works of Shakespeare; it remains aligned instead with the music of Mozart and the paintings of Delacroix.¹⁹ By accumulating such analogies, Veyne is doing his best to turn the Aeneid into the opposite of a pompous and boring work. This explains his transforming it, as we have seen, from an epic into a novel; and, because he then insists on presenting the fictional character of the poem, particularly regarding its treatment of myths,²⁰ Veyne seems to transform Virgil into (a sort of) Ovid, or to illustrate the Ovidian element in Virgil’s œuvre.²¹ In fact some may find that it is in this way, through the sceptical (or at least detached) posture that he thus lends to the poet, that Veyne makes him most unfamiliar.

14.4 The (Failed?) Marriage of Philology and Music: Jacques Perret as Translator Paul Veyne says very little explicitly on the connection between his translation and that of Jacques Perret. But Perret himself said little about his own translation, which he prepared for a three-volume edition of the Aeneid in the Universités de France series. In his review of Perret’s work, Jacques Fontaine lamented this silence: by briefly stating his principles at the end of the introduction, he wrote, Perret would have helped the reader to better understand some of his partis pris un peu abrupts ¹⁷ Apart from making numerous references to Veyne’s own works, Veyne’s translation is also full of references to John Scheid’s work on Roman religion, which is mentioned regularly in the footnotes. ¹⁸ Veyne 2012, p. 9. ¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 10, 12. ²⁰ See pp. 15–18 in the Introduction in Veyne 2013, vol. 1. The fact that an appendix dedicated to the quaestio of the Gates of Dreams is present in both editions of Veyne’s translation contributes to the emphasis placed on the fictional nature of the entire Aeneid, which Veyne regularly highlights. ²¹ For the idea that reading Virgil through lessons taken from Ovid would be fruitful, see Farrell 2001, pp. 24–8 and n. 145.

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(‘rather curt positions’).²² The fact of the matter is that, before undertaking this Aeneid for Les Belles Lettres, Jacques Perret reflected a great deal on translating the Latin and that, in an important section of his valuable work Latin et culture, published in 1947, he had expressed principles that his Aeneid clearly illustrates; he had also published several attempts at a verse translation accompanied by a very brief commentary. It is not possible for me to discuss, within the limits of this article, what his Aeneid preserves of these theoretical writings; the example given in my introduction at least offers a glimpse of the possible usefulness and appropriateness of a deeper exploration of this topic.

14.5 The Ideal Translator and the Principles of Translation: Latin et culture Latin et culture (Perret 1947) is a book in which Jacques Perret developed a deeply thought out defence of classical languages and culture at a time in the postwar period when their usefulness was contested. Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Réflexions sur l’art de traduire’ (‘Reflections on the Art of Translation’) and displays the same pedagogic approach as the entire book; after presenting a method that promotes quicker comprehension of Latin texts by students, Perret underscores the need to make them fully appreciate these texts by helping them attain the next level, namely translation. Yet this is the most difficult goal; for translation is an ‘art’. In the eighty-odd pages that make up this chapter, Perret endeavours to trace a portrait of the ideal translator by defining the distinct difficulties of the translation task and by exposing several layers of the approximation that a translation invariably is. Before attaining the ‘ideal’, the translator is insistently presented as an interpreter, that is, someone who must make a myriad of choices, and difficult choices at that (in terms of words, of rhythms and sonorities, of music). The use of ‘interpreter’ means that the individual’s personality is important: the translator is like a pianist who will play a certain piece in a way that is unique to him/her and whose name is even likely to attract the public to the concert (Perret 1947, pp. 135–6). The ‘fundamental vexatiousness’ (contrariété fondamentale)²³ of all translation, defined as l’expression d’une manière personnelle de sentir un texte (‘the expression of the way one personally feels the text’, ibid., p. 139), stems from the impossibility for the translator to include in the translation, which is unique, everything that was ‘felt’ in the text. (All translation is thus necessarily partial, in addition to being personal.) Sensibility is the first essential, non-negotiable characteristic of the ‘ideal translator’ (Perret insists upon it). This trait must be complemented by ‘philology’, which contributes all that is related to ‘ancient literary methodology, schools, currents, the ²² Fontaine 1981, p. 483. ²³ This is the title of the first section of the chapter.

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history of ideas and sensibility’ (ibid., p. 142). The translator should also be a little older and have at least some experience of being a little ‘ancient’ (i.e. more in harmony with the ancients: ‘harmony’ is one of the innumerable metaphors or images derived from music used throughout by Perret). S/he must not, however, renounce his/her status as a ‘modern’: s/he must not neglect or spurn the levels of literature and interpretation situated between the original and him-/herself. S/he must certainly lean upon philology to ‘hear’ the ancient text in its ‘original key’ as much as possible (ibid., p. 148), but s/he must not censure all natural sentiment either, which would carry him/her to interpret a certain passage of Book 6 of the Aeneid in the manner in which Dante did, to take that major example. In short, the ideal translator must be simultaneously ancient and modern; and, because s/he cannot convey all of the original work, s/he must have thought in advance what s/he wishes to communicate of the original. The second chapter is dedicated to the question of choice (ibid., pp. 166–97). Two major paths are distinguished: either to reveal a human presence, namely that of the author (either by seeking truly to reach his person or by concentrating on the traces of him inscribed in his text); or to reveal the beauty of expression. This second path is decidedly Perret’s preferred option, as he ultimately judges it to be the most effective way to convey the greatest number of elements of the original (ibid., p. 196).²⁴ It is here that the thought process is most didactic; Perret utters preferences that resemble guidelines to which he will himself adhere. Starting with the assumption that it is impossible to speak one language in another, he lists a certain number of elements that can, nevertheless, be conveyed into it. First is the ‘sketch of the Latin phrase’ (dessin de la phrase latine), its breadth, its movement—its characteristic progress, its ancient flavour, to borrow the terms of A.-M. Guillemin cited by Perret (ibid., pp. 182–3). Next are the so-called ‘Latinisms’, which are sometimes simply the resources of the classic French language (of the seventeenth century), or, again, elements that remain in ‘real’ French and recall the characteristic elements of Latin (he gives the examples of the simple past and of the pluperfect subjunctive). There is also the case of syntax made ‘flexible’, in order to contend with the boldness of one Latin poem or another (he mentions here Horace’s Odes), and in accordance with the most recent poetic experiments. According to Perret, vocabulary is the most difficult terrain when one wishes to make plain, in French, some of the colour of the original. Being rather hostile to the search for everyday words at all costs, he favours the use of antiquated words: as a matter of fact, he invites us to feel that what we are reading is a translation of an ancient composition, and even that it is a translation, full stop. Perret goes so far as to recommend using words that are ‘not entirely French’, but modelled ‘on their Latin ²⁴ For the benefit of those who seek to find ‘traces’ of the author’s person as it can be understood from his work, he speaks of traces derived from form, word order, and rhythm as the most reliable ones (Perret 1947, p. 177).

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forefathers’ (ibid., p. 188, sur le patron du mot latin). Less obscurely, this can mean simply prioritizing a word’s common meaning where the context does not prepare us for it. The basic idea here is to surprise, to accept that one is playing the flute with a violin—imitating the former to the best of one’s abilities, but without fearing incongruous notes.²⁵ The conclusion of this discussion (ibid., p. 191) contains an interesting remark in the case of Virgil: when we apply ourselves to rendering a Latin author’s recherché expressions, we must ourselves produce a certain number of recherché expressions. The difficulty lies in not overdoing it: it would not suit an author like Virgil, who forces nothing, according to Perret; avoiding searching for unusual methods of translating Virgil, though, risks producing a text that is too flat. In the final pages, Perret brings up the question of translating poetry in prose at a time when verse translations were still discredited. He clearly displays his preference for poetry and his desire for a renaissance of poetic translations. The citation of three verses from Valéry’s Cimetière marin in the last section of the chapter to illustrate what poetry alone can achieve thus takes on a stirring depth.²⁶ Valéry would have fulfilled Perret’s wish with his translation of the Eclogues; and Perret himself brought several contributions to this rebirth.

14.6 Verse above All Else The famous ‘little’ Virgil that Perret wrote for the series Les Écrivains de toujours at Seuil (Perret 1959) contains attempts at translating in verse excerpts from the Georgics and the Aeneid; after praising Paul Valéry’s translation of the Eclogues and before justifying the fact that he will say little about it, Perret offers a brief explanation of his art of, or approach to, translation (ibid., p. 176): Ne reste-t-il plus aux amateurs de Virgile qu’à essayer de faire du Valéry? Si le lecteur jette un coup d’œil sur nos traductions des Géorgiques et de l’Énéide, il verra pourtant que nous lui avons proposé autre chose. Tout en gardant fidèlement l’unité du vers, nous avons cherché un moyen de dilater l’alexandrin et d’en varier les structures internes. Il nous a semblé que l’isosyllabie même n’était pas dans le vers français une absolue nécessité, que la consécution régulière des accents, l’élimination des membres métriques dont l’étendue suggère les lapsus de diction, avait une tout autre importance, en sorte que parfois quatorze syllabes pourraient en valoir douze. Mais il n’est ²⁵ Perret 1947, p. 186: Il faudra sans doute nous efforcer de tirer du violon des sons qui ne soient pas tout à fait ceux que cet instrument fait entendre d’ordinaire, des sons qui étonneront, détonneront, auxquels, par conséquent, on pourra toujours reprocher d’être forcés, discordants, contre nature, mais qui suggéreront au moins que le son de la flûte n’est pas celui du violon et indiqueront aussi dans quelle direction il faut chercher à se l’imaginer, bien plus pur, riche, harmonieux (‘Assuredly, we will have to attempt to make the violin resonate with sounds which are not exactly the sounds usually produced by this instrument—sounds which will amaze, which will clash, for which one will certainly be reproached for their being forced, out of tune, unnatural, but which will suggest at least that the flute’s sound is not the same as the violin’s and which also will indicate in what direction this sound has to be imagined, purer, rich and harmonious’). ²⁶ Ibid., p. 201.

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jamais bien agréable qu’un habile homme explique lui-même ses tours. Souhaitons d’abord qu’ils ne déplaisent pas. For lovers of Virgil is there really only this solution left: to translate like Valéry? If the reader were to glance at our translations of the Georgics and the Aeneid, he would see, however, that we have proposed something different. While faithfully maintaining the unity of the verse, we have sought a means of expanding the alexandrine and of varying its internal structures. It seemed to us that equality of syllables was not an absolute necessity in French verse, and that the regular succession of stresses and the elimination of metrical elements, the extent of which suggests slips in diction, had a quite different importance, so that fourteen syllables could be worth twelve. Yet it is never enjoyable when a deft man has to explain his own tricks. Let us hope, then, that they are acceptable.

Let us consider an excerpt from the first passage of the Aeneid: the end of the storm in Book 1 (Verg. A. 1.142–56).²⁷ Et Neptune aussitôt calme les flots gonflés, 12 (3/3/1/5) And Neptune immediately calms the waves swollen, Éclaircit l’horizon, ramène le soleil. 12 (3/3/2/4) Lights the horizon, brings-back the sun. Cymothoé, Triton arrachent les navires 12 (4/2/2/4) Cymothoë, Triton snatch the ships Aux pointes des écueils; le dieu, de son trident, les pousse, 14 (2/4/2/4/2) From-the tips of-the reefs; the god, by his trident, them pushes, Ouvre la syrte illimitée et aplanit les eaux; 14 (4/4/4/2) Opens the Syrtes endless and smooths the waters; Son char vole, léger, sur la cime des vagues. 12 (3/3/3/3) His chariot flies, light, over the crest of-the waves. Lorsque dans un grand peuple une émeute bouillonne, 12 (1/5/3/3) As-when in a great people a riot brews, La foule ne se connaît plus; déjà torches et pierres 14 (2/6/3/3) The masses not themselves know any-more; already torches and stones Volent; tout devient arme aux mains des furieux. 12 (1/5/2/4) Fly; everything becomes arms in-the hands of-the furious. Qu’un homme alors, fort de sa piété, fort de ses œuvres; 14 (4/6/4) So, a man then, great by his piety, great by his deeds, Paraisse, et tout se tait, il retient tous les yeux, 12 (2/4/3/3) Appears, and all itself quietens, he holds all the eyes,

²⁷ I am quoting Perret’s translation (which extends to l. 296) from Perret 1959. Accented syllables are in bold. The figures at the end of French lines represent the succession of accentual groups (named coupes in French). The numbers indicate which syllables bear the stress at the end of each accentual group. For instance, here ‘3/3/1/5’ means that a stress occurs on the 3rd, the 6th, the 7th, and the 12th syllables of the line. 4/4/4 would mean that a stress occurs every four syllables of the line. As always Juliette Lormier has been invaluable for discussing rhythmical figures and in the present case the qualities of Perret’s translation(s).

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Ses mots guident les cœurs, apaisent les esprits. 12 (3/3/2/4) His words guide their hearts, appease their spirits. C’est ainsi qu’a tombé tout le bruit de la mer 12 (3/3/3/3) It is thus that fell all the sound of the sea Quand le dieu promenant son regard paternel, 12 (3/3/3/3) When the god by-turning his gaze paternal Lâche la bride à ses chevaux sous le ciel pur. 12 (4/4/4) Loosens the bridle for his horses under the sky pure. There is a clear recurrence of the twelve-syllable alexandrine, but freed from rhyme. There is also a sort of expected regularity, ‘classic’ regularity, in this line of twelve syllables. But we can observe that Perret ‘makes the internal structures vary’: the last line cited here clearly shows it with the ternary rhyme 4/4/4. Most strikingly, Perret introduces lines of fourteen syllables. If these (which have the advantage of avoiding the large loss that the strict use of the alexandrine as equivalent to the hexameter seems to entail) can equate the lines with twelve syllables, it is because of the regular consecutive placements of accents, found notably in lines 4 and 5 of the excerpt (ll. 145–6 in the Latin text): Aux pointes des écueils; le dieu, de son trident, les pousse, 14 (2/4/2/4/2) From-the tips of-the reefs; the god, by his trident, them pushes, Ouvre la syrte illimitée et aplanit les eaux; 14 (4/4/4/2) Opens the Syrtes endless and smooths the waters; We can also see how Perret tries to make his lines sing in harmony with Virgil’s, retaining the enjambments (volent instead of seditio; paraisse for conspexere), rendering something of the alliterations (paraisse, et tout se tait, il retient tous les yeux, l. 11 of the Perret excerpt; conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus astant, Verg. A. 1.152). If these aspects of ‘fidelity’ to the original poetic text are made to the detriment of accuracy (in the last line cited, eyes are mentioned instead of ears, arrectis being omitted), it is only semantic accuracy, and the latter was not the most important in the eyes of Perret when he composed this little ‘art of translation’.²⁸ Considering the cause of prose writers ‘intolerable’—‘those who seek to render in prose the works of poets like Virgil’—he refutes their main argument by emphasizing that the priority of accuracy lies elsewhere (Perret 1959, p. 170): C’est une exactitude aussi, et beaucoup plus essentielle, de rester fidèle aux tonalités de l’œuvre et de la jouer dans son registre. Si ce point est manqué, qu’importe qu’on ait fait droit à toutes les minuties de l’ordre des mots ou des particules de liaison? Bien sûr, tout est là, rien ne manque, pas une agrafe, pas une épithète. Tout est là, tout sonne faux. Staying faithful to the tonalities of the work and playing it in its own register is also a form of accuracy, and a far more important one at that. If this point is lost, what does it matter if every ²⁸ Perret 1959, pp. 163–76, the final chapter, is entitled ‘The art of translating poets’ (‘L’art de traduire les poètes’).

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minute detail of the word order and particles has been maintained? Of course, it’s all there, nothing is missing—not one link, not one epithet. It’s all there, it all sounds wrong.

Reading this page, it is hard to believe that its author would, some fifteen years later, undertake a translation of the Aeneid that the typography identifies as prose.²⁹ The constraints unique to the Collection des Universités de France—and, perhaps,³⁰ fundamentally, his own conscience as a pedagogue—convinced Perret to compose his whole translation of the Aeneid in prose, but in a prose in which he did not completely betray his convictions and principles. He did not clarify this again, and so it escapes many a reader. By resituating this translation on its long journey, both theoretical and practical, I hope to have given the means necessary to see, or to better appreciate, how this translation, which has become resolutely ‘a philologist’s’, is not ‘insipid’ as it could have been.³¹

14.7 Conclusion The ‘philologist’ Perret who translated the Aeneid may have taken pains to provide a translation that assists the reading of Virgil’s text in Latin, given the context of its publication. But this philologist was also an expert in Virgil, and particularly in the Aeneid; he was especially aware of the links between Virgilian epic and earlier works, the ins and outs of numerous rewritings; a genuine humanist, he conveys in his translation and in his notes his knowledge and awareness of the wealth and depth of not only the pre-Virgilian tradition, but also the post-Virgilian.³² Thus to go into Perret’s Aeneid is like entering the antiqua silua into which one goes (itur) along with Aeneas at Aeneid 6.179, with an awareness of the ancient and venerable tradition ²⁹ In Perret 1959, p. 174, but on the subject of Victor Bérard’s translation of the Odyssey, Perret emphasized the importance of typography: Qu’on n’aille pas dire qu’un vers et fait pour l’oreille et non pour l’œil. Il n’est jamais entendu que parce qu’il est lu. La typographie, elle aussi, modèle la voix (‘One cannot say that a verse is made for the ears and not for the eyes. It is heard when it is read. Typography too models the voice’). Bérard’s translation of the Odyssey, in alexandrines but laid out as prose, is judged to be of a soporific friendliness (une bonhomie soporifique) because of ‘the tireless yoking together of the little packets of six syllables, pressed, thrown into the fullness of the page’ (le moutonnement inlassable de ces petits paquets de six syllabes, pressés, tassés dans toute la largeur de la page). ³⁰ Can the appearance of Klossowski’s Aeneid in 1964 have played some part in this decision? Amstutz, by emphasizing the role of Latinisms and of Old French in Klossowski’s translation (p. 24), suggests an affinity with Perret’s translation, and even with some of the latter’s principles; see Amstutz 2002, p. 24 (in the conclusion). ³¹ The introduction of ‘L’art de traduire les poètes’ is about translations that precede Valéry’s, by amateurs or philologists who had raised doubts as to whether one could still translate Virgil ‘honourably’. On the subject of philologists, Perret (1959, p. 163) writes: Les philologues, certes, pouvaient être hommes de goût, mais la conscience de leurs attaches pédagogiques, leur timidité dans l’ordre littéraire, une minutie trop assidûment cultivée au service de l’exactitude verbale, les a presque toujours condamnés, d’ailleurs sans qu’ils l’eussent regretté, à nous donner des traductions bien insipides (‘Admittedly, philologists could be persons with good taste, but the awareness of their pedagogical bonds, their literary timidity, a meticulousness too constantly cultivated for the sake of verbal exactitude, almost always doomed them—who did not even regret it—to give us insipid translations’). ³² See in particular Perret 1967, an article in which he connects French Virgilian criticism to a foreign context in which the question of the ‘two voices’ in the Aeneid had been raised.

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Virgil is then (re)visiting and reshaping; it is not radically different from entering the Aeneid itself.³³ Veyne, by contrast, wished to break with philology and offered a renewed Aeneid, with a freshness and vivacity that he invites us to (re)discover in Virgil. Veyne’s Aeneid departs from Virgil’s in a number of ways. But, besides the fact that its publication side by side with the Latin text may have had the effect of bringing this ‘other’ Aeneid back to Virgil’s, this translation has actually succeeded in bringing numerous readers back to the Aeneid.³⁴

³³ For the probable metapoetic sense of itur in antiquam siluam, see Hinds 1998, pp. 11–14 (with a specific reference to Ennius). ³⁴ I would like to thank warmly Zara Torlone and Susanna Braund for their patience, the huge work they have done, and this wonderful project itself: it could have discouraged them, like the Aeneid reputedly discouraged Virgil, but they heroically reached the port.

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15 Virgil in Chinese Jinyu Liu

On the basis of a survey of the translation approaches to Virgil at various moments in China in the past century, this chapter addresses two main questions: (1) How did the Chinese translators engage with Virgil’s works, especially with respect to genre, metre, form, sound, sense, and mood? (2) What encouraged and discouraged the translation of Virgil’s works into Chinese?¹ It must be noted from the outset that, despite Virgil’s lasting fame in the West, the Chinese engagement with Virgil has been sparse and limited. The first complete translation of the Eclogues did not appear until 1957,² while a full Chinese translation of the Aeneid was not available until 1984.³ Two other complete translations of the Aeneid were published in 1990 and 2014.⁴ Only selected passages from the Georgics are available in Chinese; a full translation is still a desideratum.⁵ In consequence, this chapter ultimately intends to contribute to a discussion of whether Virgil’s literary and cultural significance is translatable in non-Western contexts.

15.1 Virgil in a Latinless and Epicless Context In the West, the importance of Virgil has long been connected with Latin education, even to this day. However, Virgil’s unmatched poetic technique did not play a prominent role in why his works were translated into Chinese. Nor did it influence in any significant way the construction of his relevance to China, where the teaching of Latin has been considerably limited from its very start in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries made Latin visible in this country. Out of all the Chinese translations of Virgil’s works, the one of the Eclogues, made by Yang Xianyi (Yang 1957), the version of the Aeneid prepared by Yang Zhouhan (Yang 1984), and the translations of selected passages from the Georgics and Aeneid by Fei Bai (Fei 2000)⁶ ¹ For a general survey of the translation and reception history of Virgil in China to the end of the twentieth century, see Liu 2015. ² Yang 1957. ³ Yang 1984. ⁴ Cao 1990 in traditional Chinese; Cao 2010 in simplified Chinese; Tian and Li 2014. ⁵ Fei 2000. ⁶ The names of Chinese authors and translators are given with surname first and given name last.

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consulted the Latin text, while all the others are based on English translations.⁷ On the one hand, the general lack of acquaintance with Latin certainly affected the ability of Chinese scholars and translators to engage with the Virgilian texts at the philological and linguistic level.⁸ On the other hand, detaching Virgil from Latin had a liberating effect, especially since the pressure for producing translations that would match Virgil’s fame and the skill of his work was much less present for the Chinese translators. In fact, without the burden of classical philological traditions and their deep entrenchment in religious debates, the Chinese translators and authors were able to focus exclusively on localizing the intellectual, political, and social values of the Western classics. An immense momentum of translation activities followed such historically significant events as the abolition of the Confucian canon-based imperial civil service examination system in 1905, the founding of a republic in 1912, and the nationalist and anti-imperialistic student movement in 1919. The translations made during this period were both products of and participants in the Chinese exploration of modernity, a process that involved a full-scale re-examination—iconoclastic approaches taking precedence—of a wide range of issues, from the status of the Confucian canon, modes of heroism, and gender roles and sexuality, to ways of expressing desire and emotion. Variously likened to a matchmaker and to a wet nurse, translation was endowed with the function of reforming the mindset and the national character.⁹ In this context, the decision regarding whether to import a piece of literature was motivated less by the literary fame of that piece in the exporting culture and more by what the importing culture needed.¹⁰ Importantly, the process of identifying a vacuum in early twentieth-century China was relentlessly comparative and involved a heavy dose of self-censorship. In this complex process, not only were not all the gaps perceived as having to be filled with equal urgency, but the selection of materials for this task also involved a ranking and selection of foreign materials.¹¹ One might consider the epic genre in this light. It joined tragedy, philosophy, logic, mythology, the scientific spirit, democracy, and so on, to make the long list of what Chinese intellectuals thought had been missing from the Chinese tradition, when they measured it against the West. The alleged lack of epic as a genre in the Chinese tradition was connected with the issue of the underdevelopment of Chinese mythology, which in turn was variously ascribed to the Confucianist disapproval of talk of the supernatural, to an early historicization of myths, and to the early development of

⁷ Cao 1990; 2010 is based on Jackson Knight’s 1956 Penguin version of the Aeneid. Tian and Li 2014 is part of the Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf (Chinese edition). Tian and Li’s prose translation seems closer to Yang 1984 than to Dryden’s version of the Aeneid that was included in the Harvard Classics. ⁸ For example, in his review of Yang Xianyi’s translation of the Eclogues, Tang Ti 1957 mentioned how he was mesmerized by John Dryden’s translation, on which he based his evaluation of Yang’s version. ⁹ Scholarly discussions on translation theories in China in the 1920s–1930s are extensive. See e.g. Chan 2001. ¹⁰ See Toury 1995, p. 27 and Lin 2002. ¹¹ See e.g. Fu 1919.

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civilization in ancient China.¹² The Chinese discourse concerning epics thus went far beyond the borders of literary genre; it was entangled in cultural criticism and self-diagnosis. Yet not all foreign epics were of equal value to Chinese intellectuals. In choosing which epics to import, these figures were significantly influenced by European originoriented attitudes towards Greco-Roman antiquity that enshrined Greece as the fountainhead and pinnacle of human artistic and cultural achievement, ‘while relegating Rome to the role of vehicle of transmission and dissemination’.¹³ Globally, European Romanticism (via Byron, for example) and German philhellenism also took part in constituting the intellectual background of philhellenism in China.¹⁴ Against this background, Virgil’s Aeneid was compared unfavourably with the Homeric epics. Not only were the Homeric epics introduced to the Chinese audience earlier than Virgil, but they have also enjoyed persistent popularity in the Chinesespeaking world, from the early twentieth century to this day. The Iliad and the Odyssey have been invariably praised by their Chinese readers for their freshness, simplicity, unvarnished beauty, optimism, and many other qualities. For such leading intellectuals as Hu Shi (1891–1962), the Homeric poems, especially the Odyssey, also represented the adventurous and exploratory spirit of the West, a spirit that, in his opinion, the Chinese tradition tended to stifle.¹⁵ In contrast, Virgil’s Aeneid was generally judged as secondary, imitative, artificial, dull, and, overall, inferior to the Homeric epics in its depiction of life and nature.¹⁶ Not only was the literary achievement of the Aeneid downgraded, but the character of Aeneas was perceived as lacking heroic appeal. In an age when China was importing Prometheus, a mythical figure valued for his rebellious spirit, as the archetypal hero, Aeneas came too close to the Chinese classical ideal of ‘being sage inside and being kingly outside’ (neishengwaiwang) to be valuable to the larger intellectual effort, in China in the 1920s–1930s, of replacing traditional culture with a new, modern one. While there was a general acknowledgement of Virgil as a patriotic writer, Aeneas’s unconditional submission to fate and to the gods’ desires, as well as his lack of a distinct personality, made him a much too passive type of hero for a struggling China.¹⁷ Even in the eyes of cultural conservatives, the Aeneid did not fare well, owing to the perceived similarity of the Romans to the Chinese: both were seen as rather practical and lacking imagination.¹⁸ The general consensus in the early twentieth century that China lacked national epics meant that there would be no local form for Chinese translators to follow in

¹² Lu 1982, pp. 17–18; Zheng 1921; Shen 1925; 1929; Zheng 1998, p. 160; Zhu 1926, pp. 81–8; Zhu 1934. ¹³ Stephens and Vasunia 2010, p. 13 (‘Introduction’). ¹⁴ See Liu 2015 for discussion and bibliography. ¹⁵ Hu 1926. ¹⁶ E.g. Zhou and Zhi 2001, p. 87; Wu 1923; Feng 1934, p. 63; Zheng 1923, p. 2. See also Zheng 1924. This judgement was based on Drinkwater 1923, p. 143, which described Virgil as lacking ‘the gift of endowing his characters with vivid humanity’. ¹⁷ Wu and Wang 1993, p. 64; Zheng 1924, p. 23; Zheng 1998, p. 256. ¹⁸ Wu and Wu 1998, vol. 2, p. 100 (entry for 14 December 1919).

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translating epics. The ensuing discussions therefore involved matching the Western epics to particular styles or forms in the Chinese tradition. Interestingly, both cultural progressives and conservatives suggested using tanci—a Chinese folklore genre that combines storytelling and sung ballads and that became popular after the sixteenth century—as a possibly suitable format for the translation of the Homeric epics into Chinese.¹⁹ Since the Homeric epics were considered paramount examples of the epic genre, they became the testing ground for translating epics into Chinese. Fu Donghua, who was the first to translate the complete Odyssey into Chinese in 1926 and who was later to translate Book 1 of the Aeneid (Fu 1930c), experimented in the Odyssey with a new style of free-rhymed verse of his own creation.²⁰ There was no discernible rule that governed the rhyming scheme: the same rhyme could be used for anywhere between two and thirteen lines. Nor did the lengths of the lines follow any clear patterns. In terms of feel, the text bore some resemblance to tanci. In the 1930s and 1940s, this translation was criticized for failing to convey the majesty of the Homeric epic.²¹ In 1930, although Fu still chose to translate the first six books of Milton’s Paradise Lost into free verse, he translated Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid into prose. All three complete translations of the Aeneid into Chinese that exist to this day are in vernacular prose. The difficulty of translating the Aeneid into verse was articulated by Yang Zhouhan (1915–89), who provided the first complete translation of this epic in 1984 (Yang 1984).²² The translators of his generation often either lacked training in traditional Chinese poetic techniques or were opposed to using traditional forms—or both. Yang ruled out the possibility of using traditional forms of versification to translate the Aeneid for at least two reasons. First, the closest traditional poetic metre is the sevencharacter poem, in which a line has seven syllables. This metre cannot fully match the Latin hexameter, where each line contains more than a dozen syllables. A complete poem containing 10,000 seven-character lines would also be very monotonous. Second, the old Chinese poems were rhymed, while hexameter poetry was not. Yang also ruled out the so-called new forms of poetry, because there were no standard forms and it was beyond his ability to create a new format. Yang agreed with C. Day-Lewis’s suggestion that, if an equivalent poetic form could not be found, one might as well use prose to translate the Aeneid, so that at least the story could be preserved. It was precisely on the basis of this principle that W. F. Jackson Knight had translated the Aeneid into prose (Jackson Knight 1956); and that was one of the sources that Yang Zhouhan consulted for his own translation. Thus the emphasis on the storyline far outweighed literary considerations, as far as Chinese versions of the Aeneid are concerned. ¹⁹ Wu 1923, pp. 43–5. ²⁰ The editorial promotion in Short Story Magazine 17 (1) of 1926 described it thus: ‘The Homeric Epic Odyssey is an immortal work of undying fame. It has now been translated by Fu Donghua into Chinese. His translation is rhymed, and carefully done.’ ²¹ E.g. Zhu 1944, p. 43. ²² See Yang 1984, pp. 34–5 (‘Preface to the Translation’); also Yang 1988, pp. 109–10.

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One should also note that, while in Greek and Latin poetry metre is based on quantity, in classical Chinese poetry metre is based on tone, and in modern Chinese verse on pause.²³ This difference, compounded with the immense chasm that separates Latin (and Greek) from Chinese in every respect (syntax, grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary), means that no Chinese translation of Greek and Latin poetry can preserve the sound effects, rhythm, and other literary devices of the source text. A major effort to give some poetic flavour to Virgil’s works can be found in Yang Xianyi’s rhymed translation of the Eclogues (Yang 1957). His translation consists of sequences of pairs of rhyming lines. The form was influenced by the heroic couplet perfected by Dryden but cannot be technically classified as such, since it was not able to sustain pentameter or iambic schemes. Since, in the Chinese context, the poetic effort of translating Virgil’s works has been limited and the translations have been read as narratives rather than as poetry, it becomes necessary to look at what guided these narratives and how the construction of the main characters was achieved.

15.2 The ‘Kind-Hearted’ Aeneas: The 1930s The first substantial textual presence of Virgil in China was associated with the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth in 1930, which was commemorated on a large scale in Europe and the Americas.²⁴ Short Story Magazine, a well-subscribed literary journal at the forefront of the New Literature movement, which advocated using the (Europeanized) vernacular as a vehicle for conveying sentiments and thoughts, played an important role in promoting Virgil in China. Over half of the November 1930 issue of this journal was devoted to the commemoration of Virgil’s bimillennium, with four introductory essays to Virgil as a poet and his three representative works, and translations of Eclogue 4 and Aeneid Book 1. Two additional publications, namely a translation of Eclogue 8 in Modern Literature and a short book on Virgil, were penned by two main contributors to Short Story Magazine’s commemorative issue. Throughout its history, the journal commemorated about twenty Western writers, including Dante, Petőfi, Byron, Keats, and Tolstoy; and Virgil was the only author from antiquity who received attention. The impetus behind this sudden attention to Virgil can be partially attributed to the magazine’s endeavour to promote the idea of world literature.²⁵ In the chief editor Zheng Zhenduo’s conceptualization of world literature, literature knew neither ‘national borders’ nor ‘distinctions between the ancients and the moderns’ but belonged to the ‘entire human community’.²⁶

²³ Li 2009, p. 32. For the difference between classical Chinese poetry and vernacular Chinese poetry, see Wong 2008, pp. 191–220, esp. 191 n. 3 Cf. Skerratt 2013. ²⁴ Ziolkowski 1993, pp. 17–26. ²⁵ On Zheng Zhenduo and world literature, see Tsu 2010. ²⁶ Tsu 2010, pp. 311–12. Cf. Zheng 1922.

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By 1930 a wide range of interpretative perspectives had developed in the West on the purposes of Virgil’s works, the relationship between Augustus and Virgil, and similar themes. These diverse interpretations and ideas found their way into the commemorative publications in China. There was no effort either to harmonize the positions or to enforce coherence, although the overall agenda was clearly to present Virgil in a positive light rather than as a second-rate author. It is noteworthy, however, that the main translator, Fu Donghua, adopted a generally pessimistic approach to the Aeneid that influenced, among other things, how he portrayed Aeneas in his own translation. Among the ten eclogues—the general theme of which, as he understood it, was love for the natural beauty of Italy—Fu saw Eclogue 4 as the most meaningful one, for it represented Virgil’s youthful dreams and hopes.²⁷ For Fu, although it might seem that these earlier dreams were later realized when Rome’s ‘golden age’ started (i.e. the Pax Romana period, conventionally between 27 BCE and 180 CE), Virgil experienced disillusion and a tension between dream and reality. This approach must be read side by side with the one taken in John Erskine’s article ‘Vergil, the Modern Poet’,²⁸ which was translated by Fu Donghua into Chinese shortly after its original publication and included in the commemorative issue of Short Story Magazine.²⁹ For Erskine, who was not a professional classicist, Virgil understood that civilization carried ‘within itself the urge to expand’, yet the method of the expansion may be tragic, expansion may be accompanied by destruction, and injustice may go hand in hand with modern progress.³⁰ It was precisely Virgil’s questioning of the sacrifice, cruelties, and sorrows involved in war, rather than his emphasis on victory and on success in building Rome, that made him ‘seem to-day the most representative of modern poets’.³¹ In Erskine’s analysis, the cost that Virgil emphasized in his epic was manifold. Both the conquerors and the conquered were victims of fate, which Erskine saw as Virgil’s unwilling answer to ‘the unanswerable tragedy of civilization’.³² One of the sharp questions that Virgil raised was whether the spread of civilization was a good thing after all, if it entailed the loss of the other peoples’ characters and traditions. At the same time, Erskine also saw the emperor as ‘a prisoner in a jail’ and the character of Aeneas as a dramatized representation of ‘the sacrifice of the founders’.³³ Thus Aeneas had ‘no enthusiasm for his part, no joy in his task, no gift for the heroic’.³⁴ This might well describe the Aeneas of Fu’s translation. In looking at the image of Aeneas in Fu’s Chinese version, I will pay particular attention to how Fu rendered such key terms as pietas and pius, which run throughout the epic and proclaim the epic heroism of Aeneas. Although Fu Donghua did not ²⁷ Fu 1930a. ²⁸ Erskine 1930. For John Erskine’s career and his role in implementing the general honours course, precursor of the humanities sequence at Columbia University, as well as in the Great Books movement in general, see e.g. Erskine 1948. ²⁹ Fu 1930b. ³⁰ Erskine 1930, p. 281. ³¹ Ibid., p. 280. ³² Ibid., p. 285. ³³ Ibid., p. 281. ³⁴ Ibid., p. 283.

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indicate the source for his translation of Aeneid 1, there is no doubt that this translation was based on the prose version of John Conington (1825–69).³⁵ Conington translated pietas by ‘piety’ (1.10; 1.545) and ‘duty done’ (1.151); and pius (1.603) by ‘the pious’ and, more frequently, ‘good’ (1.220; 1.305; 1.378). Conington was certainly neither the first nor the last translator to render pius by ‘good’. For a long time in the English tradition, pius Aeneas has been ‘the good Aeneas’,³⁶ whether ‘good’ is understood ‘as a term of indefinite commendation’, ‘chiefly implying distinguished rank or valour’, or as having ‘a moral signification’ (OED³). Yet Fu consistently rendered ‘good’ as shanliangde, which means ‘kind-hearted’ and/or ‘benevolent’. ‘Good’ in Conington’s version had already transformed the Latin adjective pius, which denotes devotion to gods, family, and friends and bears a strong connection with ritual observance; Fu’s word choice shanliangde further strayed away from the semantic field of pius. In fact, throughout the translation of Book 1, Fu tended to suppress words related to duty. This can be best exemplified by Fu’s translation of Aeneid 1.148–56, the first simile in the epic, on the importance of leadership. Here the charismatic and effective leader, who can calm the crowds, is described as pietate grauem ac meritis . . . uirum (1. 151). While Conington translated it into ‘some man of weight, for duty done and public worth’, Fu’s Chinese translation, which can be back-translated into ‘some important man who has provided an outstanding contribution and is of value to society’, eclipsed the word ‘duty’ in the English translation. Throughout Book 1, by moving the Chinese text further away from the original Latin, Fu modified the description of the quality desired in a leader as well as the character of Aeneas. Had Fu completed the translation of the entire epic, Aeneas would have predictably turned out to be torn and internally conflicted between his kind-heartedness and the need for separation and war. Although the bimillennial commemoration broadly diversified and enriched the understanding of Virgil’s literary achievements, of his historical significance, and of the interpretative breadth of his poems, it did not lead to continued effort to translate his works into Chinese. As literary development was moving in the direction of revolutionary literature in the 1930s, Virgil became largely neglected in the Chinese world—until the complete translation of the Eclogues in 1957, eight years after the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Within the context of Marxism as an official ideology, Yang put a Marxist twist on the Eclogues by characterizing this poem as a reflection on the true feelings of the people. The really significant moment for Virgil in China, however, was the publication of a complete translation of the Aeneid in 1984. ³⁵ This can be clearly seen at Aeneid 1.148–56, where Conington referred to Aeneas as ‘hero’ three times, although the Latin text was not explicit at all. Elsewhere Conington rendered mere uir (1.546, 614) as ‘hero’. The very wide distribution of the designation ‘hero’, which is rather marked in Conington’s translation, was loyally preserved in Fu’s translation; see Conington 1910 (with reprints in 1914 and 1917). It is not clear, however, which edition of Conington’s prose translation Fu used for his translation into Chinese. ³⁶ Garrison 1992; Burrow 1997, p. 29.

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15.3 The First Complete Aeneid in Chinese and Its Translator: The 1980s Yang Zhouhan deserves particular attention in Virgilian scholarship in China for three reasons: (1) his prose translation of the Aeneid, which has continued to be reprinted,³⁷ remains the most respected and commendable Chinese version of the epic, in terms of both accuracy and sentiment; (2) in his long career as a professor at the Department of Western Languages at Peking University, he has influenced generations of students and scholars of Western literature; and (3) he was one of the chief editors of one of the most widely used textbooks on the history of European literature in post-1949 China (first published in 1964, revised in 1978, and reprinted numerous times).³⁸ Many of the ideas about Virgil in the textbooks resemble to a great extent those of Fu Donghua’s and were later fully elaborated by Yang Zhouhan in a series of articles in the 1980s. Trained in English literature at Peking University in the 1930s and at Oxford in the 1940s, Yang had extensive knowledge of Western literature that contributed to the quality of his translations. Not only was he an expert in Shakespeare and seventeenth-century English literature but he had also translated into Chinese Seneca’s Trojan Women (published in 1958), a large portion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (published in 1958), and Horace’s Ars poetica (published in 1962) long before the publication of his translation of the Aeneid (1984). Importantly, Yang played a significant role in founding contemporary Chinese comparative literature. His comparativist approach, which advocated rooting comparison in the local soil, provided him with a unique framework for the interpretation of the Aeneid. An article entitled ‘The Functions of Prophetic Dreams in the Aeneid and in The Story of the Stone’ (Yang 1983), which started as a conference presentation, representatively illustrates his comparative method and his predominantly pessimistic understanding of the epic.³⁹ As one of the most acclaimed Chinese long novels written by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the eighteenth century, during the Qing Dynasty, The Story of the Stone (Hongloumeng) differs from the Aeneid in every respect. As Yang himself noted in the abstract for the conference paper, ‘[t]he Aeneid is the story of the fall and rebirth of a nation, and The Story of the Stone that of the fall of a great feudal clan’. Yet, on the basis of an analysis of what dreams signified in the two classics, Yang came to the conclusion that the Weltanschauung shared by both was one of ‘tragic fatalism’, which would cause reality to be seen as illusion and dreams as truth. Citing the famous line from The Story of the Stone, ‘When false is taken for true, true becomes false’, Yang suggested that both Virgil and Cao Xueqin harboured disillusionment

³⁷ Yang 1984, 1999, 2000, and 2016. ³⁸ See Yang, Wu, and Zhao 2015, pp. 63–6. ³⁹ Yang 1983. It was also presented as ‘Dream Vision in the Aeneid and in The Story of the Stone’ at the Comparative Literature Symposium in Beijing that was held 29 August–2 September 1983. See Zhao 1984, p. 132.

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with reality, or scepticism of life, which was reflected in the tremendous amount of deaths, partings, and funerals in both the Aeneid and The Story of the Stone.⁴⁰ In Yang’s understanding, Virgil was highly critical of wars, which he described as horrida through the mouth of the Sibyl (Aeneid 6. 86). At the time when Yang’s comparative article was published, the ‘pessimistic’ Harvard creed had already established its influence in the West for more than two decades. Yang, however, did not seem to have been directly informed by the founding works of the creed, for instance those of Wendell Clausen (1964), Michael Putnam (1965), and Kenneth Quinn (1968). C. M. Bowra’s (1945) From Virgil to Milton, T. S. Eliot’s (1945) What Is a Classic?, and Alfred Tennyson’s (1882) ‘To Virgil’ were the only Western sources that he cited in his article on dreams in the Aeneid and in The Story of the Stone. The extensive introductory article that accompanied the translation of the Aeneid (Yang 1984), elaborated still further on the thesis developed in Yang (1983), and also listed James Boswell, William Empson, Matthew Arnold, Bertrand Russell, W. A. Camps, John Dryden, Michael Grant, P. G. Walsh, C. Day-Lewis, and R. D. Williams as Yang’s sources. Yang disagreed with Alexander Pope, who saw the Aeneid as ‘political puff ’ and dismissed the omnipresent melancholy in the epic as faked. Although he was willing to concede that Virgil was grateful to Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, for bringing peace to Rome, Yang emphasized Virgil’s conflicting attitudes towards Octavian, which could be detected in the apprehension, melancholy, and empathy that ran throughout the epic and formed its fundamental texture. For Yang, the sad mood of the Aeneid not only was genuine but also constituted a manifestation of the poet’s ‘maturity’, in Eliot’s sense of the term. It was also from this maturity—and more so than from the philosophical ideas, Epicurean and Stoic, to which Virgil was exposed—that his reservations towards and even criticism of Octavian stemmed. For Yang, anxiety and scepticism were precisely the values that made Virgil unique among his fellow poets. Quoting Venus’s words fatis contraria fata rependens (Verg. A. 1.239), which he rendered as ‘A future prospect is enough to offset past fate’, Yang commented: ‘This sentence contains both positive and negative meanings: Rome is indeed great, but is it worth such a high price?’⁴¹ All the wandering, loss of beloved ones, wars, and death in the Aeneid made Yang believe that Virgil had doubts as to whether a peace acquired at this price would last and whether Octavian, a cold-hearted and cruel ruler, was trustworthy. Unlike Francesco Sforza and some of the scholars of the pessimistic creed, who argued that the Trojan characters were stupid, villainous, and even odious, Yang did not find it necessary to emphasize Aeneas as a flawed or defective character in order to prove that the Aeneid was not political puff. Instead, Yang emphasized Aeneas as a hero who was loyal to his duties—a national hero, leader, and organizer as well as a national symbol, rather than an individualistic type of hero. According to context,

⁴⁰ Yang 1983, p. 21.

⁴¹ Yang 1984, p. 27 (‘Preface to the Translation’).

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Yang rendered pius as ‘[endowed] with a strong sense of duty’ (zerenxinzhongde: e.g. 1.305, 1.418), ‘loyal to his duties’ (kejinjuezhide: 1.220), ‘devoted’ (qianjingde: 1.378; 7.5; 10.783), or with the noun ‘piety’ (qiancheng: 4.393; 6.688).⁴² Yang also accentuated Aeneas’s sense of mission by using the strongest words for determination. Certus at Aeneid 5.2, for example, was translated as ‘unwavering(ly)’. Nevertheless Yang consistently emphasized that what accompanied the sense of mission and commitment to duties was the idea, sunt lacrimae rerum; and Yang translated this line as ‘All things are worthy of tears’ in his introductory article⁴³ and ‘Misfortune in human life may also incur tears of empathy’ in the main text respectively.⁴⁴ ‘Thou majestic in thy sadness / at the doubtful doom of human kind.’ In both of the articles discussed above, Yang approvingly cited these lines from Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil: Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death’. Both Tennyson’s emphasis on the sadness of Virgil’s works and Yang’s comparative perspective underlined a pessimistic interpretation of Virgil, which is reflected in the profound melancholy of Yang’s translation of the Aeneid. Yang’s comparativist angle was carried further, in a lecture he delivered at Stanford on 12 November 1987, the Chinese version of which was published in 1988. Entitled ‘Virgil and the Chinese Poetic Traditions’, the article addressed the question of whether Virgil’s works could resonate with the Chinese audience.⁴⁵ For Yang, the answer was positive, especially since both the longing for an idealized, peaceful life and anxieties and sorrow that were seen in all of Virgil’s works could easily find a counterpart in traditional Chinese poetry. First, Yang likened Virgil’s pastoral poetry to the Gardens and Fields poetry genre practised by Tao Yuanming (c.365–427), a reclusive poet who withdrew into the country after becoming disappointed with his career in officialdom. For Yang, the idyllic images in Virgil’s Eclogues that featured villages from afar and the smoke of cooking closely resembled those in Tao’s Returning to Dwell in Gardens and Fields.⁴⁶ Importantly, for Yang, these poems were not simply about the enjoyment of tranquility but also about anxiety over the lack of security of this tranquility. For Yang, Virgil’s Eclogue 4 can be seen as the supreme example of such apprehension. ⁴² In Cao Hongzhao’s translation, pius is regularly translated as chengshi, which, to a regular Chinese reader, would mean ‘honest’ or ‘sincere’ (see Cao 1990; 2010). This equivalence is based on Jackson Knight’s translation ‘true’. Jackson Knight provided an explanation for what he meant by ‘true’ in the ‘Preface’ to his Penguin translation of the Aeneid: ‘ “Be true”, that is, loyal to the gods, to the homeland, and to family, friends, and dependents’ (Jackson Knight 1956, p. 14). Yet the Chinese expression chengshi does not fully capture the meaning of ‘true’ or pius. ⁴³ Yang 1984, p. 10 (‘Preface to the Translation’). ⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 16. ⁴⁵ Yang 1988, p. 107. ⁴⁶ Yang cited from Virgil’s first eclogue—pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen (l. 68, where his Chinese words can be back-translated into English as ‘simple rural cottage with hay rooftop’); et iam summa procul uillarum culmina fumant, / maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae (ll. 82–3, where, again, his Chinese words can be back-translated into English as ‘at dusk, cooking smoke comes out of rooftops that are shrouded in the shadow of the mountains’)—and from Tao Yuanming—‘The distant community is lost in a haze, / smoke from the village hearths lingers in the air’. (The translation of Tao’s verses is taken from Tian 2005, p. 100.)

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It conveys concerns about whether the golden age could be fulfilled. Even if a new age might arrive, ‘a few traces of old vice will still remain’ (pauca tamen suberunt priscae uestigia fraudis, Verg. Ecl. 4.31). Yang found a similar contrast between ideal and uncertainty in Tao’s poetry: ‘Mulberry and hemp grow taller every day, / every day my land grows more broad. / Yet I always fear that frost and sleet will come, / and there will be withering and falling, as with the weeds.’⁴⁷ Second, Yang likened Virgil to the great Chinese poet Du Fu (712–70), on account of the deep compassion he sensed in their poems. For Yang, the profound sadness of the Aeneid had its clear representation in the numerous separation scenes between husband and wife (2.783, 2.789), mother and child (2.789, 3.339), father and son, friends, and lovers. The parting scenes occurred not only in this world but were repeated in the underworld. ‘Such separation motifs that contain very little or no hope of reunion were deeply cherished by ancient Chinese poets.’⁴⁸ Having established some of the commonalities between Virgil’s poetry and traditional Chinese poetry, Yang continued to address the issue of whether the hero Aeneas could arouse sympathy in a Chinese audience. He offered a twofold answer. On the one hand, since Aeneas was a personification of pietas, his sense of responsibility to the gods, state, and family and his sense of mission would definitely be appreciated by the Chinese audience. On the other hand, when Aeneas started to resemble Achilles and took pleasure in mad killing, the sense of harmony and balance was broken and only Virgil’s sympathy for Turnus could restore it.⁴⁹ Tennyson’s poem ‘To Virgil’ proved to be a source of inspiration for Fei Bai (b. 1929), just as it was for Yang Zhouhan; and Fei Bai’s understanding of the Aeneid was also strengthened and enriched by a comparativist perspective. As translator, poet, and scholar, Fei Bai provided high-quality free-verse translations of selected poems and passages from works by nine Roman poets in his Anthologia Romana, which is the only anthology of Latin poetry in Chinese; and this anthology includes selections from Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid.⁵⁰ For Fei Bai, Virgil was comparable to Qu Yuan (c.340–278 BCE), an aristocrat and a poet who lived during the Warring States period, was exiled by the king, and eventually committed suicide when his country fell: the two had a similar status in the history of literature in the West and in China respectively. For Fei Bai, what Qu Yuan’s Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow) and Virgil’s Aeneid had in common was the great spirit of loyalty to one’s mission and a certain empathy with the suffering of others. In terms of the characters of the Aeneid, Fei saw ‘piety’ and immense ‘sadness’ as the two sides of Aeneas; if ‘piety’ represented his submissiveness to divine fate, ‘sadness’ represented his human side. For Fei, what was particularly noteworthy was that as Aeneas marched step by step to victory, the

⁴⁷ The translation is from Tian 2005, p. 104. ⁴⁸ Yang 1988, p. 108. ⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 109. ⁵⁰ He translated Georgics 4.8–50 and Aeneid 1.1–11, 81–105, 254–96; 2.771–804; 4.129–68, 365–87, 651–66; 5.553–602; 6.83–129, 190–211, 868–86; 7.37–45, 750–60; 8.608–29; 10.1–15; 11.59–84; 12.919–52: see Fei 2000, pp. 79–104.

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‘sadness’ did not transform into celebration but ran throughout the entire epic, and even increased with Aeneas’s victory. In Fei Bai’s analysis, the increasing sadness in the epic was derived from Virgil’s immense sense of tragedy and suffering, which boiled down to his deep sense of the tragic nature of history. In contrast to the Homeric heroes, who were naturally wilful and emotional, Virgil’s heroes understood historical responsibility and shouldered both the past and the future. If the Homeric heroes suffered owing to their predetermined fate, the Virgilian heroes suffered owing to empathy.⁵¹ It must be emphasized that Yang Zhouhan’s and Fei Bai’s comparative perspectives did not mean that they had any intention of domesticating Virgil’s poems. There are hardly any classical Chinese poetic expressions in their translations. The various foreign elements such as the names of deities and terminologies for offices, rituals, games, and so on are all well preserved and mostly translated phonetically. There was no effort to force Chinese ‘counterparts’, if any, on them.

15.4 Conclusion Virgil’s literary fame and cultural importance in the West did not make his works ready candidates for translation into Chinese. Unlike the Homeric epics, Virgil’s works did not play any significant role in the intense and complex discourse and debate on modernity, Westernization, and nation building in China in the first half of the twentieth century, when China was struggling for national salvation and dignity and seeking to establish a new culture. Furthermore, unlike in the West, the issues of metre, sound effect, and style have not occupied the attention of the Chinese translators of Virgil. Readability, along with semantic and sentimental accuracy, is prioritized over aesthetic qualities and stylistic experiments. But, due to a lack of ability to access the Latin original, it has been a challenge for most of the translators to maintain even semantic accuracy. Strategies to make Virgil relevant in China seem to involve staying away from the theme of imperialism, foregrounding the sorrows and the separation motif in his works, and accentuating Aeneas as a national and not as an individualistic hero. There has indeed been a strong tendency among the Chinese translators of Virgil to take a pessimistic approach to his works, especially the Aeneid. From Fu Donghua to Yang Zhouhan to Fei Bai, Virgil’s value and his potential to move Chinese audiences lie precisely in the anxieties, sorrow, disillusion, and critical spirit of his works. While Fu Donghua seemed to be directly influenced by John Erskine’s article concerning how Virgil’s modern spirit was embedded in his criticism of empire and ‘progress’, Yang Zhouhan grounded his pessimistic reading of Virgil in comparative approaches between Virgil’s works and ancient Chinese literature that featured prophetic dreams and separation motifs. For both Yang ⁵¹ Fei 2000, pp. 75–6.

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and Fei Bai, Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’ set the mood for reading and translating Virgil. In the layered reception of Virgil in China in the past century, therefore, the West has played an indispensable role of intermediary through the selecting agency of the local intellectuals.

Acknowledgement The research for this chapter is supported by Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Shanghai ‘1000 Plan’, and Faculty Fellowship from DePauw University. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude for their support. I am indebted to Susanna Braund and Zara Torlone for their expert comments. I also thank Yung-chen Chiang, Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, Christopher Francese, Chun Liu, Marc Mastrangelo, Jeremy Hartnett, Bronwen Wickkiser, Keith Nightenhelser, Shadi Bartsch, Walter Scheidel, and Michael Puett for their helpful suggestions and Manuela Tecusan for improving the text.

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PART 2

Poets as Translators of Virgil Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification

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16 Domesticating Aesthetic Effects Virgilian Case Studies Richard F. Thomas

Lawrence Venuti has argued that the translator, even while creating something that makes sense in the culture of the target language, mostly English, has an obligation to preserve some of the foreignness of the source culture. For him this is a matter of ethics—something pertaining to the need not to eclipse what is being translated: a specific cultural constituency controls the representation of foreign literatures for other constituencies in the domestic culture, privileging certain domestic values to the exclusion of others and establishing a canon of foreign texts that is necessarily partial because it serves certain domestic interests.¹

One of the many areas in which a foreignizing translation might appear neither desirable nor possible is that of language-specific stylistic rhetorical figures. These might include metrical issues, for instance enjambment, homodyne versus heterodyne lines in the dactylic hexameter, or the use of the final monosyllable. They might include visual aspects such as acrostics and other word plays, issues of word order, numerological and other structural patterns. Or they could involve aural phenomena such as assonance and onomatopoeia, more universal and less language-specific. My general question, then, is whether the challenge of producing a foreignizing poetic translation is to be located precisely in the sphere of the impossibility of translating language-specific idioms. Or are there strategies for executing a translation whereby the language-specific stylistic aesthetics of the source text can be represented by phenomena in the target text that have at least a relationship to the effects of the model? A foreignizing translation of, say, a golden line would in English be likely to produce gibberish, so the purely visual aspect of such a line cannot be literally translated. We may, however, explore the ways in which a domesticating translation can at least provide an aesthetic equivalent of the golden line.

¹ Venuti 1998, p. 71.

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In all of this there is of course a problem, which in some ways comes down to intentionality. Can one be sure that the translator in fact noticed, or in fact attended to, the philological aspect of the source text? The challenge here is perhaps akin to that of intertextual studies, where it will be a matter of judgement whether there is a reference or allusion. Sometimes the act of translating the stylistic element will be clear, sometimes not.

16.1 Hexameters to Hexameters One way of setting up the possibility of translating stylistic phenomena is to take over a metrical system—in the case of Virgil, the dactylic hexameter. Those who find the dactylic hexameter offensive to the English ear would justly see this choice as foreignizing at the level of metre. Indeed, Tennyson, in an echo of the Plautine vortit barbare, called it a barbarous experiment in his famous elegiac couplets: These lame hexameters the strong-winged music of Homer? No, but a most burlesque, barbarous experiment. When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England? When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon? Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us, Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. (Tennyson 1969, vol. 2, p. 651)

Yopie Prins cites George Saintsbury’s verdict on the use of the metre: ‘Our business is with English . . . I repeat that in English there are practically no metrical fictions, and that metre follows, though it may sometimes slightly force, pronunciation.’² More recent views have in fact seen the nineteenth-century use of the hexameter as more creative and radical. J. P. Phelan (1999) argues persuasively that the 1848 version of Arthur Hugh Clough’s hexameter poem Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich is to be seen in a tradition of radical metrical innovation that anticipated Gerard Manley Hopkins and other poets from later in the nineteenth century. Adopting the terminology of Coventry Patmore, Phelan sees Clough’s hexameters as adhering to a system of ‘isochronous intervals’, which explains among other things the high degree of spondaic lines that appear in English uses of the metre. In 2007 Fred Ahl, a scholar known for his attention to wordplay and artistry in Roman poetry, produced a hexameter version of the Aeneid, which curiously has received next to no reviews. Ahl’s treatment of the hexameter is brilliantly done, particularly at the end of the line, where English is less abundant in spondees. There is very little there of what is to be found in Patricia Johnston’s (2012) hexameter

² Prins 2000, p. 101.

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translation of the Aeneid, with its tedious overuse of final unstressed monosyllables. Ahl also effectively reproduces Virgilian enjambment in a free way, not necessarily enjambing the same part of the Virgilian sentence but reproducing the effect of the Latin and the high emotion that can be communicated by that feature:

te propter Libycae gentes Nomadumque tyranni odere, infensi Tyrii; te propter eundem exstinctus pudor et, qua sola sidera adibam, fama prior. cui me moribundam deseris hospes (hoc solum nomen quoniam de coniuge restat)? quid moror? an mea Pygmalion dum moenia frater destruat aut captam ducat Gaetulus Iarbas? saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi paruulus aula luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta uiderer. (Verg. A. 4.320–30)

Libyan tribesmen, nomad sheiks all loathe me. The Tyrians Hate me on your account; and on your account I have ruined My sole claim to a stellar distinction: my chastity’s good name, Once honoured, even by Rumour. I’m dying, and yet you desert me Houseguest—the lone name left for the man I called ‘partner in marriage’. What should I wait for? My brother Pygmalion’s attack on my city? Or till I’m captured and wed, by Gaetulia’s monarch, Iarbas? If I’d at least, before you ran off, conceived from our closeness Some child fathered by you, if there just were a baby Aeneas Playing inside my halls, whose face might in some way recall you, I would not feel so wholly trapped, yet wholly deserted. (Ahl 2007)

16.2 Puns, Anagrams, and Other Ludic Devices In the translator’s preface Ahl (2007, p. xlix) talks of his incorporation of ‘puns, anagrams, and other figured usage’—word play and the like. His motive—to inject some of the ludic aspects back into a poem whose supposed classicism has stripped it of those aspects—is entirely laudable, and the English hexameter form helps those effects to emerge in a way that is true to the text. The opening of the Gates of War in Aeneid 7 provides a good example. What more solemn passage could there be than one that gives the aetiology of an antiquarian practice that Augustus, in the years in which Virgil was writing, was in the process of establishing as a central part of his propaganda for pax Augusta? Especially because of that solemnity, it is important that the Callimachean and playful aspects of the Aeneid do not get concealed. To her credit, Johnston, like Ahl, also represents the acrostic.

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Acrostic Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit, cum prima mouent in proelia Martem, Siue Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum Hyrcanisue Arabisue parant, seu tendere ad Indos Auroramque sequi Parthosque reposcere signa: (Verg. A. 7.601–6)

Men had a custom in Latium’s Hesperian days, which the later Alban cities adopted and hallowed. It now is the practice in mighty Rome’s great empire, when men rouse Mars for a new set of battles: Say, for example, they’re planning to bring war’s tears to the Getae, Or to Hyrcanians or Arabs, or reach towards India’s people, March in pursuit of the Dawn and request standards back from the Parthians. (Ahl 2007)

Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit, cum prima mouent in proelia Martem, Siue Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum Hyrcanisue Arabisue parant, seu tendere ad Indos Auroramque sequi Parthosque reposcere signa: (Verg. A. 7.601–6)

When they began to wage war in Latium, there was a custom which Alban cities observed and now is closely followed by Rome, the greatest of cities, whether preparing war on the Getae, the Arabs, or the Hyrcani, or to pursue Dawn and India, and to demand of the Parthians that the standards be returned. (Johnston 2012)

Ahl also reproduces anagram and punning: Anagram loops in its pools

pulsa palus (Verg. A. 7.702)

(Ahl 2007)

is genus indocile ac dispersum montibus altis composuit legesque dedit, LATIUMque uocari MALUIT, his quoniam LATUIsset tutus in oris. (Verg. A. 8.321–2)

He got this untamed species, dispersed through the highlands, together Gave them a law code and honoured this land where he’d lately lain hidden UnMutILATed, made LATIUM its name as his ULTIMAte preference (Ahl 2007)

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Puns puppesque tuae pubesque tuorum (Verg. A. 1.399)

Your vessels and vassals

angues . . . sanguineae . . . exsangues (Verg. A. 2.204–13)

Sanguine suffusion / Anguished and pale (Ahl 2007) [Ahl transposes ll. 210 and 211 to bring sanguineae and exsangues close]

nec non Lamyrumque Lamumque ! ! (imagine) nec non Lamirusque Lamusque " (Verg. A. 9.334)

‘which yields an anagrammatic question’ # nonne C.que Marius L.que Sulla? ‘Aren’t they Marius and Sulla?’ (Ahl 2007, p. 414)

(Ahl 2007)

Acrostics These and other instances of figured speech may be communicated without any particular metrical form. Regardless of the metre, representation of such figures is also part of the scholarly aspect of translation. Indeed, liberation from strict adherence to the formal hexametrical form may allow a translator to bring out figured speech with even greater emphasis, as occurs for instance in Kristina Chew’s (2002, p. 34) translation of the MA-VE-PV acrostic at Georgics 1.429–33 and at Aratus, Phaenomena 783–7, which evokes Virgil’s name Publius Vergilius Maro in reverse:³

MAximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber; at si uirgineum suffuderit ore ruborem, VEntus erit: uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe. sin ortu quarto (namque is certissimus auctor) PVra neque obtunsis per caelum cornibus ibit

ΛΕΠΤΗ μὲν καθαρή τε περὶ τρίτον ἦμαρ ἐοῦσα Εὔδιός κ’ εἴη, λεπτὴ δὲ καὶ εὖ μάλ’ ἐρευθὴς Πνευματίη παχίων δὲ καὶ ἀμβλείῃσι κεραίαις Τέτρατον ἐκ τριτάτοιο φόως ἀμενηνὸν ἔχουσα Ηὲ νότου ἀμβλύνετ’ ἢ ὕδατος ἐγγὺς ἐόντος.

(Verg. G. 1.429–33)

(Arat. 783–7)

MAximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber; at si uirgineum suffuderit ore ruborem, VEntus erit: uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe. sin ortu quarto (namque is certissimus auctor) PVra neque obtunsis per caelum cornibus ibit (Verg. G. 1.429–33)

MAnifold storms will be under way for farmers and on sea; but if she has stained her face with virgins’ VErjuice blush there will be wind: always in wind does Phoebe shine a golden red. But if PUre she shall come through the sky . . . (Chew 2002)

In fact, even on the evidence available, Chew could have gone further, since the acrostic is confirmed by signatures in lines 430 and 432, outside the MA-VE-PV complex:

³ For fuller discussion, see Grishin 2008; Katz 2016, pp. 70–1.

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ΛΕΠΤΗ μὲν καθαρή τε περὶ τρίτον ἦμαρ ἐοῦσα Εὔδιός κ’ εἴη, λεπτὴ δὲ καὶ εὖ μάλ’ ἐρευθὴς Πνευματίη παχίων δὲ καὶ ἀμβλείῃσι κεραίαις Τέτρατον ἐκ τριτάτοιο φόως ἀμενηνὸν ἔχουσα Ηὲ νότου ἀμβλύνετ’ ἢ ὕδατος ἐγγὺς ἐόντος.

MAximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber; at si VIRGINEUM suffuderit ore ruborem, VEntus erit: uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe. sin ortu quarto (namque IS CERTISSIMVS AVCTOR) PVra neque obtunsis per caelum cornibus ibit

Chew’s omission of the parenthetical is certissimus auctor is unfortunate, since the referent of is is at once the ‘fourth rising’, the auctor Aratus, whose text Virgil is plundering, and the auctor Virgil of the Georgic’s acrostic. A more recently discovered acrostic turns out to be the most elaborate one in the corpus of Virgil, or pretty much anywhere else. In Eclogue 9.32–9, which has the acknowledged word play on anser (‘goose’ but also the poet named Anser) and olores (‘swans’, prevalent in Mantua (line 29) and so alluding to Virgil), Grishin (2008) observed the acrostic V-N-D-I-S that had escaped notice because of the abbreviation of Moeris’s name, which disrupts the eye from seeing the pattern and which appears to be confirmed by the word play at line 39, with the word now spelled out (undis):

et me fecere poetam Pierides, sunt et mihi carmina, me quoque dicunt Vatem pastores; sed non ego credulus illis. Nam neque adhuc Vario uideor nec dicere Cinna Digna, sed argutos inter strepere ANSER OLORES. M.: Id quidem ago et tacitus, Lycida, mecum ipse uoluto, Si ualeam meminisse; neque est ignobile carmen. Huc ades, o Galatea; quis est nam ludus in VNDIS? (Verg. Ecl. 9.32–9)

Me like you the Pierians made a poet. Songs I too have. Me like you a bard declare the grazers, though to them I don’t give trust; for I don’t seem so far to declare songs worthy of Cinna or Varius, only to squawk like a goose mid rustling swans. Mo: This, Lycidas, I’m pushing and slyly myself unroll, if I’ve got strength to remember—not unknown’s the song: In here, Galatea, come: what play is there in waves? (Van Sickle 2010)

16.3 More Patterns In addition to word play, puns, and the like, other instances of figured speech may be represented—though in such cases with some difficulty—since they are shared by many otherwise distinct linguistic cultures. I have gathered a few instances here, and ask whether the aesthetic appeal of the source text is best met by precise mimesis of the figure in question—potentially a type of foreignization—or by other, domestic means available in English. Here I revert to my comments at the beginning of this study. Venuti’s general critique of domesticating translation is legitimate in the context of ideological contestation between modern languages, particularly in the context of

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anglophone misrepresentation of the source text. In the case of translation of Roman poetry, those considerations and reservations seem to recede. The impossibility of poetic translation points towards the desirability of domestication, really as an aesthetic necessity.

16.4 Tricolon Abundans One of the most mannered features of the Virgilian hexameter is the tricolon, increasing or decreasing, with two limbs in one line and one in the other. Such couplets in the Eclogues and Georgics often attend the lowliest of contexts and in a sense compensate for and aesthetically elevate the humble. So the parallel but inverted description of basket weaving and corn roasting at Georgics 1.266–7, with anaphora nunc–nunc–nunc, remarkable alliterative patterns ( facilis–fiscina–fruges– frangite), and in this case opening golden line: nunc facilis rubea texatur fiscina uirga, nunc torrete igni fruges, nunc frangite saxo. Now, without trouble, weave small baskets of briar canes, now parch grain over the fire, now grind it on a stone.

Or the shepherd and swineherd epiphany of Eclogue 10.19–20, with its triple, ringcompositional anaphora uenit–uenere–uenit and the closing golden line: uenit et upilio, tardi uenere subulci, uuidus hiberna uenit de glande Menalcas.

I here set out various ways translators respond to the two lines: The Swains and tardy Neatherds came, and last Menalcas, wet with beating Winter Mast. (DRYDEN 1987) Thither the goatherd came and the weary tramp of the cowherd; He too was there, all damp from the acorns of winter, Menalcas. (MORGAN 1897) uenit et upilio, tardi uenere subulci, uuidus hiberna uenit de glande Menalcas.

The shepherd also came, the heavy swineherds came, Menalcas came, wet through from steeping winter mast. (LEE 1984) The shepherds came, and after them the swineherds, And Menalcas from his task of getting ready The fodder for the beasts for the next winter. (FERRY 1999) There also came the Shephearde; slowly swineherds came, from gathering winter acorns wet Menalcas came. (VAN SICKLE 2010)

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For Eclogue 10, Lee and Van Sickle preserve the anaphora of uenit–uenere–uenit, something that seems easy enough to do and also vital for a satisfying representation of the original. Lee, Ferry, and Van Sickle keep the distinction in upilio . . . subulci, while Dryden’s ‘Swains . . . Neatherds’ suggests a lack of concern and Morgan’s ‘cowherds’ is simply wrong—though the dactylic rhythm of the end of his first line (‘and the weary tramp of the cowherd’) is appealing. Van Sickle has ‘Shephearde’ for upilio: ‘archaic English spelling, where Virgil used archaic or dialectal Latin.’ There is a question of whether the unfamiliarity of ‘Shephearde’ matches the (probable) dialect (but not necessarily archaic) register of upilio (for opilio). Ferry’s version is radical and quite typical. As often, he ignores features of the Latin—here, the anaphora; but, poet that he is, he gets the effect of the crescendo by doubling the second line and doing a sort of anaphora with ‘fodder for the beasts for the next winter’. How successful is this as a representation of Virgil, aesthetically pleasing as it may be?

16.5 Extended Epanalepsis More complex and extended patterns pose a different challenge, for example the anaphora and epanalepsis (repetition with intervening material) at Eclogues 8.46–51:

Alien of Birth, Usurper of the Plains: Begin with me, my Flute, the sweet Maenalian Strains. Relentless love the cruel Mother led, The Blood of her unhappy Babes to shed: Love lent the Sword; the Mother struck the Blow; Inhuman she; but more inhuman thou. Alien of Birth, Usurper of the Plains: Begin with me, my Flute, the sweet Maenalian Strains. (DRYDEN) Wake, my flute, and, with me, give forth Maenalian numbers! Barbarous Love! Who of old in the blood of her children the mother Taught to embrue her hands—but thou too art cruel, oh mother! Cruel, more cruel is she—but the boy is a pestilent urchin, Pestilent urchin the boy—but thou too art cruel, oh mother! Wake, my flute, and, with me, give forth Maenalian numbers! (MORGAN 1897)

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incipe Maenalios mecum, mea tibia, uersus. saeuus Amor docuit natorum sanguine matrem commaculare manus; crudelis tu quoque, mater. crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus ille? improbus ille puer; crudelis tu quoque, mater. incipe Maenalios mecum, mea tibia, uersus.

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With me begin Maenalian verses, flute of mine. Pitiless love once taught a mother to pollute Her hands with blood of sons; you too were cruel, mother. Who was more cruel, the mother or that wicked boy? That wicked boy was; yet you too were cruel, mother. With me begin Maenalian verses, flute of mine. (LEE 1984) My flute, begin to play Maenalus’ song. Love taught a mother how to stain her hands With the blood of her children. Tell me, Mother, which Of the two of you was the crueler one? Which one Of the two, was it, Mother, cruel Love, or you? My flute, begin to play Maenalus’ song. (FERRY 1999) Take up with me, my shinbone pipe, Mad Mountain verse. Savage Love a mother taught with her own children’s blood to smear her hands. You, mother too were cruel. Cruel was mother more? Or more uncurbed that boy? That boy was uncurbed; you, mother, too were cruel. Take up with me, my shinbone pipe, Mad Mountain verse. (VAN SICKLE 2010)

This is extraordinary writing for Virgil. There is nothing like it in the Aeneid, and little in the Georgics—the example that follows below is another. Dryden, while magnificent, makes no attempt to replicate the anaphora and epanalepsis—as one would expect from his theoretical writing on translation. Lee and Van Sickle, the two classicists, again replicate the essence of the original in effective ways. Ferry replaces Virgil’s effect with his own version, highly artful, and quite appealing, not as a precise representation but as a substitute of sorts: ‘Tell me, Mother, which / Of the two of you was the crueler one? Which one / Of the two, was it, Mother, cruel Love, or you?’ Or Georgics 1.406–9:

Where ever frighted Scylla flies away, Swift Nisus follows, and pursues his Prey. Where injur’d Nisus takes his airy Course, Thence trembling Scylla flies and shuns his Force. (DRYDEN) Wherever she escapes riving the ether with wings, There the unfriendly, the cruel, with big strides, Nisus follows; where Nisus bears heavenward, She runs rapidly beating the air with wings. (DAY-LEWIS 1948)

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quacumque ILLA LEVEM FUGIENS secat aethera pennis, ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras, ILLA LEVEM FUGIENS raptim secat aethera pennis.

See where she cuts through the light air in winged flight her dark foe pursues: Nisus hissing between breezes; where goes Nisus in flight between breezes rapid-winging Scylla cuts through the light air. (CHEW 2002) Whenever she goes flying, splitting the heavens, There he’ll be, her father and her mortal foe, spitting screeches, And in hot pursuit; yes where Nisus takes himself up and away There she’ll ever be, slicing heaven with her wings and cutting it to pieces. (FALLON 2004) She flees through the evening air on her little wings; Wherever she goes her father follows after, Implacable, frightful, his wings loudly whirring; And she flees through the evening air on her little wings; And wherever she goes her father follows after, (FERRY 2005) Where swerving she slashes the delicate air with wings, there hostile, ruthless, screaming through the ether, Nisus follows; where Nisus towers through the ether, Swiftly swerving she slashes the delicate air with her wings. (JOHNSON 2009)

Only Ferry (unusually) and Johnson catch the precise repetition, though Fallon’s version is appealing. Day-Lewis applies ‘rules’ about repetition (it is to be avoided) giving for aethera . . . aethera ‘ether . . . air’, which, like the rest of his version, conceals the art of Virgil, although the parallelism of the Nisus–Scylla pairing is detectable, as in the other versions.

16.6 Preserving Structural Aesthetics at the Visual Level Generally speaking, both the ‘golden line’ (NnVaA/NnVAa) and the ‘silver line’ (NaVnA/NaVAn) produce a strong focus on the visual aspect of the line, and replication in English, with its low level of inflection, is possible in the case of the silver line but not of the golden. That is to say, noun and adjective combinations,

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whether nominative, accusative, or some other case, can be juxtaposed while noun and noun or adjective and adjective cannot.⁴ So at Eclogues 4.28–30

Unlabour’d Harvests shall the fields adorn, And cluster’d Grapes shall blush on every Thorn. The knotted Oaks shall show’rs of Honey weep, And through the Matted Grass the liquid Gold shall creep. (DRYDEN) Then with the delicate grain the golden fields shall grow yellow, Then on the rugged thorn the grape’s rosy bunches shall cluster, And from the gnarled old oak shall distill the dew of the honey. (MORGAN 1897) molli paulatim flauescet campus arista (NEAR GOLDEN LINE) incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uua (GOLDEN LINE) et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella. (SILVER LINE)

Soft spikes of grain will gradually gild the fields, And reddening grapes will hang in clusters on wild brier, And dewy honey sweat from tough Italian oaks. (LEE 1984) The grain will yellow and ripen in the fields, The purple grapes will cluster on wild vines, And honey will drip like dew from the hard oak tree. (FERRY 1999) The field will yellow bit by bit with ears grown soft and grapes blush dangling down from carefree briars; and hardened oaks will sweat out honey like the dew. (VAN SICKLE 2010)

Guy Lee’s version is not a bad representation, with alliteration underscoring the pairings of noun and adjective. But in the end there is a slight monotony in the repeated, non-inflected forms (reddening grapes, wild brier, dewy honey, tough Italian oaks). Lee’s interpolation of ‘Italian’ was perhaps meant to stave off this monotony. Another hexameter version is that of George Osborne Morgan (1897), the preface to which notes: ‘I may add that I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to translate the original, not only thought for thought, but also line for line’ (p. xiv). ⁴ For ‘golden’ and ‘silver’ lines, see Wilkinson 1963, pp. 215–16.

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By replicating the hexameter, this version gives itself room to represent all the descriptive phrasing of the original. More successful versions abandon the Virgilian patterns. Dryden turned the triad into two couplets, his first and fourth line really representing line twenty-eight of Virgil and ‘shall’ recurring in each of the four lines, the anaphora thereby communicating the necessity of the spontaneous growth that will take hold. At the same time he begins the first three lines with adjective–noun paired subjects but avoids such pairings in the second half of the line, not representing incultis . . . sentibus or roscida mella as pairings, placing incultis in the first line (‘unlabor’d’), and reorganizing sudabunt roscida mella while shifting the metaphor of sudabunt perhaps for reasons of decorum (‘shall show’rs of Honey weep’). Similarly Ferry, so far from looking for variation, while keeping the triadic structure of the Virgilian Latin, used triple anaphora of ‘will’—where Virgil’s variatio (-et / -bit / -bunt) had prevented anaphora from disrupting the other patterned effect achieved by the golden and silver lines. At the same time Ferry varies the syntax so as to avoid the noun–adjective monotony noted in Lee’s version: in particular, molli . . . arista and roscida mella are rephrased. What is lost is the more vivid image of the field yellowing, and paulatim, which contributes to the cinematic aspect of the passage, is likewise gone. Similar reworking occurs in Van Sickle’s version, which is particularly successful and consists of completely jettisoning noun and adjective combinations: participial ‘grown soft’ for molli and transformation of rubens pendebit to ‘blush dangling down’ work well in terms of aiding the transformation, though the progressives ‘grown soft’ and ‘hardened’ are slightly curious.

16.7 Preserving Structural Aesthetics at a Larger Level at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper

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temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi. So goes Georgics 3.322–38, the summer day’s feeding, in which ‘there is little, except the beauty of the language, that might not be derived from Varro R.R. 2.2.10–11’ (Mynors 1990, p. 230). It is indeed a passage of utter beauty, essentially a seventeenline bucolic addressed to the shepherd and incorporating four lines each for the four parts of the herdsman’s day. Each part is conveyed with its own perfect periodicity, the last three controlled by infinitive (l. 330 potare; l. 331 exquirere; l. 335 dare . . . et pascere), object noun clauses dependent on iubebo (l. 329), each of those parts with its own further subordination. The first part, on the other hand, finds the poet participating with the shepherd (ll. 324–5 frigida rura / carpamus). Mynors (1990, p. 231) quotes from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard: ‘carpamus: not carpes. V. makes the prospect more inviting by the suggestion that he cannot resist coming too, “to meet the sun upon the upland lawn”.’ Morning star (l. 324 Luciferi) and Evening star (l. 336 Vesper) frame the passage and give it a perfect structure, two lines and one word in from each end of the passage, with the dew of the morning (l. 326 ros), lost in the course of the day, refreshed by the workings of the moon (l. 337 roscida luna). The evening birdsong that closes the passage alludes in its echoing musicality to the song of Tityrus that opens the Eclogues: litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas

G. 3.338 Ecl. 1.5

The birdsong of the close also responds to the late morning song of the cicadas (l. 328 et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae), itself an evocation of the harvest scene in the second eclogue (Ecl. 2.13 sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis). The syntax is complex and underscores the four-part harmony indicated by alternating italics and bold: at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas / in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, / Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura / carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, / et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba.// Inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora / et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, / ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna

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iubebo / currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; // aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, / sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus / ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum / ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; // tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus / solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper / temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, / litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi. //

at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

But when the Western Winds with vital Pow’r Call forth the tender Grass and budding Flower; Then, at the last, produce in open Air Both Flocks; and send ’em to the Summer fare. Before the Sun, while Hesperus appears; First let ’em sip from Herbs the pearly tears Of Morning Dews: and after break their Fast On Greensward Ground; (a cool and grateful taste:) But when the Day’s fourth hour has drawn the Dews, And the Sun’s sultry heat their thirst renews; When creaking Grasshoppers on Shrubs complain, Then lead ’em to their wat’ring Troughs again, In Summer’s heat, some bending Valley find, Clos’d from the Sun, but open to the Wind: Or seek some ancient Oak, whose Arms extend In ample breadth, thy Cattle to defend: Or solitary Grove, or gloomy Glade: To shield ’em with its venerable Shade. Once more to wat’ring lead; and feed again When the low Sun is sinking to the Main. When rising Cynthia sheds her silver Dews; And the cool Evening-breeze the Meads renews: When Linnets fill the Woods with tuneful sound, And hollow shoars the Halcions Voice rebound. (DRYDEN)

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at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

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But when the west winds call and the exquisite warm season Ushers them out, both sheep and goats, to glade and pasture, At the first wink of the Morning Star let us wend away To the frore fields, while the morning is young, the meadow pearly, And dew so dear to cattle lies on the tender grass. Then, when the fourth hour of the sun has created a thirst And the plantations vibrate with the pizzicato of crickets, I’ll bring the flocks to water by wells and by deep ponds, I’ll bid them drink the water that runs in the troughs of ilex. But now it’s the noonday heat, make for a shady combe Where some great-hearted ancient oak throws out its huge Boughs, or the wood is black with A wealth of holm-oak and broods in its own haunted shadow. Then give them runnels of water again and let them browse About sundown, when the cool star of evening assuages The air, and moonlight falls now with dew to freshen the glades, And the kingfisher’s heard on the shore and the warbler in woody thickets. (DAY-LEWIS 1948) But when Summer under the callings of Zephyr sweetly fumed fertile sends flocks of goats and sheep to pasture in the woodlands and in fields; when beneath Lucifer star at the first light we cull through plots of earth still cool with dew; while the morning is new, while sing the fresh grasses, the dewdrops bejewelling the new soft green wins [sic] the most thanks from the herds. And then when in the morning at the fourth hour

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at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

the flocks have grown dry and the cicadas’ complaining plainsong bursts the strawberry trees, I would advise your flocks to drink the running waters from troughs hewn from holm oak beside wells and still pools. In midsummer though search you high and low for a valley rich in shade, if anywhere there may be a majestic oak of Jove with ancient bark, huge limbs held high, or if somewhere a dark-cool grove reclines in the holy shade from the holm oak trees. At this time give the herds once more waters, trickling, clean; once more put them out to pasture at sunset since then the cooling Evening Star is balancing the temperature of the air, and now the Moon bearing dew renews the woodlands, the shores cry out, the kingfisher’s croon, the thornbushes sing of goldfinches. (CHEW 2002)

at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo

But when the west wind’s gentle breezes summon them, the sheep and goats, to summer in the outfields, we’ll make our way at crack of dawn and take to chilly pastures— the day still young and grass a frosty glisten— while dew the cattle love still lingers on fresh shoots. Then, when the risen sun has honed a thirst

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currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

and crickets stir the plantings with their brittle song, I’ll bring the flocks to springs and standing pools and let them drink from hardwood troughs. But by high noon I’ll have them forage for and find a shady glen where one of those ages-old, great girthed oaks of Jupiter stretches out stout branches or a thickly planted holly grove lours in its hallowed shadows. I’ll have them drink again cool runs of water and browse again until the setting sun when twilight starts to chill the air, its dews refresh the grazing, and cries of birds ring out again— kingfishers from the shoreline, wood-warblers from the woody groves. (FALLON 2004)

at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

But let us eagerly go now, seeking the cool Fields where joyful summer, called to do so By zephyrs in the early morning, sends The sheep and goats out to the glades and pastures, When the first star, Lucifer, appears, and the day Is new, and the fields are hoary because of the dew That clinging to the tender grass is most Pleasing to the flocks; then, later in the morning, When everywhere the querulous cicadas Complain in every bush, and the flocks are thirsty, I’ll take them down to drink from brooks or pools, Or the wells where water runs through oaken channels, To quench their thirst; and after that, at noon, When the day is at its hottest, seek out with them Somewhere some shady place where Jove’s great oak Spreads out its giant arms from its ancient trunk, Or a grove that lies in a holy darkness caused By the congregated shade of ilex trees; Then lead them in the afternoon back down To drink from those pure murmuring trickling waters; And pasture them again till sunset comes,

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When Vesper, the evening star arising, brings Its coolness to the air, and the dew that falls From the risen moon refreshes the waiting glades, And the halcyon bird is heard along the shores, And finches in the trees and all the thickets. (FERRY 2005) at uero Zephyris cum laeta uocantibus aestas in saltus utrumque gregem atque in pascua mittet, Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura carpamus, dum mane nouum, dum gramina canent, et ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba. inde ubi quarta sitim caeli collegerit hora et cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae, ad puteos aut alta greges ad stagna iubebo currentem ilignis potare canalibus undam; aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere uallem, sicubi magna Iouis antiquo robore quercus ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra; tum tenuis dare rursus aquas et pascere rursus solis ad occasum, cum frigidus aëra Vesper temperat, et saltus reficit iam roscida luna, litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.

But sure, when at the Zephyr’s summons bright summer sends sheep and goats into clearings and pastures, at the morning star’s first light let us take to the cool meadows, while morning’s new, while grasses pale, while dew upon the tender green most cordial to the flocks. Then when the fourth hour of the sky has built their thirst and with plaints the fretful cicadas shatter the woodlands, beside wells and beside deep pools I’ll bid the flocks to drink the water rushing in oaken gutters, in midday heat to seek a shady swale, wherever with its ancient strength the mighty oak of Jove spreads spacious branches, or wherever dark with holm oaks lush the grove lounges in holy shade. Then offer again the trickling water and graze them again to sunset, when cool the evening star soothes the air and the moon bedewed refreshes the thickets, when the frith cries with the kingfisher, the furze with finch. (Johnson 2009)

How does one even begin to ‘translate’ such a passage? These lines, if any, bring home the truism that poetry is untranslatable; but we cannot settle for that. I teach the Georgics in translation and it is crucial to have an English version that at least permits one to bring out the aesthetic achievement of a passage like this. Again, we are back with the expectation of philological realities, first of the four-times-four

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structure of the passage, of ring composition, of closing alliteration. And does following those expectations necessarily produce the best or most effective translation? Not on its own, clearly. Ferry inserts semicolons, so giving us a separation that reflects the separation of the day. Chew’s ‘At this time’ for Virgil’s tum collapses the third and fourth parts into a single part, somewhat disastrously. As for the final line, it lends itself well to the rhymed couplets of Dryden: ‘When Linnets fill the Woods with tuneful sound, / And hollow shoars the Halcions Voice rebound.’ Fallon (‘kingfishers from the shoreline, wood-warblers from the woody groves’) and Johnson (‘when the frith cries with the kingfisher, the furze with finch’) get the Virgilian peculiarity best.

16.8 Tityrus and Meliboeus The opening of Eclogue 1 finds Meliboeus losing his land, but by line 10 he is emphatically the better poet. A satisfactory, close reading of that poem, which begins and ends with contrast, needs to bring out that fact. Here are our players:

M.: Beneath the Shade which Beechen Boughs diffuse, You Tity’rus entertain your Silvan Muse: Round the wide World in banishment we roam Forced from our pleasing Fields and Native Home: While stretch’d at Ease you sing your happy Loves: And Amarillis fills the shady Groves. T.: These Blessings, Friend, a deity bestow’d: For never can I deem him less than God. The tender Firstlings of my wooly Breed Shall on his holy Altar often bleed. He gave my Kine to graze the flow’ry Plain: And to my Pipe renew’d the Rural Strain. (DRYDEN) M.: Tityrus, Thou, reclining beneath the wide-spreading beech-tree, Tunest thy slender reed to the songs of the sylvan muses, We the delights of our home and our own sweet cornfields are leaving Far from our fatherland flying:–and thou at thy ease in the greenshade Teachest the woods to resound with the name of the fair Amaryllis. T.: Oh Meliboeus! A god hath brought this peace to our homestead; For I will always hold him a god, and oft on his altar Duly shall flow the blood of the tender lamb from my sheepcote.

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He hath bidden my kine roam at large and myself as thou seest Sport, as I list, on the pipe–the pipe the delight of the rustic. (MORGAN 1897) M.: Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas. T.: o Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram saepe tener nostris ab ouilibus imbuet agnus. ille meas errare boues, ut cernis, et ipsum ludere quae uellem calamo permisit agresti.

M.: Tityrus, lying back beneath wide beechen cover, You meditate the woodland Muse on slender oat; We leave the boundaries and sweet ploughlands of home. We flee our homeland; you, Tityrus, cool in shade, Are teaching woods to echo Lovely Amaryllis. T.: Oh, Meliboeus, a god has made this leisure of ours. Yes, he will always be a god for me; his altar A tender ram-lamb from our folds will often stain. He has allowed, as you can see, my cows to range And me to play what tune I please on the wild reed. (LEE 1984) M.: Tityrus, there you lie in the beech-tree shade Brooding over your music for the Muse, While we must leave our native place, our homes, The fields we love, and go elsewhere; meanwhile, You teach the woods to echo ‘Amaryllis.’ T.: O Meliboeus, a god gave me this peace. He will always be a god to me, and often The blood of a newborn lamb will be offered to him. Because of him, as you can see, my cattle Can browse in the fields as they please, and as I please, I idly play upon my slender reed. (FERRY 1999) M.: Tityrus, you—lying back beneath a broad beech lid— are working up a wildwood muse with a meager oat. We’re leaving our fatherland’s borders—lands once sweet to plow: we flee our fatherland. You, Tityrus, limber in shade are teaching woods to echo ‘well formed is Amaryllis.’ T.: O Meliboeus, a god it was who made us this repose, for that one always will be a god to me—his altar often a tender lamb from our own folds will stain. He let my cows range round, as you discern, and me myself, whatever I wanted, play with farmfield reed. (VAN SICKLE 2010)

The difference between the two singers comes out in the versions of Ferry and Van Sickle. The former, again typically, abandons the structure of the Virgilian opening and the intricacy of the mini ring composition of the first four lines: Tityre, tu—nos patriae—nos patriam—tu, Tityre, which only Van Sickle keeps with precision. Lee’s version almost preserves the pattern. Similarly, Van Sickle’s ‘well formed is

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Amaryllis’ captures the echo of Amaryllida siluas, glossed in a way by the preceding resonare. On the other hand, Ferry gets the music of Meliboeus in other ways, and similarly the relative plainness of Tityrus’s response comes across well in Ferry’s version. We live in an age of translation, a healthy situation indeed. The last work of Seamus Heaney, published posthumously, was his Aeneid Book 6. David Ferry has just finished his Aeneid, which is now out (Ferry 2017). In an age where we can expect few readers to come to our poets in the original, we are in the debt of translators and poets who can give a glimpse, in our own living language, of the dynamics of those original versions.

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17 Du Bellay’s L’Énéide Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? Hélène Gautier Translated by Liza Bolen and Susanna Braund

The focus of my chapter will be Du Bellay’s translations of the Aeneid. In the context of French translations of Virgil in the Renaissance, what are the choices made by Du Bellay for his translations of the Aeneid? Alice Hulubei’s old article is the starting point of my research: it helps me to put into perspective the notions of translation and creation in the Renaissance.¹ The work of Jean-Pierre Néraudeau,² Margaret Wells,³ Valerie Worth,⁴ and Todd W. Reeser⁵ consider with greater precision the translation choices made by Du Bellay in this context. I will then use their conclusions to specify the characteristics of Du Bellay’s translation of Books 4 and 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Even though there are translations in vernacular languages that go back as early as the Middle Ages, there are more poetic translations in the Renaissance.⁶ After translations of Virgil in Italian, the first translation in France is undertaken in 1483, in Lyon, by Guillaume Leroy. He prints the Enéides ‘in honour of almighty God, of the glorious Virgin Mary, mother of all grace’; but this Enéides is more of a reworking in prose than a proper translation, as the anonymous translator shuffles the sequence of events presented by Virgil and adds or removes events as he sees fit. It is in 1509 that the first exact French translation of the Aeneid appears. It is made by Octavien (sometimes known as Octovien) de Saint-Gelais, who chooses to follow the text closely. In 1541 a translation of the first four books of the Aeneid by Hélisenne de Crenne appears; she allows herself the freedom of paraphrase that brings the work close to the form of the novel, with chapters and titles of her own invention. Next,

¹ Hulubei 1931. ⁵ Reeser 2012.

² Néraudeau 1998. ³ Wells 1980. ⁴ Worth 1990. ⁶ On the first translations of the Middle Ages, see Oresme 1488, pp.353–4.

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Louis Des Masures publishes a translation of the two first books of the Aeneid in 1547, then of the entire poem in 1560. This is the literary field that Du Bellay enters when he decides to publish his translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid in 1552; and the field was highlighted for the first time by Alice Hulubei (1931). As for Du Bellay’s sixth book, it was published posthumously, in 1560. From a diachronic perspective, these translations are traces of the evolution of French language and poetics, which they illuminate through the solutions chosen to deliver the same content. From a synchronic perspective, the multiplication of translations manifests the personality of each translator, many different versions emerging from the same source. In addition, there is the development of translation theories in the 1540s, starting with Etienne Dolet’s La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (How to Properly Translate from One Language to Another, 1540). In his work Traductions et illustration de la langue française, JeanDominique Beaudin emphasizes that, concerned about his contribution to the French language, Dolet recalls the rules for a good translation: a perfect understanding of the meaning and of the content of the author translated; a good knowledge of both the source language and the target language; not following word for word; the use of everyday expressions; an observation of vocal harmony; and an awareness of rhythm and sound.⁷ In fact, for Dolet, translation must be imitation. And Du Bellay, as we shall see, will remember this. This is because, in this period, poets do not only translate; rather they propose their own vision of the translation and, more generally, of the work of the translator in their theoretical writings and prefaces. This is why Jacques Peletier du Mans, in his Art poetique (originally published in 1555), points out that the best translator is one who can find the way to turn each word of foreign poetry into a French word without ruining the ‘spirit’ (génie) of the language.⁸ And it is at the heart of this debate—a debate between word-for-word translation and liberties taken by the translator—that we find Du Bellay. First, a word about his La deffense et illustration de la langue francaise (The Defence and Enrichment of the French Language), published in 1549: in chapter 1, section 5, Du Bellay emphasizes that there is only one use for a vernacular version: to ‘instruct those ignorant of foreign languages in the knowledge of things’.⁹ Du Bellay is in fact a detractor of poetic translation, which he deems inadequate, for instance when he says that ‘it is impossible to render it [eloquence] with the same grace as used by the author’.¹⁰ In chapter 1, section 6, he targets specifically the traditeurs who attempt to put into French the great ancient poems, although (in his view) these remain untouchable models: ‘O Apollo! O Muses! Such profanities against the sacred relics of Antiquity!’¹¹ For Du Bellay, poets are the only artisans of language and the only true creators of their work (an idea that can be found in his contemporaries, with the

⁷ See in particular Beaudin 2006. ⁸ Peletier du Mans 2011, pp. 299–304. ⁹ Du Bellay 2000 [1549], p. 38 (= I, 5). ¹⁰ Ibid, p. 36. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 41 (= I, 6).

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exception of Sébillet, who exalts translation in his Art poetique).¹² But this prohibition against translating can be seen as the most extreme form of reverence towards ancients such as Virgil: Du Bellay, in fact, encourages emancipation. This is confirmed by the prefatory letter addressed to Jean Morel (‘L’épître-préface à Jean Morel’), which proffers the freedom of the translator and a condemnation of wordfor-word translation, described there as servile and unable to convey the exact meaning of the source text. Indeed, for Du Bellay, it is only by acknowledging the characteristics of the vernacular language and by following its distinct requirements and usage that we can remain faithful to the original. Our poet thus develops the conception of a translation that is not founded on the principle of literalness, but rather on that of equivalence: It seems to me, seeing the constraints of rhyme, and the differences in properties and structure from one language to another, that the translator has not made an error in his duties if, without damaging the meaning of his author, he endeavours to compensate [recompenser] in another place for what he cannot fully render in one place.¹³

By ‘compensate’ here he means finding a balance in the meaning that combines the significance in each language in the same given sentence. An accurate translation thus requires understanding the original text, then finding the right words to communicate this meaning in the target language. Therefore the ancient text is faithfully rendered even as it is ‘naturalized’ (naturalizé) in the target language: in no way am I bragging (I am not that imprudent) of having here counterfeited the nature of Virgil’s true features; but when I say that I have not ventured too far away from them, that the ways and style of this naturalized stranger [cest estranger naturalizé] makes it difficult to recognize his place of origin, I believe that fair ears shall not be offended.¹⁴

Thus specific points here would be discussions about Du Bellay’s ideas of compensation and naturalization, as highlighted by Margaret B. Wells and Valerie Worth.¹⁵ Indeed, throughout his career as a poet, Du Bellay engaged in translation—of Virgil, Ovid, the ‘best Greek and Latin poets’, Petrarch, Dorat, Buchanan, l’Hospital, and himself! The fourth book of the Aeneid was published in 1552, and was then accompanied by the end of the fifth book, and by the sixth in 1560 (posthumously). But it is safe to say that the translations are contemporary with one another—that is, they were all made before the voyage to Rome he undertook in 1553–7—given that Du Bellay alludes in later works to Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid and that during this period his poetry is nourished by Virgil, in particular by these books. What tools did Du Bellay use to translate Virgil? Marine Molins gathered an inventory of them in a thesis titled Traduction et narration à la Renaissance.¹⁶ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁵ ¹⁶

Sebillet 1910, p. 188 (= ch. 19, ‘De la version’). ‘Épître-préface à Jean de Morel’, in Du Bellay 1991, pp. 249–50. ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 250. On ‘compensation’ and ‘naturalization’, see in particular Wells 1980 and Worth 1990. Molins 2003.

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First and foremost, Du Bellay had at his disposal editions of Virgil accompanied by commentaries. We do not have access to Du Bellay’s library, but I have looked at the 1529 edition of Virgil, to which he undoubtedly had easy access. This edition brings together crucial material from the ancient and modern commentaries that were available at the time: those of Servius, Donatus, Landino, Calderini, Mancinelli, Beroaldo, Bade, Valeriano, Costanzi, and Dati.¹⁷ The Latin text is at the centre of the page, surrounded by thick columns of glosses and annotations that are priceless for the translator. Similarly, our poet had access to the dictionaries that had begun to appear: there is for instance undeniable influence from Robert Estienne’s French–Latin dictionary of 1543.¹⁸ This influence is visible in Du Bellay’s great attention to the exact meaning of words, as pointed out by Marine Molins.¹⁹ Finally, Du Bellay had surely read certain previous translations, in particular that of Des Masures, to which he pays homage in his épître-préface.²⁰ Des Masures is the first to propose a bilingual edition of the Aeneid in France: his French translation is placed at the centre of the page and the Latin lines are moved in their entirety to the margins, which will not be the case in Du Bellay’s edition. Lastly, Des Masures embraces the cause of word-for-word translation—which, again, as we shall see, will not be the case with Du Bellay. Using these different tracks as a starting point, I propose an interpretive hypothesis as follows: in Du Bellay, translator and poet cannot be separated; translation and poetry make up the two-faced Janus of Du Bellay’s imitation–creation. Before going into detail about the texts, I will indicate the editions that I have used: those of 1552, 1560, and 1569 as well as the modern edition of Henri Chamard, the old but complete critical edition of the works of Du Bellay. The 1552 edition includes only the translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid:²¹ this is the text we shall follow, as it was not modified in the later editions. ‘La Mort de Palinure du cinquiesme de Virgile’ (‘The Death of Palinurus from the fifth [Book] of Virgil’), a fragment from the end of Aeneid 5 (5.779–871), was published in 1553, in a second edition of Recueil de Poesie, where it features as item 19. The posthumous edition of 1560 includes the translations of both Book 4 and Book 6 of the Aeneid. This is the version we will follow for Book 6, for which this is the first edition.²² Moreover, it is also interesting to note that Books 4 and 6 are followed by poems and translations: ‘Complainte de Didon a Enee prinse d’Ovide’ and ‘La Mort de Palinure’, along with ‘L’Adieu aux Muses’, ‘Traduction d’une ode latine du meme Buccanan’, ‘Traduction des vers de Louis Le Roy’, and ‘Autre traduction d’une épître latine sur un nouveau moyen de faire son profit de l’étude des lettres’ (‘Dido’s Complaint to Aeneas taken from Ovid’; ‘The Death of Palinurus’; ‘Adieu to the Muses’; ‘Translation of a Latin ode by the Same Buchanan’;

¹⁷ Virgile 1529. This rare early book can be found in Paris at Bibliothèque Nationale and at Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (BNF YC-16 and BSG FOL Y45 INV 65 RES respectively). ¹⁸ Estienne 1543. A copy is held at Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (fol. BL 187). ¹⁹ Molins 2003. ²⁰ ‘Épître-préface à Jean de Morel’, in Du Bellay 1991, p. 250. ²¹ Du Bellay 1552. ²² Du Bellay 1560.

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‘Translation of Verses by Louis Le Roy’; ‘Another Translation of a Latin Epistle on a New Method of Profiting from the Study of Literature’). Finally, I also looked at the 1569 edition, because the translation of Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid is positioned between Recueil de poesie and Divers poemes, after La deffense et illustration de la langue francaise and Olive—in other words it is contemporary with Du Bellay’s own poetry. So the editor himself encouraged us to view the translations as part and parcel of Du Bellay’s poetic production, not to be distinguished or presented separately.

17.1 Paraphrase and Reorientation in Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid: The ‘Naturalization’ of Virgil As Du Bellay explains, the interest of Book 4 resides for him first and foremost in the portrayal of passions amoureuses (‘passionate love’), and the interest of Book 6 seems to reside, for himself as well as for all of his contemporaries, in mystery and prophecy, in line with the medieval period.²³ I shall demonstrate how Du Bellay rejects word-for-word, literal translation, and advocates taking liberties in order to aid the meaning, thus allowing a French ‘rebirth’ (renaissance) of Virgil.²⁴ To do so, I shall attempt to pinpoint the specifics of Du Bellay’s translation method. For this purpose I analysed all of Du Bellay’s translations of Virgil. Because of space limitations, I present here the beginning of Book 4, lines 1 to 19 in Virgil, a passage that corresponds to lines 5 to 40 in Du Bellay; so far these lines have not been subject to any detailed explication. I will proceed to a detailed study of this passage, to show how his translations work, before drawing more general conclusions about the character of his rendition of Aeneid 4 and 6 as a whole. The Latin text I use is Perret (2012–13) with the English translation of Ruden (2008). The opening of Aeneid 4 depicts Dido progressively consumed by an excessive love for Aeneas, who is at first touched by the same flame before he draws back. This passage allows us to trace the portrait of Dido, queen and determined woman, firm in her faith in her husband and loyalty to her country, at the moment when she is assailed by love and desire. We can note, first, the length of the translation: twenty lines in Virgil turn into thirty-six lines in Du Bellay. The length of Du Bellay’s translation comes not so much from an overabundance of additions as from the constraints of French. With regard to the choice of metre, Du Bellay, like his contemporaries, opts for the decasyllable, the metre of epic at least until around 1555, when it is supplanted by the alexandrine.²⁵ The content of the Latin hexameter is rendered by a couplet and/or enjambments in French, which also encourages expansion. ²³ ‘Épître-préface à Jean de Morel’, in Du Bellay, 1991, p. 249. ²⁴ When I say ‘rebirth’ I want to make a link with the French Renaissance in the sixteenth century. ²⁵ On the French line, see in particular Sebillet 1910, p. 40; Du Bellay 2000 [1549], p. 119 (= II, 4); Peletier du Mans 2011, pp. 345–6.

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at regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura volnus alit venis, et caeco carpitur igni. (Verg. A. 4.1–2) Now the queen’s lifeblood fed her grievous love wound– An unseen flame gnawed at her hour on hour. Du Bellay, L’Énéide, 4.5–8²⁶ Mais ce pandant, la Roine ja blessée But meanwhile, the Queen already wounded D’un grief souci, nourrist en la pensée by a grave concern, fed within her thoughts Ce qui la blesse, & sent dedans ses veines He who her [ACC.] wounds, and feels inside her veins L’aveugle feu des amoureuses peines. The blind fire of-the loving sorrows.

Line 1 in Virgil is enjambed into the second line by Du Bellay, with d’un grief souci (‘by a grave concern’). But he avoids major expansion by playing with enjambments and opts for a literal translation, ja blessée (‘already wounded’). The Latin words in line 2 are transformed through an expansion, nourrist en sa pensée / Ce qui la blesse (‘He who wounds her fed [her] in her thoughts’, ll. 2–3 Du Bellay), and through the addition of the expression amoureuses peines (‘loving sorrows’, l. 4 Du Bellay), to render the sentiment of being torn (peines has the strong connotation of suffering). multa viri virtus animo, multusque recursat gentis honos: haerent infixi pectore voltus verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem. (Verg. A. 4.3–5) His bravery, the glory of his family Came back to her—his face, his words were rooted In her mind, and new love kept sweet rest away.’ Du Bellay, L’Énéide, 4.9–14 Mainte valeur, mainte Troienne gloire Much valour, much Trojan glory Court, & recourt en sa prompte mémoire. Runs and runs-back in her ready memory. La face aimée, & le parler aussi The face beloved and the speech also Sont engravez en son triste souci. Are engraved in her sad concern:

²⁶ The first four lines of Du Bellay translate the last three lines of Book 3 (716–18), to provide context; hence his translation of Book 4 starts in line 5.

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Et ne permet son penser ennuieux And do-not allow her thoughts [NOM.] weary Le doulx sommeil couler dedans ses yeux. gentle sleep to-flow inside her eyes.

The Latin word honos in line 4 is transformed by a slight shift of meaning into ‘glory’ (l. 9 Du Bellay), in order to insist on the queen’s honour. Du Bellay makes a doublet of recursat in Court, & recourt (‘Runs back and forth’). He adds the adjective prompte (‘ready’) and shifts the meaning of the very general ‘spirit’ (animo in Virgil’s Latin) to ‘memory’, which is an adaptation in line with the poetic context of the time—a time that prided itself on ‘glory’ and ‘memory’; and these words are used to make the rhyme, hence they are in a strong position.²⁷ In Virgil’s lines 4–5, Du Bellay adds the adjective aimée (‘beloved’, l. 11 Du Bellay), inspired by the Latin noun pectore, to communicate more explicitly Dido’s love for Aeneas. ‘Heart’ (pectore) becomes triste souci (‘sad concern’, l. 12 Du Bellay), which introduces a dimension of pathos. Then the very broad term membris (l. 5 Verg.) yields to ‘eyes’ (l. 14 Du Bellay), the channel through which love enters during innamoramento, a topos that featured very prominently in love poetry inherited from Petrarch.²⁸ postera Phoebea lustrabat lampade terras umentemque Aurora polo dimoverat umbram, cum sic unanimam adloquitur male sana sororem: (Verg. A. 4.6–8) Dawn raised the torch of Phoebus, which is earth’s light, And pushed the drizzling shadows from the sky, And stricken Dido told her loving sister: Du Bellay, L’Énéide, 4.15–20 Ja de Phebus la lampe retournée Already of Phoebus the lamp returned Nous esclairoit la seconde journée, For-us illuminates the following day, Et ja partoit du celeste sejour And already departs from-the heavenly stay L’humide nuit, fuyant l’aulbe du jour: The damp night, fleeing the dawn of-the day: Lors qu’à sa sœur tesmoing de ses secretz While to her sister witness to her secrets Ceste insensée ainsi fait ses regretz, This crazed-woman thus makes her regrets:

²⁷ On the importance of ‘glory’ and ‘memory’ in the poetry of the group La Pléïade, see in particular Joukovsky 1969. ²⁸ On love poetry inherited from Petrarch, see in particular Rigolot 2002.

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In lines 6–7 of the Latin, Ja (l. 15 Du Bellay), frequent in Du Bellay’s poetry, opens the line—rather than postera, a Latin adjective whose meaning is finally found in the noun phrase la seconde journée (‘the following day’, l. 16 Du Bellay). Then Du Bellay changes all the subjects, highlighting the night around Dido, dramatizing the scene, and suppresses Aurora, replacing it with an antonomasia, l’aulbe du jour (‘the dawn of the day’), a way of appropriating the Latin text. Virgil’s male sana in line 8 becomes ceste insensée (‘This crazed-woman’, l. 20 Du Bellay), with the addition of a deictic that creates extra vividness to underline how the passion has led the mind astray. Du Bellay chooses an equivalent term for unanimam sororem in a synonymous expression, which emphasizes the intimacy and proximity that exist between Dido and Anna by describing her sister as tesmoing de ses secretz (‘witness to her secrets’, l. 19 Du Bellay). Finally, the addition to the rhyme of the word regretz (l. 20 Du Bellay) introduces the characteristic motif of the complaint, which we will find again in the collection of Regrets. So Du Bellay emphasizes Dido’s weakness and humanizes her. ‘Anna soror, quae me suspensam insomnia terrent! quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes, quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis!’ (Verg. A. 4. 9–11) ‘Anna, half-waking dreams have terrified me. This stranger who has come here as our guest— His face, his walk, his heart’s and weapons’ strength . . . ’ Du Bellay, L’Énéide, 4.21–6 ‘Anne ma sœur, helas dont me surviennent Anne my sister, alas, of-which for-me arise Tant de songers, qui douteuse me tiennent? So-many dreams, which doubtful me [ACC.] keep? Qui est cet hoste, & nouvel estranger, Who is this guest and new stranger, Qui s’est venu en noz palais loger? Who has come in our palaces to-lodge? Quel port il a! ô que son hardi cœur What bearing he has! Oh how his spirited heart Montre qu’il est ung brave belliqueur! Shows that he is a brave warrior!

In Virgil’s line 9, Du Bellay adds the interjection alas, which reinforces the pathos, and he frenchifies Anna to Anne (l. 21 Du Bellay). Latin insomnia (‘visions’) becomes songers (‘dreams’, l. 22 Du Bellay); songers is the equivalent of songes, ‘thoughts’, anticipating yet again his future poetry, for instance ‘Le songe’. In lines 10–11 of the

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Latin, Du Bellay creates the doublet ‘guest and new stranger’ (l. 23 Du Bellay) for novus hospes. He shifts from the verb ferens to the noun port (l. 25 Du Bellay). He adds the interjection ô and establishes a link of cause and effect between the heart and the weapons through the addition of the verb montre (‘shows’, l. 26 Du Bellay). si mihi non animo fixum immotumque sederet, ne cui me vinclo vellem sociare iugali, postquam primus amor deceptam morte fefellit; si non pertaesum thalami taedaeque fuisset, huic uni forsan potui succumbere culpae. (Verg. A. 4.15–19) If ever my mind moved from where I fixed it— I set myself against the ties of marriage After my first love cheated me by dying And made me hate all wedding ceremony— I might relent, this single time, and falter. Du Bellay, L’Énéide, 4.33–40 Si je n’avois fiché dans mon courage If I had not fixed in my courage De ne me joindre à nul par mariage, To not myself join to anyone by marriage Depuis le temps que la mort m’a deceue Since the time that death me cheated De l’amitié en moy premier conceue: Of the friendship in myself first conceived: Si je n’avoi oublié tout desir If I had not forgotten all desire De retenter des noces le plaisir, To retry of marriage the pleasure, Ma volunté (possible ores peu caute) My willingness (possible yet too-little cautious) M’eust fait tumber sou cete seule faute. Me would-have made to-fall under this sole fault.

In Virgil’s lines 15–19, the doublet fixum immotumque is fused into a past participle, fiché (‘fixed’, l. 33 Du Bellay); animo becomes ‘courage’, highlighting Dido’s resolute spirit. The queen is, however, prey to desire: the rhyme desir / plaisir (ll. 37–8 Du Bellay) brings these terms, which are not in the Latin text and which evoke sensuality, into a strong position. Suppression of uni (‘for him alone’) erases Aeneas from Du Bellay’s text, insists on the failure of Dido’s will alone, and allows for a conceptualization of the torments of love. The choice to translate culpa as ‘fault’ (l. 40 Du Bellay) tends to Christianize Virgil’s text and to adapt it to the feudal and Christian society of the sixteenth century, in which love outside of marriage constitutes a sin. So Du Bellay adapts his analysis of love’s torments to his society’s concerns.

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Let us now see the conclusions that we can draw, as well as the possible implications. Like his contemporaries, Du Bellay uses the decasyllable in rhyming couplets. Although he develops and amplifies, often through use of enjambment, we noticed few additions in Du Bellay’s translations. For instance, few logical linkages are added, in contrast with the tendency of other translators. We can only note in Books 4 and 6 the recurrence of ‘although’, ‘in short’, ‘therefore’, ‘thus’, ‘so’, ‘finally’. As we have seen with the three occurrences of ja in this excerpt, there are some small developments of temporal perception that manifest themselves through notations of time. Additions of addresses and invocations are also more important than in the original poem, and they serve the purpose of strengthening the speaker’s commitment in his discourse; similarly (in the remainder that I analysed), ‘Oh Blessed Virgin’, exclaims Aeneas to the Sibyl (6.128 Du Bellay); ‘you, old Chaos’, he says (6.450 Du Bellay); ‘O my children’, he says with a caring tone to his Trojan companions (6.1392 Du Bellay)—and so on. This amplification is also realized through the paraphrase of the original text, sometimes with a tendency to integrate a gloss in the text itself, as in the case of the fire that burns within Dido (caeco carpitur igni) in Virgil’s line 2, which becomes ‘the blind fire of loving sorrows’ in this excerpt. We have furthermore noted doublets that also contribute to textual amplification, often for added clarity, as when the unannounced arrival is underlined with the doublet ‘this guest and new stranger’ (l. 23 Du Bellay). Let me finally note, among Du Bellay’s additions, the motifs developed particularly throughout the translation of Books 4 and 6 that are not present in this excerpt. First, vegetation and water: Marine Molins (2003) shows this well. Du Bellay specifies that the funereal foliage with which Dido surrounds her pyre consists of ‘branches of cypress’ (4.914 Du Bellay) and that the simple ‘tree’ on which the sacred branch is found is in fact ‘a great oak tree’ (6.238 Du Bellay). Similarly, Du Bellay distinguishes himself by replacing Virgil’s simple mentions of water with ‘shores’, ‘shorelines’, and ‘ports’—all places that suggest transit, for instance ‘Stygian shores’ (6.635 Du Bellay) for Stygias aquas. These examples of the development of motifs emphasize Du Bellay’s particular attention to descriptions. All those modifications and adaptations serve to ‘naturalize’ Virgil’s text. In this concern to adapt and to ‘naturalize’ Virgil’s text, Du Bellay’s translation contains words expressing certain religious, political, social, and moral notions that stem from the national customs of Christian feudal sixteenth-century France. In this respect, Du Bellay first of all attempts to make proper nouns sound more French, in order to respect the qualities of the target language: thus Anne for Anna (l. 9 Du Bellay) in this excerpt. Remote references are rejected in favour of more familiar equivalents: after this passage, for example, Dido’s brother did not strike the Penates while killing Sychaeus, but ‘our Gods’ (l. 4.43 Du Bellay). Out of this same concern for adaptation, Christian notions and terms blossom; thus ‘hells’ are replaced by ‘hell’ in many places. There are also words of love and endearment of the time—mignardement (‘delicacy’, l. 4.252 Du Bellay), crespelez (‘frizzy’, l. 4.270); the medieval vocabulary of courtship—don (‘gift’), guerdon (‘reward’), but also voeu (‘loving promise’),

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mentioned on two occasions at the end of Book 4 (ll. 4.1129 and 1265 Du Bellay); technical terms such as sepz or esseuls (l. 6.908 Du Bellay); and the vocabulary of weapons and the army, for example the keyword scadrons (‘squadrons’, l. 6.817 Du Bellay).²⁹ Equivalence is what Du Bellay seeks above all: that is why we find in our excerpt, in the translation of unanimam sororem, a synonymous expression that communicates the intimacy and closeness between Dido and Anne, as he makes the sister be ‘witness to her secrets’ (l. 19 Du Bellay). Finally, his lexical research is very important: it is carried out on behalf of an ‘ancient poetry renewed’.³⁰ This is shown, on the one hand, through the use of Latinisms and archaisms—for example tourbe (l. 6.517 Du Bellay) for turba—and, on the other, through neologisms, especially thanks to the existence of compound words like pié-sonnant (l. 4.244 Du Bellay: ‘resonant’, of a hoof). Apart from the concern with adaptation and ‘naturalization’, Du Bellay’s translation highlights the picturesque element in Virgil for the sake of the aesthetics of representation. The text is thus realized and visualized through numerous deictics. These can be demonstrative pronouns: thus Dido is ‘this one’ (l. 4.170 Du Bellay). The use of terms of presentation serves a similar purpose: they lay the text before us even more openly as spectacle. The reader, who becomes a fictional spectator, is sometimes a bystander. This is the case when Dido, exasperated by Aeneas’s indifference towards her sorrow, solicits a spectator to witness the ingratitude and crime of her former companion: ‘See if he lamented our loss, / See if he even turned an eye, / If he cried, or if he felt pity / For the fury of such a friendship’ (ll. 4.657–60 Du Bellay). This aesthetics of representation is parallel to an aesthetics of variety, since Du Bellay does not hesitate to use terms and images that belong to authors other than Virgil in translating Books 4 and 6 and to offer another representation of Dido than the one offered by Virgil. In his article ‘Du Bellay’s Dido and the Translation of Nation’, Todd W. Reeser demonstrates that the Dido of Virgil in the Aeneid, queen of Carthage, epic woman, is completed by the Dido of Ovid in the Heroides, human being falling in love, elegiac woman.³¹ In my excerpt, the constant addition of the adjective ‘sad’—in the etymological sense of ‘mourning’—and the abundant interjections belong to the vocabulary of elegy. Du Bellay is also concerned with very concrete and physical manifestations of love, along the same lines as Ovid: he gives Dido a larger share of humanity by treating her above all as a loving woman. Dido who is in love with Aeneas is therefore ‘This crazed-woman’ (ceste insensée) whose spirit has been led astray by passion. It thus comes as no surprise that, after his translation of Book 4, Du Bellay places the ‘Complainte de Didon à Enée prinse d’Ovide’ (‘Complaint of Dido to Aeneas taken from Ovid’), which gives us, at the end, Dido’s own words, and hence a more human image of her.

²⁹ On Du Bellay’s poetic language, see Du Bellay (2000) [1549], II, 6. ³⁰ ‘Seconde préface de l’Olive’ [1550], in Du Bellay 2002, p. 12. ³¹ See Reeser 2012.

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This leads us to the meaning that Du Bellay wishes to confer upon Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid, or at least to what interests him most in them. In Book 4, the way he handles love and Dido, its unfortunate prey, seems to redirect reflection onto love itself; in this he diverges from the tradition of medieval allegory, which willingly associates love and morality. Yet right from the start, in the epigram placed at the head of the translation of Book 4, Du Bellay states: On void plus d’ung moqueur Enée / Et plus d’une fole Didon / Couver le feu de Cupidon / Desoubz les cendres d’hyménée (‘We see more than a mocking Aeneas / And more than a crazy Dido / Incubate the fires of Cupid / Beneath the ashes of Hymenaeus’).³² This epigram is not preoccupied with morality. The passionate love that has gripped Dido is not judged. As I have already said, Du Bellay is interested in the concrete dimensions of love and in the derangement of the mind; and this does not mean that he condemns Dido. Rather he rehabilitates her by portraying her as firm, determined, and irreproachable, before her sister’s intervention, ready to resist temptation and to respect humbly the most sacred bonds she had with her first husband. The work of Jean-Pierre Néraudeau and Todd W. Reeser demonstrates that the addition of the translation of Heroides 7 and of the epigram of Ausonius follows this direction, as it follows the Dido who was not only an elegiac woman of fiction (Ovid) but also the ‘wife of only one man’ of history (Ausonius).³³ In fact, the epigram is recited through the voice of Dido’s statue, which represents the real Dido, not the narrative: Je suis de Didon la semblables, . . . Tel corps j’avoy, non l’impudique esprit / Qui feintement par Vergile est descript (‘I am similar to Dido . . . Such a body had I, not the unchaste spirit / Which Virgil fabricated’).³⁴ That is why, from the first lines of his translation, Du Bellay predisposes us in favour of Dido’s love through the addition of three adjectives: animo becomes ‘her ready memory’, emphasizing Dido’s sufferings; voltus becomes ‘the beloved face’, which betrays the sentiments of the queen; and cura becomes ‘her weary thoughts’. Du Bellay wishes to move the reader with the representation of human passions. This explains the vocabulary of elegy and the emphasis on the pathetic, which are based on three important sources: Virgil, Ovid, and Ausonius. In Book 6, Du Bellay wishes to account for the mysteries, as they are apprehended by the society of his time; and he does so through Aeneas’s visit to the Sibyl and descent into hell. This is a universal concern, already present in Virgil’s own text and extended in the allegorical commentaries of the Middle Ages. However, Du Bellay adds to it a Neoplatonic dimension, following the trends of the time but also a connection with his own early writings, in particular Olive (1549 and 1550 for the second edition)—love poetry inherited from Petrarch.³⁵ For instance, throughout his translation as in his love poetry, he accentuates the motifs of light and obscurity, aligning Aeneas’s descent into hell with the difficult ascent of humans to the eternal ³² ‘Épigramme du translateur’, in Du Bellay 1991, p. 256. ³³ Néraudeau 1998; Reeser 2012. ³⁴ ‘Sur la statue de Didon prins d’Ausone’, in Du Bellay 1931, p. 331. ³⁵ On Olive, see in particular Millet 2000.

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world of Platonic Forms, as seen with the help of Plato’s myth in the Republic.³⁶ This brings us to the question of the links between the translations of Books 4 and 6 and his own poetic production.

17.2 Translation as a Bridge towards Creativity: The ‘Bellayization’ of Virgil First and foremost, on the basis of the findings discussed so far, it is evident that Du Bellay’s work as a translator is directly in line with his poetic project, namely to contribute to the development of the French language (its possibilities of expression, enrichment, illustration) and of French poetry, as well as to his own poetic production. The comparison between the translations of Virgil and the poetry of Du Bellay allows us to bring to light an internal intertextuality, in other words, intratextuality. Better yet, the translations of Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid deeply feed his poetry, renewing it, making his translation work the counterpart of his poetry, and supporting an imitation–creation process. Let me clarify this point by adducing a few examples, which come from my previous observations. Generally, many allusions to Books 4 and 6 can be detected in Du Bellay’s poems, in the choice of words, lines, and rhythm, and these allusions confirm their influence. Translating the two books of Virgil’s Aeneid undeniably left its mark on Du Bellay. Borrowings from these books are much more numerous than borrowings from other books of the Aeneid.³⁷ For example, in Sonnet 6 of the Antiquités de Rome, the last line of the poem, in which Rome boasts of matching Sa puissance à la terre et son courage aux cieux (‘Her power with earth’s, her courage with the sky’s’), is a translation of imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo at Aeneid 6.782.³⁸ Moreover, we find at line 1308 in Du Bellay’s Book 6 something that becomes, in the sonnet, the hemistich et son courage aux cieux (‘her courage with the sky’s’). A phrase from the translation of Book 4 (ll. 164–6 Du Bellay) can even be found in its entirety in Sonnet 31 of the Regrets—a clear sign that Virgil was Du Bellay’s source of inspiration: Plus me plaist le sejour qu’ont basty mes ayeux, / Que des palais Romains le front audacieux (‘My love’s deeper for what my father’s built, / Than Roman palace-fronts of marble, gilt’).³⁹ This intratextuality is also present in Du Bellay’s descriptions, where the picturesque and the representational are rendered notably through comparisons that open with an appeal to sight, such as ‘as we see’, ‘as much as we see’, ‘wherever we see’, formulae that are found in Antiquités de Rome (1558) and Regrets (1558). Sonnet 16 of Antiquités de Rome, for example, uses the anaphora ‘As we see’ in a triple ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹

See above all Du Bellay’s translation of lines 6.403–86. As discussed in my thesis, Du Bellay lecteur de Virgile. Les antiquitez de Rome, Sonnet 6, l. 14, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 9; translation is Kline 2009a. Regrets, Sonnet 31, ll. 9–10, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 77; translation is Kline 2009b.

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comparison, to describe the wandering of modern Roman power: Comme lon void de loing sur la mer courrouce / Une montaigne d’eau d’un grand branle ondoyant, / Puis trainant mille flotz, d’un gros choc abboyant / Se crever contre un roc, ou le vent l’a poussee: / Comme on void . . . / Et comme on void . . . / Erra la Monarchie⁴⁰ (‘As we see from afar the waves roar / Mountains of water now set in motion, / A thousand breakers of cliff-jarring ocean, / Striking the reef, driven in the wind’s maw: / As we see . . . / And as we see . . . / This Empire passed’). The dedication ‘To Monsieur D’Avanson’, which serves as a preface to the Regrets, also shows this process of describing the poetic wanderings of the ‘I’ in Rome: J’estois à Rome au milieu de la guerre, / Sortant desja de l’aage plus dispos, / A mes travaux cherchant quelque repos, / Non pour louange ou pour faveur acquerre. / Ainsi void-on celuy qui sur la plaine / Picque le bœuf ou travaille au rapart / Se resjouir, & d’un vers fait sans art / S’esvertuer au travail de sa peine⁴¹ (‘I was in Rome in the middle of the war, / Leaving already the age of fitness, / Seeking some rest in my works, / Not for praise or for acquired favours. / Thus can we see the one on the plain / Gathering cattle or working on the land / Rejoice, & from a verse made without art / Finding virtue in the labour of his pain’). Among the aforementioned motifs dear to Du Bellay, the foregrounding of vegetation in his translations of Virgil can be linked to the idea of the reverdie (‘regreening’) and to the taste for nature and greenery in his poetry, for instance in the passage in Divers jeux rustiques where the poet links his love song with Tous les verds tresors des cieux, / Riche ornament de la plaine (‘All the green treasures of the heavens, / Rich ornament of the plains’).⁴² As for the images of shores, shorelines, and ports, in the Regrets they announce the antithesis between the ‘Latin shore’ and the ‘paternal shore’ of the Loire (Sonnet 16, for example), where the priestess asks Aeneas whether he will go see the ‘Stygian shores’ (Stygias aquas, 6.635) and where the Trojans do not go near the river (fluvio) but rather the ‘river-bank’ (6.654).⁴³ More generally, the feeling of tenderness that manifests itself in the translation of Virgil’s descriptions is a marked quality of Du Bellay in all of his poems, in imitation of the Latin master himself. Consider for example the tenderness of Aeneas’s sleep, which quite sedately opens Sonnet 149 of the Regrets (Au doulx repos avoit courbé le chef ’, ‘The leader had bowed down to gentle rest’, l. 4.998 Du Bellay), where it is the gentle madness of the poet himself that is praised, because it has become a sign of election: Vous dictes (Courtisans) les poètes sont fouls, / Et dictes vérité : mais aussi dire j’ose, / Que telz que vous soyez, vous tenez quelque chose / De ceste doulce humeur qui est commune à tous (‘You say, Courtiers, that poets are mad, / And you are not wrong: but I dare add, / That such as you are, you

⁴⁰ ⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³

Les antiquitez de Rome, Sonnet 16, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 17; translation is based on Kline 2009a. Regrets, ‘A Monsieur D’Avanson’, ll. 5–12, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 46. Divers jeux rustiques, ‘Chant de l’amour et du printemps’, ll. 101–2, in Du Bellay 1987, p. 42. Regrets, Sonnet 16, ll. 9–14, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 64–5.

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have something / Of this gentle mood everyone shares’).⁴⁴ I could multiply examples of intratextuality between Du Bellay’s translations and poems, but that is not my purpose here.⁴⁵ To conclude, Du Bellay’s translations of Virgil bear the mark of his own poetry, and his later poems bear the mark of his translations from Virgil. The two influence each other: translations and poetry make up the two-faced Janus of Du Bellay’s imitation. Moreover, the translations of Aeneid 4 and 6 deeply feed his contemporary and later poems, making his translation the counterpart of his poetry and supporting an imitation process and, even more, a ‘text rewriting’ as creation. In fact, after his translations of Virgil, Du Bellay not only borrows lines, images, and rhythms from Virgil’s texts but assimilates Aeneid 4 and 6 into his own poetry. Thus one form of poetry interrogates another; the poetry of Virgil makes Du Bellay ponder over his own poetry. These translations become the materials of Du Bellay’s writing. The very general formulation of the second preface to Olive (1550)—which recalls quite directly La deffense et illustration de la langue francaise and Du Bellay’s first poems, but which in fact encompasses the whole of his work, including the translations that he started at this date—already advances in this direction: Je me suis beaucoup travaillé en mes écriz de ressembler aultre que moymesmes⁴⁶ (‘In my writings I have worked hard to resemble someone other than myself ’). Here the work, in its entirety, appears already as a quest for the self. And it is indeed to the reinvention of Du Bellay’s poetic practice that the translation of Virgil leads, because it profoundly feeds the works that follow.

⁴⁴ Regrets, Sonnet 149, ll. 1–4, in Du Bellay 2000, p. 171. ⁴⁵ As discussed in my thesis, Du Bellay lecteur de Virgile. ⁴⁶ ‘Seconde préface de l’Olive’ [1550], in Du Bellay 2002, p. 12.

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18 Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis Stephen Scully

18.1 Dryden on Virgil and Homer In the Preface and Postscript to his Æneis (Dryden 1697), Dryden speaks extensively about Virgil’s poetics and politics but does not discuss one in relation to the other. In this chapter I shall attempt to link the two, proposing that Dryden viewed Virgil’s ‘quiet and sedate’ style as ideally suited not only to the political necessities of Augustan Rome but also to the political turmoil of Dryden’s own time. As Dryden felt that Virgil ‘maturely weigh’d the Conditions of the Times in which he liv’d’ and wrote for ‘the Interest of his Country’ (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, ll. 455 and 470, in Dryden 1958, pp. 1014 and 1015), so Dryden felt the same when translating Virgil for his England in the throes of its own political upheaval. As Rome needed Virgil’s sedate voice, so did England need Dryden’s sedate Æneis. To that end, in line with Virgil’s style, he exercised a self-conscious restraint that, three years later, in another Preface, he was to describe as being at odds with his own genius. He expresses this new sentiment in 1700, at the age of sixty-eight, in the last year of his life, when commenting on Homer, Virgil, his own poetic temperament, and his efforts to translate Iliad 1: ‘I have found by Trial, Homer a more pleasing Task than Virgil . . . For the Grecian is more according to my Genius, than the Latin poet . . . One warms you by Degrees; the other sets you on fire all at once, and never intermits his Heat . . . This vehemence of [Homer’s], I confess is more suitable to my Temper: and therefore I have translated his First Book with greater Pleasure than any Part of Virgil.’ ‘Virgil’, he explains there, ‘was of a quiet, sedate Temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of Fire. The chief Talent of Virgil was propriety of Thoughts, and Ornament of Words: Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the Liberties both of Numbers, and of Expression, which his Language, and the Age in which he liv’d allow’d him’ (Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, ll. 165–75, in Dryden

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2000–5, vol. 5, pp. 56 and 57).¹ Such singular praise for Homer was rare in its time (Sowerby 1996, p. 26) and perhaps unexpected coming from Dryden, especially after the mighty success of his Æneis.² A cynic might suspect that such claims were designed to win him subscriptions for the completion of the task of translating the entire Iliad—after all, Samuel Johnson observed that Dryden’s critical observations were often designed to recommend the work at hand;³ but a comparison of Dryden’s Ilias 1 (Book 1 of the Iliad, first published in 1700: see Dryden 2000–5, vol. 5) and Æneis (Dryden 1697) suggests that he wrote these words with conviction. This chapter shall illustrate the point through close readings of Dryden’s two translations and a consideration of his political leanings in a time of regime change.

18.2 Dryden’s Æneis and Ilias By way of comparison, one observes that Dryden’s renderings of Juno’s rage in Aeneid 1 and of Agamemnon’s fury in Iliad 1 are both full of vim and vigour, but the difference in their heat is demonstrable. First I’ll quote the narrative introduction and Juno’s opening words: When laboring still, with endless discontent,

cum Iuno aeternum servans sub pectore vulnus

The queen of heaven did thus her fury vent:

haec secum: ‘mene incepto desistere victam

‘Then am I vanquished, must I yield’, said she,

nec posse Italia Teucrorum avertere regem!

‘And must the Trojan reign in Italy?

quippe vetor fatis.’

So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force;

(Verg. A. 1.36–9)

Nor can my power divert their happy course.’ (Dryden, Æneis, 1.54–9)

The passage with the narrative introduction and Agamemnon’s opening blast in the Iliad (Il. 1.172–7) reads thus in Dryden’s translation (ll. 257–66 in Dryden 2000–5, vol. 5):⁴ ¹ See Corse 1991, pp. 39–51. Dryden’s distinctions between Homer and Virgil may be influenced by Longinus’s distinction between the Iliad and the Odyssey: the former displays greater vehemence, sustained energy, consistent sublimity, continual outpouring of passion, and rapidity than the latter (Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13). See also Løsnes 2011, pp. 274–84. On Dryden’s Ilias, see Winn 2000. ² Seven years earlier, in 1693, Dryden had offered a different assessment of Homer and Virgil: the Greek was ‘too Talkative, and more than somewhat too digressive’, while Virgil he praised for having ‘the Gift of expressing much in little, and sometimes in silence. For though he yielded much to Homer in Invention, he much Excell’d him in his Admirable Judgment’ (‘Dedication to Examen Poeticum’, 355–6 and 374–7, in Dryden 2000–5, vol. 4, pp. 225–6), views echoed by Cooke (1741, pp. 135–6) in his edition of Virgil. In ‘Lines on Milton’ (published in 1688; Dryden 2000–5, vol. 3, p. 200), Dryden praised Homer for his ‘loftiness of thought’; Virgil for his ‘majesty’; and Milton for ‘both’. See Mason 2012, pp. 98–100. See note 18 in this chapter. ³ See Johnson 2006, vol. 2, pp. 120–1 (Life of Dryden 202); cf. Sowerby 1996, p. 26. ⁴ For Dryden avoiding the refinement (or ‘smoothness’, to use the favoured term of his day) so admired by many seventeenth-century readers, see Davis 2004, pp. 86–9.

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The King, whose Brows with shining Gold were bound; Who saw his Throne with scepter’d Slaves incompass’d round, [ALEXANDRINE] Thus answer’d stern! ‘Go, at thy Pleasure, go: We need not such a Friend, nor fear we such a Foe. [ALEXANDRINE] There will not want to follow me in Fight: Jove will assist, and Jove assert my Right, But thou of all the Kings (his Care below) Art least at my Command, and most my Foe. Debates, Dissentions, Uproars are thy Joy; Provok’d without Offence, and practic’d to destroy.’ [ALEXANDRINE]

The tirade concludes with a flourish (ll. 279–83 = Il. 1.184–7): From thy own Tent, proud Man, in thy despight, This Hand shall ravish thy pretended Right. Briseis shall be mine, and thou shalt see, What odds of awful Pow’r I have on thee: That others at thy cost may learn the diff ’rence of degree. [A FOURTEENER]

In both passages, Dryden’s expansiveness may startle modern readers. On occasion he stays quite close to the ancient poems, but more often he paraphrases or even invents, striving to bring to the surface what lay ‘secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him’, as he expressed it in the ‘Preface to Sylvae’ of 1685 (Dryden 1995, vol. 2, p. 43).⁵ As every good translator must, he feels the need to burrow underneath the surface of sentence and line—beneath word order, syntax, and metrics—to discover where the energy of thought and expression lies; and that is what he brings to his English surface, adapting foreign hexameters to the rhetorical strengths of his rhyming couplets. In that sense, he is ‘faithful’ to verse. By way of example, when translating the introduction to Juno’s monologue (cum Iuno aeternum servans sub pectore vulnus / haec secum), Dryden ignores Virgil’s enjambment, instead shaping the heroic couplet brilliantly around the end rhyme of ‘discontent’ and ‘vent’: ‘When laboring still, with endless discontent, / The queen of heaven did thus her fury vent.’⁶ His addition of ‘fury’ in this couplet may also anticipate William Levitan’s (1993, p. 14) observation that the Queen’s first words ‘mene incepto’ may be a bilingual pun on μῆνιν, the first word of the Iliad. There are ⁵ In a duly famous passage, Dryden says that ‘turning an Author word by word’ (metaphrase) should generally be avoided, but with paraphrase, where ‘words are not so strictly followed . . . as sense’, the ‘Spirit of an Author may be transfus’d, and yet not lost’. ‘The sense of an Author [must generally be treated as] Sacred and inviolable’ but it must be rendered in such a way that ‘will bear [the author’s Genius], or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance’ (‘Preface to Ovid’s Epistles’, 234, 240–1, 404–5, and 379–81, in Dryden 1995, vol. 1, pp. 384 and 389). In Richard Bentley’s tiresome quip, paraphrase could also be criticized: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer’, as recounted by Samuel Johnson in The Life of Pope 285: see Johnson 2006, vol. 4, p. 61. See Carne-Ross 1996, pp. xiii–iv, and Silk et al. 2014, pp. 173–98. ⁶ For end rhyme in heroic couplets ‘defin[ing] their materials as neatly and precisely as the Latin poets had done,’ see Piper 1969, p. 30.

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many other pleasures, too, in Dryden’s rendering: the piling up of rhetorical questions, the heavy stress on monosyllabic words, lines roughly divided into halves followed by ones with full sentences. The metre of his first verse—‘ “Then am I vanquished, must I yield,” said she’ (Dryden, Æneis, 1.56)—is particularly fine. With its heavy beat of monosyllables, the stress could fall most anywhere. With an iambic beat, stress would fall on am, van of ‘vanquished’, must, yield, and she, point being given to both ‘I’s, precisely because the pronoun is demoted to the unstressed position. Or one might imagine the stress as falling on the first syllable (Then) and I as emphasizing Juno’s incredulity that she should be constrained by Fate. The spondaic Latin line—haec secum: mene incepto desistere victam (Verg. A. 1.37)—is equally complex, especially in the second foot, as -cum (and not me, the first word in Juno’s speech) receives the ictus. Such metrical uncertainties in Dryden’s translation allow us to interpret Juno’s emotions variously, conveying well the queen’s furious, unsteady state. In the last two lines of my excerpt, So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force; Nor can my power divert their happy course,

Dryden translates Juno’s indignant and ironical quippe vetor fatis. Virgil’s phrasing is starker, more combative, even while Dryden’s end rhyme of ‘force’ and ‘happy course’ has its own bitterness and his complete line of monosyllables is elegant— ‘So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force’—although Dryden’s Englished Juno recognizes her limit in ways in which she does not in Latin. But, when comparing these verses from the Æneis to Agamemnon’s fury in Dryden’s Ilias 1, we find heat and liberties in Dryden’s Homer that are not found in his Virgil. In none of our lines from Virgil does Juno, even in her fury, break out of the pentameter frame, but neither the heroic line nor the heroic couplet can contain Agamemnon’s passion in Ilias 1. In three instances (ll. 257, 259, and 265) the Greek leader’s metre stretches into the six-feet alexandrine.⁷ And, as if to emphasize Agamemnon’s greater power, Dryden has the king’s speech at the end boil over into a triplet (ll. 281–3) where the last verse bursts the pentameter frame with a rousing seven-footer. Even though Dryden criticized fourteeners in Chapman’s translation of the Iliad as ‘monstrous’,⁸ we find that he cannot resist the temptation to convey in metre what Agamemnon says in person, namely that he differs from all others in degree. Eighty years later, in 1779, Samuel Johnson will say of the English alexandrine and the triplet that they ‘break the lawful bounds’ of the English heroic verse by ‘surprising’ the reader with their expansion of the accustomed form. ⁷ According to the OED, Dryden is the first poet in England to use ‘alexandrine’ as a noun; its first adjectival usage is attributed to Puttenham in 1589. ⁸ About Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, Dryden writes: ‘[It] has thrown [Homer] down as low as harsh numbers, improper English, and a monstrous length of verse could carry him’ (‘Dedication to Examen Poeticum’, 406–9, in Dryden 2000–5, vol. 4, p. 227).

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Jonathan Swift censured every instance of them. Both liberties, alexandrines and triplets, occur with much greater frequency in Dryden’s Ilias 1 than in his Æneis, making his Homer appear to race forward at a gallop while his Latin poem goes along at a trot, to borrow Christopher Ricks’s metaphor.⁹ Some might prefer the trot to the gallop. But in almost every way there’s more bite to Agamemnon’s outburst than to Juno’s lament in Dryden’s rendering. The end rhymes themselves are stronger and almost tell the story (ll. 258–65): ‘go . . . Foe, Fight . . . Right, [below . . . Foe,] Joy . . . destroy.’ Agamemnon’s speech starts hot and never lets up on its heat. First, Agamemnon breaks into the narrator’s line and begins with the strong single syllable ‘Go’, repeated at the end of the line: ‘Thus answer’d stern! “Go, at thy Pleasure, go.” ’ The qualifier ‘stern’ is Dryden’s addition. The next line stretches to six feet, all monosyllables: ‘We need not such a Friend, nor fear we such a Foe’; its strong parallelism, enhanced by the repetition of ‘such’ and by the repeating sound patterns, captures the rapidity of thought and fire Dryden associated with Homer and his age. ‘Nor fear we such a Foe’ is all Dryden. Again, he adds to Homer a few lines later, making explicit that the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is political. Where Homer has ‘strife’, ‘wars’, and ‘battles’ (ἔρις, πόλεμοι, μάχαι, Il. 1.177), Dryden reads ‘Debates, Dissensions, Uproars are thy Joy’ (l. 265). Sometimes Dryden’s sense of Homeric fire gets the better of him, especially in the narrative. Look how his narrator describes Achilles as he listens to Agamemnon (Dryden ll. 284–96 = Il. 1.188–95; my underlining): At this th’ Impatient Hero sowrly smil’d: His Heart, impetuous in his Bosom boil’d, And justled by two Tides of equal sway, Stood, for a while, suspended in his way, Betwixt his Reason, and his Rage untam’d; One whisper’d soft, and one aloud reclaim’d: That only counsell’d to the safer side; This to the Sword, his ready Hand apply’d. Unpunish’d to support the Affront was hard. Nor easy was th’ Attempt to force the Guard. But soon the thirst of Vengeance fir’d his Blood: Half shone his Faulchion, and half sheath’d it stood. In that nice moment, Pallas, from above . . .

Almost all of this is Dryden’s own,¹⁰ although he may be taking his guide from Jean de Sponde (Spondanus) at Iliad 1.189, whose Greek text and Latin commentary he ⁹ See Ricks 2004, pp. 92–100 and Johnson 2006, vol. 2, pp. 153–4 (Life of Dryden 344–50): ‘the English Alexandrine breaks the lawful bounds [of verse], and surprises the reader with two syllables more than he expected. The effect of the triplet is the same . . . Surely there is something unskillful in the necessity of such mechanical direction.’ On metrical liberties (including fourteeners) in the Ilias, see Winn 2000, pp. 272–3. ¹⁰ As Dryden felt that Homer took more liberties of expression than did Virgil, so in his translation of Ilias I he takes liberties of expression not found elsewhere in his writings, particularly in the form of

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used. About this passage Spondanus writes: Certamen istud in Achille fuit Rationis & partis irascibilis (‘The struggle within Achilles is between Reason and an irascible part’, Sponde 1606, p. 11). Whatever Dryden’s source may be, his tone differs greatly from Homer’s, which I translate here as literally as I can, line by line: So he (Agamemnon) spoke, and anger came upon Achilles. In him, the heart in his shaggy breast pondered twofold, whether, drawing his sharp sword from his thigh, he should stand up among them and slay the son of Atreus, or whether his anger he should stop and restrain his spirit. As he was considering these things midst his lungs and spirit, he was drawing the great blade from its scabbard, but Athena came down from heaven . . .

Dryden makes the mistake of giving the Homeric narrator the same voice as he gives his characters. Unlike in the other passages we have seen, here everything is contained within the iambic heroic couplet. There are no alexandrines or fourteeners. But in Dryden, unlike in Homer, Agamemnon’s fiery words spill over into the narrator’s vocabulary, describing a personified Reason and Rage that boil in the bosom of the impatient hero. The voice of Dryden’s Homeric narrator fits with what he says about Homer himself: it is ‘impetuous’ and ‘full of Fire’.¹¹ We also see that the seventeenth-century poet has little patience for Homeric formulae. The narrator’s description of Achilles’s deliberation in Homer is highly formulaic and much less impassioned (‘he pondered double-fold in his heart, whether to do A or B,’ Il. 1.188–95, repeated on numerous occasions in the Iliad ), but in Dryden the passage is made for the moment. The three epithets in his translation—‘th’ Impatient Hero’, ‘ready Hand’, and ‘nice moment’—are all Dryden’s own inventions and, again, speak very much to the occasion and are intended to raise the emotional temperature of the narration. There’s rapidity in Dryden’s narrator but, oddly, he avoids Homer’s brilliant rapidity in describing Athena’s descent from Olympus, enjambed over lines 194–5 of the Greek text. Just the opposite: Dryden takes her intervention as an occasion to mark a scene break, introducing it with a new line and a new paragraph. When translating this passage, Pope (1996) [1715–20] also ‘translates’ Dryden’s expansion (Pope, Iliad, 1.251–8; correspondences are underlined by me): Achilles heard, with grief and rage opprest, His Heart swell’d high, and labour’d in his breast. Anglo-Saxon terms; see Winn 2000, p. 273. Some of these, like ‘rude skinker’ for Hephaestus, I suspect Dryden got from Chapman, who referred to Vulcan as skinker (in a marginal note at Iliad 1.578; it was also picked up by Hobbes in his Iliad of 1676). ¹¹ For Sowerby 1996, pp. 28–38, Dryden’s Homeric liberties are primarily in character portrayal and politics: Achilles is a ‘free subject’ overtaken by destructive rage; Agamemnon is overtly hybristic throughout. For liberties in Dryden’s Ovid in Fables, see Davis 2008, pp. 207–33.

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Distracting thoughts by turns his bosom rul’d, Now fir’d by wrath, and now by reason cool’d: That prompts his hand to draw the deadly sword, Force thro’ the Greeks, and pierce their haughty Lord, This whispers soft, his vengeance to controul, And calm the rising tempest of his soul.

While Pope criticized Dryden for having ‘too much regard to Chapman, whose words he sometime copies, and has unhappily follow’d him in passages where he wanders from the original’ (Pope, ‘Preface to the Iliad ’, as quoted in Shankman 1986, p. 20), he himself follows Dryden when he wanders from the original.¹² Pope’s reworking of Dryden is instructive. In a famous comparison in his Life of Pope, Samuel Johnson put it this way: ‘If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant . . . Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight’ (Johnson 2006, vol. 4, p. 66 = Life of Pope 310). Influenced by Longinus’s On the Sublime, Johnson sees Dryden’s poetics as ‘sublime’ and Pope’s as ‘graceful’: the latter’s couplets are carefully balanced and smoothly closed, while the former’s swagger and liberties lead to astonishment.¹³ David Hopkins phrases the comparison as follows: ‘Pope’s Achilles is still to a large extent the same passionate figure as Dryden’s but . . . he expresses himself with a distinctly more measured eloquence than his predecessor.’¹⁴ I don’t disagree with Johnson or Hopkins but I would put the stress differently: Pope’s grace also tames Dryden—and it tames Homer.¹⁵ Dryden makes a parallel distinction between Virgil and Lucretius: he finds Virgil to be closer to perfection but finds himself translating Lucretius ‘more happily’, that is, he was better able to capture Lucretius’s turns of phrase and character. The sentiment dates back to 1685, when he translated selections from both the Aeneid and the De rerum natura in his Sylvae. Parallels between what he says about Lucretius in 1685 (Dryden 1995, vol. 2) and what he says about Homer in 1700 (Dryden 2000–5, vol. 5) jump out. Thus in the Preface to the 1685 work he said:

¹² In his own description of Homer in the Preface to his translation of the Iliad, Pope too follows Dryden: ‘That which in my opinion ought to be the endeavor of any one who translates Homer, is above all things to keep alive that spirit and fire which makes his chief character’ (as quoted in Shankman 1996, p. 20). ¹³ Shankman 1983, pp. 160–1 n. 51. ¹⁴ Hopkins 2010, p. 27; see Hopkins 2012. ¹⁵ So Sowerby 1996, p. 48: ‘Pope tends to mitigate the darker side of Homer’s vision’—a view shared by Pope’s contemporary Bezaleel Morrice: ‘He smoothes him o’er, and gives him grace and ease, / And makes him fine—the Beaus and Belles to please’ (Morrice 1719, p. 8). Samuel Johnson’s phrase was more characteristic: ‘considering into what hands Homer was to fall (i.e. Pope’s), the reader cannot but rejoice that [Dryden’s] project went no further’ (Johnson 2006, vol. 2, p. 108 (Life of Dryden 151). Winn 2000, p. 273 writes: ‘later critics, influenced by the careful decorum of Pope’s version, have found the range of Dryden’s diction disturbing’. Closer to Homer, and in my view stronger than either Dryden’s or Pope’s rendering, is Chapman’s rendering of Iliad 1.191–8 in his translation of 1611, in fourteeners. See also Silk et al. 2014, pp. 193–4.

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From this sublime and daring Genius of [Lucretius], it must of necessity come to pass that his thoughts must be Masculine, full of Argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his Expression, and the perpetual torrent of his Verse, where the barrenness of his Subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his Fancy. (‘Preface to Sylvae’, ll. 261 and 301–7, in Dryden 1995, vol. 2, pp. 245 and 247)

As a translator, Dryden feels more at one with Homer’s and Lucretius’s daring, perpetual torrent and loftiness of expression than with Virgil’s temperate heat. Also, by personal inclination, he seems more drawn to Homer and Lucretius than to Virgil: Englishing ‘The Nature of Love’ . . . pleased me . . . I am not yet so secure from the passion, but that I want my Authors Antidotes against it. He has given the truest and most Philosophical account both of the Disease and Remedy, which I ever found in any Author: For which reasons I Translated him.¹⁶

What Dryden says about the relative styles of both authors is also captured well in his translations of them. While both Dryden’s Lucretius and his Virgil display his characteristic energy and forcefulness (although both texts are less daring and bold than his Ilias), the phrasing in his Virgil is generally quieter than in his Lucretius, Virgilian units of thought usually staying safely within the line.¹⁷

18.3 Aesthetics and Politics If Dryden felt more at ease and indeed more successful as a translator when rendering Lucretius (in 1685) and Homer (in 1700) than when translating Virgil (in 1685–97), why did he devote the most prolific time of his literary life to translating the whole of Virgil and why did he feel drawn to a poet who curtailed an inborn vehemence? One explanation, of course, is opportunity, both financial and aesthetic. He felt scorn for Ogilby’s translations of Virgil, but he felt the same for Chapman’s and Ogilby’s Homer, so he might just as well have turned to the Iliad. Another reason may be that his views on Homer changed. In the year when he started his Virgil project, we recall that Dryden found fault with Homer for being ‘too Talkative’ and ‘too digressive’, while Virgil had the ‘Gift of expressing much in little’.¹⁸

¹⁶ ‘Preface to Sylvae’ 369–81, in Dryden 1995, vol. 2, pp. 248–9. On Dryden adopting, testing, and trying out Epicurean and Lucretian stances, see Hammond 1983 and 2001. On Dryden’s intimacy with and distance from Lucretius, see Hopkins 2010, pp. 95–103. ¹⁷ Proudfoot 1960, pp. 237–45 notes much greater restraint in hypermetric lines and a severe reduction in the number of alexandrines and triplets in Dryden’s 1697 Æneis by comparison to his 1685 rendering of the Nisus and Euryalus episode. ¹⁸ See note 2 in this chapter. In 1693 Dryden also published a translation from Iliad 6, the ‘Last Parting of Hector and Andromache’—what Hopkins 2012, p. 173 calls Dryden’s ‘Virgilianising Homer’. In my view, this is a sentimental and dreadful translation, especially for its epithets, each one his own and clearly designed to particularize the scene and touch our heartstrings. After Dryden translates all of Virgil, his Homer is much better, much of this earlier sentimentality cut away.

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But another explanation may be political. If Dryden was temperamentally drawn to a more rapid and fiery poet, whether Homer or Lucretius, in other ways he deeply identified with Virgil. In his Dedication of the Æneis he writes that ‘one Poet may judge of another by himself ’,¹⁹ a personal identification fostered both by the times in which they lived and by how he thought their art related to those times. As we can see from this Dedication, he regarded his age as closer to Virgil’s and in need of Roman restraint. As Dryden imagines it, Virgil wrote ‘when the Old Form of Government was subverted, and a new one just Established’ (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, 367–8, in Dryden 1958, p. 1012). When he is describing the end of the Roman Republic as ‘[t]he Commonwealth [having] receiv’d a deadly Wound in the former Civil Wars’ and as ‘the Heads of it destroy’d’ (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, 370–1 and 426, in Dryden 1958, pp. 1012 and 1014), Dryden is equally thinking of England having come out of the Civil War and of the bloodless revolution in which the Protestant William of Orange replaced the Catholic James II. For Dryden, Virgil was ‘still of Republican Principles in his Heart’ (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, 430–1, in Dryden 1958, p. 1014), a poet who was ‘useful to the Romans of his Age’, ‘maturely weighed the Conditions of his Times . . . [and wrote for] the Interest of his Country . . . to infuse an awful Respect into the People towards the Prince’ (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, 334, 455 and 470–1, in Dryden 1958, pp. 1011, 1014, and 1015). Similarly, even with his strong Jacobean yearnings of the heart, he strove to make his Æneis speak to the whole nation. A few observations about Dryden’s life and times illustrate the point. Dryden was ten when the English Civil War began in 1641 and eighteen at the regicide of Charles I in 1649. Throughout Dryden’s twenties, Oliver Cromwell ruled England in what the monarchists called ‘the Interregnum’. Even though he was employed by the Commonwealth and wrote a poem upon the death of ‘his late Highness Oliver’, he was always very much a Stuart royalist. After Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Dryden, who was twenty-nine at the time, served both as Poet Laureate (appointed in 1668) and as Historiographer Royal (appointed two years later). He converted to Catholicism in 1685, shortly after Charles’s death, when the monarchy passed to Charles’s overtly Catholic brother, James II of England and Ireland (James VII of Scotland). James’s rule was brief: it lasted from 1685 to 1688, when, in a bloodless revolution (known by the victors as the Glorious Revolution of 1688), James II was ‘forced away’ into exile to France. The monarchy stayed in Stuart hands, the reign passing to James’s daughter, the Protestant Mary, and to her husband William of Orange, James’s nephew. Together, William and Mary became king and queen of England in 1689. Dryden did not begin to translate his complete Virgil for another four years. Eventually he signed a contract with his publisher, Jacob Tonson, in June 1694 and published his Virgil three years later in July 1697.

¹⁹ As found in The Poems of John Dryden in Kinsley 1958, p. 3.

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In Dryden’s eyes the revolution was anything but glorious. Still loyal to the Catholic Stuarts, he refused to reconvert to the Church of England and lost his titles and the pensions that came with them. Some of that defiance is recognizable in the politics of his Æneis. His publisher Tonson, who was a Whig (while Dryden was a Jacobite), wanted Dryden to dedicate his translation to the new king. Dryden refused, dedicating the Eclogues to a Catholic (Hugh, Lord Clifford), and the Georgics and the Æneis to noblemen who refused to take a loyalty oath to William III (respectively Philip Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield, and John Sheffield, third earl of Mulgrace and marquess of Normanby). That defiance may also be seen in the translation itself, especially in its opening lines (Dryden, Æneis 1.1–10 = Verg. A. 1.1–7; my underlining): Arms and the Man I sing, who, forc’d by Fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting Hate;

Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan Shoar: Long Labors, both by Sea and Land he bore; And in the doubtful War, before he won The Latian Realm, and built the destin’d Town: His banish’d Gods restor’d to Rites Divine, And setl’d sure Succession in his Line: From whence the Race of Alban Fathers come, And the long Glories of Majestick Rome.

arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.

Here Dryden is certainly at his best, and this may indeed be the best opening of the Aeneid in English. Like Virgil, he keeps the proem to one sentence, using ten verses to Virgil’s seven. He retains the outer shape of Virgil’s sentence, beginning with ‘Arms and the Man I sing, who’ and ending with ‘And the long Glories of Majestick Rome’, although his end is much more grand and ennobling than Virgil’s altae moenia Romae. But in the middle Dryden reconstructs the guts of the sentence, taking what Virgil has in line 4— the ever-mindful anger of savage Juno—and putting it in the second line, brilliantly shaping the poem around the rhyme of ‘fate’ and ‘hate’. As if picking up the stitch after this defining move, he comes back to profugus and iactatus at Aeneid 1.2–3 with his ‘Expell’d and exil’d’, and proceeds forward, more signs of his mastery as he burrows underneath the surface of the Latin to discover where the energy of the line lies. He also takes other liberties, most notably in ignoring Virgil’s pointed enjambments (Italiam, litora, vi superum) and working instead for end rhymes and end stops. There is only one exception to his preference for the end stop: ‘before he won / The Latian realm, and built the destin’d Town’ (and this runover is all Dryden; it is not in Virgil; like all of Dryden’s enjambments, it happens within a couplet, not between one couplet and another). Even within the constraints of the couplet, these lines gain force by not following the conventional balance and antithesis found so frequently in Dryden’s verse.

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Dryden’s many additions in these lines, especially in lines 5–8—the epithet ‘doubtful’ for War, ‘restor’d’ in ‘banished Gods restor’d’, and the whole verse ‘And setl’d sure Succession in his Line’—speak more to English politics and contemporary times than they do to Virgil or to Rome. Scholars make different claims. Even though Aeneas had to establish a new home in a foreign land, some think that these inventions refer to the restoration of Charles II to the monarchy in 1660, after the republican Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell had ended and thirty-five years before Dryden published this translation.²⁰ Others argue that phrases like ‘forc’d’, ‘expell’d and exil’d’, and ‘banish’d Gods restor’d to Rites Divine’ can be read as allusions to James II being ‘forced away’ (a euphemism used at the time for his banishment),²¹ as if Dryden were advocating for James’s restoration to the throne after he was overthrown in 1688 by way of presenting Aeneas as being—not quite restored, but—given his rightful rule. In either case, no one in England in 1697, when the poem was published, could miss the allusions: Dryden was asking his readers to think of current English history, as he was telling the story of Aeneas’s founding of Rome. This also qualifies as a kind of translation—updating Virgil’s association of Aeneas with Rome’s new founder, Augustus, with contemporary references and terms for his English readers and, like Virgil, placing present society beside that of the mythic past. Dryden translated the Aeneid to serve the whole country and not just a faction within it. The financing of the book through subscriptions of potential readers who paid in advance for the printing of the work sheds some light on this inclusive approach. As a number of scholars have observed, the 349 patrons represented all shades of political and religious belief, some supporting the Catholic Stuart line, others loyal to the new regime, and still others longing for the lost republican Commonwealth.²² Expressing his gratitude to his patrons, the earls of Darby and Peterborough, who provided lodging as he prepared his translation, Dryden writes: ‘How much more [I owe] to those from whom I have receiv’d the Favours which they have offer’d to one of a different Persuasion’ (Postscript). As Virgil gave up his sympathies for the Commonwealth and his republican principles for ‘the Interest of ²⁰ Three years after the Restoration, Dryden celebrates the old order made new in his epistle ‘To My Honored Friend, Dr. Charleton’, verses 47–52 and 58 (Dryden 1995, vol. 1, pp. 73–4), alluding to it by metaphor in Charleton’s restoration of Stonehenge: ‘You (Charleton) have found / A Throne, where Kings, our Earthly Gods, were Crown’d, / Where by their wondring Subjects They were seen, / Joy’d with their Stature, and their Princely meen. / Our Soveraign here above the rest might stand; / And here be chose again to rule the Land. / . . . / But, He Restor’d, ’tis now become a Throne.’ ²¹ Erskine-Hill 1996, especially pp. 201–15, here 215: ‘Dryden needed the pagan pantheon to convey, imaginatively, the experience of the defeat through which he lived in 1688–9, and the seemingly endless pattern of hope and disappointment and further hope thereafter. Much of the Æneid came perfectly to his purpose, and his Æneis was the result.’ ²² Barnard 2004, p. 211 (more broadly, pp. 210–17) and Davis 2004, pp. 86–7; and cf. Zwicker 1984. There were 349 subscribers in all, 99 paying five guineas for a large, limited edition and an engraving in it dedicated to them and 250 paying two guineas for a small, paper edition. Without his pension, Dryden depended on these subscriptions for the years he translated Virgil.

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his Country [in order] to infuse an awful Respect into the People, towards such a Prince’, so Dryden thought of his translation as doing the same for his country in its time of travail. Restoration voices in the Æneis need not make it a poem advocating restoration. Paul Hammond expresses the point well: Dryden’s Æneis is a politically engaged text but not one which is merely partisan. Dryden and Tonson planned the publication of The Works of Virgil to appeal to a broad constituency in the nation, and the translation itself reshapes ideas of piety and of nationhood in ways which do not run smoothly along party lines but transpose the issues of the day into a new, more demanding, imaginative terrain.²³

In consequence, Dryden ‘saw Virgil’s poem of empire in a melancholy light’, as Steven Zwicker writes, a melancholy that lies precisely in the suppression of personal desires for the greater unity of a fractured whole.²⁴ Dryden’s professed admiration for Virgil comes precisely from his restrained temperament: every where Elegant, sweet and flowing in his Hexameters . . . pitch’d on Propriety of Thought, Elegance of Words, and Harmony of Numbers . . . [H]e who removes [Virgil’s words] from the Station wherein their Master sets them, spoils the Harmony . . . the least breath discomposes them, and somewhat of their Divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my Verses, but I have endeavour’d to follow the Example of my Master: And am the first Englishman, perhaps, who made it his design to copy him in his Numbers, his choice of Words, and his placing them for the sweetness of the sound. (‘Dedication of the Æneis’, ll. 1633–50, in Dryden 1958, pp. 1045–6)

Elegance, harmony, propriety of thought, sweetness of sound, divinity are inextricably of one piece. Samuel Johnson says that Dryden’s temper is akin to the ‘wild and daring sallies of sentiment’: Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy.²⁵

Johnson is thinking of Dryden’s satires and comedies, but some apply this reading to his Virgil as well.²⁶ No doubt, such wild and daring sallies find their way into Dryden’s Æneis, but this is not the Virgil that Dryden aspires to paraphrase. As I see it, both historical moments, Virgil’s and his own, required language of ‘elegance’, ‘propriety’, and ‘harmony’ more than fire.

²³ Hammond 1999, p. 228. ²⁴ Zwicker 1984, p. 62. ²⁵ Johnson 2006, vol. 2, pp. 149–50 (Life of Dryden 330). ²⁶ See Davis 2004, p. 89. Regarding Dryden’s own ornament of words when translating Virgil, see Sowerby 2006, pp. 108–28.

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In the case of this translation, form and content work together. The political—and emotional—restraint needed for the times dovetailed with the verbal restraint of Virgil’s poem and of Dryden’s imitation of it. In Paul Davis’s characterization, ‘Virgil was for Dryden emphatically the poet of self-sacrifice or (to use the term Dryden favoured) “retrenchment” in the cause of nationhood.’²⁷ The restraint is also expressed in character. In a remarkable reduction, Dryden equates the hero of the poem with the leader of Rome’s new regime, claiming that Virgil made ‘Piety the chief Character of his Heroe . . . [and] design’d to form a perfect Prince, and would insinuate, that Augustus, whom he calls Aeneas in his Poem, was truly such . . . without blemish; thoroughly Virtuous’ (‘Dedication’, ll. 666–73, in Dryden 1958, p. 1020). Such a reading required, at times, a taming of the Aeneid as well. A vivid example of this comes in Book 10, when Dryden pretties up Aeneas who, beset by the storm of war, chides a young Lausus for his filial piety (Dryden, Æneis, 10.1146–59 = Verg. A. 10.808–16). Compare Dryden’s fourteen lines to Virgil’s nine: Aeneas thus o’rewhelm’d on ev’ry side The storm of Darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat’ning cry’d. ‘Why wilt thou rush to certain Death, and Rage In rash Attempts, beyond thy tender Age: Betray’d by pious Love?’ Nor thus forborn The Youth desists, but with insulting Scorn Provokes the ling’ring Prince: Whose Patience tyr’d, Gave Place, and all his Breast with Fury fir’d. For now the Fates prepar’d their sharpen’d Sheers; And lifted high the flaming Sword appears: Which full descending, with a frightful sway, Thro Shield and Corslet forc’d th’ impetuous Way, And bury’d deep in his fair Bosom lay.

sic obrutus undique telis Aeneas nubem belli, dum detonet omnis, sustinet et Lausum increpitat Lausoque minatur ‘quo moriture ruis maioraque viribus audes? fallit te incautum pietas tua.’ nec minus ille exsultat demens, saevae iamque altius irae Dardanio surgunt ductori, extremaque Lauso Parcae fila legunt. validam namque exigit ensem per medium Aeneas iuvenem totumque recondit

Deducing what secretly lay in the Latin poet, Dryden works hard to make Aeneas a perfect prince. Expanding the verse to six beats as the third line in a triplet (10.1148),

²⁷ Davis 2004, p. 85; see also Davis 2008, p. 188 (and, more broadly, pp. 176–207): ‘Virgil provided the prime model in his critical writings for self-denial in twinned aesthetic and ethical senses.’ He also writes: ‘Dryden had long tended in his critical writings to present the style of Virgil as the aesthetic and moral antidote to Ovid’s disease of self-indulgence: retracting an indecorously witty line from his version of “Mezentius and Lausus” in the “Preface to Sylvae”, for instance, he observed that “Virgil wou’d not have said it, though Ovid wou’d” ’ (Davis 2004, p. 85).

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he adds that Aeneas threatened Lausus with a ‘friendly’ voice, that he tried to cool the youth by warning him that he was tempting a feat ‘beyond his tender Age’. Dryden further turns pietas into an adjective, making Love the noun that puts Lausus at risk. Further, only after Aeneas’s ‘patience’ has been sorely ‘tired’ does Dryden have the ‘lingering’ hero give way to fury (and to a triplet: 10.1057–9), his sword descending with a frightful sway, through shield and corslet forcing its impetuous way, before buried in Lausus’s fair bosom it lay. There is also a softening of Lausus’s ira, as Dryden chooses not to translate saeva, and thus avoids an echo that would link a son’s pietas with Juno’s destructive rage. One scholar calls Dryden’s ‘friendly threat’ning’ a ‘brilliant rendering of the Latin’.²⁸ But how is it brilliant? There is nothing friendly about Aeneas’s threat at this moment. Frederick Ahl (2007) is much truer to et Lausum increpitat Lausoque minatur at 10.810: ‘Aeneas endures this cloudburst of warfare, / Waits for the thunder to end, cursing Lausus, threatening Lausus.’ For Dryden, however, elegance of words and propriety of thought never fail Aeneas, an accomplishment that can be had at times only by quieting the Latin.²⁹ In conclusion, to pull these parts together: Dryden strove to bring the voice of Virgil into British culture. His Ilias 1 (in many places more bold than Pope’s Iliad) shows that he had the capacity, even near the end of his life, for a tumultuous poetic surface, roughed by heavy alliteration, metrical freedoms, and lexical range; but this he strove to keep in check when giving England the ancient poem best suited for his times. His Æneis aims to do for England what he thought Virgil achieved for Rome, writing a poem of force and fury, which can weather the storms of gods and humans as a new age and a stable monarchy bring to their people social cohesion and a kind of virtue in the cause of nationhood. In Dryden’s words: ‘For though [Virgil] yielded much to Homer in Invention, he much Excell’d him in his Admirable Judgment’ (‘Dedication to Examen Poeticum’, 375–7, in Dryden 2000–5, vol. 4, p. 226).

²⁸ Erskine-Hill 1996, p. 214.

²⁹ See Thomas 2001b, pp. 140–5.

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19 Translation Theory into Practice Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile Marco Romani Mistretta

19.1 Introduction: Delille Is Dead, Long Live Delille Few figures of Western intellectual history can match Jacques Delille (1738–1813) in embodying the mutability of literary taste. Highly admired and almost idolized in his day, he became démodé soon after his death, following the spread of ideas connected with the onset of Romanticism.¹ The didactic genre in which he excelled, characterized as ‘nature poetry’ (le poème de la nature),² contributed to reinforcing Virgil’s authority among early modern French writers—even though Virgil’s popularity in France never experienced any decrease, especially due to the fact that he was perceived as being simultaneously an ‘ancient’ (that is, a classical author) and a ‘modern’ (that is, an innovator).³ While the ancient world as a whole was for Delille an inexhaustible source of poetry (his inspiration coming especially from Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid), Virgil remained his main model throughout his entire career; sometimes the relationship was even pushed towards self-identification. For an eighteenth-century intellectual influenced by Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, to imitate Virgil meant to go straight to the source of poetry, that is, to nature itself: Virgil is regarded—as he already was in ancient criticism—as a ‘second nature’.⁴ Delille’s literary fame was first proclaimed at the appearance of his translation of the Georgics into French verse (Delille 1770), which Voltaire immediately defined as the greatest possible ‘honour paid to Virgil and to the nation’.⁵ At the heyday of the physiocratic

¹ On Delille’s huge success, see the well-known (and rather biased) assessment of Sainte-Beuve 1993, p. 394. Delille’s translation of the Georgics is also discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume. ² See Guitton 1974, p. 56. ³ See notably Conley 2013. ⁴ Compare Wilson-Okamura 2010, p. 99. See further, Guitton 1974, p. 504 and Castaños-Dubois 2008, p. 102. For the concept of ‘second nature’ in eighteenth-century literary theory, see also Pope 1970, pp. 9–10. ⁵ Letter written to the French Academy on 4 March 1772; quoted in Sainte-Beuve 1993, p. 398.

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movement, whose proponents posited land development as the main source of a nation’s wealth and gained the support of the Encyclopédie Française, a French version of the Georgics could not have been more fitting to the general intellectual climate.⁶ After the triumph of this translation, the Georgics continued to be Delille’s principal source of inspiration. His activity as a didactic–pastoral poet proceeded along the parallel lines of autonomous production and Virgilian translation.⁷ Delille’s Géorgiques have been defined as ‘a verse translation in an age of prose’: a unique case in the French Enlightenment, and a very influential one.⁸ As noted, Delille appears to be wholly conscious of the auspicious timing of his own translation: besides mentioning the agromanie of his contemporaries in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ (which precedes the translation itself ), he states that ‘one cannot publish the translation of a work on agriculture at a more opportune moment’, since the subject has become ‘the object of a host of books, researches, and experiments’.⁹ Delille draws a clear connection between the Georgics and the Augustan revival of Rome’s agricultural traditions.¹⁰ The parallel with the contemporaneous situation, albeit left unsaid, is transparent: Delille will sing the rebirth of agriculture in France just as Virgil did in Augustan Rome. The new, physiocratic agronomy has gained the authority that only a Virgilian Renaissance can bestow on it.¹¹

19.2 Delille as a Translation Theorist Delille’s ‘Discours préliminaire’ is one of his most important theoretical texts: the poet-translator defends the need for a verse translation of the Georgics, praises the literary quality of Virgil’s poem, and explains the aesthetic and poetic underpinnings of the translation itself. Translation, for Delille, is a means of enriching the linguistic and literary patrimony of a nation. In fact, he describes the translator’s exploration of a foreign culture as an experience similar to the traveller’s: both expand and broaden the mental horizon—their own and that of others—in the same way.¹² Delille’s translation theory is thus part of the eighteenth-century debate concerning the origin of language and its role in human society, the nature of verse and the possibility of translating poetry, and the relationships among different languages: translation itself becomes in fact the polarized field in which such questions become apparent.¹³ For Delille, the causes of linguistic change constitute a kaleidoscopic set of variables that consists of geography, chronology, technology, social structure, climate conditions, political regimes, modes of production, and the linguistic usage of great ⁶ See Dupont, in Delille 1997, p. 43. See also de Saint-Denis 1967, p. 125; Pascal 2013. ⁷ For a chronological outline of Delille’s production, see Usher 2013. ⁸ Hayes 2009, p. 201. ⁹ On ne peut publier dans un moment plus favorable la traduction d’un ouvrage sur l’agriculture . . . l’object d’une foule de livres, de recherches et d’expériences (Delille 1997, p. 315). All translations from French are my own. ¹⁰ Delille 1997, pp. 316–17. ¹¹ See Hayes 2009, p. 204. ¹² Delille 1997, p. 327. See further, Hayes 2009, p. 249. ¹³ Guitton 1974, p. 233.

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writers. These are, in a nutshell, the factors contributing to shape what Delille— anticipating some of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas—calls le génie de la langue.¹⁴ The idiosyncrasy of individual tongues, in Delille’s opinion, cannot but generate a multifaceted, Babelized diversity of mutually unintelligible languages, in spite of Leibniz’s dream of a grammatica universalis.¹⁵ As a result, those features of a foreign text, ancient or modern, that are most intimately rooted in the génie de la langue are, for Delille, ‘untranslatable’. Is there any remedy to this intrinsic untranslatability? As the ‘Discours préliminaire’ states, what Delille calls ‘literary genius’ plays the most important role in the process of overcoming ‘incommunicability’ and in turning a singular idiôme into a shared langue, which then becomes part of a common patrimony. Secondly, in Delille’s view, good translators ought to study the ‘spirit’ of both languages with which they work and to proceed accordingly, being ‘faithful’ when the two come together and ‘filling the gap’ when the two diverge.¹⁶ In Delille’s opinion, Virgilian poetry is based on a fundamental stylistic quality, which—he thinks—has been neglected even by the greatest successors of Virgil, in both France and England. This quality is what Delille—following and building upon contemporaneous literary criticism—calls l’harmonie imitative.¹⁷ The meaning of this term, with whose elucidation Louis Racine is generally credited,¹⁸ has been summed up in the formula ‘the management of sound to reflect meaning’.¹⁹ The concept is never clearly defined by Delille in his ‘Discours’. Nonetheless, a crucial passage helps us to understand his thought through an analogy between poetry and painting: il doît en être d’un poème comme d’un tableau: les teintes qui séparent les différentes couleurs doivent être si légères, que l’œil le plus attentif, même en apercevant leur variété, ne puisse distinguer celle qui finit de celle qui commence. Mais, pour que les liaisons aient cette légèreté, il faut que les idées elles-mêmes se lient naturellement, et que, pour passer de l’une à l’autre, l’auteur n’ait pas besoin d’un long circuit. Personne n’a mieux connu cet art que Virgile.²⁰ A poem must be like a painting: the shades separating the different colours must be so slight that the most scrupulous eye, despite perceiving their variety, cannot distinguish the boundaries between them. However, in order for the transitions to have such lightness, the ideas themselves should be naturally connected with one another, without the author needing long, circuitous paths to pass from one idea to the next. Nobody has mastered this art better than Virgil. ¹⁴ For both Delille and Humboldt, ‘language contains as well as shapes subjectivity and its location in culture’ (Hayes 2009, p. 206). ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 202. ¹⁶ Delille 1997, p. 332. ¹⁷ See e.g. Guitton 1974, pp. 235 ff.; Nye 2000, pp. 129 ff. ¹⁸ Louis Racine, Réflexions sur la poésie, as quoted in Nye 2000, p. 86 n. 39: l’harmonie du discours consiste donc en deux choses: dans l’arrangement des mots, ce que j’appellerai l’Harmonie Mécanique; et dans le rapport de cet arrangement avec les pensées, ce qui j’appellerai l’Harmonie Imitative (‘the harmony of speech thus consists of two things: the arrangement of words, which I shall call mechanical harmony, and the relationship of such an arrangement with thoughts, which I shall call mimetic harmony’). ¹⁹ Nye 2000, p. 146. ²⁰ Delille 1997, p. 320.

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Delille pushes the Horatian principle ut pictura poesis to the extreme.²¹ The existence of a nexus between poetry and painting was a widespread tenet in French aesthetics in Delille’s time. After being asserted by Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) in 1719, in his very successful Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture,²² this idea was developed in one of the French Enlightenment’s foundational texts. This was Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire à l’Encyclopédie (d’Alembert 2000), where painting and poetry are regarded as the aesthetic categories under which all fine arts can be subsumed.²³ In similar fashion, Marmontel describes l’harmonie imitative using the language of painting.²⁴ Such a close connection between poetry and the visual arts is thus justified by synaesthesia: a sort of phonomimetism ‘echoes’ or ‘suggests’ perceptions mediated by different senses simultaneously. This view is perfectly in keeping with many eighteenth-century theories concerning the iconic origins of language, from De Brosses and Batteux to Diderot and Condillac. According to Delille, the art of poetry is—quite literally—an art of ‘painting’ with words.²⁵ The poet’s choice of expressive techniques, in accordance with the sensualist aesthetics of many Enlightenment thinkers, is functional to the reader’s sense, which the poem intends to appeal to. Delille, however, operates with an almost synaesthetic conception, as he argues that l’harmonie imitative makes poetry simultaneously

²¹ For the reception of Horace’s well-known aesthetic maxim in eighteenth-century France, especially through the mediation of Charles Batteux’s Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (published in 1746), see notably Munsters 1991, p. 95. The image used by Delille, with particular regard to the multiplicity of colours and the légèreté of their nuances, can be also traced back to Ovid (Met. 6.61–7). ²² See e.g. Du Bos 1993, p. 136: Une tragédie renferme une infinité de tableaux. Le peintre qui fait un tableau du sacrifice d’Iphigénie ne nous représente sur la toile qu’un instant de l’action. La tragédie de Racine met sous nos yeux plusieurs instants de cette action, et ces différents incidents se rendent réciproquement les uns les autres plus pathétiques. Le poète nous présente successivement, pour ainsi dire, cinquante tableaux qui nous conduisent comme par degrés à cette émotion extrême qui fait couler nos larmes (‘A tragedy encloses an infinite number of pictures. The painter who depicts the sacrifice of Iphigenia only represents one moment of the action on the canvas. Racine’s tragedy places multiple moments of this action before our eyes, and these different events make one another more pathetic. The poet presents in succession, so to speak, fifty pictures leading us step by step to that extreme emotion which makes our tears flow’). ²³ D’Alembert, quoted in Modica 1997, p. 45: La Peinture, la Sculpture, l’Architecture, la Poësie, la Musique, et leurs différentes divisions, composent la troisième distribution générale qui naît de l’imagination, et dont les parties sont comprises sous le nom de Beaux-Arts. On pourroit aussi les renfermer sous le titre général de Peinture, puisque tous les Beaux-Arts se réduisent à peindre, et ne diffèrent que par les moyens qu’ils employent; enfin on pourroit les rapporter tous à la Poësie, en prenant ce mot dans sa signification naturelle, qui n’est autre chose qu’invention ou création (‘Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Poetry, Music, and their various subdivisions, form the third general category born of imagination, and whose parts are grouped under the name of Fine Arts. One could also group them under the general label of Painting, since all the Fine Arts are reduced to painting, and only differ from one another based on the means they employ; in the end, one could reduce them all to Poetry, taking this term in its natural meaning, which is nothing but invention or creation’). ²⁴ Marmontel 1819, pp. 206–7. ²⁵ Cf. Munsters 1991, pp. 125–9, who has just observed (ibid., p. 119) that Delille uses the terms décrire and description as quasi-synonyms of peindre and peinture (or tableau). Delille himself is the first author who uses the expression poésie pittoresque with reference to a style rather than a genre (ibid., p. 126). Munsters also remarks that, in the late eighteenth century, French translators use the Italianism pittoresque to render the English adjective romantic (ibid., p. 58).

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come closer to both music and painting: in fact the poet must only appeal to the sense of hearing as a means of ‘painting to the ear’.²⁶ Pictorial poetry is, in other words, a universal art: the poet can paint descriptions, vignettes, and scenes but also sounds, characters, and—above all—emotions.

19.3 The Translator at Work Delille’s poetics of translation can be epitomized by what I shall call his theory of ‘the translator’s debt’. In the conclusion of his ‘Discours préliminaire’ he states that the act of translating amounts to an economic transaction in which the translator contracts a debt with the author.²⁷ The idea of translation as compensation had a long tradition in France; it starts in Du Bellay’s preface to his Deux livres de l’Énéide de Virgile and culminates, shortly before Delille’s Georgics, in d’Alembert’s idea of la menue monnaie.²⁸ In an essay entitled Observations sur l’art de traduire, the philosopher elaborates a theory of translation as compensation.²⁹ According to d’Alembert, regardless of how many coins one possesses, it is crucial to keep score: similarly, in translating a text, one is allowed to lose a portion of meaning or aesthetic quality on one side, as long as the translation compensates for it with an analogous element elsewhere. Delille’s concept of translation as a ‘debt’ offers a further proof of the ‘economic’ dimension of his poetics. The whole process of translation can be assimilated, in his view, to a cross-linguistic commerce heureux with the ideas, images, and expressions of a foreign nation: such a world of free (intellectual) trade is essentially utopian, insofar as it is grounded in the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism and in physiocratic thought.³⁰ It has now become clear that Delille’s understanding of Virgil’s poetics

²⁶ See ibid., p. 126. ²⁷ Mais le devoir le plus essentiel du traducteur, celui qui les renferme tous, c’est de chercher à produire dans chaque morceau le même effet que son auteur. Il faut qu’il représente, autant qu’il est possible, sinon les mêmes beautés, au moins le même nombre de beautés. Quiconque se charge de traduire, contracte une dette; il faut, pour l’acquitter, qu’il paie, non avec la même monnaie, mais la même somme: quand il ne peut rendre une image, qu’il y supplée par une pensée; s’il ne peut peindre à l’oreille, qu’il peigne à l’esprit; s’il est moins énergique, qu’il soit plus harmonieux; s’il est moins précis, qu’il soit plus riche (‘But the most important duty of a translator, the one that includes all the others, is to attempt to reproduce, in every single piece, the same effect produced by the author. A translator must depict, to the best of his ability, at least the same number of beauties, if not the same beauties themselves. Whoever undertakes to translate contracts a debt. In order to discharge it he must pay, not in the same coin, but the same sum. When he cannot render an image, let him supply it by a thought; if he cannot “paint to the ear”, let him “paint to the spirit”; if he should be less energetic, let him be more harmonious; if he is less precise, let him be richer’, Delille 1997, p. 334). ²⁸ Du Bellay 1931, pp. 243–396. ²⁹ This essay was first published in Amsterdam in 1757, together with Essai de traduction de quelques morceaux de Tacite, in d’Alembert’s four-volume Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie. For a similar idea in Dryden, see Martindale 2008, p. 90. ³⁰ Hayes 2009, p. 205.

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is informed by the same concept of a stable natural order that regulates the free circulation of wealth and ideas.³¹ Being an intellectually enriching form of ‘commercial’ travel, translation is ultimately a ‘domesticating’ process, yet it paradoxically ‘foreignizes’ the domestic culture itself by introducing new words and ideas from a different cultural context.³² In what follows an attempt will be made to analyse some of the main features of Delille’s ‘commerce’ with Virgil’s text.

19.4 Word Choice and Didactic Tone In eighteenth-century France, Latin was considered almost a ‘modern’ language, in that its distance or ‘foreignness’ was construed as a cultural rather than chronological category.³³ Correspondingly, Delille’s ‘Discours préliminaire’ contains a comparative linguistic analysis of the génies of Latin and French—an analysis in which the respective political regimes play a fundamental role in explaining the most apparent differences between the two languages. For Delille, in fact, the ‘democratic’ Romans did not prevent ‘lowly’ or ‘popular’ terms from making their way into highbrow poetry; in France, on the contrary, the social barrier separating the people from the aristocracy also separates their linguistic usages in a much more marked fashion than it did in ancient Rome.³⁴ Among the shortcomings of French poetic diction, Delille lists ‘timid circumlocutions’ and ‘slow periphrases’, which he attributes to the muddled complexities of France’s monarchical government: he seems to be convinced that such principles as ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ would enable the language to express more ‘natural’ and ‘spontaneous’ emotions.³⁵ A very strange and unexpected assessment for an ‘ardent royalist’ such as Delille!³⁶ In his view, a translation of such an eminently didactic text as the Georgics should not shun ‘technical’ word choices and terms of everyday use.³⁷ Let us consider an example of his ‘lowly’ style, where he strives to achieve the desired flow of images:

³¹ ‘Defending the Roman poet’s lack of “transitions”, Delille argues that Virgil refuses to be tied to the expository norms of science, preferring the “natural” sequence [la suite naturelle] of ideas, which he indicates in the most minimalist fashion possible, sometimes with a single word . . . Transition resides primarily in the mind of the reader’ (ibid., p. 204). ³² For the antithesis ‘domesticated’ vs ‘foreignizing’ applied to Virgilian translations, see Braund 2010 and 2013. ³³ Hayes 2009, p. 206. ³⁴ See further, Stalnaker 2010, p. 132. An emphasis on the clarity and simplicity of Virgil’s style can also be found in ancient criticism (see e.g. Suet. Verg. 44). ³⁵ See Guitton 1974, p. 248; De Souza 1938, p. 304. ³⁶ The definition belongs to Downs 1940, p. 527. For the parable of ‘royalist translations’ in England, see Thomas 2001b, p. 125. ³⁷ Delille 1997, p. 327.

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Verg. G. 1.84–8 saepe etiam sterilis incendere profuit agros, atque levem stipulam crepitantibus urere flammis: sive inde occultas viris et pabula terrae pinguia concipiunt, sive illis omne per ignem excoquitur vitium atque exsudat inutilis humor.

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Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 141) Cérès approuve encore que des chaumes flétris la flamme, en pétillant, dévore les débris: soit que les sels heureux d’une cendre fertile deviennent pour la terre un aliment utile; soit que le feu l’épure, et chasse le venin des funestes vapeurs qui dorment dans son sein.³⁸

The participle crepitantibus, which mostly belongs to poetic usage in Latin (cf. Verg. A. 7.74; Ov. Met. 1.143, 15.783), is rendered with a verb (pétiller) that the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) classifies as pertaining to le style familier. In translating Virgil’s occultas vires et pabula . . . pinguia, Delille resorts to a more concrete and specific word choice: les sels heureux . . . un aliment utile, where the adjective utile can be seen as taking up, antithetically, Virgil’s inutilis humor at 1.88. The noun vapeur, still almost exclusively technical in the eighteenth century, is rarely used in poetry before Delille.³⁹ The transition at the beginning of the passage is highlighted by an introductory formula (Cérès approuve encore) entirely absent from the source text. The textual elements added by Delille are not always simple line fillers. Quite frequently, the didactic self-consciousness of Virgil’s Georgics is in fact emphasized in the translation through the addition of various exhortative periphrases. In accordance with Delille’s poetics of learned didacticism, Virgil’s descriptive language is often translated as prescriptive and indicatives are replaced by imperatives: for instance, continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis / imposuit natura locis (Verg. G. 1.60–1, p. 139) becomes connais donc la nature, et règle toi sur elle (‘then get to know nature, and adjust to its rules’). In this passage, where the original reference to ‘laws’ imposed by nature has prominent Lucretian overtones (cf. Lucr. 1.586), Delille adds an allusion to the need for human conciliatio naturae (règle toi has no counterpart in the Latin text).⁴⁰ The influence of physiocracy could not be more apparent. Quite frequently, the didactic and prescriptive tone of Delille’s translation is balanced by the addition of exclamatory or pathetic outbursts. A case in point is this passage from the first Georgic:

³⁸ ‘Ceres also approves that sparkling fire devours the fragments of withered stubble: whether the felicitous salts of fertile ashes become a useful nutrient for the soil; or whether the fire purifies it, and chases away the poison of the deadly vapours slumbering in its bosom.’ ³⁹ See again Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) s.v. vapeur; cf. also Littré 1872–7, s.v. vapeur. ⁴⁰ Thomas 1988, vol. 1, p. 78.

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Verg. G. 1.196–200 et quamvis igni exiguo properata maderent, vidi lecta diu et multo spectata labore degenerare tamen, ni vis humana quotannis maxima quaeque manu legeret: sic omnia fatis in peius ruere, ac retro sublapsa referri.

Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 149) J’ai vu dans le marc d’huile et dans une eau nitrée détremper la semence avec soin préparée: remède infructueux! inutiles secrets! Les grains les plus heureux, malgrés tous ces apprêts, dégénèrent enfin, si l’homme avec prudence tous les ans ne choisit la plus belle semence. Tel est l’arrêt du sort: tout marche à son déclin.⁴¹

The redoubled exclamation sets the stage for the pessimistic thought that closes the passage on the theme of inevitable and unstoppable decay of all natural things: the emotional temperature of the exclamations is raised by the contrast with the ‘dry’, technical vocabulary used in the preceding lines (eau nitrée, détremper la semence).⁴² Delille further emphasizes the final statement by using a strong rhythmic and syntactic caesura followed by a simple, epigrammatic sententia (tout marche à son déclin).

19.5 Rhythm and Sound Effects Lorsque nous ne pouvons pas peindre par le son des mots, nous le pouvons par le mouvement du style, says Delille in his ‘Discours préliminaire’.⁴³ In reality he seems to be much more concerned with rhythmic effects of continuity or ‘fluency’ and with phonomimetism than with the literalness of his text.⁴⁴ How does he render Virgil’s harmonie imitative in translation? Delille devotes great attention to alliteration and other phonostylistic effects, which he considers to be the nuts and bolts of mimetic harmony. The storm in the first Georgic offers a perfect example: Verg. G. 1.322–34 saepe etiam immensum caelo venit agmen aquarum et foedam glomerant tempestatem imbribus atris collectae ex alto nubes; ruit arduus aether et pluvia ingenti sata laeta boumque labores

Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 159) Tantôt un vaste amas d’effroyables nuages, dans ses flancs ténébreux couvrant de noirs orages, s’élève, s’épaissit, se déchire; et soudain la pluie, à flots pressés, s’échappe de son sein; le ciel descend en eaux, et couche sur les plaines

⁴¹ ‘I have seen seeds, carefully prepared, being soaked in the dregs of oil and nitrated water: fruitless remedy, useless secrets! The best grains, despite all this finicking, degenerate at last, unless man prudently chooses the most beautiful seeds each year. Such is fate’s ultimate will: everything marches to its decline’. ⁴² ‘The very heart of the poem’ according to Thomas 1988, vol. 1, p. 102. ⁴³ ‘When we cannot paint through the sound of words, we can do it through the movement of style’ (Delille 1997, p. 327). ⁴⁴ See Pascal 2013, p. 99; De Souza 1938, p. 308.

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diluit; implentur fossae, et cava flumina crescunt cum sonitu fervetque fretis spirantibus aequor. ipse pater media nimborum in nocte corusca fulmina molitur dextra, quo maxima motu terra tremit, fugere ferae et mortalia corda per gentes humilis stravit pavor; ille flagranti aut Atho aut Rhodopen aut alta Ceraunia telo deicit; ingeminant Austri et densissimus imber; nunc nemora ingenti vento, nunc litora plangunt.

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ces riantes moissons, vains fruits de tant de peines; les fosses sont remplis; les fleuves débordés roulent en mugissant dans les champs inondés; les torrents bondissants précipitent leur onde, et des mers en courroux le noir abîme gronde. Dans cette nuit affreuse, environné d’éclairs, le roi des dieux s’assied sur le trône des airs: la terre tremble au loin sous son maître qui tonne; les animaux ont fui; l’homme éperdu frissonne; l’univers ébranlé s’épouvante . . . le dieu, d’un bras étincelant, dardant un trait de feu, de ces monts si souvent mutilés par la foudre, de Rhodope ou d’Athos met les rochers en poudre; et leur sommet brisé vole en éclats fumants; le vent croît, l’air frémit d’horribles sifflements; en torrents redoublés les vastes cieux se fondent; la rive au loin gémit, et les bois lui répondent.⁴⁵

The source text includes a number of artful sound patterns in word-initial position, such as the alternating fricatives and sibilants in lines 326–7: Delille employs a similar technique (moissons . . . fruits . . . fosses . . . fleuves), then adds the quasi-onomatopoeic roulent en mugissant to reproduce the swelling of the rivers and the resounding irruption of the flood (cum sonitu). This constant use of sound effects is further strengthened by a heavily alliterative line without direct equivalents in the source text: l’air frémit d’horribles sifflements. The quasi-Lucretian image of l’univers ébranlé, ⁴⁵ ‘At times a vast pile of dreadful clouds rises up on its gloomy sides, containing dark storms, then it thickens and is torn apart; and suddenly floods of rain escape from its bosom. The sky falls down as water, and flattens on the plains these laughing crops, vain result of so much labour. The ditches are filled; the overflowing rivers roll and howl over the flooded fields; the leaping streams dash with their waves, and the dark abyss of enraged seas rumbles. In this dreary night, surrounded by lightning, the gods’ king sits on his heavenly throne; the earth trembles afar under its master’s thunder. The animals have fled; distraught people shiver; the shaken universe is horrified . . . the god, shooting a fiery bolt with a gleaming arm, pulverizes the rocks of Rhodope or Athos, mountains so often struck by lightning, and their shattered top explodes into smoking splinters. The wind grows stronger, the air quivers with horrible whistling; the huge skies melt in redoubled streams. The shore moans from afar, and the woods reply.’

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moreover, adds a ‘cosmic’ and ‘sublime’ dimension to the formidable storm: the pathos of the scene is enhanced by the suspension that Delille inserts between s’épouvante and le dieu. Figures of sound and rhythmical artifices are sometimes combined into particularly impressive effects of mimesis. On occasion, Delille’s commitment to l’harmonie imitative reveals itself explicitly and metapoetically in the translation. At Georgics 4.260–3, p. 273, the turmoil of the sick bees is represented through three compressed, highly alliterative Homeric similes.⁴⁶ Delille writes: Tantôt le bruit plaintif de ce peuple aux abois / imite l’aquilon murmurant dans les bois, / et le reflux bruyant des ondes turbulentes, / et le feu prisonnier dans les forges brûlantes.⁴⁷ His metapoetic use of the verb imiter (which has no counterpart in the text) to introduce this ‘mimetic’ series of vignettes is authorized by a similar procedure applied by Virgil himself earlier in the same poem (4.70–2). Delille thus takes the cue from Virgil by ‘reflecting’, within the translation, upon the underpinnings of his own phonostylistic and phonomimetic artistry while putting it into practice. Delille often strives to highlight Virgil’s use of rhythmic and rhetorical figures such as anaphoras and epiphoras by giving them an even more prominent place in his translation. An example is found in the famous scene depicting the unbridled lust of all living creatures: Verg. G. 3.242–9 omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque et genus aequoreum, pecudes pictaeque volucres, in furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem. tempore non alio catulorum oblita leaena saevior erravit campis, nec funera vulgo tam multa informes ursi stragemque dedere per silvas; tum saevus aper, tum pessima tigris; heu male tum Libyae solis erratur in agris.

Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 231) Amour, tout sent tes feux, tout se livre à ta rage; tout, et l’homme qui pense, et la brute sauvage, et le peuple des eaux, et l’habitant des airs. Amour, tu fais rugir les monstres des déserts: alors, battant ses flancs, la lionne inhumaine quitte ses lionceaux et rôde dans la plaine; c’est alors que, brûlant pour d’informes appas, le noir peuple des ours sème au loin le trépas; alors le tigre affreux ravage la Libye: malheur au voyageur errant dans la Nubie!⁴⁸

⁴⁶ Tum sonus auditur gravior, tractimque susurrant, / frigidus ut quondam silvis inmurmurat Auster, / ut mare sollicitum stridit refluentibus undis, / aestuat ut clausis rapidus fornacibus ignis. ⁴⁷ ‘Sometimes the plaintive sound of these alarmed people / imitates the Aquilo’s whisper in the woods, / and the noisy surge of stormy waves, / and fire, captive in the blazing forges.’ ⁴⁸ ‘Love, everything feels your flames, everything is given over to your rage; everything, thinking man and savage beasts alike, and the people of the waters, and air’s inhabitants. Love, you make desert monsters roar: then, beating her sides, the wild lioness abandons her cubs and roams across the plains. Then, burning for shapeless charms, the black people of bears sow everywhere the seed of death. Then, the hideous tiger ravages Libya: woe to the traveller wandering in Nubia!’

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The triple alors reproduces, in an expanded form, Virgil’s triple tum; yet there is no equivalent in the text for Delille’s repeated apostrophe to Amour, which is further emphasized by a generalizing or resumptive tout (a favorite marker of Delille’s style). The sequence is enriched by epithets absent from the Latin text (l’homme qui pense, et la brute sauvage) that allow Delille to insert an Enlightenment-inspired idea into the passage (thought is what distinguishes humans from animals); thus he can underscore the overwhelming universality of lust and passion, which reaches even les monstres des déserts (also missing from the text).⁴⁹ An analogous technique of expansion is applied by Delille to sound effects already operating in Virgil’s Latin. For instance, at 4.525–7, p. 291 (Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua / a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat: / Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae), Delille makes the echo resound even more loudly than in the source text: Là, sa langue glacée et sa voix expirante, / jusqu’au dernier soupir formant un faible son, / d’Eurydice, en flottant, murmurait le doux nom: / Eurydice! ô douleur! Touchés de son supplice, / les échos répétaient, Eurydice! Eurydice!⁵⁰ Here l’abbé Virgile, as Voltaire called Delille, is more Virgilian than Virgil, since no such fourfold repetition is found in Virgil’s poetry.

19.6 Imagery and Domestication In his celebrated Laokoön, Lessing affirms that the poet, unlike the prose writer, cannot be content with simply intelligible and plain representations, but must strive to create vivid and painterly images.⁵¹ Quite often, Delille expands Virgil’s metaphorical language and imagery, to make the metaphor even more vivid and explicit than it is in the text. A crucial transitional moment of the second book falls in to this category.

Verg. G. 2.362–70 ac dum prima novis adolescit frondibus aetas, parcendum teneris, et dum se laetus ad auras palmes agit laxis per purum immissus habenis, ipsa acie nondum falcis temptanda, sed uncis carpendae manibus frondes interque legendae.

Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 199) Quand ses premiers bourgeons s’empresseront d’éclore, que l’acier rigoureux n’y touche point encore: même lorsque dans l’air, qu’il commence à braver,

⁴⁹ This addition captures the intention of the Virgilian passage, in which ‘the animals chosen are very fierce by nature’ (Mynors 1990, p. 219). ⁵⁰ ‘There did his frozen tongue and his dying voice, / forming a feeble sound up to the last sigh, / flutter and whisper Eurydice’s sweet name: / Eurydice! O grief! Moved by his affliction, / the echoes would repeat, Eurydice! Eurydice!’ ⁵¹ Lessing 1766, ch. 17. See also Kallendorf 2007b, p. 583.

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inde ubi iam validis amplexae stirpibus ulmos exierint, tum stringe comas, tum bracchia tonde (ante reformidant ferrum), tum denique dura exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentis.

le rejeton moins frêle ose enfin s’élever, pardonne à son audace en faveur de son âge; seulement de ta main éclaircis son feuillage. Mais enfin, quand tu vois ses robustes rameaux par des nœuds redoublés embrasser les ormeaux, alors saisis le fer; alors sans indulgence de la sève égarée arrête la licence; bonde des jets errants l’essor présomptueux, et des pampres touffus le luxe infructueux.⁵²

The vines’ growth requires the farmer’s restraining intervention with the pruning knife. In Virgil, the vines are anthropomorphically pictured, as is testified to by such phrases as laetus ad auras / palmes agit, stringe comas . . . bracchia tonde, or reformidant ferrum. The personification involves the use of language typical of child-rearing in the description of the farmer’s activity (prima . . . adolescit . . . aetas). The translator takes the cue from Virgil’s anthropomorphizing language to develop the metaphor even more explicitly: neither son audace nor l’essor présomptueux, let alone le luxe infructueux, have a direct equivalent in the text, and the exhortation arrête la licence (vaguely related to dura exerce / imperia) seems to lend a somewhat ‘moralizing’ tone to the passage. Human control over nature, as Virgil teaches in the Georgics, is needed to ensure prosperity. Art must complete and complement nature.⁵² In translating Georgics 1.300–4, p. 157, Delille develops a simile already hinted at, if not properly embedded, in Virgil’s text. The translation actually likens winter to a helmsman: L’hiver, tel qu’un nocher qui, plein d’un doux transport, / couronne ses vaisseaux triomphants dans le port, / tranquille sous le chaume, à l’abri des tempêtes, / l’heureux cultivateur donne ou reçoit des fêtes. / Pour lui ces tristes jours rappellent la gaieté; / il s’applaudit l’hiver des travaux de l’été.⁵³ A significant instance of the same phenomenon is found at the beginning of the third Georgic, p. 219: lines 68–9 are translated by Delille as hélas! nos plus beaux jours s’envolent les premiers: / un essaim de douleurs bientôt nous environne; / la vieillesse nous glace et la mort nous moissonne.⁵⁴

⁵² ‘When its first buds gather around in bloom, let harsh steel not touch them yet: even when, at last, the least fragile offshoot dares to rise up into the air, which it starts to defy, forgive its boldness by virtue of its age; just prune its foliage with your hand. But when you finally see its sturdy branches embrace the elms with redoubled knots, then take hold of the blade; then, without leniency, stop the licentiousness of sap gone astray. Curb the presumptuous rise of wandering shoots, and the fruitless luxury of bushy branches.’ ⁵³ ‘In winter, like a helmsman who, full of sweet affection, / crowns his triumphant vessels in the harbour, / quiet under the stubble, sheltered from storms, / the happy farmer gives or takes celebrations. / To his mind, these sad days recall cheerfulness; / in winter he applauds himself for summer’s labour.’ ⁵⁴ ‘Alas! Our most beautiful days are the first to flee: / a swarm of sorrows soon surrounds us; / old age freezes us and death reaps us.’

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The metaphor of death as a reaper, albeit common even in popular culture, is particularly appropriate to the georgic atmosphere and language: the image used by the translator is, as it were, called for by the text. Moreover, Delille’s ‘swarm of sorrows’ (also absent from the text) suggests a connection with the topic of bee keeping. These metaphors can be seen as an intratextual ‘commentary’ embedded in the translation. Delille’s re-elaboration of Virgil’s imagery can be regarded as ‘domesticating’ in many respects. For instance, the translation frequently unveils and explains Virgil’s learned allusions: Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen (Verg. G. 2.176, p. 185), is rendered as Hésiode aux Romains va parler dans mes vers.⁵⁵ Correspondingly, Delille often strives to simplify (or even elide) certain names and epithets that would sound—in his opinion—too heavy in a translation, or even too unfamiliar to the reader. At Georgics 3.457–63, for instance, Delille elides Virgil’s enumeration of exotic-sounding names of northern populations. A similarly simplifying generalization is found in the fourth Georgic, in a passage where Virgil compares the bees’ devotion to their king (rex) to the honours paid by easterners to their monarchs:⁵⁶

Verg. G. 4.210–18 praeterea regem non sic Aegyptus et ingens Lydia nec populi Parthorum aut Medus Hydaspes observant. rege incolumi mens omnibus una est; amisso rupere fidem, constructaque mella diripuere ipsae et cratis solvere favorum. ille operum custos, illum admirantur et omnes circumstant fremitu denso stipantque frequentes, et saepe attollunt umeris et corpora bello obiectant pulchramque petunt per vulnera mortem.

Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 269) Quel peuple de l’Asie honore autant son roi? Tandis qu’il est vivant, tout suit la même loi: est-il mort? ce n’est plus que discorde civile; on pille les trésors, on démolit la ville: c’est l’âme des sujets, l’objet de leur amour; ils entourent son trône, et composent sa cour, l’escortent au combat, le portent sur leurs ailes,⁵⁷ et meurent noblement pour venger ses querelles.

On the one hand, Delille abbreviates the ethnographic enumeration; on the other hand, he amplifies the monarchic imagery by adding a town, a throne, and a whole ⁵⁵ ‘Hesiod will speak to the Romans in my poetry.’ ⁵⁶ The detail is traditional (see Thomas 1988, vol. 2, p. 185). For the problems generated by the allegorization of bees as subjects, see notably Batstone 1997, p. 140. ⁵⁷ ‘What people of Asia honour their king in like manner? While he lives, everything follows the same law; is he dead? Then nothing but civil strife; riches are plundered, the city is destroyed: he is the subjects’ soul, the object of their love. They surround his throne, and compose his court; escort him to combat, carry him on their wings, and nobly die to avenge his feuds.’

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court. Correspondingly, Delille’s emphasis on the destructive power of civil strife after the king’s death is a further hint at his royalist stance.⁵⁸ This king of the bees, in other words, would not feel out of place at Versailles. No less interesting is the opposite case, where Delille adds proper names or epithets not justified by the text. In the episode of senex Corycius, for example, he adds two goddesses entirely absent from the Latin: quotque in flore novo pomis se fertilis arbos / induerat, totidem auctumno natura tenebat (Verg. G. 4.142–3, p. 265) is rendered as Jamais Flore chez lui n’osa tromper Pomone: / chaque fleur du printemps était un fruit d’automne.⁵⁹ An analogous expansion is found in Orpheus’s catabasis:

⁵⁸ An interesting development in Delille’s political perspective is embodied by a note he later wrote to elucidate Georgics, 1.505–12. This note appears in the commentary on chapter 4 of his own poem L’homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises, which was first published in 1800. Here Delille assesses the lines Hélas! et que n’en peut la sanglante mémoire, / ainsi que de ces murs, s’effacer de l’histoire in a different way, in the light of the recent revolutionary events. The note deserves to be quoted here in extenso: ‘J’ai déjà remarqué dans le discours préliminaire, que le poème de Virgile, publié dans un temps de calme et de bonheur, fut composé dans des circonstances trop malheureusement semblables à celle où ce morceau des Géorgiques françaises fut écrit. . . . J’ai à me reprocher, dans cette traduction, d’avoir infidèlement rendu ces mots, fas versum atque nefas: ils rendent avec une précision et une énergie extrêmes le plus grand malheur des grandes crises des empires; c’est la confusion des idées morales et politiques, du bien et du mal, du juste et de l’injuste. Les bornes une fois arrachées, on ne sait plus où les replacer. De cette incertitude naît le combat des opinions, qui l’augmente encore. Si l’incertitude est un grand tourment pour les particuliers, elle est un plus grand tourment pour les empires: de là résulte pour les âmes communes une attente inquiète, pour les âmes pusillanimes le découragement, pour les âmes ambitieuses l’audace des entreprises téméraires et désorganisatrices. Et comment jouir de quelque bonheur dans un état de choses où la constitution, la religion, l’éducation, les institutions civiles et militaires marchent, ou plutôt se traînent, au milieu de craintes et de projets, de contradictions et de réclamations sans nombre, qui résultent nécessairement des souvenirs du passé, du sentiment douloureux du présent, et de la perspective incertaine de l’avenir? Les nouveaux riches ne jouissent qu’en tremblant du fruit de leurs rapines; les hommes dépouillés, du fond de leur misère, voient avec indignation l’apparition scandaleuse des fortunes nouvelles élevées sur leurs débris: tout est inquiétude, inimitié, fureur; tous attendent, souffrent ou conspirent: quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas [Verg. G. 1.505] (‘In the “Preliminary discourse”, I have already remarked that Virgil’s poem, published during an age of peace and prosperity, was composed in circumstances all too similar to those in which this part of the French Georgics was written. . . . I must reproach myself for having unfaithfully rendered, in this translation, the words fas versum atque nefas: they represent with extreme accuracy and energy the greatest misfortune of the great crises of empires, namely the confusion of moral and political ideas, of good and evil, of justice and injustice. Once the boundary markers have been removed, one no longer knows where to place them again. Such uncertainty gives birth to the struggle of opinions, which further intensifies it. While uncertainty is a great torment for individuals, this is even truer of empires: hence anxious expectation arises in ordinary souls, despondency in pusillanimous ones, the audacity of reckless and disruptive enterprises in ambitious ones. How can one enjoy any delight in a situation in which the constitution, religion, education, civil and military institutions march—or rather drag themselves—amid fears and projects, innumerable contradictions and complaints, which inevitably spring from the memories of the past, the grievous sentiment of the present, and the uncertain perspective of the future? The new rich cannot but shudder while enjoying the fruit of their robberies; the looted people, from the abyss of their misery, look indignantly at the outrageous appearance of new fortunes built upon their shattered ruins. Everything is anxiety, enmity, rage; everyone waits, suffers, or conspires: quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas [Verg. G. 1.505]’, Delille 1820, pp. 203–5). ⁵⁹ ‘At his home, never did Flora deceive Pomona: / every flower of spring was a fruit in autumn.’

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Verg. G. 4.481–4 quin ipsae stupuere domus atque intima leti Tartara caeruleosque implexae crinibus anguis Eumenides, tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora, atque Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis.

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Delille, Géorgiques (Delille 1997, p. 287) L’enfer même s’émut; les fières Euménides cessèrent d’irriter leurs couleuvres livides; Ixion immobile écoutait ses accords; l’hydre affreuse oublia d’épouvanter les morts; et Cerbère, abaissant ses têtes ménaçantes, retint sa triple voix dans ses gueules béantes.⁶⁰

Among the details added by Delille, an entire image is without counterpart in the Latin text: the translator strives to lend vividness to his description of the underworld by using a mythical theme (the Hydra), perhaps sprung from a ‘contamination’ with Aeneas’s catabasis in the Aeneid (cf. Verg. A. 6.576), which was certainly familiar to the intended readership. The translator, however, should not fully disclose—in Delille’s view—what Virgil had left unsaid on purpose.⁶¹

19.7 Conclusion Throughout his entire œuvre, Delille is always a translator, be it in a broader or in a narrower sense; Virgil is his guide in his effort of adapting the georgic genre to a new poème de la nature, inspired by physiocracy—new both to mid-eighteenth-century French culture and to his own production of pastoral poetry. As Venuti observes, the case of domesticating translators—at least since Livius Andronicus—clearly shows how the interpretive force of translation means that the source text is not only decontextualized, but also recontextualized insofar as translating rewrites it in terms that are intelligible and interesting to receptors, situating it in different patterns of language use, in different cultural values, in different literary traditions, and in different social institutions.⁶²

Mediating between the source context and the receiving context inevitably entails a semantic or formal interpretation of the correspondences—and of the differences— between the two cultures: translation, in other words, demands involvement in the text’s construction of meaning. In Delille’s poetics of translation as ‘economic’ ⁶⁰ ‘Hell itself was stirred; the proud Eumenides stopped urging on their pale snakes; unmoving Ixion listened to his music; the hideous hydra forgot to frighten the dead; and Cerberus, lowering his threatening heads, restrained his triple voice within his gaping mouths.’ ⁶¹ In his note on Verg. G. 3.258–9 (quid iuvenis, magnum cui versat in ossibus ignem / durus amor?), Delille criticizes Dryden for having included an explicit account of the myth of Hero and Leander in his English translation, when in the original the story is subtly alluded to in the text but never actually narrated (Delille 1770, p. 344; section headed ‘Remarques’). ⁶² Venuti 2013b, p. 180. See also Benjamin 1972, pp. 11–14 and Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014, p. 181.

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exchange, the source text and its reworking operate in a fruitful relationship of reciprocal enlightenment. Translating the Georgics into French is, for Delille, a necessary and preliminary endeavour, integral and complementary to his activity as a Virgilian exegete and as a Virgilian poet. In this respect, Delille’s translation can be defined as ‘domesticating’ in the fullest sense of the term: not only does he strive to make the Georgics accessible to the French poetic taste of the time, but he also aims at creating a whole poetic genre based on Virgil’s model. This is why he continues to rework his Géorgiques throughout his life, adding explanatory notes, variants, and comments.⁶³ Similarly, in his edition of the Aeneid, the critical remarks sur les principaux beautés du texte (‘on the chief beauties of the text’) follow, accompany, and integrate the translation of Virgil’s Latin: the commentator, in Delille’s view, is also an emulator of the ancient model and a rival. As a further step in his appropriation of Virgil’s poetry and poetics, thirty years after translating the Georgics, Delille feels the inescapable need to challenge the preeminence of Virgil’s poem—which he contributed to consolidate—by writing his own georgic work: L’Homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises, first published in 1800 (Delille 1820). The poet, for Delille, is thus simultaneously a teacher, a moralist, a painter, and an observer of nature, someone who constantly investigates the mutual intertwining of the physical, the aesthetic, and the moral world. Delille’s Virgil is a painter and a master of harmony as well as of agricultural wisdom. His poetry is as much the work of a skilled craftsman as that of a masterful painter: thus, for Delille, to create pastoral poetry is to follow in the footsteps of Virgil’s imitation of nature.⁶⁴ In Delille’s poetics there is no clear boundary between the georgic art and Virgilian exegesis. Delille’s work on and with Virgil’s Georgics makes any neat distinction between ‘text’, ‘translation’, and ‘commentary’ somewhat blurred and elusive. As a result, the tradition of humanist scholarship—to a large extent characterized by imitatio and emulation of ancient masters—is regarded, in Delille’s approach, as progressing hand in hand with a specifically modern attempt at interpreting and contextualizing antiquity.⁶⁵

⁶³ Guitton 1974, p. 244. ⁶⁴ Pour mieux imiter la manière dont il a peint les objets, il faut voir les objets eux-mêmes; et, à cet égard, c’est composer jusqu’à un certain point, que de traduire. C’est en voyant la campagne, les moissons, les vergers, les troupeaux, les abeilles, tous ces tableaux délicieux qui ont inspiré l’auteur des Géorgiques, que j’ai cru sentir quelque étincelle du feu nécessaire pour le bien rendre. Jamais je n’ai trouvé la nature plus belle, qu’en lisant Virgile; jamais je n’ai trouvé Virgile plus admirable, qu’en observant la nature: la nature, en un mot, a été pour moi le seul commentaire de celui de tous les poètes qui l’a le mieux imitée (‘In order better to imitate the way he painted the objects, one ought to see the objects themselves; and, in this regard, translating is composing, up to a certain extent. It is by seeing the countryside, the crops, the orchards, the herds, the bees, all these delightful pictures inspiring the author of the Georgics, that I have believed I feel some sparks of the fire necessary to render them well. Never have I found nature more beautiful, than by reading Virgil; never have I found Virgil more admirable, than by observing nature: nature, in a nutshell, has been for me the only commentary on its best imitator among the poets’, Delille 1997, p. 335). See further, Pascal 2013, p. 96. ⁶⁵ See Laird 2002, p. 195.

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20 ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’ The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi Giampiero Scafoglio

Giacomo Leopardi, born in Recanati in 1798 and dead in Naples in 1837, is one of the most important poets of the Italian and European literary tradition: he is well known as the author of lyric poems gathered in a collection entitled Canti (Songs), but also as the author of prose dialogues on ethical issues, Operette morali (Minor Moral Works), and of a collection of philosophical observations, personal impressions, literary criticism, and various types of notes, all published posthumously under the title of Zibaldone (Miscellany).¹ His work is characterized by a deep pessimism that permeates his vision of human life as well as his personal feelings: in a first phase (labelled ‘historical pessimism’), he considers suffering as an intrinsic feature of his age, while idealizing antiquity as the dream period of lost happiness; then, in a more mature and more radical phase (labelled ‘cosmic pessimism’), he recognizes suffering as a necessary condition of human nature at all times.² Leopardi was not only a great poet but also a passionate lover of classical texts, as well as a rigorous and fine scholar of the Greek and Latin languages and literatures.³ He was no more than a teenager when he undertook the translation of Books 1 and 2 of

¹ Leopardi is the most studied Italian poet after Dante. Among many contributions to the study of his thought and work, Bazzocchi 2008, Folin 2008, Natale 2009, Savoca 2009, Blasucci 2011, and Polizzi 2011 are useful points of start. On his life and personality, see Damiani 2002 and Citati 2010. On his poetics and poetry in particular, see Gaetano 2002 and Mengaldo 2006. ² It is worth pointing out, however, that a chronological boundary between these two phases cannot be traced with precision and that not all scholars are agreed on such a ‘periodization’ of Leopardi’s pessimism. A philosophical interpretation of his thought is offered by Severino 1990, 1997 and by Natoli and Prete 1998. ³ See the many contributions collected in Centro nazionale di studi leopardiani 1982, which is a volume of conference proceedings. See also Fischetti 1986, pp. 295–324; Alfonsi 1987, pp. 489–510; and especially Timpanaro 1978.

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Horace’s Odes from Latin and, from Greek, the translation of the pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia (an epic parody of the Iliad), of the Idylls of Moschus, and of Book 1 of the Odyssey.⁴ In 1815, along with the translation of Moschus’s poems, he also brought out a theoretical work entitled Discorso sopra Mosco (Discourse on Moschus). There he expresses his admiration for the ‘sincere and natural poetry’ of Moschus, which ‘is not covered in ornaments, is not tarnished by poetic phrases, is not enslaved to artistic purposes’, since he ‘is a civilized poet, but not a corrupt one: he is a shepherd who sometimes left his farm, but did not share the vices of the citizens’.⁵ Then he observes that Moschus is ‘the Greek Virgil, but a Virgil who creates something of his own and does not merely make imitations’—and it is not difficult to recognize in these words a substantial criticism of Virgil’s poetry as artificial and contrived literature, which lacks spontaneity and sincerity.⁶ In the following year, 1816, something important happens: the young poet experiences what he calls a ‘literary conversion’, which consists of ‘a shift from erudition to beauty’: he feels poetic inspiration growing within him and conceives of devoting himself to creative writing. But he does not give up the study and translation of classical poetry: indeed, he looks at Virgil’s poetry with different eyes now. He embarks on translating Book 2 of the Aeneid, a challenge that represents the ‘fusion’ of his philological and scholarly interests with his new aesthetic and creative ambitions. At the same time, this translation is a very effective exercise in preparing and even foreshadowing the outstanding literary activity that will develop in the following years.⁷ Together with the translation, Leopardi also writes a piece that would serve as a preface and explains the reasons for his approach to the Aeneid and the purpose of his translation. Here we can see that his judgement on Virgil’s poetry has completely changed by comparison with the dismissal he had given it in the previous year. Here is what he thinks now: Letta la Eneide (sì come sempre soglio, letta qual cosa è, o mi par veramente bella), io andava del continuo spasimando, e cercando maniera di far mie, ove si potesse in alcuna guisa, quelle divine

⁴ On Leopardi’s translations in general and on his theoretical reflections on translation methods and aims, see Carini 1964; Bigi 1964, pp. 11–80; Portier 1970, pp. 551–7; Pellegrini 1978; Mazzini 1990, pp. 331–42; Albrecht 1990, pp. 27–38; Prete 1998, pp. 143–70; Nacci 1999, pp. 58–82; Nasi 2006, pp. 5–19; Piraino 2009; Camarotto 2009; Stramucci 2010. Unfortunately the papers delivered at the conference ‘Leopardi e la traduzione: Teoria e prassi (XIII Convegno Internazionale di Studi Leopardiani)’, held in Recanati in September 2012, are still unpublished. ⁵ La natura nelle poesie di Mosco non è coperta dagli ornamenti, non è offuscata dalle frasi poetiche, non è serva dell’arte . . . Mosco è un poeta civilizzato, ma non corrotto; è un pastore che è sortito qualche volta dalla sua villa, ma che non ha contratto i vizi dei cittadini (Leopardi, Discorso sopra Mosco, quoted from D’Intino 1999, p. 48). ⁶ È il Virgilio dei Greci [sc. Moscho], ma un Virgilio che inventa e non trascrive e che inoltre canta in una lingua più delicata e in un tempo che conserva alquanto più dell’antica semplicità (Leopardi, Discorso sopra Mosco, quoted from D’Intino 1999, p. 49). ⁷ On some aspects of this translation and its relationship with Leopardi’s later poetry, see Stefani 1975; Sole 1990, pp. 179–205; Stramucci 2010; Corsalini 2013; and Corsalini 2012 (which is still unpublished: see note 4 in this chapter).

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bellezze; né mai ebbi pace infinché non ebbi patteggiato con me medesimo, e non mi fui avventato al secondo libro del sommo poema, il quale più degli altri mi avea tocco, sì che in leggerlo, senza avvedermene, lo recitava, cangiando tuono quando il si convenia, e infocandomi e forse talvolta mandando fuori alcuna lagrima.⁸ ‘After reading the Aeneid (as has always been my habit after reading something that is or seems truly beautiful), I was overcome with emotion, trying to find a way to make those divine beauties mine, if it were somehow possible. Nor could I find peace until I came to a decision and plunged into the second book of the great poem, which had moved me more than any other, so much so that, while reading, I was reciting it aloud without realizing it, changing my tone of voice where appropriate, becoming excited and maybe at times even shedding some tears.’

Virgil is now at the centre of the interests and literary passion of young Leopardi, who is about to translate Book 2 of the Aeneid. This preface provides the theoretical framework within which the Italian poet conceived the translation and worked on it. He is fully aware that it is not enough to master the Latin language in order to translate such a work, but that it is necessary to possess particular qualities, such as creativity and aesthetic sense, that is to say, it is necessary to be a poet: Messomi alla impresa, so ben dirti avere io conosciuto per prova che senza esser poeta non si può tradurre un vero poeta, e meno Virgilio, e meno il secondo libro della Eneide, caldo tutto quasi ad un modo dal principio al fine; talché qualvolta io cominciava a mancare di ardore e di lena, tosto avvisavami che pennello di Virgilio divenia stilo in mia mano. (Leopardi 1817, p. 3) ‘I can say that, when I started the work, I understood from experience that it is not possible to translate true poetry without being yourself a poet, and this applies even more to Virgil, and even more to the second book of the Aeneid, which is full of pathos virtually from start to finish; thus, whenever I was beginning to lack ardour and vigour, I realized that Virgil’s brush had become a stylus in my hand.’

Why is it necessary, in Leopardi’s opinion, to be a poet in order to translate true poetry such as the Aeneid? Leopardi does not mean that the translator has to rewrite the Latin work; in fact he professes the highest fidelity to the original text. He explains this concept a little further: E sì ho tenuto sempre dietro al testo a motto a motto (perché, quanto alla fedeltà, di che posso giudicare co’ miei due occhi, non temo paragone); ma la scelta dei sinonimi, il collocamento delle parole, la forza del dire, l’armonia espressiva del verso, tutto mancava, o era cattivo, come, dileguatosi il poeta, restava solo il traduttore. (Ibid., pp. 3–4)

⁸ Here and passim, I quote the text of Leopardi’s Preface to and translation of Virgil’s Aeneid 2 from the editio princeps of 1817, which was published in Milan, by the typographer Giovanni Pirotta (Leopardi 1817). I also consulted the reproduction of the autograph manuscript in Antona Traversi 1887, pp. 39–69, the critical edition of Leopardi’s translation in Stefani 1975, pp. 123–54 and 131–62, and some important editions of Leopardi’s works (Binni-Ghidetti 1969; Damiani-Rigoni 1987; Felici-Trevi 1997). The passage quoted here comes from Leopardi 1817, pp. 2–3. In what follows, English translations of Italian quotations are all mine. English translations of Virgil’s Latin Aeneid are from Fairclough 1916.

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‘I always followed the original text word for word (because, when it comes to fidelity, I do not fear comparisons, as I can see with my own eyes), but the choice of synonyms, the placement of words, the strength of the style, the expressive musicality of the verse, everything was missing or was bad, as if the poet had disappeared and had left only the translator.’

Leopardi understands that the suggestiveness of Virgil’s poetry is based on the choice and placement of words as well as on the musicality achieved by metrics and patterns of sounds. He feels inadequate in front of a poem so full of charm and inner resonances: a good scholar with high linguistic intelligence cannot translate properly such a poem; only a poet can do it. In building a theoretical framework to start his translation work, Leopardi feels that his poetic inspiration and attitude provide an advantage that allows him a deeper understanding of Virgil’s poetry and at the same time makes him more aware of the difficulties attached to such a profound and complex language. Indeed Leopardi talks about the major problems (immense difficoltà) he had to face; but one seems to him greater than all: Ma che la difficilissima cosa siami stata non intoppar nel gonfio e non cascar nel basso, ma tenermi sempremai in quel divino mezzo che è il luogo di verità e di natura, e da che mai si è dilungata un punto la celeste anima di Virgilio; questo, io penso, comprenderai agevolmente. (Ibid., p. 4) But, for me, the biggest challenge was not to rise to a bombastic style and not to fall into a low style, but always to maintain that divine middle way, which is the place of truth and nature: the celestial soul of Virgil never departed from it. I think you can easily understand this.

Leopardi understands the perfect balance of Virgil’s poetry, which is as much removed from high-sounding elegance as it is from rude simplicity: this is what he calls ‘that divine middle way’. Such a view of Virgil’s style could seem reductive, since it does not pay heed to some aspects of the Aeneid, notably ‘extreme’ features such as the dramatic setting and the heightening of pathos that characterize some scenes (think, for instance, of the episode of Laocoön devoured by serpents).⁹ It is clear, therefore, that Leopardi has his own view, a personal vision of Virgil’s poetry, as he focuses on the prevailing stylistic register or, if you prefer, the overall tone of the narrative, underestimating or deliberately leaving aside the dissonant aspects that do not fall under ‘that middle way’. It is also clear that, for Leopardi, translation work is a stylistic exercise, a chance to train his ability to control the passions and language, an opportunity to practise the task of refining and finishing poetry (labor limae, ‘polishing work’).¹⁰ Considering Leopardi’s subjective perception of Virgil’s poetry, it could be said that his translation seems somewhat to ‘domesticate’ or ‘normalize’ the Latin text, insofar as he captures and enhances the ‘dominant’ aspect of its ⁹ As for instance at Verg. A. 2.199–233 (for which see also the commentary in Horsfall 2008, pp. 183–209). On pathos and ‘extreme’ aspects of Virgil’s style, see La Penna 2005, pp. 420–9 and especially 435–41. ¹⁰ See Sconocchia 1994, pp. 541–51.

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language, while he risks losing its wide range of nuances. However, the outcome of his translation work shows that he did not get stuck in this theoretical framework and acted in a more flexible way. The proem more than any other part of Aeneid 2 can give an idea of the difficulties Leopardi had to face in creating his translation. It is a meaningful and particularly elaborate passage, because it represents the first step, the starting point of the narrative—that is, Aeneas’s retrospective tale of the last night of Troy. Here is the Latin passage, followed by Leopardi’s translation: conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto: infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem, Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima uidi et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando Myrmidonum Dolopumue aut duri miles Vlixi temperet a lacrimis? et iam nox umida caelo praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos. sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros et breuiter Troiae supremum audire laborem, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam. (Verg. A. 2.1–13) All were hushed, and kept their rapt gaze upon him; then from his raised couch father Aeneas thus began: ‘Too deep for words, O queen, is the grief you bid me renew, how the Greeks overthrew Troy’s wealth and woeful realm—the sights most piteous that I saw myself and wherein I played no small role. What Myrmidon or Dolopian, or soldier of the stern Ulysses, could refrain from tears in telling such a tale? And now dewy night is speeding from the sky and the setting stars counsel sleep. Yet if such is your desire to learn of our disasters, and in few words to hear of Troy’s last agony, though my mind shudders to remember and has recoiled in pain, I will begin.’ Leopardi, Eneide, 2.1–20 Ammutirono tutti, e fissi in lui Fell-silent everyone, and fixed on him teneano i volti; allor che il padre Enea they-held the faces; when the father Aeneas sì cominciò da l’alto letto: Infando, thus begun from the high couch: Unspeakable, o regina, è il dolor cui tu m’imponi o queen, is the pain that you me force che rinnovelli. I’ dovrò dir da’ Greci to retell. I will-have to-tell by-the Greeks i Teucri averi e il miserando regno the Trojan wealth and the unfortunate kingdom

1

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come fosser diserti: io dire i casi how have-been overthrown: I to-tell of-the events, tristissimi dovrò, cui vidi io stesso so-sad will-have-to, that saw I myself e di che fui gran parte. E qual potrebbe and of which I-was a-large part. And who could, o Mirmidòne, o Dolope, o seguace either Myrmidon, or Dolopian, or follower del fero Ulisse rattenere il pianto of-the cruel Ulysses, refrain-from the tears tai cose in ragionando? E omai dal cielo over-such things in telling? And now from-the sky precipita la notte umida, e gli astri falls-down the wet night, and the stars vanno in cader persuadendo il sonno. are, while-coming-down, counseling sleep. Ma se cotanto hai di saper desio But if such-a-great you-have to know desire i nostri casi, e l’ultima sciagura our misfortunes, and the final agony se ti diletta in brevi accenti espressa if you it-pleases, in a-few words told, di Troja udir, benché membrarla orrendo of Troy to-hear, even-if-it-is to-remember-it awful a l’alma sia, che addolorata il fugge; for soul my-own, that sorrow runs-away; comincerò. I-will-begin.

The first most obvious difference between the two passages is their respective length: thirteen Latin lines versus twenty Italian lines. There is also a noticeable difference of this order between the whole book of the Aeneid (804 lines) and Leopardi’s complete translation (1078 lines). This discrepancy is due to the greater length of the hexameter by comparison to the hendecasyllable, the metre of the Italian epic tradition that Leopardi used. Moreover, the Latin language is, by virtue of its grammatical structure and semantic organization, more succinct and concise than modern (Romance) languages; as an example that only scratches the surface, Latin has no articles. Sometimes, however, Leopardi chooses to extend the phrasing beyond what is in the Latin text, in order to point out logical connections or to make a concept clearer. This occurs, for example, in lines 3–9 of Leopardi’s translation, which correspond to lines 3–6 in Virgil. The subordinate clause Troianas ut opes and so on (with an ut that corresponds to the Homeric ὡς) depends on the preceding renouare dolorem; there is no declarative verb (uerbum dicendi)—such a verb is implicit in Aeneas’s readiness to

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accede to Dido’s desire.¹¹ Leopardi adds the verb that is absent from the Latin text: I’ dovrò dir (l. 5); and again, shortly afterwards: io dire . . . dovrò, ‘I will have to talk about’ (l. 7–8). He feels the need to make explicit (twice!) the uerbum dicendi, filling a gap that the Latin text owes to Virgil’s elliptical style. Another aspect of the translation that stands out at first glance is the close correspondence of many phrases in it to their counterparts in the Latin text. Compare for example the first hemistich of line 1 in Leopardi, ammutirono tutti (which is delimited by a metrical break that coincides with a comma) with line 1 in the Latin text, conticuere omnes (with the penthemimeral caesura). Or compare these two sentences: e fissi in lui / teneano i volti (Leopardi, ll. 1–2) ~ intentique ora tenebant (Verg. A. 2.1); allor che il padre Enea / si cominciò da l’alto letto (Leopardi, ll. 2–3) ~ inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto (Verg. A. 2.2). The first word of Aeneas’s speech, infandum (a remarkable word, when we consider its meaning and sound) is almost transliterated by Leopardi: his elegant and rare infando is in fact a Latinism. Nevertheless, Virgil’s whole sentence infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem in line 3 is reworked by the Italian poet into a wider syntactic structure—a sentence with two subordinate clauses that are not found in the Latin text: infando / o regina, è il dolor cui tu m’imponi / che rinnovelli (Leopardi, ll 3–5)—while the effective hyperbaton that encloses the Latin line, infandum . . . dolorem, is lost. The use of the verb rinnovellare, which corresponds to the Latin renouare, recalls another model followed here by Leopardi, namely the words of Count Ugolino in Dante’s Inferno (33.4–5): Tu vuo’ ch’io rinovelli disperato dolor che ’l cor mi preme. You want me to renew despairing pain that presses at my heart.

The words just quoted from the beginning of Ugolino’s speech:¹² here Dante imitates Aeneas’s words to Dido in the Virgilian passage (Verg. A. 2.3).¹³ Thus Leopardi translates Virgil’s line through the mediation of Dante’s passage, which in turn partly reproduces the opening words of Aeneas’s speech.¹⁴ Despite the longer wording obtained through the addition of verbs of speaking in lines 5–9 (as discussed at pp. 310–11 in this chapter), most of the passage corresponds closely to the Latin text, beginning with Leopardi’s line 9, e di che fui gran parte, for et ¹¹ See Horsfall 2008, p. 49. ¹² Dante and Virgil witness the soul of Count Ugolino, a treacherous Italian nobleman and politician, being frozen within the ice of Cocytus’s second circle, the Antenora—the place in Hell reserved for traitors to the fatherland. The translation is Mandelbaum 1995. ¹³ On Dante’s imitation of Aeneid 2 in Inferno 23, see Squarotti 2006, pp. 253–76 (on the point at issue here, pp. 263–4). ¹⁴ There is indeed a parallelism in the construction of the subordinate clause, which is attached to a verb of command (uerbum iubendi) in both Dante’s and Leopardi’s phrasing: tu vuo’ ch’io rinovelli (D.) ~ tu m’imponi / che rinnovelli (L.).

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quorum pars magna fui (Verg. A. 2.6). Lines 9–14 and 15–20 of Leopardi’s translation are particularly close to the Latin (Verg. A. 2.6–9¹⁵ and 10–13¹⁶ respectively). This comparison clearly shows that Leopardi tends to reproduce, through lexical selection and syntactic construction, the literal meaning of the Latin text and, at least in some cases, attempts to preserve as much as possible the position of words and phrases within the lines, and even their sound. In the light of Leopardi’s characterization of Virgil’s style as ‘that divine middle way’, one might wonder how he performs translation of scenes with strong pathos, such as the killing of Laocoön by monstrous serpents from the sea (Verg. A. 2.199–233). Here is the most dramatic point of that narrative, with Leopardi’s translation: diffugimus uisu exsangues. illi agmine certo Laocoonta petunt; et primum parua duorum corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque implicat et miseros morsu depascitur artus; post ipsum auxilio subeuntem ac tela ferentem corripiunt spirisque ligant ingentibus; et iam bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum terga dati superant capite et ceruicibus altis. ille simul manibus tendit diuellere nodos perfusus sanie uittas atroque ueneno, clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit: qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram taurus et incertam excussit ceruice securim. (Verg. A. 2.212–24) ‘Pale at the sight, we scatter. They in unswerving course make for Laocoön; and first each serpent enfolds in its embrace the small bodies of his two sons and with its fangs feeds upon the hapless limbs. Then himself too, as he comes to their aid, weapons in hand, they seize and bind in mighty folds; and now, twice encircling his waist, twice winding their scaly backs around his throat, they tower above with head and lofty necks. He the while strains his hands to burst the knots, his fillets steeped in gore and black venom; the while he lifts to heaven hideous cries, like the bellowings of a wounded bull that has bled from the altar and shaken from its neck the ill-aimed axe.’

¹⁵ See in particular the evocative position of words with the same meaning and a similar sound, in enjambment: dal cielo/precipita (Leopardi, ll. 12–13) ~ caelo / praecipitat (Verg. A. 2.8–9). ¹⁶ The only difference here seems to be the addition of the short sentence se ti diletta (l. 17); or, better, Virgil’s tantus amor in line 10 of the Latin is replaced by two Italian phrases in Leopardi: hai . . . desio (l. 15) and se ti diletta (l. 17). There is uariatio too, as the coordinate clauses quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit (Verg. A. 2.12) become a concessive and a relative clause subordinate to it: benché membrarla orrendo / a l’alma sia, che addolorata il fugge (Leopardi, ll. 18–19); but this is a minor point. On the other hand, the next main verb is equally in a prominent position in both versions: comincerò (Leopardi l. 20) ~ incipiam (Verg. A. 2.13).

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Leopardi, Eneide, 2.301–17 Smorti fuggiamo a quella vista. I draghi Dead-pale, we-ran-away at this sight. The dragons ambo van dritto a Laocoonte: e i due both go straight to Laocoön: and the two teneri figli avviticchiati e stretti, young sons after-entwining and tightening, pascon in pria le miserande membra they-devour first their pitiful bodies co’ morsi: e poscia assalgon lui che teli with bites: and then they-attack him whom weapons recava, accorso in lor difesa, e d’ampie took, as-he-came to their aid, and in-mighty spire il van ricingendo: e già due volte folds they were binding: and now twice a mezzo il corpo hanlo aggirato, e due at middle the body they-it encircled, and twice intorno al collo le squamose terga around the throat the scaly backs hangli ravvolto, e sovrastangli al capo they-it entwined, and they-towered-above the head co’ capi loro e gli erti colli. Ei brutto with heads of-them and lofty necks. And steeped di tabe e di veneno atro le bende, in rottenness and in venom black the bandages, a un tempo co le mani sgruppar tenta at the-same time with the hands about-to-burst he-tries i nodi, e orrendi al ciel ululi innalza: the knots, and hideous to-heaven cries he-lifts: quai dà muggiti il toro allor che fugge as gives bellowings the bull when it-runs-away piagato l’ara, e s’ha dal collo scossa wounded from-the-altar, and he-has from-the neck shaken la mal certa bipenne. the badly aimed axe.

Here too the translation corresponds quite closely to the Latin text: there are even some Latinisms in Leopardi, both in the vocabulary (e.g. teli, l. 305; ueneno atro, l. 312) and in syntax (e.g. the retained accusative brutto . . . le bende, ll. 311–12; cf. perfusus . . . uittas, Verg. A. 2.221). The stronger points are accurately preserved by Leopardi, who translates them almost word for word, without diminishing their pathos: lines 302–5 and 307–14 of the Italian text are particularly close to the Latin— lines 213–15 and 217–22 respectively. The final simile (Verg. A. 2.223–4), which acts

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to maintain the pathos¹⁷ and at the same time provides a key to understanding the scene (the killing of Laocoön as a perverted sacrifice),¹⁸ is translated by Leopardi (ll. 315–17) so closely to the original that the Italian words tend to reproduce even the sound of their Latin equivalents (It. s’ha . . . scossa ~ Lat. excussit; It. mal certa ~ Lat. incertam). Thus Leopardi, even though he speaks of a ‘divine middle way’ (maybe a medium style), is able to recognize and express the different registers and tones of Virgil’s poetry, including their most pathetic notes. This is confirmed by his translation of other dramatic scenes in the narrative, such as Aeneas’s mad rush into battle; only just woken up by Hector, in a dream, he gives vent to his desperate desire to die valiantly, defending the city: arma amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis, sed glomerare manum bello et concurrere in arcem cum sociis ardent animi; furor iraque mentem praecipitat, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis. (Verg. A. 2.314–17) ‘Frantic I seize arms; yet little purpose is there in arms, but my heart burns to muster a force for battle and hasten with my comrades to the citadel. Frenzy and anger drive my soul headlong and I think how glorious it is to die in arms!’ Leopardi, Eneide, 2.431–6 L’armi insensato afferro, e che da l’armi Arms, a fool, I-take-up, and for-what with the-arms speri, non so, ma di pugnar commisto I-can-hope-for, I-do-not know, but to-fight along a’ combattenti, e di scagliarmi insieme with the-fighters and to rush together co’ socj sulla rocca, ardo: la mente with my-comrades to-the citadel, I-burn-with-desire-for: my mind ira, furor precipita: sovviemmi anger, fury overwhelms: it-occurs-to-me che bel morir s’acquista in mezzo all’armi. how fine to-die you-get in midst in arms.

Virgil and Leopardi describe in very similar words, and with the same expressive power, Aeneas’s deranged mind (Lat. amens ~ It. insensato), blinded by rage (Lat. furor iraque mentem / praecipitat ~ It. la mente / ira, furor precipita). The keyword ‘weapons’, in Virgil’s text (arma) as well as in the translation (armi), stands out at the beginning and end of the first line and then again at the end of the last line,

¹⁷ On the simile as a means to increase pathos in the Aeneid, see West 1969, 1970; Perutelli 1977. ¹⁸ See Putnam 1965, p. 24; Hornsby 1970, p. 59; Lyne 1989, pp. 74–5; Smith 1999, pp. 514–5; Fratantuono 2007, pp. 41–2.

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which concludes the description with a nascent wish for a ‘beautiful death in battle’ (pulchrum mori . . . in armis ~ bel morir . . . in mezzo all’armi). Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s mood after witnessing the killing of Priam by Neoptolemus is quite different in stylistic characterization and emotional tone, which is heavy with fear and anxiety, since the hero suddenly remembers that his family must be in danger. It is worth seeing how Leopardi deals with such a passage: at me tum primum saeuus circumstetit horror. obstipui; subiit cari genitoris imago, ut regem aequaeuum crudeli uulnere uidi uitam exhalantem, subiit deserta Creusa et direpta domus et parui casus Iuli. (Verg. A. 2.559–63) Then first an awful horror encompassed me. I stood aghast, and there rose before me the form of my dear father, as I looked upon the king, of like age, gasping away his life under a cruel wound. There rose forlorn Creüsa, the pillaged house, and the fate of little Iulus. Leopardi, Eneide, 2.756–64 Ma primamente allora atro d’intorno But primarily then an-awful all-around orror mi si diffuse: istupidii, horror me encompassed: I-was-stunned, e appresentossi al mio pensier l’imago and came to my mind the image del caro genitor, poscia ch’il rege of-the dear father, after the king ugual d’anni ebbi visto in fera guisa of-the-same age I saw in cruel manner trapassato spirar. Vennemi a mente murdered die. It-occurred to my-mind la deserta Creusa, e il patrio tetto the left-alone Creusa, and the ancestral house preda a’ nemici, ed il periglio estremo pillaged by enemies, and the danger extreme del pargoletto Julo. of little Iulus.

In the first sentence—It. ma primamente allora atro d’intorno/orror mi si diffuse ~ Lat. at me tum primum saeuus circumstetit horror—only a slight variation prevents the word-by-word correspondence from being complete: the Latin adjective saeuus, ‘cruel’, is replaced by Leopardi with the Italian atro, ‘dark’, which modifies his noun orror (horror in Virgil’s Latin); but the effect is more or less the same, accentuating the thrill of horror suddenly felt by Aeneas at the memory of his family in danger. The verb istupidii recalls the Latin obstipui, in meaning and (once again!) even in sound. There is no Italian verb corresponding to Virgil’s subiit, ‘occurred to me’, but

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that is effectively paraphrased through the expression appresentossi al mio pensier, ‘came to my mind’. Here too there are Latinisms placed in a sequence that comes very close to the Latin text (It. l’imago / del caro genitor ~ Lat. cari genitoris imago; It. la deserta Creusa ~ Lat. deserta Creusa). When forced to choose from the wide range of meanings of the polysemous word casus (‘circumstances’, ‘opportunities’, ‘difficulties’, ‘misfortunes’, ‘death’, and so on), Leopardi chooses a strong meaning, highly consistent with the context: il periglio estremo, ‘the extreme danger’, ‘the danger of death’. Many other passages from Leopardi’s translation could be examined, but the overall picture would not change. The Italian rendering corresponds as literally as possible to Virgil’s text: it does not reproduce only the meaning of the Latin words but also (when possible) their position within the original syntactic and metrical structures, and sometimes even their sound. However, Leopardi’s translation is not a slavish one: it is not a pedantic work, aimed only at literal interpretation of the Latin text, since the author is himself a poet. In fact he begins to become aware of his own poetic vocation just in 1816, when he undertakes the translation of Aeneid 2. This is why, as we have seen, he openly declares in his introduction that he has difficulty not so much with producing a reliable version of the Latin text as with capturing and expressing the poetic suggestiveness conveyed through ‘the placement of words, the strength of the style, the expressive musicality of the verse’ (il collocamento delle parole, la forza del dire, l’armonia espressiva del verso). As a poet, Leopardi recognizes the ‘nature’ of poetry, its suggestive and elusive fascination, and, notably, the nature of Virgil’s poetry, which is particularly suggestive and elusive. This is why he feels in trouble in translating the Aeneid. Nevertheless, Leopardi succeeds in achieving his purpose, as evidenced by the passages we have read, and still more by his translation as a whole.

Appendix Here are some translation samples of sentences and short passages, as well as single words and iuncturae, and their counterparts in the Latin text. Throughout this Appendix the Italian appears, against convention, in Roman type, for better contrast with the original Latin. The intention of the Appendix is to confirm the overall picture outlined in the chapter with selected and detailed comparisons. diuina Palladis arte (2.15) ~ da Minerva istrutti / divinamente (22–3); ergo omnis longo soluit se Teucria luctu (2.26) ~ Onde il suo lungo duol Dardania tutta / si disveste (37–8); innuptae donum exitiale Mineruae (2.31) ~ il fatal don sacrato / a la vergine Pallade (45–6); accipe nunc Danaum insidias et crimine ab uno/disce omnis (2.65–6) ~ Or de’ Greci le insidie ascolta, e tutti / da un sol misfatto li conosci (95–6); inuidia . . . pellacis Ulixi (2.90) ~ per livor del blando / ingannatore Ulisse (126–7); nec requieuit enim, donec Calchante ministro (2.100) ~ Né mai ristette, in fin che di Calcante / a ministro valendosi (142–3); dies infanda (2.132) ~ l’infando / giorno (187–8); dictis . . . amicis (2.147) ~ con amici detti (210); ille dolis instructus et arte

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Pelasga (2.152) ~ quei di frodi e d’arte greca istrutto (218);¹⁹ scelerumque inuentor (2.164) ~ l’inventor di nefande opere (234); numen (2.178) ~ la diva imago (254); captique dolis lacrimisque coactis / quos neque Tydides nec Larisaeus Achilles, / non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae (2.196–8) ~ presi da inganni e stretti / da pianti noi, cui non domar Tidide, / non Achille o dieci anni o mille navi (280–2); tum uero tremefacta nouus per pectora cunctis/ insinuat pauor (2.228–9) ~ Allor discorre / a tutti noi pe’ palpitanti seni/nuovo terror (321–3); scandit fatalis machina muros / feta armis (2.237–8) ~ A la città d’armati / pregna ascendea la fata mole (330–1); tacitae per amica silentia lunae (2.255) ~ a l’amico / silenzio . . . de la cheta luna (352–3); urbem somno uinoque sepolta (2.265) ~ la città nel vin sepolta / e nel sopor (366–7); ruit alto a culmine Troia (2.290) ~ da la somma cima / Ilio a terra precipita (399–400); fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens / gloria Teucrorum (2.325–6) ~ Fu Troja, fummo noi Trojani e il grande / onor del Troico nome (445–6); arduus armatos mediis in moenibus astans / fundit equus (328–9) ~ Stassi / la Fera immane a la cittade in mezzo, / armati traboccando (448–50); ferri acies (2.333) ~ siepe di spade (456); una salus uictis nullam sperare salutem (2.354) ~ sola che resti / salute ai vinti è non sperar salute (483–4); crudelis ubique / luctus, ubique pauor et plurima mortis imago (2.368–9) ~ Ovunque / è fero duol, terror, morte atteggiata / in mille forme (502–3); haud numine nostro (2.396) ~ deserti / da’ nostri numi (535–6); Pyrrhus / exsultat telis et luce coruscus aena (2.469–70) ~ imbaldanzisce / Pirro di teli armato, e d’enea luce / folgoreggiante (633–5); penitusque cauae plangoribus aedes / femineis ululant; ferit aurea sidera clamor (2.487–8) ~ le cave stanze / ululan tutte a’ femminil lamento / che l’auree stelle fiede (658–60);²⁰ praecipites atra ceu tempestate columbae (2.516) ~ come per atro turbine colombe / precipitose (700–1); alma parens (2.591) ~ l’alma mia genitrice (798); tum uero omne mihi uisum considere in ignis / Ilium et ex imo uerti Neptunia Troia (2.624–5) ~ Tutta vidi sommersa Ilio e divelta / la Nettunia città da l’imo fondo (841–2); miserebitur hostis / exuuiasque petet (2.645–6) ~ pietosi i Greci / agogneran mie spoglie (870–1); numquam omnes hodie moriemur inulti (2.670) ~ Ah non fia ver che tutti /oggi inulti moriamo (904–905); heu misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa / substitit, errauitne via seu lapsa resedit, / incertum (2.738–40) ~ ahi! la consorte mia, / la mia Creusa i’ persi; o che da fato / miserando rapita, o per lassezza / ristata fosse, o traviata errasse, / come non so (990–4); horror ubique animo, simul ipsa silentia terrent (2.755) ~ Orror dovunque, / silenzio pur l’alma spaura (1013–14); infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae / uisa mihi ante oculos et nota maior imago (2.772–3) ~ apparmi /il miserando simulacro e l’ombra / di Creusa maggior che pria non era (1035–7); cessi et sublato montis genitore petiui (2.804) ~ Cessi, e ritolto / sul collo il padre, a la montagna ascesi (1077–8).

¹⁹ Cf. di frodi e di Pelasga arte fornito in the first draft from Leopardi’s autograph manuscript. ²⁰ Compare the line s’odono gridi e femminil lamenti in Ariosto (Orlando furioso 17.13.2), which in turn recalls Virgil’s lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu (A. 4.667).

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21 Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil Philip Hardie

William Wordsworth’s translation of the first three books of the Aeneid, on which he worked between 1823 and 1831, is one of his least known and least studied longer works—it is indeed the longest poetic composition of his later years. There are several reasons for this neglect. First, it shares in the relative lack of critical interest that is the fate of all of Wordsworth’s later works. Secondly, the devotion of considerable energy to the translation of one of the canonical texts of classical antiquity runs athwart the common perception that Wordsworth’s major contribution to English literature lies in the turn from the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century to a romanticism that draws its strength from a direct encounter with nature, not art—a turn accompanied by a revolution in poetic language, which moves away from the artificial diction of an ‘Augustan’ neoclassicism to the vocabulary and rhythms of ordinary speech. Thirdly, modern critical neglect tracks Wordsworth’s own dismissive account of the translation in the letter ‘To the Editors’ that accompanied the only part of the translation to be published in Wordsworth’s lifetime: the last part of Book 1 (ll. 901 to the end, in the numbering of Wordsworth’s English version), which appeared in the academic journal The Philological Museum for February 1832. Conceding reluctantly to the request (by Julius Charles Hare) for a specimen of the translation, over eight years after its initial composition, Wordsworth says that he ‘had abandoned the thought of ever sending into the world any part of that experiment,—for it was nothing more,— an experiment begun for amusement, and I now think a less fortunate one than when I first named it to you’ (Wordsworth, as quoted in Graver 1998, p. 173). ‘Experiment for amusement’ is hardly adequate as a description of a project which, as Bruce Graver says in his excellent critical edition of the translation, ‘absorbed Wordsworth during its six months of composition, and that he revised periodically

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for eight years’.¹ Experimental, however, it certainly was, in ways to be described in more detail in this chapter—ways that could be seen as in some sense an exercise analogous to the ‘experiment’ undertaken a quarter of a century before in the Lyrical Ballads, the 1802 ‘Preface’ to which begins: The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.²

Nor is the Aeneid translation merely an aberration in the career of the Romantic poet. Wordsworth’s debt to Latin poetry is deep-rooted and continuous over his career. Stuart Gillespie has recently used a study of Wordsworth’s suppressed translation of Juvenal’s eighth satire as the occasion for a more thoroughgoing revision of the received wisdom that Wordsworth ‘had to move away from the classics before finding his own voice’.³ Wordsworth’s friend R. P. Graves recorded: ‘He was a very great admirer of Virgil, not so much as a creative poet, but as the most consummate master of language, that, perhaps, ever existed. From him, and Horace, who was an especial favourite, and Lucretius, he used to quote much.’⁴ Affinities with and allusions to Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues, and also with and to the Georgics, are an important element in Wordsworth’s own native version of a poetry about the countryside and about humble country folk.⁵ Virgil’s epic also had its attractions for Wordsworth: his long autobiographical poem The Prelude has often been described as an ‘epic’; it charts the development of the poet in a manner that may owe something to readings of the Aeneid as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress of the soul, or as a Bildungsroman.⁶ In addition to the translations of Aeneid 1–3, there survive two other fragmentary translations, of Aeneid 4.688–92 (Dido’s death throes) and 8.337–66 (Aeneas’s tour of the site of Rome with Evander and Aeneas’s entrance to the humble palace of Evander). We know from a conversation recorded by the poet’s nephew, Christopher Wordsworth, that William held this last passage of the Aeneid in particularly high regard: I admire Virgil’s high moral tone: for instance that sublime ‘Aude hospes, contemnere opes’ etc. [Aen. 8.364 ff.], and ‘his dantem jura Catonem’ [Aen. 8.670]. What courage and ¹ Graver 1998, p. 156. ² Wordsworth and Coleridge 2007, pp. 56–7. Graver 1986 brings out the experimental nature of the project very well. ³ Gillespie 2011, pp. 125–6 (in a chapter entitled ‘Receiving Wordsworth, Receiving Juvenal: Wordsworth’s Suppressed Eighth Satire’), citing Kenneth Haynes from France and Haynes 2006, p. 155. On Wordsworth and Virgil in general, see Portale 1991; on the Aeneid translation, see ibid., pp. 146–52; and see also Engell 2014 (with further bibliography). ⁴ Cited from Peacock 1950. ⁵ Patterson 1987a, pp. 269–84 (‘Wordsworth’s Hard Pastoral’). ⁶ Gordon 1931, p. 50: ‘there are passages in the Prelude which might entitle their author to be called the profoundest Virgilian of the century’.

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independence of spirit is there! There is nothing more imaginative and aweful than the passage . . . ‘Arcades ipsum / Credunt se vidisse Jovem’, etc. . . . [Aen. 8.352 ff.].⁷

Virgil’s aweful and sublime description of the landscape of the primitive Capitoline Hill, instinct with an obscure numinosity, will also have appealed to the poet of Romantic landscapes, as will have the description of the ruined settlements of Janus and Saturn: ‘Here also sees two mouldering towns that lie / Mournful remains of buried Ancestry’ (Wordsworth, Aeneid 8.365–6). Wordsworth also responds to those aspects of the Aeneid that were to be emphasized thanks to the later nineteenth-century responsiveness to Virgil as a poet of pathos and sweet melancholy. One of his most Virgilian compositions is also one of his masterpieces: Laodamia, composed in October 1814, first published, with revisions, in the 1815 Poems and then republished, with subsequent revisions, down to 1845.⁸ Wordsworth was an inveterate reviser of works that were important to him, and the fact of being subjected to repeated revision is one thing that the Aeneid translation shares with Laodamia. In this poem Wordsworth evokes a very Virgilian kind of pathos through Laodamia’s transient encounter with the briefly renewed ‘vital presence’ of her dead husband Protesilaus vouchsafed for only three hours, and whose ‘unsubstantial Form eludes her grasp’ as surely as the ghosts of Creusa and Anchises elude the grasp of Aeneas. Protesilaus comes from the ‘pensive though . . . happy’ Elysian Fields and chides his wife for her inability to control the ‘rebellious passion’ of her earthly love for her husband, and to realize ‘A fervent, not ungovernable, love’, such as the gods approve. When the shade of her husband disappears, she falls dead. Her posthumous fate changes from version to version: in the first she is delivered into the Elysian Fields, but later she gets sentenced to eternal exclusion therefrom, and finally, in a kind of purgatorial time-serving, she is ‘doomed to wear out her appointed time, / Apart from happy Ghosts, that gather flowers / Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers’ (Laodamia ll. 160–2). This will be in a version of the Fields of Mourning to which both Laodamia and Dido are confined in Aeneid 6. The conflict between love and reason, in which Laodamia succumbs to her excessive passion, might be read as a moralizing version of Dido’s failure to control her desire for Aeneas, who, in medieval and Renaissance readings, succeeds in governing his own conduct in Carthage through reason, not passion. It is the psychopomp Hermes (Mercury) who brings the ghost of Protesilaus to Laodamia for their three-hour interview at the beginning of the poem, and Hermes who reappears at the end to separate the couple, as it is Mercury, the god of logos, who forces Aeneas to leave Dido. Protesilaus’s message about the true goal of the human soul is also stiffened by the Stoic and the Christian outlooks.

⁷ Peacock 1950, p. 373. ⁸ See Bush 1937, pp. 62–5; Raymer 1939; McGhee 1971; Taylor 1980; and Doherty 1954, p. 224 (‘what seems, in a unique manner, both Vergilian and Wordsworthian is the sense of pathos, expressed in the First Aeneid: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’). Here I follow the text (with notes of later variants) in De Selincourt 1940–6, vol. 2: 267–72.

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At two points the Virgilianism of Laodamia comes close to translation. This happens first in Protesilaus’s description of the Elysian Fields (ll. 105–8): An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey.

This is based on Virgil’s description of the Elysian Fields at Aeneid 6.640–1: largior hic campos aether et lumine uestit / purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt (‘Here a broader sky clothes the plains in glowing light, and the spirits have their own sun and their own stars’, trans. West 1990). The poet’s final reflections on the story take their point of departure from the famous lacrimae rerum, the phrase that becomes almost a motto for the nineteenthcentury Virgil of pathos and melancholy (ll. 164–7): Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, As fondly he believes.

Compare sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (Verg. A. 1.462), rendered by Wordsworth in his own translation as ‘Tears for the frail estate of human kind / Are shed; and mortal changes touch the mind’ (Wordsworth, Aeneid 1.633–4). In Laodamia the alliteration of mentem mortalia (‘mortal . . . mind’) is intensified in ‘mortal . . . mourned . . . man . . . man’. Laodamia draws on a number of ancient sources apart from Virgil (Catullus, Ovid, Euripides, Pliny the Elder). There is also a strong admixture of Milton: 1. Compare ‘The Phantom parts—but parts to re-unite, / And re-assume his place before her sight’ (Wordsworth, Laodamia, ll. 29–30) with ‘The griding sword with discontinuous wound / passed through him, but th’ ethereal substance closed / Not long divisible’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, 6.329–31 = Satan wounded in the war in heaven). 2. Or compare ‘No Spectre greets me,—no vain Shadow this’ (Wordsworth, Laodamia, l. 61) with ‘And I will bring thee where no shadow stays / Thy coming, and thy soft embraces’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.470–1 = the voice of God directing the newly created Eve to Adam). 3. Or compare ‘He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel / In worlds whose course is equable and pure’ (Wordsworth, Laodamia, ll. 97–8) with Adam and Raphael conversing on the loves of spirits (Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.615–29); with ‘Love not the heavenly spirits, and how their love / express they . . . ?’ (ibid., 615–16); and with ‘Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring’ (ibid., 627–8).⁹ ⁹ With ll. 115–19 in Laodamia, which describe the pastimes of Protesilaus’s ‘youthful peers’ at Aulis, compare perhaps Paradise Lost 2.528 ff., the pastimes of the devils.

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The combination of Virgil and Milton in a poem about marital love and loss and about the afterlife is a natural one; and it raises the question, to which I shall return, of the presence of Miltonic elements in Wordsworth’s versions of the Aeneid. A translation of the Aeneid is not, then, so atypical or marginal, considered as a Wordsworthian project. It holds other claims on our attention. Not least is the fact that this is a major translation project by a major English poet, as such comparable, at least potentially, with Dryden’s Aeneid and Pope’s Iliad, two translations that continue to enjoy a canonical status as monuments of English poetry in their own right, while Wordsworth’s truncated Aeneid has failed to achieve this status. I will return to the importance, for Wordsworth, of Dryden’s translation. Then there is the fact that there exist successive drafts of the translation, with deletions and second thoughts, which allow us to see the poet’s mind at work as he goes over and revises what he has written.¹⁰ The process of revision was also a collaborative effort: Wordsworth sent drafts to a number of friends for comment and criticism, and at a late stage in the history of the translation, in 1827, worked with his nephew Christopher to revise part of Aeneid 2. Christopher (Junior) was the son of William’s brother, Christopher (Senior), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1820–41), and at the time a brilliant undergraduate at Trinity. The literary and the academic are intertwined, anticipating in this respect later nineteenth-century translations of Virgil by the scholars John Conington and James Henry. Finally but not least, in 1824 Wordsworth lent a copy of the translation to Coleridge, whose comments survive in a letter and in detailed notes to Book 1 (see Graver 1998). This was the first renewal in many years, and the last, of the old literary partnership of Wordsworth and Coleridge that had been so fruitful for the production of Lyrical Ballads. In this case there were few fruits: Coleridge’s comments are almost all negative, if frequently trenchant, and Wordsworth adopted few of his suggested changes. That Wordsworth did not undertake the translation just as an ‘experiment for amusement’ is also shown by the letters he wrote about it to Lord Lonsdale between November 1823 and February 1824, explaining his ideas about translation at length. The following selective quotations from this correspondence will set up some consideration of the place of Wordsworth’s translation within the longer history of English translations of the Aeneid and, more generally, within the history of English poetry.¹¹ 9 November 1823 (announcing the completion of Aeneid 1): ‘I have endeavoured to be much more literal than Dryden, or Pitt, who keeps much closer to the original than his Predecessor.’ Early December 1823 (reporting on progress with Aeneid 2): ‘It takes in many places a high tone of passion, which I would gladly succeed in rendering—When I read Virgil

¹⁰ For photographs and transcriptions of the heavily revised manuscript drafts, see Graver 1998. ¹¹ For the full texts of Wordsworth’s observations on translation to Lord Lonsdale, see Graver 1998, pp. 562–7.

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in the original I am moved, but not so much in the translations; and I cannot but think this owing to a defect in the diction; which I have endeavoured to supply . . . ’ 23 January 1824: ‘If [the translator] wishes to preserve as much of the original as possible, and that with as little addition of his own as may be, there is no species of composition that costs more pains. A literal Translation of an antient Poet in verse, and particularly in rhyme, is impossible; something must be left out and something added; I have done my best to avoid the one & the other fault. I ought to say a prefatory word about the versification, which will not be found much to the taste of those whose ear is exclusively accommodated to the regularity of Pope’s Homer. I have run the Couplets freely into each other, much more than even Dryden has done. This variety seems to me to be called for, if anything of the movement of the Virgilian versification be transferable to our rhyme Poetry . . . ’ 5 February 1824: ‘Pentameters, where the sense has a close, of some sort, at every two lines, may be rendered in regularly closed couplets; but Hexameters, (especially the Virgilian, that run the lines into each other for a great length) can not.—I have long been persuaded that Milton formed his blank verse, upon the model of the Georgics and the Aeneid, and am so much struck with this resemblance, that I should have attempted Virgil in blank verse; had I not been persuaded, that no antient Author can be with advantaged [sic] so rendered. Their religion, their warfare, their course of action & feeling, are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns—My own notion of translation is, then, that it cannot be too literal, provided three faults be avoided, baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness or uncouthness including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions cannot in fact be said to be given at all.’ There follows a detailed comparison of Dryden’s and Wordsworth’s translations of the words of Aeneas to the ghost of Hector in lines 270–86 of Aeneid 2, in the course of which this general comment is made: ‘It was my wish & labour that my Translation should have far more of the genuine ornaments of Virgil than my predecessors. Dryden has been very careless of these, and profuse of his own, which seem to me very rarely to harmonize with those of Virgil . . . [detailed comment on an example in Dryden] . . . I feel it however to be too probable, that my Translation, is deficient in ornament, because I must unavoidably have lost many of Virgil’s, and have never without reluctance attempted a compensation of my own.’ 17 February 1824: ‘I began my Translation by accident; I continued it with a hope to produce a work which should be to a certain degree affecting, which Dryden’s is not to me in the least. Dr Johnson has justly remarked that Dryden had little talent for the Pathetic, and the tenderness of Virgil seems to me to escape him.—Virgil’s style is an inimitable mixture of the elaborately ornate, and the majestically plain & touching. The former quality is much more difficult to reach than the latter, in which

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whoever fails must fail through want of ability, and not through the imperfections of our language.’ There is in these comments a tension between a desire to do justice to Virgil’s qualities in English verse and a desire to compete with Dryden. With regard to both authors there is an unmistakable anxiety: in the case of Virgil, the anxiety is that it is in fact impossible to produce an English rendering that matches exactly the effects of the original. This is hardly news, but a fact that is obvious to each and every translator and his readers. Wordsworth makes it difficult for himself by aiming for something that is ‘literal’, the goal of a truthfulness to the original that is perhaps to be related to the wish of the Wordsworth and Coleridge of the Lyrical Ballads to be truthful to the ‘language really used by men’.¹² This is made doubly difficult, in that at the same time Wordsworth wants to avoid the ‘strangeness or uncouthness’ that would follow from forcing his English into the mould of Virgil’s Latin. In terms of Venuti’s typology of translation, Wordsworth aims both at ‘domesticating’ and at ‘foreignizing’. With regard to Dryden, the anxiety is that felt by one great poet towards another. Wordsworth never admits as much, but one senses a competition with Dryden on the ground of producing a translation of an ancient classic that is at the same time a great English poetic text. It is no accident that Wordsworth also translated passages from Chaucer, another author translated by Dryden. Graver presents his edition of Wordsworth’s translations from Chaucer and Virgil as ‘a thorough examination of Wordsworth’s uneasy relations with the greatest English translator, and one of his most important neoclassical predecessors . . . Wordsworth’s translations of Chaucer and Virgil thus constitute a self-conscious dialogue with Dryden, as well as a competition with his achievement.’¹³ In his article on ‘Wordsworth and the Language of Epic’, Graver (1986, p. 285) attempts to show the ways in which Wordsworth succeeded in ‘produc[ing] an experimental poetic diction, closely according to the subtleties of the original, and a radically new kind of translation, one that strives to move the reader as powerfully as does the Aeneid itself ’. Graver shows how Wordsworth imitates the rhythm and cadences of Virgil’s Latin and gives a far higher proportion of run-on lines than in previous translations into couplets, corresponding to Virgil’s heavy use of enjambement; Wordsworth exploits a Latinate kind of vocabulary and echoes the vowel and consonant sounds of Virgil’s poetry. The case is persuasive. Here I give just a couple of examples of Wordsworth’s experiments in a very close Latinism. The lines ‘Clamor and clangor to the heavens arise, / The blast of trumpets mix’d with vocal cries’

¹² Graver 1986, p. 263. ¹³ Graver 1998, pp. xi–xii. Graver continues: ‘The present edition of Wordsworth’s translations supplies crucial evidence for a major reassessment of Wordsworth’s attitudes toward John Dryden; from this evidence emerges a more complicated and vexed picture of the relation of his poetry to British neoclassicism.’

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(Wordsworth, Aeneid 2.424–5) render exoritur clamorque uirum clangorque tubarum (Verg. A. 2.313). Here ‘clamor’ and ‘clangor’ are also English words, paired chiastically in the following line with glosses that render the Virgilian genitives uirum and tubarum. Secondly, Venus reveals to her son the gods at work on the destruction of Troy; here the lines ‘Dire faces are apparent, Deities / Adverse to Troy; the Gods, her mighty Enemies’ (Wordsworth, Aeneid 2.834–5), render apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae / numina magna deum (Verg. A. 2.622–3). In an almost hallucinatory way the reader sees through the English words ‘dire faces . . . apparent’ to the Latin originals, one of which has exactly the same form, and two of which are the same minus one letter. More recently, however, Stuart Gillespie has shown how closely dependent Wordsworth is on Dryden’s version, particularly in Book 3.¹⁴ Gillespie takes this as evidence of a general principle ‘that the primary means of access English poets have to ancient writers always tends to be through the translations of previous English poets (rather than through Latin or Greek texts)’.¹⁵ In the case of Wordsworth and Dryden’s Aeneid, Gillespie (2011, p. 155) talks of ‘an ingrained sense . . . that what the Aeneid sounds like is, in fact, Dryden’s translation. That is to say, to imagine a Virgil unmediated by Dryden is at this date an impossibility for an English poet.’ The passage that Gillespie chooses to illustrate his point (Verg. A. 3.441–7) is in fact one where Dryden’s translation is closer to the Latin than it often is, which may be one reason for Wordsworth’s closeness to Dryden.¹⁶ At one point where Wordsworth does diverge from Dryden, Gillespie, paradoxically, sees a reinforcement of the inevitability of Dryden: where Dryden has ‘the flood, / Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood’ for diuinosque lacus et Auerna sonantia siluis (Verg. A. 3.442), Wordsworth has ‘the sacred floods / Of black Avernus resonant with woods’. Gillespie (2011, p. 154) comments: ‘His epithet in “Avernus resonant with woods” develops out of Dryden’s “sounding wood”. Not only repetition but variation too can be a sign of a previous translation’s background presence.’ But note, for a start, that other pre-Wordsworthian translators give phrases similar to Dryden’s: Ogilby (1654) has ‘heard in woods Avernus sound’, and Trapp (1718–20) has ‘The Lake Divine, resounding in the Woods’ (like Wordsworth, Trapp—who is often more literal than other translators—translates the Virgilian epithet diuinos). And, if Wordsworth does start from Dryden, his ‘black Avernus resonant with woods’ steers the phrase much more

¹⁴ Perhaps partly the result of the less intense effort put into this book, if we are to judge by Wordsworth’s comment to Lord Lonsdale (letter of 5 February 1824): ‘The third Book being of a humbler Character than either of the former, I have treated with some less scrupulous apprehension, & have interwoven a little of my own’ (quoted in Graver 1998, p. 566). ¹⁵ Gillespie 2011, p. 150. ¹⁶ Although, in fairness, Gillespie (ibid.) claims: ‘Many other passages would show exactly the same thing.’

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closely to the Latin, Auerna sonantia siluis. The word sonantia resonates in ‘resonant’, even if the alliteration of sonantia siluis is not captured. This suggests a post-Dryden translator who is certainly not trying to evade Dryden, but who is not inevitably bound to Dryden either. Rather than see Wordsworth as the passive follower of an inescapable Dryden, one might see the echoes of Dryden and of other earlier English translations as Wordsworth’s self-positioning within the previous two centuries’ tradition of English verse translation of the Aeneid. Translators, like commentators, build on the work of their predecessors both as an aid to composition and in a spirit of rivalry, a practice that reaches its highest point of development in Dryden’s Aeneid. Thus the earl of Surrey, Henry Howard (1516/17–47)—who introduced blank verse to English poetry with his translation of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid and who, according to Thomas Warton, the eighteenth-century pioneer of English literary history, ‘may justly be pronounced the first English classical poet’ (Warton 1774–81, vol. 3: p. 27)—drew extensively on the first complete English translation of the Aeneid into rhyming couplets by the Scottish churchman Gavin Douglas (c.1476–1522). Howard perhaps did this partly to challenge Douglas and to show how the latter’s Middle Scots dialect could be normalized within the idiom of the English court. Dryden, whose Aeneid is very confidently Dryden’s, has no anxiety about reusing the words of earlier translators. He followed John Denham—of whose 1636 translation of Aeneid 2 a part (only) appeared in print, in 1656, as The Destruction of Troy (Denham 1656)— in his endeavour ‘to make Virgil speak such English as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age’ (Dryden 1987, vol. 6, pp. 330–1). Dryden’s Virgil indeed speaks, selectively, with the words of a whole series of preceding English translators of Virgil, and in particular those of his own age—Ogilby, Denham, Luke Milbourne, the earl of Lauderdale—but remoulded with Dryden’s own refinement and vigour. A very prominent and unchanged borrowing, that of the last line of Denham’s The Destruction of Troy—which, provocatively in the 1650s, breaks off with the headless body of a king—is footnoted by Dryden himself; the previous three lines show Dryden improving on Denham: He who the sceptre of all Asia swayed, Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obeyed, On the bleak shore now lies the abandoned king, A headless carcass and a nameless thing. (Dryden, Aeneid, 2.760–3)

Here are Denham’s original lines (The Destruction of Troy, ll. 546–9): He whom such titles swelled, such power made proud To whom the sceptres of all Asia bowed, On the cold earth lies th’ unregarded king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing.

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Wordsworth sets off on his translation with a couplet lifted from an earlier translator, a literary furtum that he goes out of his way to publicize in the ‘Advertisement’ in one of the manuscripts: ‘It is proper to premise that the first Couplet of this Translation is adopted from Pitt’. I give the whole of Wordsworth’s nine-line version of the first seven-line sentence of Aeneid 1: Arms, and the Man I sing, the first who bore His course to Latium from the Trojan shore, A Fugitive of Fate: long time was He By Powers celestial toss’d on land and sea, Through wrathful Juno’s far-famed enmity; Much, too, from war endured; till new abodes He planted, and in Latium fix’d his Gods; Whence flowed the Latin People; whence have come The Alban Sires, and Walls of lofty Rome.

The first couplet is indeed Christopher Pitt’s (1740); it is a fairly literal translation of the Latin, and therefore suitable for Wordsworth’s project of a ‘literal’ translation.¹⁷ Wordsworth, in the letter of 9 November 1823 to Lord Lonsdale, notes that Pitt is in fact more literal than Dryden. Having made this ostentatiously tralatitious start, Wordsworth swerves decisively from the tradition in the first four words of the third line, translating fato profugus as ‘A Fugitive of Fate’, where Pitt has ‘By fate expell’d’.¹⁸ Wordsworth, I suggest, chooses ‘fugitive’ because it is from the same Latin root as profugus and is thus programmatic for the ‘deliberately Latinate kind of English’ rightly diagnosed by Bruce Graver (1986, p. 264). Similar comments could be made about Wordsworth’s more literal rendering of the rest of this passage: for example, his last two lines incorporate all three proper names from Aeneid 1.6–7 ( genus unde Latinum / Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae) and the last line not only is a very literal translation of the Latin, correctly attaching altae to Romae (not to moenia), but also imitates the framing of the line with the names of the cities of Alba Longa and Rome (‘The Alban . . . Rome’, cf. Albanique . . . Romae).¹⁹ Wordsworth acknowledges his dependence on Dryden (1697) and Pitt (1740, and much reprinted), and it is clear that he also had before him the translations ¹⁷ arma uirumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam fato profugus Lauiniaque uenit / litora. For comparison: Ogilby: ‘Arms and the man I sing who first did come, / Driven by fate, from Troy to Latium, / And Tyrrhen shores’; Dryden: ‘Arms, and the Man I sing, who forc’d by Fate, / And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate; / Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan Shoar’; Trapp: ‘Arms, and the Man I sing, who first from Troy / Came to th’Italian, and Lavinian Shores, Exil’d by Fate’. ¹⁸ For comparison: Ogilby: ‘Driven by fate’, Dryden ‘forc’d by Fate’; Trapp: ‘Exil’d by Fate’. ¹⁹ For comparison: Dryden: ‘From whence the Race of Alban Fathers come, / And the long Glories of Majestick Rome’; Pitt: ‘Hence the fam’d Latin line, and senates come, / And the proud triumphs, and the tow’rs of Rome’; Ogilby: ‘whence, Latine Originalls / The Alban fathers and Romes lofty walls’; Trapp is closer to the Latin: ‘Whence sprung the Latin Progeny, the Kings / Of Alba, and the Walls of Tow’ring Rome’.

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of Ogilby (1649, revised 1654) and Trapp (1718–20).²⁰ A glance through Graver’s lists of what he scrupulously labels ‘possible borrowings’ from these four translators shows that the parallels with Ogilby and Trapp are as numerous as those with Dryden and Pitt. Trapp may have been particularly useful, since his blank verse translation cleaves more closely to the literal sense of the Latin than do the other three, which makes it a good crib. Samuel Johnson observed of Trapp’s translation that it ‘may continue its existence as long as it is the clandestine refuge of schoolboys’ (Johnson 2009, p. 197). Wordsworth’s translation appears as a late example of the tradition of translations of the Aeneid in either heroic couplets or blank verse, a tradition that goes back to Douglas and Surrey in the early sixteenth century and turns into a regular stream through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After Wordsworth, the later nineteenth century sees a dissolution of this tradition into a variety of attempts either to return to older forms or to find new forms for the Englishing of Virgil. Time had given the fourteener, used in the sixteenth-century Phaer–Twyne translation of the Aeneid (Phaer 1987), its own archaic resonance, which was exploited by William Morris in his 1876 alliterative translation, complete with compound epithets and kennings. John Conington, Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford and author of the major nineteenth-century English commentary on the Aeneid, produced a ballad translation of the Aeneid in the metre of Scott’s Marmion. In 1853 the Irish classical scholar and physician James Henry, author of a massive and idiosyncratic collection of notes on the poem called the Aeneidea, published in Dresden, in My Book, a translation of Aeneid 1–6 in a variety of metres, loosely Pindaric, under the title ‘Six Photographs of the Heroic Times’. An uncertainty as to what metre might be appropriate for an Aeneid for the present age (an age of photography, indeed) follows a century and a half in which Virgil could be comfortably packaged in the two standard metres for epic poems in English, heroic couplets and blank verse. There is something puzzling about Wordsworth’s choice of the rhyming couplet rather than blank verse for his translation. The couplet is associated particularly with the neoclassical poetry from which Wordsworth was trying to distance himself throughout his career. His own explanation to Lord Lonsdale for his choice of metre (in the letter of 5 February 1824, quoted above)—which is that the attractions of the sound of English verse need to ease the remoteness of the matter of ancient poetry—is not entirely persuasive. One might tentatively suggest two alternative or additional explanations. First, the choice of heroic couplets takes the literary competition on to Dryden’s own ground: Wordsworth will show how the form of what had established itself as the classic English Aeneid can accommodate a very different lexicon, syntax, sound, and verse movement. Secondly, to have adopted blank verse might have moved Wordsworth

²⁰ For surveys of the English tradition, see Conington 1861 and Burrow 1997.

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too deep into the gravitational field of Milton. My impression is that Wordsworth’s Aeneid is not in fact all that Miltonic and, where it is, this is often because Milton is himself imitating Virgilian phrasing rather closely.²¹ So Kevin Doherty, comparing Dryden’s and Wordsworth’s versions of Aeneas’s dream of the ghost of Hector in Aeneid 2, observes that Dryden’s lacks ‘the Miltonic overtone that Wordsworth adds (of Satan addressing the fallen Beelzebub the first shocked instant in Hell)’ (Doherty is referring here to Paradise Lost 1.84–7: ‘If thou beest he—but Oh how fallen! how changed / From him!—who, in the happy realm of light, / Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine / Myriads’).²² This is undoubtedly close to Wordsworth’s Aeneid, 1.370–2: ‘A spectacle how pitiably sad! / How chang’d from that returning Hector, clad / In glorious spoils, Achilles’ own attire!’: but then Milton’s Satan closely adapts, and at one point translates, Aeneas’s Latin (ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo / Hectore qui redit exuuias indutus Achilli, Verg. A. 2.274–5). Colin Burrow, to make the point that Wordsworth cannot escape from the dominance of Miltonic vocabulary, notes that ‘Laocoon’s serpent ends like the tail of Milton’s Sin “In folds voluminous and vast” (2.275; cf. Paradise Lost 2.652)’ (Paradise Lost 2.651–2, ‘But ended foul in many a scaly fold / Voluminous and vast’).²³ But Milton’s Sin, modelled in the first instance on Virgil’s Scylla (Verg. A. 3.426–8), is also a version of the serpents that attack Laocoon (pars cetera pontum / pone legit sinuatque immensa uolumina terga, ‘The rest of their bodies ploughed the waves behind them, their backs winding, coil upon measureless coil’: Verg. A. 2.207–8, trans. West 1990). The question is inevitably asked, why did Wordsworth abandon his translation project? There are the difficulties identified by Wordsworth himself, of attempting a ‘literal’ translation and of denying himself the path of ‘compensation’ (substituting for ornaments lost from the Latin ornaments of the English translator’s own making). There are, undoubtedly, awkwardnesses in the English, and there is an unfortunate tendency to the flat and flabby in renderings of the sententious and pithy in Virgil (where Dryden scores), for example ‘Precipitation works with desperate charms; / It seems a lovely thing to die in Arms’ (2.430–1) for furor iraque mentem / praecipitat, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis (Verg. A. 2.316–17); ‘For safety hoping not, the vanquish’d have / The best of safety, in a noble grave’ (2.476–7) for una salus uictis nullam sperare salutem (Verg. A. 2.354); or ‘and should I lie forlorn / ²¹ Although Bush 1937, p. 15 opines: ‘In his Virgilian translations . . . Wordsworth was at least as pseudo-Miltonic as Dryden’. See also Doherty 1961, p. 216: ‘A pseudo-Miltonic element creeps into other verses in the form of strained etymological usages: “Graced with redundant hair, Iopas sings”, 1.1021 (cf. Laodamia 59 ‘Redundant are thy locks’); “Rosy Lucifer, prevenient to the day”, 2.1068; “Aeneas, much revolving through the night . . . Who ruled the uncultured region . . . ”, 1.414–16.’ ²² Doherty 1961, p. 216. ²³ Burrow 1997, p. 33. Cf. also ‘Why? though I seem of a prodigious waist, / I am not so voluminous, and vast, / But there are lines, wherewith I might b’ embrac’d’ (Ben Jonson, ‘My Answer: The Poet to the Painter’, 1–2); and ‘That, of rude form, his uncouth members shows, / Looks horrible, and frowns with his rough brows; / His monstrous tail in many a fold and wind, / Voluminous and vast, curls up behind’ (Christopher Pitt, Vida’s Art of Poetry 3.487–9).

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Of sepulture, the thought may well be borne’ (2.866–7) for facilis iactura sepulcri (Verg. A. 2.646). Other reasons that have been suggested for the abandonment of the translation include the stumbling block of the heroic couplet (Doherty 1961), or Wordsworth’s reluctance to undertake a version of the Dido tragedy, the next book to which he would have come: that would have required a full treatment of sexual passion that would have aroused unwelcome memories of his youthful affair with Annette Vallon (Spiegelman 1974, p. 104). And one should not underestimate the cramping effect of the incubus of Coleridge, whose needling criticisms begin with the very first words of the translation that are Wordsworth’s own, after the first couplet lifted from Christopher Pitt. Coleridge (quoted in Graver 1998, p. 181) notes, on line 3, ‘A Fugitive of Fate’, the phrase that, I have suggested above, marks a Latinizing departure from the tradition of Aeneid translations: ‘A Fugitive of Fate, were it less dubious English, seems to give the sense of fato profugus, urged by propelling fate? By destiny propelled? A fated Fugitive?’ This is just the first of the ‘unenglishisms’ that Coleridge notes in the translation.²⁴ From the beginning Coleridge has Wordsworth on the run.²⁵ Even if ultimately judged a failure, Wordsworth’s version of Aeneid 1–3 sheds an interesting light on some of the larger questions about translating a text remote in time but canonical within the European tradition. First, Wordsworth is fully aware of the competing demands of ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ approaches to translation, which he attempts to negotiate with tact, if not with complete success. Secondly, Wordsworth engages consciously, and in a spirit of competition, with the prior tradition of English translations of the Aeneid, accepting that the most recent translation cannot simply wish away earlier ones as if they did not exist, not least because they continue to exist in the memories of his readers. The act of translation is never the product of an unmediated contact between the linguistic and cultural worlds of the source text and the translating text, and this is all the more true when there is already a line of prior translations of the source text into the cultural world of the translator. Finally and not least, Wordsworth’s translation is engaged not only with a prior history of translations of Virgil but with a wider history of reception in both the literary and the academic spheres, a history of which Wordsworth’s own non-translational poetic activity forms an important part. That activity, as manifested for example in Wordsworth’s Laodamia, partakes in cultural translation in a wider sense.

²⁴ Coleridge, on line 1.279 in Wordsworth’s Aeneid: ‘There are unenglishisms here & there in this translation of which I remember no instance in your own poems, one or two in the Descriptive Sketches excepted.’ ²⁵ Coleridge’s negative judgement is seconded by one of the few recent discussions of Wordsworth’s translation; see Caldwell 2008, pp. 193–9.

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22 Epic Failures Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian Translations of the Aeneid Zara Martirosova Torlone

nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus interpres. As a true translator you will take care not to translate word for word. Horace, Ars poetica

In one of his letters to a friend, Nikolai Gogol gave the following ecstatic reaction to Vasilii Zhukovskii’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey: The appearance of the Odyssey will be an epoch. The Odyssey is definitely a perfect work for all ages . . . Now the translation of the very first poetic creation is occurring in the language which is fuller and richer than all the European languages. Zhukovskii’s whole literary life was a preparation for this work. His verses had to acquire experience in his own works and translations from the poets of all nations and languages in order to be able to convey the eternal Homeric verse . . . But something miraculous happened. It is not a translation, it is a re-creation, re-building, resurrection of Homer. The translation leads us even more into ancient life than the original.¹

Vasilii Zhukovskii, a prominent romantic poet in nineteenth-century Russia, translated Homer’s Odyssey in 1842–9. This translation, like Nikolai Gnedich’s 1829 translation of the Iliad, became canonical and has been read generation after generation, contributing to the formation of a Russian poetic vernacular. While Homer took strong root in Russia through these excellent translations of Gnedich and Zhukovskii, the fate of Virgil was very different. Mikhail Gasparov observes: Virgil did not have much luck in Russia. They neither knew nor loved him: ‘reshaped’ Aeneids of various authors were more familiar to the Russian reader than the real Aeneid. At the ¹ Visit http://feb-web.ru/feb/gogol/texts/ps0/ps8/ps8-236-.htm (last accessed 9 January 2014).

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beginning it was the disgust engendered by the gymnasium education, which hindered closeness to Virgil, then it was the language barrier. The poems in which narrative is everything can please in translation; but the poems in which each word is alive and resounding (and that is Virgil) demand a translator who is a language maker, and that is rare. Gnedich became that translator for Homer, for Virgil there was none. None, because the romantic 19th century, dreaming about natural and spontaneous poetry, did not like the civilized Roman classics and preferred the Greek one to it.²

This lack of interest in Virgil on Russian soil Gasparov mostly blames on the absence of canonical Russian translations of Virgil, especially the Aeneid. There have been several attempts at translating the whole Roman epic into Russian, four of which are most notable and significant. In the eighteenth century Vasilii Petrov, the court poet of Catherine the Great, was the first man of letters to undertake this monumental task. His translation, however, although highly praised by Catherine and the newly established Russian Academy, was ridiculed by the educated elite as a feeble shadow of the great Roman poem. Petrov’s main focus was on Dido as a metaphor for Catherine and the idea of dux femina facti. While this version makes for an interesting study in translation as ideology, it failed to convey to the Russian public the poetic quality of Virgil’s epic. No further attempt at translating the whole epic happened until the late nineteenth century; this was undertaken by a prominent Russian poet, Afanasii Fet, who, together with a Russian philosopher, Vladimir Solov’ev, attempted to finally bring the Aeneid to the Russian reading public. While this translation was received much more favourably, it still did not acquire the desired canonical status. Valerii Briusov, one of the founders of Russian symbolism and an accomplished translator, devoted most of his life to yet another translation of the Aeneid, but also fell short of the mark because the final version of his translation exhibited many ‘foreignizing’ tendencies, which rendered the text almost unreadable. The fourth translation was accomplished during the Soviet era by Sergei Osherov, a classical scholar who wanted to bring the Aeneid to Russian readers in the most accessible language. Zhukovksii sought to translate only an excerpt from the Aeneid, and his translation happened after Petrov and long before other poets and translators attempted to translate the whole poem. It also occurred long before Zhukovskii translated the Odyssey and it was the first attempt to translate the Roman epic in dactylic hexameters, the metre of the original Latin text. He began the translation in May 1822 and published it in fragments in the journal Poliarnaia Zvezda (Northern Star) in 1823 under the title ‘The Death of Priam’. The translation subsequently became known as ‘The Destruction of Troy’ (‘Razrushenie Troi’). ² Gasparov 1979, p. 5. This text can also be found in the introduction to the collected works of Virgil in Russian, for which visit http://www.philology.ru/literature3/gasparov-79.htm (last accessed 4 October 2013). Unless otherwise indicated all the translations from Russian are mine.

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In the following pages I would like to ponder over, and possibly answer, the following questions: Why did Zhukovskii choose to translate only the second book of the Aeneid? Why did he not subsequently undertake the translation of the whole epic but direct his efforts instead to the translation of the Odyssey, which, even on his deathbed, he considered his poetic masterpiece?³ Furthermore, I would like to compare a sizable part of Zhukovskii’s translation with the same passage from the post-Zhukovskii translations of Afanasii Fet and Valerii Briusov, two prominent Russian poets, finally drawing some conclusions about the quality and canonical status of these translations. Unlike Zhukovskii’s translation of the Odyssey, that of the Aeneid was made directly from the original: indeed it made more sense for him to undertake translating the Roman epic, since he could read Latin. The translation appears to date from the period in Zhukovskii’s life when he was employed in St Petersburg as the personal tutor of Grand Duchess Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas I. Many of Zhukovskii’s most esteemed translations, including those from Goethe, were written as practical language exercises for Alexandra. It seems likely that ‘The Destruction of Troy’ was one of these; this may explain why he did not pursue the project further. ‘The Destruction of Troy’ was also the first Russian attempt at translating the Aeneid in hexameters. The choice of the second book of the Aeneid was perhaps not the most obvious one for a Western reader to make, although there have been instances in English poetry of choosing specifically this portion of the text for a partial translation. In 1620 the republican politician Thomas Wroth published in London ‘The Destruction of Troy, or the Acts of Æneas, Translated out of the Second Booke of the Æneads of Virgil’; and Sir John Denham’s ‘The Destruction of Troy: An Essay upon the Second Book of Virgil’s Aeneis’ was first published in 1656.⁴ A. N. Egunov, in his formative study of Homer’s translations into Russian, points out the popularity of this particular story in Russia. In 1287 Guido delle Colonne wrote in Latin prose a Historia destructionis Troiae; subsequently this account made its way into Russian literature and acquired a fate of its own. The oldest translation of this narrative into Russian goes back to the sixteenth century, although a complete translation appears rarely. The notable fact is, however, that, as Egunov points out, in the sixteenth century ancient Rus’ had the same Trojan cycle accounts available for reading as did Western Europe.⁵ Zhukovskii’s choice of this particular part of the Aeneid, however, is most noteworthy. In 1822 the victory over Napoleon was still fresh in everybody’s mind.

³ In an unpublished paper delivered at the Symposium Cumanum in 2014, Susanna Braund observes: ‘We can perhaps see his Aeneid as an early try-out of the hexameter technique to which he [Zhukovskii] returned later. And we can likely attribute his preference of Homer to Virgil to the general tendency among the Romantic poets to privilege Greek culture over Latin. Zhukovskii’s extensive connections with the German intelligentsia and literary circles are very likely to have affected his tastes in this matter’ (Braund 2014, p. 5). I want to thank Susanna Braund for allowing me to use it in this paper. ⁴ Ibid. ⁵ See Egunov 1964, p. 23.

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That victory was also a bitter-sweet one, since it was closely linked with the burning of Moscow in 1812, when, to Napoleon’s chagrin, his army marched into one of Russia’s capitals only to find it abandoned and in flames. The escape of Aeneas from a Troy consumed by fire might have resonated in the minds of Russian readers with impressive force. Aeneas’s claim to greatness was built on unspeakable loss and the sacrifice of his original identity. By the same token Moscow had to be rebuilt from scratch, resurrected from ashes, and made to thrive again: the whole generation of Russian intellectuals, including Zhukovskii, saw that event as identityaltering and connected it with the subsequent rise of national consciousness and conscience. The choice of translation had an unmistakable patriotic subtext, which Zhukovskii was attracted to at least temporarily before his attention fully turned to Homer. I would like to consider the quality of Zhukovskii’s translation using one of the most dramatic passages of Book 2: the one describing the confrontation between Priam and Pyrrhus before the latter’s murder of the Trojan king, which presents distinct translational challenges in prosody and diction to convey the tension and effect of the Virgilian text. Virgil’s lines read as follows (with Fitzgerald’s translation): hic Priamus, quamquam in media iam morte tenetur non tamen abstinuit nec voci iraeque pepercit: ‘at tibi pro scelere’, exclamat, ‘pro talibus ausis di, si qua est caelo pietas quae talia curet, persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant debita, qui nati coram me cernere letum fecisti et patrios foedasti funere vultus. at non ille, satum quo te mentiris, Achilles talis in hoste fuit Priamo; sed iura fidemque supplicis erubuit corpusque exsangue sepulcro reddidit Hectoreum meque in mea regna remisit’. sic fatus senior telumque imbelle sine ictu coniecit, rauco quod protinus aere repulsum, et summo clipei nequiquam umbone pependit. cui Pyrrhus: ‘referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis Peliadae genitori. illi mea tristia facta degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento. nunc morere’. (Verg. A. 2.533–50) Now Priam, in the very midst of death, Would neither hold his peace nor spare his anger. ‘For what you’ve done, for what you’ve dared,’ he said, ‘If there is care in heaven for atrocity, May the gods render fitting thanks, reward you As you deserve. You forced me to look on At the destruction of my son: defiled A father’s eyes with death. That great Achilles

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You claim to be the son of—and you lie— Was not like you to Priam, his enemy; To me who threw upon his mercy He showed compunction, gave me back for burial The bloodless corpse of Hektor, and returned me To my own realm.’ The old man threw his spear With feeble impact; blocked by the ringing bronze, It hung there harmless from the jutting boss. Then Pyrrhus answered: ‘You will report the news To Pelides, my father; don’t forget My sad behavior, the degeneracy Of Neoptolemus. Now die.’

The two most important Russian translations after Zhukovskii illustrate, with the help of this passage, why the poem has completely escaped the attention and interest of the Russian reader. Below I quote Fet’s (1888) and Briusov’s (1933) translations of this excerpt. I then compare them with Zhukovskii’s version in order to illustrate his aptness as a translator of ancient epic. Each of the translations contains interlinear and word-by-word English translation—in which, following Susanna Braund’s method,⁶ I use a hyphen wherever a single Russian word needs more words in English: Afanasii Fet, Eneida Vergiliia, 2.533–550 Тут и Приам, хоть уже в половину во власти был смерти, Here Priam, though already by half in the-power he was of-death Не воздержался меж тем, ни слов не жалея, ни гнева. Did-not restrain-himself in the-meanwhile, neither words sparing, nor wrath. ‘Пусть за злодейство тебе, он вскричал, за твое дерзновенье ‘Let for malice to-you—he exclaimed—for your arrogance Боги, коль жалость там есть в небесах, что печется об этом, Let–the-gods, if mercy there is in heaven, which cares for this, Воздадут по делам и тебе по заслугам заплатят, Bestow according-to deeds to-you, according-to merits repay, Что ты заставил меня воочию видеть кончину That you forced me with-my-own-eyes to-see the-demise Сына и запятнал отцовские взоры убийством. Of-my-son and defiled paternal sights with-murder. Но не таков Ахиллес, от которого, лжешь, что родился, But not such [was] Achilles, from whom, you-lie, you were-born Был для Приама врага; а почтил и права, и надежды Was for Priam the-enemy; but he-respected both the-rights and the-hopes Умолявшего и бездыханное выдал мне тело Of-the-suppliant and breathless he-gave to-me corpse Гектора для похорон и меня отпустил в мое царство.’ ⁶ Braund 2010.

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Of-Hector for the-funeral and me he-let-back into my kingdom.’ Это сказавши, старик копьем невоинственным кинул That having-said, the-old-man with-the-spear unwarlike threw Без размаха; оно сейчас же глухою отбито Without swinging; it rightaway by-the impervious repelled Медью, посверху щита на горбине безвредно повисло. Brass, above the-shield on the-knob harmless it-hung. Пирр ему: ‘вот передашь родителю это Пелиду; Pyrrhus to him: ‘then you-will-convey to-the-parent this Pelides Вестником ты и пойдешь; рассказать о делах моих грустных As-a-messenger you also will-go; to-narrate of deeds mine sad И о выродке ты Неоптолеме припомни, And of the-misfit you Neoptolemus mention, Ныне умри.’ Now die.’

As one can see even from the interlinear English rendition, the translation stays remarkably faithful to the original and even tries to follow the Latin word order. But its shortcomings are also obvious. First of all, it fails to convey the impact and passion of the Virgilian text, the unspeakable sorrow of the father who has just witnessed the bloody murder of his own son, and his despair in his darkest hour. Secondly, the translation does not have the natural flow of a Russian poetic text. Some word choices are simply bewildering. While the word vultus in Latin is indeed plural, in Russian the choice of the plural взоры (‘glances’) is confusing, as the poetic plural and the idea of defiling the eyesight of the father through the murder of his son is not conveyed. The word ‘горбина’ used to describe the knob of the shield is simply incomprehensible and hard to visualize. The whole exchange between Pyrrhus and Priam lacks the passion and the poetic impulse of the original text. Pyrrhus’s selfidentification as degenerem is translated as выродок, which does not have the same connotation of moral degradation. Fet’s failure in his translation is undoubtedly surprising. Afanasii Fet (1820–92) was a major poetic figure of the 1840s–1850s period, when prose was paramount.⁷ He was a meticulous craftsman of Russian verse. His poetry abounds in imagery and he has an ear keenly attuned to the musicality of the verse (not surprisingly, many of his poems were set to music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov among others). Furthermore, even in his early poetry the interest in classical themes is apparent. It seemed that he would make the most natural choice for a translator of the Aeneid. Afanasii Fet, in the introduction to his translation (Fet 1888), offers the main reason for his ambitious undertaking by noting that ‘it is strange to see a detailed

⁷ Peace 1989, p. 189.

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analysis of a famous classical author, while Russian literature does not even have a translation of this author’. What is interesting in this observation is that Fet refuses to acknowledge any previous attempts at translating Virgil, except for a brief observation, at the end of his introduction, to the effect that, every time when he consulted his predecessors hoping to solve some of his difficulties, he was always left disappointed.⁸ The only translation Fet actually acknowledges and considers acceptable is Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’. His own work he jubilantly declares to be very close to Zhukovskii’s, in that both are ‘close to the original’.⁹ However, he also finds an insurmountable flaw with Zhukovskii’s translation: it does not follow the line numbering of the original. He considers such licence unacceptable, especially in light of Zhukovskii’s canonical translation of the Odyssey, where the number of the lines is preserved exactly as it is in the Greek text. The next full translation of the Aeneid did not happen until Valerii Briusov (1873–1924)—who, as already mentioned, was one of the founders of Russian symbolism and an extremely authoritative figure on the Russian literary landscape at the turn of the nineteenth century—embarked again on this uneasy task in his early poetic career and continued his attempts at bringing Virgil to Russian readers all his life. In his seminal essay devoted to Briusov’s translation of the Aeneid, Gasparov tries to formulate the main concerns that any work of translation elicits:¹⁰ So: letter or spirit? These are to a degree the polar opposites of the translator’s work. But between these two poles there is an innumerable plentitude of shades and half-shades, approximating this or that attempt either in the first case—to the letter, or in the second case—to the spirit, now to a copy, now to a creatively restored portrait.

In order to understand Briusov’s valiant but misguided attempt at translating the Aeneid, one has to view it as an integral part of his whole literary career. He made his debut as a translator as early as in the 1890s, when he produced translations of French symbolist poetry (Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphan Mallarmé, and Maurice Maeterlinck). His further publications included translations of Poe, Hugo, Racine, Molière, Byron, Goethe, and Wilde (to name a few). As for the Aeneid, he saw it as one of the most attractive challenges for his poetic talent. Briusov’s translations from Latin started early and were his first attempts to make a literary name for himself. Under the tutelage of the renowned philologist V. G. Appelrot, Briusov began his work on the Aeneid in his gymnasium days and worked steadily on it from 1895 on.¹¹ In 1899 he translated in toto the second and fourth books; in 1913 he prepared more books (as many as three, according to some testimonies), which he destroyed after some comments from specialists such as F. F. Zelinskii and V. I. Ivanov— only to begin translating all over again.¹² Briusov loved Virgil and the translation of the

⁸ Fet 1888, p. x. ⁹ Ibid., p. vi. ¹¹ Ibid. ¹² Ibid., p. 92.

¹⁰ Gasparov 1971, p. 89.

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Aeneid became one of his life’s tasks. He worked on his translation until his death in 1924, but he only ever completed the first seven books. We have as many as seven versions, which belong to different phases of Briusov’s career as a translator. Gasparov has analysed in detail all the different phases that led Briusov to the final version of his translation, which acquired such a bad reputation on account of its ‘literalism’ (or ‘bukvalism’, from bukva, which means in Russian ‘letter of the alphabet’). What interests me most in the context of this study is why Briusov, a man of flawless poetic taste and a seasoned translator whose renderings of French symbolists and of Armenian poetry remain canonical to this day, could have so completely failed at translating Virgil.¹³ Barry Scherr observes: ‘Briusov . . . strove so hard to convey every word, every syntactical structure, and every formal device with absolute faithfulness to the original that the Russian text is virtually unreadable—and this despite his extensive experience as a translator.’¹⁴ The final version of Briusov’s translation that we have today, completed by Sergei Solov’ev (Briusov and Solov’ev 1933), was in fact preceded by one that was entirely free of this ‘literalism’ and its contrived and somewhat puzzling phrasing. Briusov, having started with free translation, moved towards trying to be more precise in his phrasing and imagery and finally to imitating the original even in his use of grammatical forms and word order; at times he introduced confusing Latinisms.¹⁵ Let us now consider in this light Briusov’s rendition of the passage describing Priam’s and Pyrrhus’s showdown in order to better illustrate the reason for his translation’s failure. Briusov, Eneida, 2.533–50 Приам тогда, хотя уже сам на грани был смерти, Priam then, although already himself on the-edge he-was of-death, Не воздержался, не дал ни гласу, ни гневу пощады. Not restrained-himself, not gave either to-his voice or wrath quarter. ‘Пусть за злодейство тебе,—восклицает,—за эти дерзанья ‘Let for malice to-you,—he-exclaims,—for these darings Боги, коль на небе блюдущая то справедливость, Let-the-Gods, if [there is] in heaven watching-over that justice, Мздой воздадут заслуженной и пусть отплатят наградой With-payment recompense earned and let-them repay with-prize Должной,—тебе, кто меня лицезреть заставил погибель Due to-you, who me to-behold forced the-undoing Сына, кто осквернил отцовский взор убиеньем.

¹³ It is noteworthy that in 1944 Dmitri Mikhalchi published a short note on ancient literature in Russian translation, in which he stated: ‘The approximate rendition of Virgil in pre-revolutionary editions has been replaced by the new excellent translation of the Aeneid by that refined and exacting poet Valeri Briusov, with the co-operation of Sergei Solovyov’ (Mikhalchi 1944, p. 63). Briusov’s translation unfortunately did not live up to these expectations. ¹⁴ Scherr 2008, p. 244. ¹⁵ Ibid.

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of-my-son, who defiled the-paternal gaze with-killing. Нет, не таков Ахилл, от которого лжешь, что рожден ты, No, was-not such Achilles, from whom you-lie that were-born you, К Приаму был, врагу; умолявшего—права и чести Towards Priam was, the-enemy; of-the-begging-man—his-right and his-honour Он устыдился, он выдал бескровное Гектора тело He became-ashamed, he gave-out the-bloodless Hektor’s body Для погребения мне и отпустил в мое царство.’ For burial to-me and he-let-[me]-back into my kingdom’. Это сказавши, старик небранным копьем, без удара, That having-said, the-old-man with-unwarlike spear, without a-blow Бросил и, хриплою тотчас оно отраженное медью, Threw and, by-hoarse right-away it repelled brass Тщетно на самой повисло высокой щита середине. In-vain on the-very it-hangs highest of-the-shield middle. Пирр ему: ‘Передай же об этом, ступай же, как вестник. Pyrrhus to-him: ‘Convey then this, go now, as a-messenger. Прямо к Пелиду отцу; о моих прискорбных деяньях, Directly to Pelides my-father; about my sorrowful deeds, О Неоптолеме выродке там рассказать не забудь же, About Neoptolemus, the-misfit to-narrate do-not forget, Ныне умри!’ Now die!’

In the introduction to the translation, Briusov defines very concisely his task as translator:¹⁶ As for translations, one can briefly define the task of translators by saying that their work will replace the original for readers. What follows from this is that such a translation cannot be limited to a paraphrase—even if a correct one—of the plot. Nowhere else is form as closely connected to content as in the writings of the ancient writers, especially poets.

In Briusov’s opinion, the work of translation must become an integral part of the literature into whose language the foreign text is translated. Thus the work of the original fades, replaced by the translation that now, in form and content, becomes part of a new literary canon. Briusov considered all previous translations, including the one by Fet, to be inadequate because he was preoccupied with the faithful rendition of Virgilian ‘sound technique’ and poetic diction. He laments that Russian translators ‘dumbed down Virgil: spelled out the metaphors, which seemed to them too daring, replaced hints with direct expressions, placed the words in the correct grammatical order, but they did not pay any attention

¹⁶ Cited in Gasparov 1971, p. 122.

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to the way Virgil rendered the sound’.¹⁷ Following his desire to stay true to the poetic ‘music’ of the original, Briusov even retained the original spelling of the Latin names, rejecting the accepted Russian rendition of them. Gasparov observes that, ‘in striving to translate for the Russian person the Latin worldview, Briusov . . . transfers into the Russian language the traits of the Latin language’.¹⁸ It appears that, despite his ambition of ‘replacing’ the original with his translation, Briusov achieved the exactly opposite result, by reminding his readers that what they were reading was in fact a translation, not an original work of poetry in Russian. A few examples of that can be taken from our passage. The words ausis in Latin Briusov translated as дерзанья, which in Russian can have a distinct positive connotation instead of the intended idea of arrogant behaviour. Virgil’s nec voci iraeque pepercit Briusov renders as ‘gave no quarter to his voice or to his wrath’. While it is clear that Priam did not spare his voice or his wrath in rebuking Pyrrhus, the choice of a phrase like ne dat’ poschady to apply to the voice, or to wrath, simply leaves the reader bewildered. This phrase is not idiomatic in Russian, nor is it even correctly used here. It is, however, a precise translation of the Latin verb ‘pepercit’. The adjective imbelle Briusov translates as nebrannyi, which, although the exact calque of the Latin word, is somewhat archaic and does not convey the idea of harmlessness of the weapon because of Priam’s old age. All that this word does is indicate that the spear is not to be used in battle. These are of course minor details that present a challenge for any translator. The biggest problem of Briusov’s translation, as also manifested by this passage, is that he chooses a word order that is completely incomprehensible to a Russian reader. He constantly suspends the verb—a procedure that, while expected and natural in Latin poetry, is completely artificial and alienating in Russian. An example of that is the postponement of ‘he became-ashamed’ and the confusing construction subordinated to that verb. It is not clear whether the verb governs ‘the begging man’ or the ‘his right and honour’, nor does the punctuation help here. It is obvious that Briusov tried to follow the Latin construction with the ‘begging man’ in the genitive and iura fidemque in the accusative, as direct objects of erubuit. While Russian has the same cases in the text, the syntax is extremely convoluted and obscures the understanding of the text. The result of this approach was an intentional ‘foreignizing’ of the translation, because Briusov in fact wanted his Aeneid to sound alien to his readers. While the desire to retain certain features of the original is appropriate because these features would demarcate differences between the foreign and the receiving cultures, Briusov failed to assimilate the text to any values of the Russian reader. Briusov, it seems, ‘was not translating poetry, he was translating poetics’.¹⁹ This practice clearly did not help him with the Aeneid; Gasparov called it ‘ill-begotten’

¹⁷ Briusov 1933, p. 40.

¹⁸ Gasparov 1971, pp. 107–8.

¹⁹ Gasparov 1997, p. 122.

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(злополучная), and that opinion is in tune with the general assessment of Briusov’s translation.²⁰ Briusov felt, as Gasparov observes, that the most precious aspects of any literary legacy are what makes it unique, nationally specific, not what appeals to a reader in the receiving culture.²¹ Attention to culturally specific features is manifest already in Briusov’s pre-revolutionary Roman novels The Altar of Victory and Jupiter Overthrown (published consecutively, in 1911–12 and 1912–13), which he oversaturated with details aimed at reproducing the exotic and foreign quality of the life and events portrayed. Sometimes the effect bordered on the absurd, such as when a lamp was called lutserna (< Lat. lucerna), a pool of water pistsina (< Lat. piscina), and a dagger pugion (< Lat. pugio). The irony of such devotion to lexical Latinization is that the reader eventually becomes completely lost and cannot even visualize the verbal descriptions in front of her. The goal, however, is not to make the text more comprehensible, but to make it actually less so.²² The same tendency is evident in Briusov’s translations, as the passage reproduced here testifies. Gasparov calls it effect otdalennosti (‘the effect of distancing’), aimed at producing a distinct feeling of not belonging to the cultural context of the work but of looking at it rather from a distance, as an outsider—almost a voyeuristic effect.²³ Briusov wanted to make sure that the reader understood that the text in front of him was a thing of a past culture.²⁴ It is time now to turn to Zhukovskii’s translation and to consider it in the light of all the failures that preceded and followed him (see Zhukovskii 1992 for the edition of the ‘Destruction of Troy’). Zhukovskii—to the consternation of all other translators, as we have seen in Fet’s case—shrunk the text to 794 lines instead of the original 804; and this is how he rendered the passage under examination here: Zhukovskii, Aeneid, pp. 266–7 Тут закипело Приамово сердце. Сам погибая, Then boiled-up Priam’s heart. Himself dying Он не стерпел столь великого горя и гневно воскликнул:

²⁰ Ibid., p. 128. ²¹ Gasparov 1971, p. 105. ²² Ibid. ²³ This ‘foreignizing’ tendency, as Braund has illustrated, was not characteristic solely of Briusov’s translation. The translations of the Aeneid, in French, by Pierre Klossowski in 1905–2001 and, in English, by William Morris in 1876 and by Frederick Ahl in 2007 were also examples of ‘foreignizing’, or ‘defamiliarization’, as Ahl phrases it. See Braund 2010. I am thankful to Susanna Braund for kindly sending me the early version of that article. ²⁴ Briusov’s ‘foreignizing’ practices, however, despite their glaring shortcomings, had famous followers. One of them was Vladimir Nabokov, with his translation of Evgenii Onegin into English. In his commentary to Onegin, Nabokov claims: ‘The only concern has to be textual precision, while the music is allowed only to the degree that it does not weaken the clarity of the meaning’ (Единственной заботой должна быть текстуальная точность, а музыка допустима лишь в той мере, насколько она не ослабляет ясности смысла) cited in Zverev 2001, 378–9. Although Nabokov never directly named Briusov as his role model, except that he (ironically) calls Briusov’s Virgil ‘withered’ (вялый), his translation of Onegin is clearly an unfortunate product of Briusov’s method, where the rhythm, ‘the music’ of the original poem, is sacrificed to the most tediously followed ‘letter’ of the text. Nabokov’s Onegin, with its heavy and awkward English phrasing, is as much a challenge for the reader as is Briusov’s barely readable Aeneid.

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He could-not tolerate such-a great sorrow and angrily exclaimed: ‘О чудовище! Боги тебе, святотатный убийца, ‘O monster! Gods to-you, sacrilegious murderer, Боги—если живет в небесах правосудная жалость— Gods—if dwells in heaven righteous pityМзду ниспошлют; по заслуге получишь награду, губитель, The-recompense will-send-down; according-to [your] merit you-will-receive the-prize, destroyer, Ты предо мной моего растерзавший последнего сына! You, in-front-of me my last having-torn-apart son! То ли Ахилл, от тебя названьем отца поносимый, Was it what Achilles, by you with the name of-a-father slandered Сделал с Приамом—врагом? Он, краснея, почтил униженье Did to Priam—the-enemy! He, blushing, respected the-humiliation Старца молящего; дал схоронить мне бездушное тело Of-the-suppliant old-man; he-allowed to-bury to-me the-breathless body Гектора—сына и в Трою меня отпустил безобидно.’ of-Hektor, my-son and into Troy me let harmless.’ Так он сказал и копье бессильное слабой рукою So he spoke and spear forceless with-a-weak hand Бросил; оно, ударяся в медь, зазвеневшую глухо, He-threw; it, striking on the-brass, which-resonated muffled Тронуло выгиб щита и на нем без движенья повисло. Touched the-curve of-the-shield and from it without a-movement hung. Яростно Пирр возопил: ‘Иди же с поносной отсюда Angrily Pyrrhus shrieked: ‘Go then with the-report away-from-here Вестью к Пелиду—отцу; не забудь о бесславных деяньях With-the-news to Pelides—the-father; do-not forget about the-gloryless deeds Пирра поведать ему; теперь же умри.’ Of-Pyrrhus to-report to-him; now die.’

While this translation is undoubtedly more archaic than those presented earlier, what it conveys better than both of them is the dramatic nature of this confrontation. Zhukovskii portrays adequately the degree of Priam’s ineffable grief for his slain son as he stands on the threshold of his own death. The names he calls Pyrrhus appeal to the reader because they reflect the monstrous nature of the murder Pyrrhus is about to commit. The syntax, despite the fact that Zhukovskii’s translation is much older than Briusov’s and Fet’s, does not sound strange to the Russian ear. Zhukovskii also chose carefully the verb to describe Pyrrhus’s act (‘tore apart’), conveying the beastly nature of the murder, its inhumane character. He succeeds where the other translators failed, namely at rendering the difficult lines at non ille, satum quo te mentiris, Achilles / talis in hoste fuit Priamo. He uses the Russian participle ponosimyi, making it agree with Achilles and conveying the idea that Achilles would have felt ‘slandered’ by being called the father of such an unworthy son. Zhukovskii also avoids using any

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kind of unusual words to describe the knob of the shield; he merely choses a common and yet poetic noun, vygib (‘curve’), which any reader would easily visualize as the bend in curvature of the middle of the shield. Pyrrhus’s reaction also leaves the reader convinced about the evildoer in this scene. The verb applied to Pyrrhus, vozopil (‘shrieked’), makes Pyrrhus appear irrational, almost insane in his thirst for blood. Zhukovskii managed to render well the tension of the situation, the outrage and empathy that Aeneas, by telling this story, was trying to elicit in his listeners, at the same time keeping the Russian syntax simple and staying faithful to the Latin original. Surprisingly, this translation is quite close to the most recent version of the Aeneid by Sergei Osherov—not a poet, but a Russian classical scholar who undertook his task during the era of ‘socialist realism’ and, while adopting a more liberal approach to the Virgilian text, rendered it significantly more readable to a wider audience.²⁵ It is ironic that two wonderful Russian poets, Fet and Briusov, whose original poetry is read with pleasure and imitated to this day, failed at translating Virgil and that Zhukovskii, a good poet but not one of a similar standing, succeeded, albeit in a limited way. After all, the history of Russian translations of ancient epics showed that it was mostly the poets who felt up to the task. So why was the situation different with Virgil? Venuti observes, in his discussion of the formation of translation practices: The cultural power of translation is uniquely revealed when we consider its role in the canonization of a foreign text in the receiving situation. A translation contributes to this canonizing process by inscribing the foreign text with an interpretation that has achieved currency and in most cases dominance in academic or other powerful cultural institutions . . . At the same time, however, the interpretation that the translator inscribes will also revise the foreign comprehension and evaluation of the text in so far as the translator inevitably puts to work patterns of linguistic usage, literary traditions and effects, and cultural values in the receiving situation, possibly in an effort to address specific readerships. In contributing to the canonicity of a foreign text, the translation leaves neither that text nor the receiving situation unaltered. The foreign text undergoes a radical transformation in which it comes to support a range of meanings and values that may have little or nothing to do with those it supported in the foreign culture.²⁶

The Russian translations of Fet and Briusov, not to mention Petrov’s, did not achieve this degree of symbiosis with the receiving culture. Petrov’s translation clearly failed at appealing to Russian reading culture, although it was the most attuned to ‘inscribing’ the foreign text within contemporary interpretation. However, it did not empower the Russian reader with the ability to interpret and assimilate the foreign aspects of the source text. Fet’s translation failed at making any contemporary connection. Here was Virgil’s text in its most honest and well-intentioned Russian rendition, but it was ‘dead on arrival’, because poetically it was artificial. Briusov’s ²⁵ An analysis of Osherov’s translation can be found in Torlone 2014. ²⁶ Venuti 2008, pp. 29–30.

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text, on the other hand, became so carried away by form and outlandish language that it alienated every poetically attuned Russian eye and ear by rendering the beauty and power of the Virgilian masterpiece through unnatural and bizarre poetic devices. It seems that Zhukovskii, despite some liberties he took with the Latin original, may have achieved canonicity if he had translated the whole poem. It addressed wider readerships, the way his Odyssey did and still does: readerships that did not have a professional interest in Latin but were curious about why Virgil’s poem was a part of the Western literary canon. It accomplished the goal of ‘demystifying’ the foreign text and conveying in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text without alienating the reader. It is too bad that Virgil did not hold as much appeal for Zhukovskii as Homer did. In this sense, indeed, it is true that ‘Virgil did not have much luck in Russia’.

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23 Virgílio Brasileiro A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos Translated by Liza Bolen

The reception of Virgil’s works in Brazil is a story still to be written.¹ The first Brazilian epic—and, according to many critics, the first piece of poetry to appear in Brazilian literature—is the brief, ninety-four-stanza Prosopopeia by Bento Teixeira, written during the sixteenth century—that is, the century of the Portuguese discovery of Brazil—and published in 1601, one year after its author’s death.² Strongly imitating Os Lusíadas, an epic by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões (c.1524–c.1580), this poem pays tribute to the Aeneid, which it imitates directly, too.³ The Aeneid also influences Brazilian epics throughout the eighteenth century; we can see its influence in Caramuru by Santa Rita Durão and in Uraguai by Basílio da Gama, which are both set in Brazil and present native Indians as actors in the narrative. Yet none of Virgil’s works seems to have had as much influence on Brazilian literature in the eighteenth century as the Eclogues, which is at the heart of a literary movement called arcadismo (Arcadianism) that took its inspiration from themes and modes of expression in Virgil’s work. It appears particularly significant that the conspirators behind the Conjuration Mineira, which aimed to free the country from the Portuguese yoke and

¹ A brief overview of Virgil’s influence on Brazilian literature can be found in the article ‘Brasile’, in da Nóbrega 1984: 1, pp. 533–4. Recently Lorenz Rumpf has studied Brazilian Arcadianism and the reworking of Virgilian material by poets such as Cláudio Manuel da Costa; see Rumpf 2016. ² According to Bosi 1983, p. 41, this poem ‘can be considered as a first and awkward example of mannerism in the literature of the colony’. Translations of secondary literature from Brazilian Portuguese were translated into French by me and then into English by Liza Bolen. ³ Camões 1972. I am not aware of any detailed studies of the imitation of Virgil in this epic. Here is a clear example of direct imitation of the Aeneid: the lines E pôde Palas subverter no Ponto / O filho de Oileu por causa leve? (‘And could Pallas submerge in the Ocean / The son of Oileus for such weak reason?’, Teixeira Prosopopeia stanza 49.1–2) are inspired by Pallasne . . . exurere classem / Argiuum atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto / unius ob noxam et furias Aiacis Oilei? (Verg. A. 1.39–41). The poet celebrates his ‘hero’, Jorge d’Albuquerque Coelho, governor of the province of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil, as ‘another pious Trojan’ (outro Troiano Pio, Prosopopeia stanza 27.5)—in other words, another Aeneas.

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to which some Arcadian poets belonged, had chosen an excerpt from Virgil’s first eclogue as their slogan: Libertas quae sera tamen (‘Freedom, yet delayed’, Verg. Ecl. 1.27). These words were later incorporated into the flag of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The work of Virgil, as we can see, plays a fundamental role in some key moments of Brazilian literature and history. Among the Latin classics, Virgil is among those whose work is most frequently translated into Brazilian Portuguese, but the detailed story of the reception of this poet through such translations is also yet to be written. There is, in particular, a complete poetic translation of Virgil’s work in the nineteenth century made by Manuel Odorico Mendes, who called it Virgílio Brasileiro (The Brazilian Virgil). The poetic nature of this translation and the prestige that it currently enjoys in Brazil, after having been harshly criticized earlier, make this volume a unique case in the reception of classics in this country. In this chapter I will present some intriguing features of Odorico Mendes’s translation of Virgil, and then I will point out briefly its direct influence on modern Brazilian literature with the help of an example. By the end of the chapter it will be clear, I hope, that this translator deserves a place of honour in the history of Virgil’s reception in Brazil. But let me start by giving some biographical information on him, since he is almost totally unknown outside Brazil. Manuel Odorico Mendes (24 January 1799–17 August 1864) was a literary figure and a politician from the state of Maranhão who lived under the first and second empire, when Brazil was governed by the Portuguese Emperor Dom Pedro I (1822–31), and then by his Brazil-born son, Dom Pedro II (1831–89).⁴ He founded newspapers and was an active journalist and poet, whose poems were published in newspapers and magazines of his time; his poetic composition ‘Hino à Tarde’ (‘Hymn to the Afternoon’) became famous and admired even by those who dismissed his translations.⁵ In the introduction to his version of the Aeneid, which was published in France (first in 1854, then in 1858), Odorico declares that, as he did not possess the ‘genius indispensable for undertaking an original piece of at least the second order’, he decided to dedicate himself to the translation of the epic that he appreciated most,

⁴ There is no background biography of this translator-poet that is based on serious documentary research and analyses his political role as well as his role as a literary figure in the context of imperial Brazil. Apart from this, there is also a need to research the current location of the manuscripts of his translations. The manuscript of his Iliad was recently discovered at the Museum of the Imperial Palace (Museu da Casa Imperial) in Petrópolis, in Rio de Janeiro; we also know the location of his translations of Voltaire’s tragedies (Mérope and Tancrède). However, the manuscripts of the first version of his Aeneid, of the Brazilian Virgil, and of the Odyssey still need to be located. ⁵ Such as the critic Sílvio Romero; see e.g. ‘the tender “Hino à Tarde” . . . The “Hino à Tarde”, if I am permitted to express a personal opinion, can never be read without a good and nostalgic feeling’ (Romero 1949, p. 32); ‘With regard to the translations of Virgil and Homer attempted by the poet, the greatest severity would not be strong enough to condemn them. Everything there is false, counterfeit, extravagant, impossible’ (ibid., p. 35). On the reception of Odorico Mendes’s translations of Virgil in the nineteenth century, see Vieira 2010, pp. 139–54.

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relying upon his knowledge of the language and of poetry.⁶ To devote himself fully to the translation of Virgil, in a country where he could access sufficient research material, Odorico Mendes settled in France in 1847, in a gesture of renunciation of any political activity, of which he was sick, and of abandonment of his own poetic ambitions. Thus, completely committed to the task of translating his favourite classics, he stayed in Europe from 1847 to 1864, the year of his death. He died in London, during what was meant to be one last visit; he planned to bid the city adieu before returning to Brazil after so many years away. In France he published Virgílio Brasileiro (Mendes 1858), which contained verse translations of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, along with the Latin text and abundant notes and comments. His translations of Homer were published posthumously, the Iliad in 1874 and the Odyssey in 1928. Here are some of the characteristics of his translations of Virgil that I consider the most significant: 1. In his notes, Odorico Mendes sometimes points out similarities between ancient culture and Brazilian culture. At the end of the Georgics, for instance, we find an excursus on apiculture in Brazil. In his last comment on the Eclogues, the translator refers to the sertanejos (the inhabitants of the most isolated rural regions in the North East of the country), who in his day were generally shepherds and who he thought deserved to serve as inspiration for Brazilian pastoral poetry—just as the native Indians, ‘crude, and with quasi-Homeric customs, could supply great portraits to epic poetry’.⁷ Thus Odorico, in his transpositions of the classics, is always concerned with Brazilian reality and with the positive influence that Virgil could have on the literature of a country that, in 1822, had just won its independence from Portugal and had yet to truly assimilate, in its national literary production, genres such as bucolic poetry.⁸ 2. Regarding the Aeneid, the translation is in dialogue with the epic tradition in Portuguese, sometimes reproducing expressions and lines from the epic Os Lusíadas by Camões, which I have already mentioned. On more than one occasion, when Camões imitates passages of the Aeneid, Odorico translates Virgil’s poem through Camões, using the latter as a filter between Virgil and his own translation. In fact, attentive as he is to the stylistic diversity of genres and to what is typical of each, Odorico—apart from sometimes ‘epicizing’ the Portuguese of his Aeneid through Camões’s epic language—seeks to adopt a simpler syntax in his translation of the Eclogues, without using too many inversions; and in his Georgics he applies himself to

⁶ Não possuindo o engenho indispensável para empreender uma obra original ao menos de segunda ordem (Mendes 2016, p. 21). ⁷ Mendes 2008, p. 192. ⁸ On the influence of the first version of the Eneida Brasileira (1854) on the epic Confederação dos Tamoios by Gonçalves de Magalhães (1856) and on Os Timbiras by Gonçalves Dias, see Vieira (2010, pp. 144–5).

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finding the most precise Portuguese word for certain technical terms. In every one of his works, he Latinizes the Portuguese syntax and lexicon, so that the target language evolves under the influence of the source language—a process described at least since Schleiermacher.⁹ Thus his is a translation that is never banal: it creates the sort of ‘strangeness’ that challenges the reader by proposing an often difficult, often nonfluent Portuguese text. As a result, it is a most difficult translation of Virgil into Brazilian Portuguese, sometimes a challenging read even for Brazilian classicists. 3. One of the principles of Odorico Mendes’s translation is variatio; when, for example in the Aeneid, Virgil uses different terms all with a general meaning of ‘cruel’, the translator uses various synonyms in Portuguese, going to great lengths to find unusual terms and Latinisms previously used by classics of the Portuguese language. The search for variation is such that, in the episode of the storm in Book 1 of the Aeneid, while Virgil gives the same noun fluctus five times, in different grammatical forms (fluctus, ll. 107, 111, 120; fluctu, l. 110; fluctibus, l. 113; I am reproducing here the line numbers in the Latin text used by Odorico), Odorico searches for a synonym for ‘wave’ for every occurrence, in a tour de force of lexical richness. In this way he shows awareness that the repetition of a noun with variation in its inflection cannot be reproduced in Portuguese—a language where grammatical cases and their syntactic functions are not marked by suffixes specific to each. Furthermore, when the same line appears in the Georgics and in the Aeneid, Odorico does not translate it the same way; expressions that are repeated within the body of a single work are assigned different versions, as though the translator found it preferable to avoid an impression of repetition and did not perceive, or did not deem important, the intertextual element of Virgil’s texts.¹⁰ The formulaic character of the epic style in the Aeneid is not respected. As a small example of this, consider Messapus equum domitor (‘Messapus, tamer of horses’, Verg. A 7.691, 12.128, and 12.550), which receives a different solution each time. 4. Odorico seeks concision, as eloquently demonstrated by the number of lines in his translations: in the Eclogues, his translations barely exceed the number of lines in the original (with the exception of the translation of the seventh eclogue, which has seventy lines, like the original);¹¹ the first georgic has exactly the same number of lines as the original, 514, and the rest are shorter than their Latin counterparts;¹² and, as for the Aeneid, from Book 8 to the end, the translation has fewer lines

⁹ See Heidermann, 2010, pp. 38–101 (an article penned by Schleiermacher under the title ‘Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens’). ¹⁰ The translator shows that he is aware of repetition, which he avoids; in a note on the Georgics, he says: ‘Some of these verses are repeated in Books 1 and 8 of the Aeneid: I differentiated the choice of terms in their respective translations’ (Mendes 1858, p. 199). ¹¹ Here is a comparison between the number of lines in Virgil and in Mendes: Eclogues 1: 84 in the original  92 in the translation; 2: 73  75; 3: 111 112; 4: 63  65; 5: 90  91; 6: 86  87; 7: 70  70; 8: 109  110; 9: 67  68; 10: 77  78. ¹² Georgics 2: 542 in the original  526 in the translation; Georgics 3: 566  548; Georgics 4: 566  553.

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than the Latin text.¹³ In several of Odorico’s notes, we see him emphasizing that Portuguese can be more concise than other Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian, and at times even more than Latin.¹⁴ Odorico Mendes thus seems involved in a dynamic of emulation that pushes him to prove that Portuguese can be not only as brief as Latin but even more so.¹⁵ This concision is another factor that makes the translation difficult reading; and so does the syntax of certain sentences and the choice of vocabulary. Sometimes we encounter terms for which the particular meaning envisaged by Odorico here can only be found in the most ancient of Portuguese dictionaries. Modern dictionaries are not fully adequate to accompany the reader through the text. 5. When there are expressions in the original that should produce an impression of strangeness or that might have a figurative sense, Odorico also uses unusual expressions in his translation, trying to re-create, for example, the metaphors of the original. To illustrate this, let us consider a very simple example: the beginning of the Georgics, quid faciat laetas segetes, Odorico translates as O que alegre as searas (‘What would make the harvests rejoice’). By using the verb alegrar (‘to rejoice’) in the sense of ‘give vigour’, which is not common in Portuguese,¹⁶ the translator maintains, for the Brazilian reader, the figurative effect that is present in the Latin adjective laetus used in the original: laetus has the multiple meanings of abundant, fertile, vigorous—and, by extension, ‘happy’, as in the Portuguese alegre (see Cicero, De oratore 3.155, where laetas segetes is presented as an example of metaphor).¹⁷ This

¹³ Aeneid 8: 731  728; Aeneid 9: 818  798; Aeneid 10: 908  894; Aeneid 11: 915  885; Aeneid 12: 952  926. ¹⁴ For example, in this note on a passage of Aeneid 1: ‘Our language has been able to translate its beauties in the same number of lines, something that no other living language has yet succeeded in doing, not even the two “sweetest” [mais suaves], Spanish and Italian’ (Mendes 1858, p. 250 = Mendes 2016, p. 54). ¹⁵ Vieira’s article, cited above in n. 5, sets these characteristics in their historical context: Odorico adheres to the translation project of the Portuguese Filinto Elísio, which was the pseudonym of Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (1734–1819). I must also refer here to José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1763–1838), called ‘the patriarch of independence’ for his role in the process of earning Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822. According to him, there would come a day when, thanks to ‘new talents’, the Portuguese language would rival Latin in its audacity and concision (see Malta 2012, p. 226). Audacity and concision are clearly ideals pursued by Odorico Mendes in his translations. ¹⁶ This is probably why the translator, undoubtedly anticipating the surprise of some readers, affirms in a note that the use of the Portuguese word alegrar (‘rejoice’) in the sense of dar viço (‘give vigour’) is ancient Portuguese (Mendes 1858, p. 100). ¹⁷ Tertius ille modus transferendi uerbi late patet, quem necessitas genuit inopia coacta et angustiis, post autem iucunditas delectatioque celebrauit. Nam ut uestis frigoris depellendi causa reperta primo, post adhiberi coepta est ad ornatum etiam corporis et dignitatem, sic uerbi tralatio instituta est inopiae causa, frequentata delectationis. Nam ‘gemmare uitis, luxuriem esse in herbis, laetas segetes’ etiam rustici dicunt ‘The third method in our list, the use of metaphor, is of wide application; it sprang from necessity due to the pressure of poverty and deficiency, but it has been subsequently made popular by its agreeable and entertaining quality. For just as clothes were first invented to protect us against cold and afterwards began to be used for the sake of adornment and dignity as well, so the metaphorical employment of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment. For even country people speak of ‘jewelled vines’, ‘luxurious herbage’, ‘joyful harvests’ (trans. H. Rackham).

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is how Odorico Mendes retains the personification of nature, which is a key element in the representation of nature throughout the Georgics. For Odorico Mendes, one of the difficulties of translating Virgil resides in the ‘audacity of images’.¹⁸ In Book 1 of the Aeneid, for example, et pleno se proluit auro (literally, ‘and he bathed himself in full gold’, l. 739), describes Bitias drinking from a golden cup; to render this, the translator proposes em transbordante / Ouro se ensopa¹⁹ and makes the observation: ‘I kept the audacity of the original.’²⁰ This procedure, which neither explains nor paraphrases the Latin in the translation, is constant; when Virgil, in Odorico’s view, creates surprising and unusual images, the translator competes in audacity by re-creating those surprising and unusual images in Portuguese. 6. Odorico’s translation claims to be poetic. He criticizes paraphrase that passes itself off as translation; his intention is to create, starting from Virgil’s text, a work of poetry in the Portuguese language of Brazil (which explains the subtitle given to his Brazilian Aeneid: Tradução poética da epopeia de Públio Virgílio Maro [Poetic Translation of the Epic of Publius Virgilius Maro]). In the interpretation of Virgil’s poetry, Odorico Mendes draws on ancient and contemporary experts but affirms that the best experts on Virgil, apart from Virgil himself, are the ‘true poets who know how to feel him and imitate him’.²¹ The translator has in mind these poetic imitations (not only in Portuguese but in other languages as well; for example the translation of the Italian Annibale Caro) when he interprets the meaning of certain passages and produces a poetic translation of the original. Odorico Mendes claims to remain faithful to the literal meaning, all the while creating poetic effects that are analogous to those of the original, which is also true of the sound and rhythmic fabric of the work. He would have certainly approved of Valéry’s words: The fact is that the most beautiful verses in the world are insignificant and meaningless once their harmonious movement has been ruptured and their aural identity has been altered (an identity that consists of measured development at its own pace), and once they are replaced by an expression without its own musical inevitability and without resonance. (Valéry 1956, p. 23)

The sound effects, the rhythms, and the expressive word order that Odorico Mendes perceives in the original through his personal reading or through that of Virgil experts are re-created in Portuguese. This tradition of creatively translating poetic

Conington and Nettleship (1898, p. 167) comment that laetae segetes ‘was a common expression’, yet Thomas 1988, vol. 1, p. 69 states that the meaning ‘fertile’, ‘teeming’ of the adjective is its ‘primary, though somewhat less common, meaning’ (see especially Munro on Lucretius 1.14, as quoted in Mynors 1994, p. 3: ‘the epithet is at once poetical and idiomatic’). ¹⁸ Mendes 2016, p. 95. ¹⁹ ‘In an overflow of gold he immerses himself ’. ²⁰ Conservei a audácia do original (Mendes 2016, p. 95). Odorico Mendes signals his imitation of the ‘audacity’ of the Latin text on other occasions too, e.g. in the notes on Georgics, 3.30 and 4.62–3. ²¹ Mendes 2016, p. 53.

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texts is later theorized and practised in the twentieth century by Haroldo de Campos under the label of ‘transcreation’. This poet and translator will in fact underline Odorico Mendes’s role as a pioneer (in theory and in practice) in the art of ‘creative translation’ on Brazilian soil.²² Using several examples, I will now illustrate this facet of Odorico Mendes’s translation. During oral or written presentations on Odorico’s body of work, I have often cited the passage in the Aeneid in which Virgil begins to tell the story of the last night of Troy, an episode introduced by the description of nightfall. As a matter of fact this seems to me a good illustration of the translator’s procedures: vertitur interea caelum et ruit Oceano nox inuoluens umbra magna terramque polumque (Verg. A. 2.250–1)²³ The heavens swung round, night leaped from the ocean To wrap the earth and sky . . . in its great shadow

Here we should note the monosyllable at the end of the first verse and the nasals of the second verse, which has an essentially spondaic rhythm (only spondees up until the fifth foot). In cases like this, we see that Odorico Mendes considers rhythm an important part of the poetry of the original and forces himself to find an analogous effect in a language that does not, however, have a quantitative rhythm, but rather an accentual one. Instead of simply abandoning this aspect of the original and considering it ‘untranslatable’, Odorico tries to create its poetic effect in Portuguese: Mendes, Aeneid, 2.250–1 Vira o céu, no Oceano a noite cai, Turns the sky, in-the Ocean the night falls E embuça em basta sombra a terra e o polo and wraps in thick shadow the earth and the heavens.

Apart from the monosyllabic ending of the first verse (cai), we may notice the beautiful sonority of the second, with its reiteration of bilabials (emBuça em Basta somBra) and nasals (em, em, om marks of the Latin text), and above all the iambic rhythm (one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable, indicated below through capital letters):

²² ‘Once we admit, in principle, the thesis of the impossibility of translating “creative” texts, it seems that we may also admit, in principle, the corollary of this thesis, the possibility of re-creating the texts. The texts may exist . . . in two languages and as two bodies of autonomous aesthetic information, which, we should like to add, will be linked to each other through an isomorphic relation: they will be different in language, but like isomorphic bodies, they will crystallize within the same system’ (Campos 2007, pp. 312–26, here 315). Haroldo de Campos was one of those responsible for the critical reevaluation of Odorico Mendes’s translations in Brazil, often the victim of harsh criticism. ²³ Excerpts from the Aeneid are taken from Conte’s edition (see Conte 2011). Translations for these excerpts come from Ruden 2008.

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e(e)mBU/ç(a)em BAS/ta SOM/br(a)a TER/r(a) e o PO/lo (where ‘()’ = elisions). This is not the same effect as the original, given that a quantitative rhythm is substituted by an accentual rhythm: the translator, as an interpreter of poetry, re-creates in his own way, and with the means available in his language, the poetic effect that he believes he reads in Virgil’s original text.²⁴ In Odorico’s line the total uniformity of the rhythm corresponds to the nearly uniform nature of the Latin rhythm, and the Brazilian reader can give a particular meaning to this aspect of the text. If I can venture a manifestly more subjective observation, we find that many passages in the translations of Odorico Mendes are worthy of being showcased in anthologies of Portuguese poetry for the extremely skilful execution of the verses. I will present a simple example—just one among many others. tum sonus auditur grauior, tractimque susurrant, frigidus ut quondam siluis immurmurat Auster, ut mare sollicitum stridet²⁵ refluentibus undis, aestuat ut clausis rapidus fornacibus ignis. (Verg. G. 4.260–3) Then is heard a duller sound, a long-drawn buzz, as at times the chill South sighs in the woods, as the fretted sea whistles with its ebbing surge, as seethes in close-barred furnaces the devouring flame. Mendes, Georgics, 4.248–51 em tom mais surdo e grave então sussurram, In a more muffled and deep sound they-murmur qual vozeia úmido Austro na floresta, Like cries the-humid Auster in-the forest qual ruge na ressaca o mar tumente, Like roars in-the undertow the sea swollen, qual rápido na forja estala o fogo. Like rapid in-the forge crackles the fire.

We should observe, in addition to the nasals in the first line (eM toM Mais . . . ENtÃO sussurrAM), the closed vocalic sound in sUrdo . . . sUssUrram, reiterated in the following lines in the stresses of úmido (‘humid’) and ruge (‘roars’), the echo of

²⁴ See Gadamer 2010, p. 236: Jede Übersetzung ist . . . schon Auslegung, ja man kann sagen, sie ist immer die Vollendung der Auslegung, die der Übersetzer dem ihm vorgegebenen Wort hat angedeihen lassen (‘Every translation is . . . already interpretation, and we can say that it is always consumed by the interpretation that the translator makes of a given word’. A translator of the classics such as Odorico, in his work as a philologist and translator, studies ancient and modern experts in poetry and translators from many countries; in cases like this one, interpretation, a central task of translation, is influenced by the words of all those who have dedicated themselves to the exegesis and to the translation and interpretation of the original. It is through this filter that the translator interprets and then translates. ²⁵ In the edition used by Odorico, stridet; in Conte 2013, stridit. Translation is that of Fairclough 1999.

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auSTro (‘Auster’) in the word floreSTa (‘forest’), the dynamism of the proparoxytone rápido (‘rapid’), and the force of onomatopoeia gained by the term estala (‘crackles’), all these elements being ‘iconic’; in other words, both sound and rhythm try to suggest qualities of the object or event they depict, as if the poetry might in some way escape the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. A comparison with the Latin text would reveal that Odorico arrives at these lines in an attempt to reproduce the poetic effects of the original. It is a sort of emulation: starting from the reading and analysis of the poetic effects of the original, the translator ‘responds’ to a certain stimulation to creation provoked by lines that sound expressive both in their sound patterns and in their rhythmic forms. He thus reproduces the essential meaning and recreates the effect of sound and rhythm. My final example of poetic reworking shows the creative audacity of the translator. During the episode of the death of Turnus in Book 12, in which Aeneas appears under the light of Achilles, revenger of Patroclus, we find this line (924 in Odorico): No peito aqui lhe esconde o iroso ferro. In [his] chest here he-hides the irascible iron.

‘Esconder’ (to hide) is a verb related to the Latin condere, but its presence in this context generates a feeling of ‘strangeness’ in Portuguese. Reading this out loud, and more attentively, makes a cryptogram emerge: AQUI LHE ESconde (almost the same, phonetically, as ‘Aquiles’, which is ‘Achilles’ in Portuguese).²⁶ While in the act of killing Turnus, Aeneas is phonetically associated with Achilles, in a translator’s intervention that has no correspondence with the original. It is hard to believe that, for a translator so deeply attentive to sound as Odorico, such anagrammatic games could be the result of chance. This insertion of an anagram raises the question of the limits of a translation: in Virgil’s corresponding line there is no anagram, but we know that there are some in other lines of the Aeneid.²⁷ This means that using such sound games in an independent manner nonetheless constitutes a reproduction of a stylistic trait that is not alien to Virgil’s style. Having presented some significant characteristics of Odorico Mendes’s translations, I will end this chapter with two brief comments about originality and influence. Odorico Mendes, in the 1854 preface to his translation of the Aeneid, which was later reproduced in Virgílio Brasileiro (Mendes 1858), presents himself as a literary figure who, deemed incapable of creating sophisticated poetry of his own, decides to dedicate himself to the translation of the work he loved most. What we see is far more ambitious, however, than what this captatio benevolentiae leads one to suppose: an emulation of the Latin poet on the part of the translator poet, ²⁶ A sound play discovered by Thomaz Amâncio and Liebert Muniz, two Latin students from the Institute for the Study of Language (IEL) at the University of Campinas, Brazil. I thank the latter, who informed me of this discovery. ²⁷ I have myself proposed the reading of some sort of anagram in a line of the Aeneid. See Vasconcellos 2015.

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who attaches the epithet ‘Brazilian’ to the title of Virgil’s Aeneid, in a curious display of appropriation. By proposing a poetic re-creation of Virgil, Odorico Mendes created high poetry in the Portuguese language that competed with the original. The difficulty of providing consistent bibliographical references to his Aeneid or to his Virgil is a special clue to the translator’s audacity of action. Indeed, how is it possible to indicate, with the bureaucratic precision of bibliographical norms, the author of a Brazilian Aeneid, a piece published in 1854 and reissued with some alterations in 1858? Is its author Virgil? But what are we to do with the ‘Brazilian’ in the title? Or do we need to register Odorico Mendes as its author? The title, in sum, encapsulates the project of an emulator who bases himself on the original and maintains himself in a dialectical relation with it, signalling his authorship in a complex way which unites source and target texts inextricably. In fact a Brazilian Aeneid implies simultaneously, and inseparably, Virgil and his translator. In short, the title of Odorico Mendes’s Virgil is, in itself, emblematic of the creative aspect of his translation. I conclude this chapter by returning to the reception of Virgil in Brazil, the theme with which I began. There is a curious case of the influence of Odorico Mendes’s Aeneid on modern Brazilian literature: the twentieth-century poet Jorge de Lima has written an epic poem entitled ‘Invenção de Orfeu’ (‘The Invention of Orpheus’); and in certain passages he uses expressions and verses from Odorico Mendes’s translation of the Aeneid. Virgil is, then, present in the poem of this important Brazilian poet through Odorico’s translation.²⁸ This is an intriguing example of intertextual appropriation: Virgil means, in Jorge de Lima’s lines, the poetic rendition of him by one of his translators. But whom is that modern poet imitating: Virgil or Odorico Mendes? I think the best answer would be: both at the same time, that is, the Brazilian Virgil created by Odorico Mendes. When a translation exerts such an active influence, it is impossible to deny its creative aspects and its literary significance.

²⁸ See Busatto 1978.

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24 Between Voß and Schröder German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid Ulrich Eigler

In his review of Sarah Ruden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in the New York Review of Books, Gary Wills described it as follows: ‘The first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself.’¹ In this statement Wills is focusing on the artistic aspect of a twenty-first-century translation by comparing it with a seventeenth-century forerunner. At the same time, Wills, in his journalistically brief statement, gives the impression that Ruden’s translation came about incidentally, to join a version that is more than three hundred years old. Both versions, however, owe their existence to specific intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts of the highest complexity. I will skip over that, leaving aside such questions to those who deal with Dryden and English translations in general. By choosing here for discussion Johann Heinrich Voß and Rudolf Alexander Schröder, who both made translations of the Aeneid in German, I am attempting to encompass a similarly complex framework of traditions in which translators’ efforts are to be located. Both Voß and Schröder prepared their translations of Virgil in contexts that are entirely different from Dryden’s or Ruden’s. Looking at them more closely offers the possibility of showing the cultural and intellectual threads that connect them. Furthermore, they participated in different cultural dynamics, which made them entirely different from each other. Thus I will give a very general outline² of movements and changes in the lively culture of translating ancient authors in German-speaking Europe from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century.³ At the

¹ Wills 2009; the translation reviewed was Ruden 2008. ² For more detailed information, see the brilliant work of Nina Mindt 2008. ³ Schröder himself, in the postscript (‘Nachwort des Übersetzers’) to his translation of the Iliad, stresses the decisive influence of J. H. Voß on his own translations in hexameters and talks about the triumph of Voß’s translation of the Odyssey, which seemed to him to have made the hexameter the canonical metre for most of the verse translations of ancient epic: Mit dem Triumph der Voßischen Odyssee hat sich dann ihr Vers für alle Späteren durchgesetzt, so überwiegend, daß man hier sagen muss: Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel (‘With the triumph of the Vossian Odyssey, its metre has then prevailed for all later translations, so

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same time I will attempt to explain why it is that, after Schröder’s translation of Virgil, no German translation of Virgil’s Aeneid can be found that is welcomed as ‘a great poem in itself ’.⁴ After some preliminary remarks in §24.1, I will briefly glance at problems and aspects that characterize the German tradition of translations from ancient literature (§24.2). Then I will take a closer look at Voß’s work and its strong influence on German translations of Virgil and of classical authors in general (§24.3)—an influence that can still be felt in the output of Rudolf Alexander Schröder (§24.4). A brief conclusion will bring together the results of my admittedly sketchy ‘whirlwind tour’ (§24.5).

24.1 Preliminary Remarks During the years 1789–99, Johann Heinrich Voß, who had already gained fame for his translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1781 and was about to produce an equally successful translation of the Iliad in 1793, penned translations of Virgil’s works that were published in three volumes in Braunschweig (the Georgics in 1789, the Eclogues in 1797, the Aeneid in 1799). He closely imitated the Latin original in metre and style, being very strongly influenced by his intellectual environment, which at the time was the extremely modern university of Göttingen, the community of enlightened and pre-Romantic poets located in that town, and the rising young classical scholars represented by Johann August Wolf and Johann Gottlob Heyne.⁵ Heyne had just published the first complete commentary on Virgil (1765–67).⁶ But we cannot examine Voß’s translation of Virgil without glancing at his translations of Homer and the interest that German poets of the time took in the hexameter. So we have to look at poems in German, such as Goethe’s and Schiller’s hexameter poetry. At the same time, Voß sets his translation against the highly poetical experiments of Schiller, who translated Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid in 1792, continuing earlier work (he had already translated the storm scene at Verg. A. 1.34–156).⁷ It is noteworthy that all this was happening towards the end of the eighteenth century, when Virgil’s position as paradigmatic poet was fading away in Germany, to make room for Homer.⁸ But, in spite of Homer’s rise as princeps poetarum, there was a strong persistence of Virgil in Germany’s Latin schools and rapidly developing gymnasia.⁹

overwhelmingly that one has to say here: “The exception confirms the rule” ’, Schröder 1952 [1943], p. 598). ⁴ In his review of Rudolf Alexander Schröder’s translation of the Georgics, Eduard Fraenkel 1926, p. 218 explicitly introduces Schröder as ‘a real poet’ (ein wirklicher Dichter). Nor has Emil Staiger’s (1981) fine translation of the Aeneid ever won the fame of an independent, widely read translation. ⁵ For more information, see Fuhrmann 2001, pp. 128–35 and Riedel 2000, pp. 114–15. ⁶ Evidence for Voß’s careful reading of Heyne’s commentary is in his notes, which were published posthumously 1832 under the title ‘Bemerkungen zu den zwei ersten Büchern der Aeneis’ at Kreuznach. ⁷ For more on this, see Müller 1970, pp. 348–51. ⁸ This is brilliantly described in Atherton 2006. ⁹ See Fuhrmann 2001, pp. 159–91.

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Schröder, a twentieth-century German poet famous between the 1920s and the 1950s, translated both Homer and Virgil, as Voß had done. When he published his translation of the first book of the Aeneid in German, just in time for the bimillennial celebration in 1930, he presented to the world a work that showed the same scrupulous imitation of Virgilian metre he had practised in earlier renditions, namely of the Bucolics (published in 1924) and of the Georgics (also published in 1924). His German version of the Iliad came out during the Second World War, in 1943, continuing the process of translating Homer he had initiated in 1910 with the Odyssey. After harsh criticism in the initial reception, his hexameter œuvre was finally accepted as a masterpiece throughout the German-speaking postwar world.¹⁰ One must be aware that translations of ancient authors in particular contributed much to Western Germany’s and Austria’s postwar efforts to regain a place among the nations of Europe by drawing upon their own classical cultural tradition, represented by Schiller and Goethe, and by reactivating classical studies and the teaching of ancient literatures, which had been closely entwined since the eighteenth century. In tackling Voß and Schröder as a pair, I made a conscious choice, although their translations of the Aeneid never stood at the centre of their activity as translators. On the one hand, they are outstanding translators, who far outstripped other renderings of the Aeneid into German. On the other hand, the contrast between them puts us in a position to give a clear-cut picture of different aspects and constitutive parts in the history of German translations of the Aeneid. Both Voß and Schröder came up with source-language-oriented translations, taking pains to produce the closest possible imitation of the original, even at the cost of readability and intelligibility to the modern reader. Translations of this type were rightly characterized as identische Übersetzung (‘identical translation’) by Goethe. Goethe himself distinguished three kinds of translation, which he put in a hierarchical sequence: identische Übersetzung (‘identical translation’), parodistische Übersetzung (‘transformative translation’), and schlicht-prosaische Übersetzung (‘simple prose translation’).¹¹ I will leave aside translations into verse such as the alexandrine, into polymetric forms,¹² or in prose, as I am well aware that, even now, ¹⁰ See an influential article by Schott, who compares Voß’s Aeneis with Schröder’s translation and enthusiastically concludes: Schröders Aeneis ist ganz und gar Vergil, jetzt, wenn die alten Götter wollen, inniger unter den Deutschen auflebend (‘Schroeder’s Aeneis is entirely Virgil, now, so the ancient gods approve, rising again more intensively among the Germans’, Schott 1953–4, p. 545). ¹¹ Goethe, as presented in Müller 1970, p. 347 (Müller is using vol. 2 of the 1952 Berlin Academy edition of Goethe’s complete works). Schröder 1952 [1943], p. 602, who is obviously familiar with these categories, describes his own translations as more or less ‘similar’, trying to put it more precisely when he says daß es sich um alle Fälle bei der deutschen Nachahmung nicht um ein identisches (sic!), sondern um ein ähnliches Gebilde handeln müsse (‘that in all cases of German imitation it should not be an identical (sic!) but a similar construction’). ¹² Eduard Norden tried, in a polymetric translation of Book 6 of the Aeneid, to do justice to the ‘unattainable diversity of the Virgilian hexameter’ (der unnachbildbaren Vielgestaltigkeit des vergilischen Hexameters), almost impossible to imitate: see Norden 1984, p. viii.

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hexameter translations still enjoy high esteem: the hexameter functions as a criterion of correctness among both German readers and German classicists.¹³ Wills talks about Ruden’s translation as ‘an English poem in itself ’. This is also applicable to Voß and particularly to Schröder, whose translations have been generally acknowledged as masterpieces.¹⁴ In consequence, I would like to acknowledge an important limitation. By singling out Voß and Schröder as examples, I exclude a mass of translations of lesser quality, which took off markedly at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, mostly for practical use in the schools.¹⁵ Rather I will focus on the area to which Qualitätsübersetzungen¹⁶ (‘translations of high quality’) belong, namely the culture of the learned and their literary productions. As we will see, Schröder’s twentieth-century translation belongs in this sphere too. Selecting Voß and Schröder also means dealing with certain difficulties; and being blamed for oversimplifying the facts might spring from one of these—perhaps the greatest one. I am indeed connecting the results of a selective glance at German translations of Virgil with a cursory and schematic treatment of the debate on translating authors from classical antiquity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁷ Besides, there will be only a very sketchy outline of the Aeneid’s history of reception and history of translation.¹⁸ Voß and the German classics, Goethe and Schiller, created a language for the hexameter that was triggered by the translations of Voß, but also by the original texts of Homer and Virgil, which were translated with the explicit intention of preserving the source text. By choosing the literary style of ancient epic translations for their own hexameter poetry, Goethe and Schiller quite involuntarily created a normative language closely tied to their own literary status as classics of German literature. In particular, Goethe’s epic poems (Reineke Fuchs, 1794; Hermann und Dorothea, 1797; Achilleis, 1808) were being written at the time when Voß was publishing his translations; consequently these poems had a strong influence on German poetic language as a whole.¹⁹ The canonization of the hexameter was finally sanctioned by ¹³ Still true, though cum grano salis, remains the statement of Müller 1970, p. 347: Ausgesprochen oder unausgesprochen gilt diese Werteskala noch heute; besonders für Dichtungen aus der Antike sieht man (seit Voß) die ‘identische Übersetzung’ allgemein als die einzig ‘richtige’ an (‘Whether articulated or not, this value scale still applies today; especially for poetry from the ancient world, ‘identical translation’ (since Voß) is generally regarded as the only ‘correct’ translation’). But, for alternative concepts, see e.g. Schadewaldt 1960 [1958] and especially Fuhrmann, who made a strong case for a via media between a strict source-language-oriented and target-language-oriented translation (Fuhrmann 1992 is one of many significant publications). ¹⁴ For the reception of Schröder, see Mindt 2009, pp. 259–64, especially p. 261 n. 114. ¹⁵ Bachleitner 2008, pp. 103–4, talks about a flood of cheap translations of lesser quality. For Virgil, see ibid., p. 108. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 104. ¹⁷ For more information, see the very interesting chapters on German translations of classical authors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Mindt 2008, 27–47. See also Fuhrmann 1987. ¹⁸ See especially Gronemeyer 1963, pp. 3–4. ¹⁹ On 1800 as the turning point towards a more source-language-oriented type of translation, see Fuhrmann 1987.

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Goethe as the supremely canonical author, and this phenomenon in effect put a spell on later German translators—of Virgil or of any other classical epic poet. For that matter, one was supposed to stick to the cold classical style of Goethe and his cultural entourage at the court of Weimar. This impact was still felt in Schröder’s translations in the mid-twentieth century. It comes up even today, in debates on ‘correct’ translating in German classical philology,²⁰ as is evident in the reviews of Raoul Schrott’s translation of Homer’s Iliad,²¹ which perpetuate positions that reach back to the nineteenth century.²² So one could go so far as to say that, in Germanspeaking countries, translations of classical literature into the native tongue remain under the spell not only of Goethe but also of the gymnasium, which is still vigorously involved in the academic teaching of ancient languages.²³ The spell cast by Goethe can be found in the dramatic genre too: for example, translations of Greek tragedy reflect an artistic language developed by Goethe for his Iphigenia, a drama still read as part of the curriculum in German-speaking schools throughout Europe.²⁴ To give just one notable example, Emil Staiger, the famous professor of German at my home university in Zurich, testifies to the enormous influence of Goethe on twentieth-century translations of Greek drama.²⁵ He asserts that a translator who uses the language of Goethe, which in turn was inspired by the original language of Greek tragedy, restores Greek style, thinking, and mentality to the translated drama. Thus Staiger creates a circle of transmission, translation, and pious restitution,²⁶ which is also valid in the history of translating classical hexameter poetry: Ein Übersetzer, der aufmerksam auf den Tonfall der Goetheschen Trimeter lauscht, hat die Verse geschrieben, die hier Agamemnon, Klytaimnestra, Aigisthos, Kassandra, der Bote und der Wächter sprechen. Aischylos fällt damit nur wieder zu, was von ihm ausgegangen ist.²⁷ A translator who listens carefully to the tone of Goethe’s trimeters has written the lines uttered here by Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Cassandra, the messenger, and the watchman. Thus what Aeschylus gets back is only what came out of him.

Obviously Dryden and Ruden worked under widely different conditions, whereas Voß and Schröder worked within the narrowing confines of a specifically German intellectual history. ²⁰ Janka 2011, pp. 4–5. ²¹ Schrott 2008. For an example of an unfavourable review of this translation we need look no further than Dräger 2009. ²² For more detailed information, see Lubitz 2009, pp. 161–80. See also the observations made by Manuel Baumbach in a paper on Christoph Martin Wieland’s translations of Lucian, where he defines very strictly how to translate authors of classical antiquity into German; in particular, Baumbach stresses the canonical style of Weimar and the importance of the Schulbildung established by the second half of the nineteenth century (Baumbach 2008, p. 99). ²³ For a discussion of the theory of translations and its strong connection with the teaching of ancient languages in the German gymnasium, I refer the reader to the magisterial publications of Manfred Fuhrmann, especially Fuhrmann 1992. ²⁴ Janka 2009. ²⁵ On translation of Greek drama at that time, see Schadewaldt 1969. ²⁶ Compare Lubitz 2008, p. 130. ²⁷ Staiger 1959, p. 155.

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24.2 The German Tradition of Translating Ancient Literature Before Voß’s translation, there was no German version of Virgil that could claim any significance. This is true even of the first German Aeneid—which was cast in the oldfashioned Knittelverse and was first printed in 1515 in Strasbourg, then reprinted three times (1559, 1562, 1606)²⁸—and of several translations in prose. The history of Virgil’s reception and the history of Virgil’s translation went in opposing directions. While the original Latin Virgil remained an object of high esteem and veneration in Germany, no German translation ever won the popularity that Dryden’s translation gained in England.²⁹ Although, as mentioned before, Virgil was pushed aside by Homer by the end of the eighteenth century, paradoxically, this never meant that translating Virgil ceased. The opposite was the case; we even see a significant increase in the number of translations of his poetry. And, in spite of the diminished significance of the Latin poet as a model for contemporary poetry, these translations enjoyed an increasing presence in the didactic sphere, as Virgil remained dominant in the Latin schools and in the rising gymnasium. Voß’s translation of Virgil profited substantially from this dominance—but even more from kinship with the translations of Homer published by the same author. After some critical reception these translations gained high renown, especially in the group around Goethe. But Voß’s Virgil also received the severe criticism that the Homeric translations were to endure later on. Thus, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the leading German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff argued harshly against the bombastic and even trivial style of the translation, claiming that, with his classicizing mode of hexameter canonized by Goethe, Voß had made it impossible for Germans to translate hexameters at all. Wilamowitz described a German dilemma. Translators were trapped because the sacrosanct national author, Goethe, used in his own poetry the hexameters inspired by Voß and hence did not allow the literary translation of classical epic in any other kind of verse: [E]r [sc. Voß] hat einen Stil geschaffen, mit dem der Deutsche wohl oder übel den Begriff homerisch verbindet, obwohl Trivialität und Bombast seine Hauptkennzeichen sind . . . Wir können diesen Stil nicht los werden, weil Hermann und Dorothea die voßische Ilias am Leben erhält, obgleich der falsche homerische Rock die Wirkung des einzigen Gedichtes so stark beeinträchtigt, daß es nicht sein kann, wozu es sein echt homerischer Geist befähigt, ein Buch für hoch und niedrig, für jung und alt.³⁰ he [sc. Voß] has created a style the Germans willy-nilly associate with the term ‘Homeric’, although triviality and bombast are its main characteristics . . . We cannot get rid of this style, because Hermann and Dorothea keeps the Voßian Iliad alive, though the false Homeric coat ²⁸ Bernstein 1972, 1974; Luzzerato 1956; Frick 2017. ²⁹ Müller 1970, p. 348 n. 5. ³⁰ Wilamowitz 1925, p. 9.

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impairs the effect of this outstanding poem so severely that it cannot exhibit its genuinely Homeric spirit and be the book for high and low, young and old.

So it was Wilamowitz, the bourgeois university professor, who laid bare the problematic side of the Voßian translations as he rejected the dogma of strict sourcelanguage orientation, which was supposed to make translations more readable and more attractive to the learned elite to which he himself belonged. In Wilamowitz’s eyes, this elitist language and its artificial artistry, which owed its high status to an affinity of style with the classics of German literature, made it impossible for Germans to bring out ‘the universal’ (das Allgemeine) in the poetry of Homer, who was understood as a popular poet, in the spirit of nineteenth–century Romanticism. The verdict that Wilamowitz directed against Voß’s translation of Homer covered in fact all hexameter poetry, including Virgil’s. Wilamowitz ignored, however, the strong influence of the teaching of German, Latin, and Greek at the gymnasium; he also neglected the fact that the link between the language of Voß and that of Goethe and Schiller was created within the reception of these poets in nineteenth-century Germany. Wilamowitz was looking at the language of poetry by taking the German hexameter as an end point. At its beginning, however, stood the common interest in Greco-Roman heroic poetry in Germany. But, while Voß drew upon the original texts, Goethe received most of the material he was aware of by reading Voß’s translations, which had a strong influence on his own epic style. Thus, without their own knowledge but most effectively, they both contributed to a language that was essential for bringing about a bourgeois and national identity after the unification of Germany 1871. The most important institutions in this process were the humanistic gymnasia and the universities. This had very favourable effects on the reception of Virgil, who actually stood in the shadow of Homer at that point. The close link between classical German language and the language of the Homeric poems in Voß’s translation had the automatic result of elevating the appreciation for Virgil’s language in Voß’s translation, in spite of the critics’ neglect of Virgil as an author. In what follows I will try to illustrate how this link between actual poetry and translations came about.

24.3 Voß’s Translations and Influence Voß and Goethe writing hexameters lived in an intellectual environment³¹ whose outstanding representative was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, author of a monumental biblical epos Messias (published in 1748). This milestone in German literature influenced Goethe’s poetry in heroic verse as substantially as did the achievements of Voß. Between 1802 and 1805, Voß stayed in Jena, around Goethe—who tried hard but in vain to persuade him not to leave Jena for Heidelberg when Voß was offered there a prestigious chair in classical literature. ³¹ See Lubitz 2008, p. 126. There one must not forget the continuous influence of the Latin school.

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Although it is hard to discover literal intertextual relationships, one can easily grasp, from a general look at Goethe’s fragmentary 1808 epic poem Achilleis (just to pick one example), how close his poetry came to Voß’s translations of Homer and even to Voß’s Aeneid. When Goethe read Homer and Virgil in Voß’s rendering, he discovered that there should be one more epic poem between Hector’s death in the Iliad and the Greeks’ departure from Troy in the Odyssey and in the Aeneid.³² So Goethe’s Achilleis is located between the ensemble created by Voß’s three translations, and it fits there perfectly in style, metre, and attitude towards ancient epic poetry. By establishing his language as canonical for German poetry, Voß entered the history of German translation in aesthetic companionship with Goethe. I want to show this by looking at the simile of the ants in Goethe’s Achilleis (ll. 412–18)³³ and in its predecessors. In spite of all theoretical prejudices against Virgil, which were prevalent at the time, Goethe seems to draw intensively upon corresponding similes in the Aeneid, transforming them into German poetic language and metre inspired by Voß.³⁴ He compares the activity of the Myrmidons as they build up a tomb for their prince—and he, in the Achilleis, is anticipating his own premature heroic death—with the actions of a swarm of ants: Gleich der beweglichen Schar Ameisen, deren Geschäfte As the quickly moving ants, whose business Tief im Walde der eilende Tritt des Jägers gestöret, Deep in-the woods the hasty kick of-the hunter disturbed, Ihren Haufen zerstreuend, wie lang’ er und sorglich getürmet war; Their heap scattering, as in-a-long-time it and with-care built-up was; Schnell die gesellige Menge, zu tausend Scharen zerstoben, Quickly the sociable crowd, into thousand flocks dispersed, Wimmelt sie hin und her, und einzelne Tausende wimmeln, crawling back and forth, and single thousands swarming, Jede das Nächste fassend und sich nach der Mitte bestrebend, each what’s next grasping and for the middle searching, Hin und nach dem alten Gebäude des labyrinthischen Kegels: Towards and to the old fabric of-the labyrinthine cone.

This passage has already been compared to a couple of similes of busy work done by little insects, for example the bees in Aeneid 1.³⁵ The activity of Carthaginians

³² Goethe to Schiller, letter of 23 January 1797 (Goethe 1987, p. 384): Ob nicht zwischen Hektors Tod und der Abfahrt der Griechen von der Trojanischen Küste, noch ein episches Gedicht inne liege? oder nicht? (‘Isn’t there some space left for an epic poem between Hector’s death and the departure of the Greeks from the Trojan coast? Or am I wrong?’). ³³ For more information on the relationship of this passage taken from Goethe’s Achilleis with Goethe’s predecessors, see Gronemeyer 1963, pp. 34–43. The passage is quoted from Goethe 1994, p. 529. ³⁴ Gronemeyer 1963, p. 34. In his heroic verses, however, Goethe rather follows one aspect of heroic German verse introduced by Klopstock, when he accepts the trochee instead of pure spondee. ³⁵ For the whole, see Gronemeyer 1963, pp. 34–43.

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labouring for their newly founded town elicits from Virgil a comparison with a busy swarm of bees (Verg. A. 1.430–6): qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto ignavom fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent: fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella.³⁶

In Voß’s 1799 translation that Goethe drew upon, the lines are much longer than their Latin counterparts and the hexameter is end-stopped, even at the cost of grammatical correctness. Newly coined words such as sommern (‘to summer’, which describes spring slowly changing to summer) are used to shorten the line; but they also contribute to the artistic, but almost artificial, character of the verse (Voß, Aeneid, 1.430–6): So wie Bienen, wann sommert der Lenz, durch blumige Felder As the bees, when is-summering the spring, over full-of-flowers fields Emsigkeit unter der Sonn’ umtreibt, die pflegen des Volkes Industry under the sun revolve, tending their people’s Aufgewachsene Brut, dort andere häufen des Honigs Grown-up offspring, there others collect the honey’s Klarsten Seim und dehnen mit lauterem Nektar die Speicher, clearest liquid and extend with refined nectar the storages, Oder empfahn die Lasten der kommenden, oder in Heerschar Or receive the burdens from-the incoming, or in legion Wehren sie ab die Drohnen, das träge Vieh, von den Krippen, Chase they away the drones, the lazy animals, from the cribs, Rastlos glüht das Gewerb’, und Thymian duftet der Honig. Restless glows their doing and of-thyme smells the honey.

In the passage of the Achilleis I am examining here, Goethe pretty much followed Voß in terms of line length and vocabulary; but he also drew upon a simile Virgil used when he described the Trojans hastily preparing the fleet to get away from Africa (Verg. A. 4.402–6). Dido has just hurled her curse at Aeneas: ac velut ingentem formicae farris acervum cum populant hiemis memores tectoque reponunt, it nigrum campis agmen praedamque per herbas ³⁶ Latin text is Götte 1958. ‘Even as bees in early summer, amid flowery fields, ply their task in sunshine, when they lead forth the full-grown young of their race, or pack the fluid honey and strain their cells to bursting with sweet nectar, or receive the burdens of incomers, or in martial array drive from their folds the drones, a lazy herd; all aglow is the work and the fragrant honey is sweet with thyme’ (Fairclough 1999, p. 293).

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convectant calle angusto; pars grandia trudunt obnixae frumenta umeris, pars agmina cogunt castigantque moras, opere omnis semita fervet.³⁷

That Goethe also had Voß in mind for the ants’ simile in the Achilleis is demonstrated by Voß’s translation of the Aeneid 4 passage just quoted: Wie wenn ein Schwarm Ameisen den mächtigen Haufen des Speltes As when a swarm of-ants the mighty heap of spelt Gierig zerrafft, für den Winter besorgt und verwahret im Obdach; Greedily disperses, of the winter mindful and stores-up in shelter; Dunkel geht im Felde der Zug, und den Raub durch die Kräuter Dark marches in-the fields the troop, and the booty through the grass Führen auf schmalem Steig sie daher, teils drängt man des Kornes They-carry on tiny track, one part pushes the grain’s Große Last mit der Schulter gestemmt, teils treibt man den Heerzug, great burden with their shoulder lifting, the other drags on-the army Züchtigend Säumnis und Rast; rings glüht von der Arbeit der Fußpfad. chastising slowness and rest; all-around glows from the toil the path. (Voß, Aeneid 4.402–7)

Both Voß and Goethe created the authoritative German hexameter style, which for later translators and poets seemed obligatory, supported as it was by the nineteenthcentury myth of a kinship between the Greek and the German languages which was nourished as a political message of ‘Germanic’ Germany against ‘Latin’ France.³⁸ But what about Virgil? He was read along these lines in German schools throughout the nineteenth century and finally returned to favour in literary circles and was reinstated in universities as an object of research. The spell that Goethe’s and Voß’s reception put on the German hexameter lasted in Gemany, particularly after the world wars.

24.4 Schröder’s Translations In twentieth-century Germany, Schröder is well aware of the overall influence that the hexameter in the style of Goethe and Voß had on the German literary tradition. He points to its sacrosanct character and wants to use it faithfully. He even stresses the need to do so:³⁹ Trotzdem sieht sich der heutige deutsche Homerübersetzer gewissermaßen zwangsläufig [necessarily] auf den durch Goethe, Schiller und Hölderlin für uns geheiligten [sacrosanct] Vers verwiesen. ³⁷ ‘Even as when ants, mindful of winter, plunder a huge heap of corn and store it in their home; over the plain moves a black column, and through the grass they carry the spoil on a narrow track; some strain with their shoulders and heave on the huge grains, some close up the ranks and rebuke delay, all the path is aglow with work’ (Fairclough 1999, p. 449). ³⁸ See Wiedemann 1986. ³⁹ Schröder 1952 [1943], p. 601.

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Nevertheless, today’s German Homer translator certainly finds himself necessarily relying on the verse made sacrosanct for us by Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin.

Schröder’s translations of Homer and Virgil are the last ones in a line of more or less influential German translations of a high literary standard,⁴⁰ always classified as ‘identical’ in Goethe’s sense. Although Schröder admits that German heroic verse goes back to a separate tradition of its own, with no organic connection with the classical hexameter of antiquity,⁴¹ he, under the spell of Goethe and Voß, sees no way around putting it into hexameters; so he attempts the ‘impossible’. Again, as in Voß’s translation, here too the extremely literal hexameter translation comes at the cost of sacrificing German language.⁴² For example his translation of calle angusto (‘on a narrow path’, V. Aen. 4.405) by im ängstlichen Hohlweg (‘on a frightened path’) is almost nonsensical. Translations like that arise from Schröder’s concept of Repristination (‘pious restoration’),⁴³ which asks the translator to create the maximum similarity with the original text (ein möglichst ähnliches Gebilde).⁴⁴ This is a requirement that Schröder puts forward against Wilamowitz, who preferred a target-language-oriented translation—that is, the kind that comes close to the language and imagery of the translator’s Lebenswelt (‘lifeworld’). Wilamowitz called it Travestie, modifying Schiller’s concept of transformative (parodistisch) translation,⁴⁵ and argued that the best translations should renounce any feature that brings back antiquity. Just to give an impression, I quote here Schröder’s translation of the simile of the ants from Virgil’s Aeneid 4, which I have already discussed above (Schröder, Aeneid, 4.402–7; the German text comes from Schröder 1963): Wie wenn ein Emsenschwarm den mächtigen Stapel Getreide As when an antswarm the huge pile of-wheat Plündert und hofft für den Winter im Bau die Beute zu bergen: Plunders and hopes for [the] wintertime at home their booty to save: Schwarz am Boden strebt der Zug im ängstlichen Hohlweg Black on-the ground creeps-forth the crowd on fearful hollow-way Quer durch Gräser und Kraut: ein Teil wälzt riesige Körner, Across the-grass and herbage: one part drags bulgy corns, Stößt mit den Schultern die Last, ein anderer bildet die Nachhut, pushing with their shoulders the burden, one part forms the rear, Feuert die Säumigen an, von Beeifferten wimmelt der Fusspfad. cheers-on the stumbling, with busy-people buzzes the path. ⁴⁰ Outstanding translations of the Aeneid (not included in the present bibliography) are those by Christian Ludwig Neuffer, published in 1788–1816, by Adolf Trendelenburg, published in 1928, and by Tassilo von Scheffer, published in 1943; see Müller 1970, p. 348 n. 5. ⁴¹ So Schröder 1952 [1943], p. 616 (in the postscript to his translation of Homer). ⁴² Müller 1970, pp. 355–6. ⁴³ For a discussion of Repristination as the central notion of Schröder’s theory of translation, see Mindt 2009, pp. 260–4. ⁴⁴ Schröder 1952 [1943], p. 602. ⁴⁵ Wilamowitz 1925, p. 8.

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Even native German speakers do not understand Emsen (for formicae) and are bewildered by the ‘archaizing stiltedness’, as Müller called it,⁴⁶ of Schröder’s style. Beeifferte (‘busy people’) in the last line sounds completely artificial and old-fashioned (let alone that the geminate ‘ff ’ runs against modern German orthography). In his effort towards Repristination, Schröder tries to imitate the epic style of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, thus bringing together the German and the Greco-Roman epic traditions. For this reason Schröder uses old and out-dated words designed to bring a solemn epic style to the translation, just as he did in his Iliad and as he also pointed out in the postscript to that work.⁴⁷ Words like Schnur (‘stepmother’), Ger (‘spear’), Name (‘ship’), or Helgen (‘shipyard’) are completely incomprehensible to contemporary readers without the original text at hand. This translation is a strange but fascinating experience for contemporary readers; and it illustrates the enormous split in the German intellectual tradition after the 1960s, when these archaizing and classicizing modes of expression lost their acceptance among a wider public. German readers of today prefer target-language-oriented prose translations of a more sober style and in everyday language; thus they cut off any link with the direct tradition from Goethe and Voß, favouring instead a mode of translation that Goethe called schlicht prosaisch (‘simple and in prose’).⁴⁸ But, as we have seen, there is still a strong group of classicists in German schools and universities who hold these awkwardly spellbound hexameter translations in high esteem. So, to conclude, let us have a quick look at Ruden’s modern ‘identical’⁴⁹ translation with which I started this chapter. This will lead me to a brief evaluation of the German situation.

24.5 Conclusions One could say that Raoul Schrott, with his target-language-oriented translation of the Iliad, published a ‘poem in itself ’⁵⁰—and this in the same year when Sarah Ruden brought out her highly esteemed source-oriented English Aeneid. But, although Schrott received much more public attention, his important work—as a translation—rarely secured a review as enthusiastic as Ruden’s in the New York Review of Books. Schrott’s case shows what could happen to a modern translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in Germanspeaking countries that claimed to present a Qualitätsübersetzung.⁵¹ In German culture one easily could wind up between Scylla and Charybdis. With a source-language-oriented translation in the manner of Schröder’s, one may run the ⁴⁶ Müller 1970, p. 365 (archaisierende Gesetztheit). ⁴⁷ Schröder 1952 [1943], pp. 632–3. ⁴⁸ See n. 11 in this chapter. ⁴⁹ To stress the source-language-oriented character of Ruden’s translation, Wills 2009 titled his review of it ‘Closer Than Ever to Vergil’. ⁵⁰ Schrott himself characterizes his translation as Art von rezitativer Interpretation (‘a way of performative Interpretation’, Schrott 2008, p. xxxix). ⁵¹ Bachleitner 2008, p. 104.

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risk of being blamed by a wider public for using a rather schoolish, old-fashioned, and dusty style and of still being under the spell of Voß and Goethe. With a targetlanguage-oriented, modernizing translation, one offends—as did Schrott, who tried to free himself from the spell of Voß and Goethe—the smaller but influential intellectual, well-educated academic community, which still sticks to the standards of the Weimar classics. On both scenarios, the spell of Goethe and Voß can be felt in different ways. There is no such spell to be felt or to free oneself from in English-speaking cultures. Sarah Ruden has much more freedom to present a new text that is strongly sourcelanguage-oriented. She obviously did not feel that she had any shadow to pay respects to or any verdict to overcome when she embarked on an ‘identical’ translation of the Aeneid. She made a free decision to use the iambic pentameter and ignored Wilamowitz’s postulate that hexameters are ‘untranslatable’ because of a literary and linguistic tradition that cannot be abandoned by later translators—or any such caveat.⁵² Ruden’s choice of translating Latin hexameters into English, which led to decisions similar to those of Rudolf Alexander Schröder, is widely accepted. So Ruden uses the same technique of Repristination. She prefers Anglo-Saxon to Latinate words, for example huge to immense and hard to difficult.⁵³ When we consider German-speaking countries, however, one cannot picture such a translation of Virgil as ‘a poem in itself ’. One has to find a via media,⁵⁴ as the one successfully chosen by Wolfgang Schadewaldt in his ingenious prose translation of the Odyssey— which perhaps could be called ‘a novel in itself ’.

⁵² Wilamowitz 1925, p. 27 describes epic poems of antiquity as ‘untranslatable’ (unübersetzbar) for German writers. ⁵³ Ruden 2008, p. viii. ⁵⁴ As was postulated by Fuhrmann 1992.

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25 Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the Twentieth Century Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol Jacqueline Fabre-Serris Translated by Liza Bolen and Susanna Braund

Two verse translations of the Eclogues produced by famous writers, the poet Paul Valéry and the playwright and novelist Marcel Pagnol, were published in France in the mid-twentieth century, in 1956 and 1958. I chose to compare these translations for two reasons. The first is that these translations were accompanied by commentaries that shed light on their authors’ theoretical positions, in particular regarding the choice of poetic form. The second is that Valéry and Pagnol differ in every respect, whether we consider their motivations, their judgements concerning Virgil (both his period and his text), their positions regarding other translators and commentators, and their own reflections on the process of translation. My critical reading of their programmatic texts and translations will be followed by a brief study of the edition of Eugène de Saint-Denis, who translated the Eclogues into prose for the Belles Lettres edition of 1942. I will try to demonstrate that, all things considered, his prose translation is more satisfying and more successful.

25.1 The Eclogues According to Paul Valéry and His Variations on the Eclogues 25.1.1 His critical reflections Valéry’s translation was a response to a suggestion made by a friend of his, Alexandre Roudinesco, who skilfully added an element of challenge in proposing this task to him: ‘that the Latin and French texts correspond line for line’ (ligne pour ligne; as

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quoted in Valéry 1997, p. 301).¹ Valéry considers that a poet has everything to gain by accepting strict rules. The condition imposed thus possessed the elements needed to entice him. He considered it a double challenge. As he reminds us, Latin is denser than French: there are no articles, no auxiliaries, few prepositions, and more freedom for positioning and for the order of words, which increases the difficulty of a line-for-line correspondence. To this mechanical exigency, so to speak, Valéry added another: he wrote that he was only ‘disposed to accept, from myself as from others, a translation as faithful as the differences between languages would allow’ (Valéry 1997, p. 302). He is referring, without developing it, to the idea that synonymy is not possible because transposing from one language to another involves inevitable transformation, if not loss, of the signified: the translated text cannot say the same thing as the text to be translated.² In his Postface, he specifies that he is not a very good Latinist: ‘My meagre knowledge of Latin had been, over the past fifty-five years, reduced to the memory of a memory [au souvenir de son souvenir]’ (Valéry 1997, p. 302). This disadvantage could have been compensated for by the use of translations with commentaries, but this did not happen. Valéry admits that learning Latin left him with horrible memories: he speaks of boredom, of students reciting in a drone, of forced work, even of torture (ibid., p. 310); and he shows contempt for Latin teachers and philologists. Another handicap: Valéry is only moderately interested in bucolic poetry because he is not attracted to life in the fields; he does not like the countryside, or nature in general: ‘I confess that bucolic themes do not passionately excite my spirit. Pastoral life is foreign to me and seems rather boring . . . the sight of grain silos makes me gloomy’ (ibid., p. 302). This lack of taste for the subject, added to the fact that his education in matters of classical antiquity is quite limited, has an effect on the literary judgement that he brings to the Eclogues. We can feel, in his choice of words, that he is not persuaded of their poetic value: he speaks of ‘these works of circumstance that nineteen centuries of glory have made venerable and almost sacred’ (ibid., p. 303; emphasis added). Valéry chooses to translate into alexandrines but does not justify this choice. He does, however, justify his preference for poetry over prose, which he considers an entombment, as it implies the loss of the ‘harmonic movement’ (mouvement harmonique) and the alteration of the ‘sound substance’ (substance sonore) of the original poetry (ibid., p. 304). ‘Among the combinations of words that present themselves to his mind’, he writes, the poet chooses ‘not the one that might most faithfully express his “thought” (that is the business of prose) and that would therefore repeat to him what he already knows; but rather the one that thought, just by itself, cannot produce

¹ In this section I use Valéry 1997—a Gallimard edition of Virgil that contains the Eclogues (Bucoliques) translated by Paul Valéry and the Georgics (Géorgiques) translated by Jacques Delille. All English translations of Virgil’s Latin in this chapter come from Lee 1984. The Latin is reproduced from the editions of Valéry 1956 and Pagnol 1958. ² See Borutti and Heidmann 2012, p. 32, who refer to Van Orman Quine 1960.

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and that seems at once strange and foreign, precious [mais bien celle qu’une pensée à soi seule ne peut produire et qui lui paraît à la fois étrange et étrangère, précieuse]’ (ibid., p. 305; emphasis added). He sees the poet as ‘a special type of translator, who translates ordinary discourse, modified by emotion, into the “language of the gods”, and whose work consists less of searching for words for his ideas than of searching for ideas for his words and predominant rhythms’ (ibid.). This conception of poetry implies an interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness, which has consequences for his translations. Valéry indeed translated Virgil by putting himself in the position of the poet more than in that of the translator (or at least equally in both). He explains that, after a while, he felt himself taken back to his own past. He noticed flaws in Virgil that seemed to be those of his own youth. In other words, he gradually came to take the Latin poet’s place: ‘In front of my Virgil, I had the feeling (that I know well) of a poet at work; and I discussed absent-mindedly with myself, here and there, this famed piece, fixed in millennial glory, as freely as I would have made a poem at my desk. At times, I found myself feeling, while playing around with my translation, the urge to change something in the venerable text’ (ibid., p. 306; emphasis added, here and in all subsequent quotations). This state of confusion, he admits, only lasted for a few seconds; but, upon thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that it was ‘always (the) same problems . . . (the) same attitudes: the internal ear attuned towards the possible, towards what will be murmured “alone” [l’oreille intime tendue vers le possible, vers ce qui va se murmurer ‘tout seul’]’ (ibid., p. 306). Valéry admits that he somewhat deviated from his initial project: ‘Soon I had more taste than I perhaps should have had for elaborating this poetry. This rather fascinating creative practice detached me from the initial motive of the work, which had become a pretext’ (ibid., pp. 308–9). Because Valéry sees the poetry as resulting from the combined effects of the substance of sound and thought, his translation turns into a re-creation.³ To be a renowned poet when translating another may seem to be an advantage. But Valéry’s conception of poetry—that there existed in each poet an internal rhythm that could express itself through words that the poet does not truly choose and that prevail over intellectual activity—reduces this advantage. This position, which he adopts also when he translates, is all the more arguable as Virgil’s poetry is scholarly poetry. Its foundation is constituted of precise textual references to Hellenistic poetry and to Latin poetry, which are conscious or intentional (namely intended by Virgil), and which one must absolutely render when translating the Eclogues, otherwise one would miss the mark in terms of the author’s intentions and ‘betray’ his work. Valéry’s image of Virgil confirms his misjudgement of Virgil’s poetic project. He describes him as a product of the Italian countryside, familiar with its people, its values, and the work of countrymen, as well as with their ³ On the idea of re-creation, see Jakobson 1959 and 1960 and the different positions of Derrida 1967 and Meschonnic 1973.

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beliefs in mysterious links between things and gods (ibid., p. 311). Admittedly, Valéry knows that he is also dealing with an author influenced by Greek poetry: he detected in him ‘a refined mind, instructed in the delicacies of Greek and seduced by compositions more scholarly than these artless songs of cowherds’ (ibid., p. 312). However, to put it somewhat brutally, if Virgil is a poet to Valéry, it is solely due to his being the future author of the Aeneid. This reductive conception is confirmed by the negative vision he has of Virgil’s interactions with Augustan power. Valéry evokes his submission to ‘a tyrant’ (un despote), whose benefits were accepted by Virgil in exchange for the recovery of his goods and the safeguarding of the material conditions of what Valéry calls ‘the conditions of being oneself ’ (les conditions d’être soi, ibid., p. 313). However, my saying ‘negative vision’ requires further consideration. Given the period when he wrote his translation, under the German occupation (1940–4), it is more than likely that Valéry projected much of his own situation when he wrote in the interrogative mode: ‘How can we want him not to receive the favours of the tyrant and sing in praise of the one who ensures tranquil days and thus restores his reason for being? . . . Virgil did not hesitate between the independence of the citizen and that of the creator of poems’ (ibid., p. 313).

25.1.2 His translation We cannot consider the translation to be the success its author had hoped for. In general, Valéry does not translate accurately: not only because translating line for line implies that he cannot translate every word, but also because he renders wrong meanings, probably owing to his level of Latin. Here is an example: at mihi sese offert ultro meus ignis, Amyntas, notior ut iam sit canibus non Delia nostris. (Verg. Ecl. 3.66–7) ‘My flame Amyntas gives himself to me unasked, Not even Delia’s more familiar to our dogs.’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 3.66–7 Mais à moi vient s’offrir Amyntas, mon amour, But to me comes himself to-offer Amyntas, my love, Comme courent mes chiens reconnaissant Délie. As run my dogs on-recognizing Delia.

Valéry is mistaken about the meaning of ut in this usage. With the subjunctive, ut does not introduce a comparison but a subordinate consecutive clause; it should not be translated ‘as’, but ‘so that’: ‘so that now Delia is not better known by my dogs’. He also misses the comparative notior. De Saint-Denis, whose translation I shall use as a standard, given its precision, has: À moi s’offre spontanément l’objet de ma flamme, Amyntas; aussi nos chiens le connaissent déjà mieux que Délie (‘The object of my flame, Amyntas, offers himself to me of his own accord. That is why my dogs already know him better than they do Delia’).

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Since Valéry is not interested in bucolic poetry, he sometimes eliminates crucial words. Amoebaean singing is a competition between poets where each term and each motif counts, and where the second poet absolutely must reuse and add a variation to the words and the motifs of the first. It is therefore impossible to remove, as for example Valéry does, the name of Iollas in the strophe where Menalcas responds to Damoetas, who has just used it: if Menalcas had not reused this name, as is the case in Valéry’s translation, he would have lost the contest: Phyllida amo ante alias; nam me discedere fleuit, et longum ‘formose, uale, uale’ inquit ‘Iolla’. (Verg. Ecl. 3.78–9) ‘Iollas, I love Phyllis most of all; when I left, she wept and said, ‘So long, handsome, so long!’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 3.78–9 J’adore ma Phyllis, qui pleura mon départ, I adore my Phyllis, who bewailed my departure, Et ne cessait de dire: ‘Adieu, mon beau, Adieu!’ And never would-stop from saying: ‘Farewell, my fine-man, farewell!’

Here is another example of Valéry’s lack of attention to Virgil’s poetics in Eclogue 8: he does not render the contrast between the adjectives improbus (‘bad, nasty’, used twice) and crudelis (‘cruel’, used three times). He neglects the former or translates it as ‘cruel’, which breaks the initial contrast, and he uses the word ‘love’ twice, exactly where Virgil takes care to introduce a variation, Amor versus puer (repeated twice): saeuos Amor docuit natorum sanguine matrem commaculare manus; crudelis tu quoque, mater: crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus ille? improbus ille puer; crudelis tu quoque, mater. (Verg. Ecl. 8.47–50) ‘Pitiless Love once taught a mother to pollute Her hands with blood of sons; you too were cruel, mother. Who was more cruel, the mother or that wicked boy? That wicked boy was; yet you too were cruel, mother.’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 8.47–50 L’atroce Amour voulut que du sang de ses fils Savage Love wanted that in-the blood of her sons Soient couvertes les mains de leur cruelle mère! Be covered the hands of their cruel mother! Qui fut le plus cruel, ou la mère ou l’enfant? Who was the more cruel, the mother or the child? Si l’amour fut cruel, tu fus barbare, toi . . . If Love was cruel, you were barbaric, you . . .

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Nonetheless, Valéry’s text contains a large number of passages rendered quite successfully. In French poetry, rhythm is produced not only by rhymes, but also by word stresses (some syllables are longer and stronger) and by other stresses, which are either fixed (for example, the sixth syllable in the alexandrine) or mobile (produced by pauses). Rhythm produced by word stresses often coincides with rhythm produced by pauses. My first example is taken from Eclogue 2 (I put in bold the word stress and indicate groups of words that result from pauses with numbers; in both verses there is a pause at the sixth syllable).⁴ It is to be noted that a syllable ending in mute e (graphically, final -e without any accent) at the end of a verse does not count metrically: o crudeli Alexi, nihil mea carmina curas? nil nostri miserere? mori me denique coges? (Verg. Ecl. 2.6–7) ‘O cruel Alexis, have you no time for my tunes? No pity for us? You’ll be the death of me at last.’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 2.6–7 O cruel Alexis, tu dédaignes mes chants? (3 + 3 / 3 + 3) O cruel Alexis, do-you scorn my songs? Point de pitié pour moi. Tu veux donc que je meure? (4 + 2 / 3 + 3) No pity for me. You want then that I die?

Musicality is also produced by sounds repeated, which are either vowels (assonances): è (cruel; Alexis, dédaignes), é (dédaignes, mes), u (cruel, tu), i (pitié), e (dédaignes, de, veux, que, je, meure), or consonants (alliterations): t (tu, tu), p (point, pitié, pour), d (dédaignes), k (cruel, donc, que). Another from Eclogue 7: huc mihi, dum teneras defendo a frigore myrtos, uir gregis ipse caper deerrauerat; atque ego Daphnim aspicio (Verg. Ecl. 7.6–8) ‘Here, while I shielded tender myrtles from the cold, My herd’s old man, the he-goat, had wandered off; and then I notice Daphnis.’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 7.6–8 J’étais à protéger du froid mes frêles myrt(es) (2 + 4 / 2 + 4) I was at protecting from cold my fragile myrtles Quand s’égara mon bouc et j’aperçus Daphnis. (4 + 2 / 4 + 2) When strayed my he-goat and I glimpsed Daphnis.

The sounds repeated are é (j’étais, protéger, égara, et), è (étais, frêles), a (quand, égara, aperçus, Daphnis), j (j’étais, protéger, j’aperçus), fr or f (froid, frêles, Daphnis), ⁴ I encourage native English speakers to read aloud the French, following my indications, if they wish to appreciate the musicality of the language.

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s (s’égara, aperçus, Daphnis). My last example is taken from Eclogue 6, where the rhythm is regular and the musicality is produced through repetition of the sounds en (entrouve, tempes, sang), t (entrouve, tempes), ou (entrouve, barbouille), r (entrouve, barbouille, front, vermeil, mures), b (barbouille), é (les, Eglé, les, et, des), e (entrouve, yeux), l (les, lui, les, le), m (vermeil, mures), r (vermeil, mures). The verb barbouille (‘scribble’) is very apt for pingit, and sang vermeil (‘vermilion blood’) is a suggestive colour: Aegle, Naiadum pulcherrima, iamque uidenti sanguineis frontem moris et tempora pingit. (Verg. Ecl. 6.21–2) ‘Aeglë of Naiads loveliest, and, now he’s looking, With blood-red mulberries paints his temples and his brow.’ Valéry, Bucoliques, 6.21–2 Il entrouve les yeux mais Eglé lui barbouil(e) (3 + 3 / 3 + 3) He opens his eyes but Aegle for-him smears Les tempes et le front du sang vermeil des mûr(es). (3 + 3 / 4 + 2) His temples and his forehead with-the blood vermilion of mulberries.

To conclude, musicality and verbal elegance characterize Valéry’s translation. When reading it, we can undeniably hear the voice of a great poet through a text that is not his . . . but, and here’s the rub, it is not Virgil’s, either!

25.2 The Eclogues According to Marcel Pagnol When Pagnol published his Eclogues in 1958, he was already an extremely popular and famous author; he had been a member of the Académie française since 1946. Unlike Valéry, he declares his interest in the subject of Virgil’s poem in his preface. He quotes the famous expression inspired by Virgil’s Eclogue 5.43 (Daphnis ego in siluis): Et ego in Arcadia, to which an essay from another Provençal writer, Jean Giono—Arcadia, Arcadia (published in 1953)—had just given renewed relevance. Pagnol understands the inscription that Poussin had put on the tomb of his Bergers d’Arcadie as meaning ‘I, too, have been a shepherd’. Between 1936 and 1955, the German art historian Erwin Panofsky had changed his mind about the meaning of this expression, going from ‘and I, too, have lived in Arcadia’ to ‘I, death, am present even in Arcadia’. It is a variation on the first meaning that Pagnol applies to his own situation. However, it is not himself who lived in Arcadia, in pastoral Provence, but rather his brother Paul, who was a goatherd. Pagnol often went to meet him in his solitudes: ‘On the hills of Provence, in the ravines of Beaume Sourne, at the bottom of the gorges of Passe-Temps, I often followed my brother, who was the last goatherd of l’Étoile’⁵

⁵ L’Étoile is a mountain near Aubagne in the south of France.

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(Pagnol 1958, p. 9).⁶ In his Preface, Pagnol paints a beautiful portrait of his brother, a shepherd and harmonica player, whom he has already mentioned in the previous year, in La gloire de mon père and Le château de ma mère (both published in 1957), and will mention again shortly afterwards, in Le temps des secrets (published in 1959). He worked on the Eclogues for about twenty years ‘for my pleasure and my benefit’ (pour mon plaisir et mon profit, Pagnol 1958, p. 18). One day a friend of his, André Chaumeix, published two of his Eclogues, namely 1 and 3, in La revue des deux mondes and another, Pierre Brisson, published Eclogues 2 and 5 in Le Figaro littéraire. It was the (unexpectedly) successful reception of these texts by readers that brought Pagnol to publish the ensemble of his work. He received many letters from people asking for such and such Eclogue (6 and 10), or discussing some of his translations. These people were notaries, merchants, booksellers, postmen, two bankers, and one countryman who signed himself paganus (‘the peasant’). Pagnol tells of having also been approached by strangers on the train. It is very strange to read this kind of experience today, when classical culture is no longer widespread in France. What were the principles that Pagnol forged for himself for this translation? Like Valéry, Pagnol chose to translate into verse, guided by the desire to be as faithful as possible to Virgil’s text. He came to this decision after reading many translations of Virgil, going back to the eighteenth century and to the debates that took place then between the partisans of prose and those of verse. He refers to a scholar and cleric, l’Abbé Desfontaines (1797), who defended prose in the name of precision; but he turns his argument against him because l’Abbé Desfontaines made the error of citing a few of his adversaries, with whom Marcel Pagnol was in agreement. According to one of them, président Bouhier, ‘prose could only imperfectly represent the graces of poetry [les grâces de la poésie]; translations into prose are made less for the pleasure of the reader [le plaisir du lecteur] than to facilitate the understanding of the original text’ (Desfontaines, as quoted in Pagnol 1958, p. 12). The two proposed criteria, ‘pleasure’ and ‘graces’, are relatively vague, especially the second. Pagnol also cites a partisan of translation into prose invoked by l’Abbé Desfontaines, Father Sanadon, because he lends his adversaries arguments that, once again, convince him. Arguing about ‘force’ (force) and ‘agreement’ (agrément), about the ‘harmony and fire of the lines, the people of merit, . . . persuaded that verse must be translated only into verse’, considered that a poet who is translated in a way that settles for his thoughts alone, stripped of the harmony and the fire of verse, is no longer a poet but rather the cadaver of the poet [n’est plus un poète mais le cadavre d’un poète] and . . . all the translations of verse into prose that we deem faithful are in fact very unfaithful as the author behind the text has been disfigured [défiguré]. (Father Sanadon, as quoted in Pagnol 1958, p. 12)

⁶ In this section quotations from the French Eclogues are taken from Pagnol 1958 (the Grasset edition), de Saint-Denis 1942, and, in one instance, Valéry 1997.

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Pagnol goes on to explore the means of rendering the ‘graces’ of foreign poetry into the French language, which has other criteria and practices. He reviews several possibilities of equivalence: the free verse of the classics (he uses La Fontaine as an example), but its ‘gait’ (démarche) is ‘too nimble’ (trop preste) and ‘too jaunty’ (trop guillerette); the free verse of the moderns, which is also brushed aside because, for him, it constitutes ‘dislocated prose’ (prose disloquée); and blank verse, by which he means without rhyme (which is Valéry’s choice). Pagnol rejects that too, because for him rhythm is essentially produced by rhymes. Although he finds Valéry’s translation ‘admirable’, he indeed considers that ‘the reader is constantly waiting for the rhyme’ (Pagnol 1958, p. 14). Like Valéry, Pagnol is aware of the structural differences between Latin and French, which necessarily make all translations longer: ‘We are forced to use a pronoun in front of the verb; the genitive, the dative, the ablative demand prepositions; compound verb tenses require an auxiliary, and the article, in front of the substantive, is another inconvenience’ (ibid., p. 16). According to him, on average, two Latin lines are rendered in three French lines. Initially he aimed to be as faithful as possible by making sure to omit nothing from the original text and by remaining very close to it. Then he decided to expand: ‘I quickly realized that in order to remove nothing, it was sometimes indispensable, because of the metre and the rhyme, to add des chevilles’ (ibid., p. 16), some of them explanatory (as we shall see).⁷ This decision exposes him to a critical remark that de Saint-Denis makes in his preface to the translation of Henry des Abbayes: ‘the search for rhymes is one of the most patent causes of the usual padding when translating into verse’.⁸ Pagnol had read not only many previous translations, but also Jérôme Carcopino, author of a thesis on Virgil and the Origins of Ostia that was published in 1919. Carcopino was at that time a member of the Académie française and undoubtedly the philologist best known to the general public. Showing that he occupied a place in the line of scholars and wanting to meet the same standards, Pagnol accompanied his translation of each Eclogue with notes in which he recalls previous translations, discusses them, and justifies his own. Unlike Valéry, he is aware that translating a text requires interpretation of this text and, in the case of Roman texts, a good knowledge of ancient culture. Here is a sample of his observations, written in a casual, simple and funny tone. After observing that the clerics who had translated Eclogue 2 had been hampered ‘by the nature of Corydon’s passion’ and that some had refused to understand, Pagnol playfully specifies the way Abbé Delille dealt with it: ‘More literary and perhaps less ecclesiastical . . . he did not bother finding justifications

⁷ Cheville, which means something like ‘padding’ or ‘stopgap’, relates to an expression that is not necessary for the thought but is used by the poet because he needs to add a few words for rhyme or rhythm. ⁸ de Saint-Denis 1962, p. 8.

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or palliatives. He bravely grabbed the bull by the horns, and turned it into a heifer . . . Virgil’s beautiful Alexis became the charming Lycoris’ (Pagnol 1958, p. 56). More seriously, Pagnol recalls the Christian interpretation of Eclogue 4 and shows that Carcopino ‘seems to have destroyed this beautiful legend: he has quenched the halo of the poet [il a éteint l’auréole du poète] in his magisterial book Virgil and the Mystery of the Fourth Eclogue, published in 1930’ (ibid., p. 98). The child evoked anonymously would be Saloninus, Pollio’s second son. What is very typical of Pagnol’s approach is that he is respectful of knowledge (he does not question the point of view of a scholar like Carcopino), but he allows himself to reintroduce differently what he just discarded, with (here) an ‘allow me to stray for a moment’ (ibid.). He indeed proposes the rather crazy hypothesis that Virgil might have ‘received, unknowingly, a supernatural influence; a ‘higher spirit’ (esprit supérieur)—perhaps the angel of the Annunciation—attempted to dictate the announcement of the Nativity to him, and some sentences that shine with such a strange light might be the fragments of a divine message’ (ibid., p. 99). The third feature of his notes is that, in them, Pagnol discusses textual readings. This is the case for the final lines of Eclogue 4. ‘The reader’, he writes, ‘is undoubtedly familiar with the long debate between cui non risere parentes and qui non risere parenti. In short, is the mother the one who is smiling, or must the newborn smile?’ (ibid., p. 100): incipe, parue puer, risu cognoscere matrem (matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses); incipe, parue puer, cui non risere parentes / qui non risere parenti, nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est. (Verg. Ecl. 4.60–3) ‘Begin, small boy, to know your mother with a smile (Ten lunar months have brought your mother long discomfort) Begin, small boy: him who for parent have not smiled No god invites to table nor goddess to bed.’

For the first version, after proposing the translation commence, petit enfant, à reconnaître ta mère à son sourire . . . celui à qui ses parents n’ont pas souri (‘begin, little child, to recognize your mother by her smile . . . the one to whom his parents have not smiled’), Pagnol recalls that some commentators see in these two lines an allusion to Vulcan, who was so ugly that his mother refused to see him and Minerva did not want him as husband. He finds this passage unclear. If the parents do not want to smile at their child, it is not the child’s responsibility, and he does not understand why the critics refer to ‘the rather troublesome story of Vulcan’. For the second version, he proposes the translation commence, petit enfant, à montrer par ton sourire que tu reconnais ta mère . . . ceux qui n’ont pas souri à leur mère (‘begin, little child, to show that you recognize your mother through your smile . . . those who have not smiled at their mothers’). He feels it runs foul of two difficulties. First, it implies that

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the text is corrupt; yet, for him, that is ‘a solution that is a bit too easy’. Secondly, qui seems problematic to him. On the one hand, this is due to the allusion to Vulcan: ‘could there be several Vulcans?’; and, on the other, there is the grammatical aspect, as the next line contains a hunc (= this person) ‘that would have to be replaced by hos’ (= those people). Pagnol finds it difficult to accept the point of view of Henri Goelzer (translator of the Eclogues in 1895), who suggests that we have here a syllepsis. His position here is strictly philological.⁹ Pagnol finally proposes a personal interpretation that he presents as ‘a rather bold hypothesis’: risu might hold a double meaning, which would give: Commence, petit enfant, à montrer par ton sourire que tu reconnais ta mère, pour qu’elle sourie à son tour . . . commence à sourire, petit enfant, (car d’autre part) celui à qui ses parents n’ont pas souri n’a pas été jugé digne de la table des Dieux ni du lit d’une déesse (‘Begin, little child, to show that you recognize your mother through your smile, so that she too can smile . . . Begin to smile, little child, (since furthermore) the one not smiled upon by his parents has not been deemed worthy of the table of the Gods nor of the bed of a goddess’, Pagnol 1958, p. 101). Here is his translation: Pagnol, Bucoliques, 4.91–6 Du fond de ce berceau que tous les Dieux chérirent From-the bottom of this cradle that all the Gods cherish Petit enfant, connais ta mère à son sourire. Little child, know your mother by her smile. Elle a subi pour toi dix mois fastidieux . . . She suffered for you ten months tedious . . . Ouvre tes yeux brillants de rêve et de chimères: Open your eyes shining with dreams and with fancies: Celui qui n’a pas vu lui sourire sa mère The-one who never saw at-him smile his mother Ne s’est jamais assis à la table des Dieux. Never sat at the table of-the Gods.

This translation is typical of his method. Pagnol translates certain lines with precision and freely interprets others through additions. The second and third lines of the passage are rather successful; but he did not translate incipe, which is nevertheless repeated in anaphora. The first and fourth lines are amplifications inspired by romantic or symbolist poetry.¹⁰ In the sixth line, Pagnol did not render the allusion to the Golden Age, which he did not understand: dea nec dignata cubili est. Valéry, who had chosen version 2, had proposed:

⁹ Heyworth 2015, pp. 207–11, who recently discussed this passage, comes down in favour of the version chosen by de Saint-Denis. ¹⁰ Words like berceau, chérir, rêves, and chimères recall Romantic and symbolist poets fascinated by mystery, the sacred, and dreams.

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Valéry, Bucoliques, 4.60–3 Sache par ton sourire accueillir cette mère Know by your smile to-welcome this mother (qui durant dix longs mois, t’a porté dans son sein); (who, during ten long months, you [ACC.] carried in her womb); pour sa mère, celui qui n’eut pas ce sourire for his mother, the-one who did not have this smile N’aura les mets des dieux ni le lit des déesses. Shall-not have the meals of gods nor the bed of goddesses.

It is a substantially more exact translation but does not render incipe either. Neither Pagnol nor Valéry translated dignata est. Let us return to Pagnol and to his usage of what he calls chevilles. They have various purposes. For example: he understands nothing of Eclogue 6, on which he remarks: and here suddenly appears Gallus, this general, friend of Virgil, who wrote poetry in his spare time. Throughout ten hexameters, the poet kneels before the military man, who would later pour torrents of tears onto the cold feet of a gourgandine¹¹ named Lycoris. Apollo and his court rise as he approaches to offer him the flutes of the old Hesiod: it seems as though he did not use them much, and this vulgar flattery, that was perhaps popular at the time, does not bring honour to the Swan of Mantua. (Pagnol 1958, p. 134)

Given that Marcel Pagnol has read the work of philologists, he is aware that this statement, made on the run, is not exact. He also remarks: ‘we tried to justify the incoherence of the poem by saying that each of these fables had been treated at length by Cornelius Gallus, and that the eclogue is a summary of his work’. He concludes: ‘it would therefore be an eighty-six line piece of flattery’ (ibid., p. 135). It is because he has this conception of Gallus that he adds, in Eclogue 10, a cheville that is pure toadyism at the centre of his translation of the first three lines: extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem: pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, carmina sunt dicenda: neget quis carmina Gallo? (Verg. Ecl. 10.1–3) ‘Permit me, Arethusa, this last desperate task. For Gallus mine (but may Lycóris read it too) A brief song must be told; who’d deny Gallus song?’ Pagnol, Bucoliques, 10.1–5 Sois propice, Aréthuse! Encore un dernier chant Be kind, Arethusa! Once-more a last song Accorde-moi ces vers pour un ami que j’aime.

¹¹ Gourgandine is a bodice that is laced at the front. It is a colourful term for a loose woman who leads a dissolute life.

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Grant to-me these verses for a friend whom I love. A mon Gallus, si beau, si noble, si touchant, To my Gallus, so handsome, so noble, so moving, Qui pourrait refuser l’amitié d’un poème? Who could refuse the friendship of a poem? Je veux que celui-ci soit lu par Lycoris. I want that it be read by Lycoris.

I will conclude with his translation of the word frondator. Here too Marcel Pagnol shows his respect for learning: he aims to insert himself into a tradition of which he is highly conscious. But he again allows himself to innovate in his interpretation and translation. The translation of frondator as émondeur (‘pruner’) at line 56 of Eclogue 1 (hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras, ‘From here under the high rock the pruner will sing to the winds’) seems to him arguable because the position of this frondator at the foot of a high boulder does not correspond to the habits of country life. He remarks: ‘Pruners are usually in trees, but we can allow that this one climbed down from the branches to rest for a moment alta sub rupe’ (Pagnol 1958, p. 39). Nonetheless, making an objection in the interest of common sense, but one that remains pure speculation, he remarks: ‘If this frondator is a man, he is a pruner, and if he came down to have a rest sub alta rupe, he is not singing because he is sleeping’ (ibid., p. 40). Furthermore, ‘no beeches, pines, or any forest trees require pruning: and this is surely why Abbé Delille very skilfully transformed him into several woodcutters’ (ibid., p. 40). Already in his youth, he adds, he had detected a corrupt passage. Later, his readings led him to discover, in l’Abbé Desfontaines’s notes, that Servius had argued that there were ‘always birds perched on the trees that we call frondatores’ and that Abbé Saint-Rémy had translated frondator as rossignol, ‘nightingale’ (ibid.). In fact Servius had written in his commentary on this passage (and this actually offers a response to Pagnol’s objection to beeches, pines, and other trees): id est rusticus (uel quod de floribus nascitur); nam tria genera sunt frondatorum: frondator qui arbores amputat et qui frondibus manipulos facit, hiemi tempore animalibus ad pastum offerendos, et qui manibus uitium folia auellit, quo ardor solis uuam maturiorem reddat (‘this means countryman (or what is born from flowers); for there are three types of pruners: the one that cuts trees, the one that makes bundles of foliage to provide animal feed in the winter, and the one that removes the leaves of the vines by hand in order to let the heat of the sun better ripen the grape’, Serv. ad Ecl. 1.56).¹² Thus not a single word about a bird, but a strange comment, ‘what is born from flowers’, which, de Saint-Denis suggests, should be considered an interpolation emanating from (uel quod floribus) and from Junius Phylargirius (uel animal quod de floribus nascitur) and arising from an error made in ¹² As in fact noted by de Saint-Denis 1962, p. 561, frondator can be a pruner who is making provisions from foliage to ensure winter food for the herds, or who trims the vines to avoid the maturation of the clusters.

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two manuscripts about susurro in line 55—namely the error of attributing it to a bird rather than to bees.¹³ Let us return to Pagnol: he notices that the nightingale rarely sings during the day and that it is not seen up high. Nor is he convinced by the identification with the wood pigeon that coos—which he attributes to Servius (or rather his sources do)—on the grounds that it would overlap with the pigeons in the next line. Looking for a ‘bird that makes its nest of leaves, whose melodious singing can be heard from afar, and who lives in Italy’, he concludes, ‘we see only one option, and that is the blackbird [le merle], whose song is comparable to that of the nightingale during its nesting season’ (Pagnol 1958, p. 42). This is why he translates: Pagnol, Bucoliques, 1.81–2 Là-haut, dans un fourré que les roches surplombent Up there, in a thicket which the rocks overlook un merle siffle au vent la chanson de l’été . . . a blackbird whistles to-the wind the song of summer . . .

—a lovely line, whose only fault is having nothing to do with Virgil’s text! If one of the reproaches that have been made, and justifiably, against Pagnol is that he has diluted his translation, this is not always the case. I will end with a small selection of his successes: qui legitis flores et humi nascentia fraga. (Verg. Ecl. 3.92) ‘You children picking flowers and earth-born strawberries.’ Pagnol, Bucoliques, 3.142 Vous qui cueillez les fleurs et la fraise nouvell(e) (4 + 2 / 3 + 3) You who pick the flowers and the strawberry young

Pagnol did not translate humi, but the reader can appreciate his stylish game of assonances—ou (vous, nouvelle), é (cueillez, les, et), è (fraises, nouvelles)—and alliterations— v (vous, nouvelle), k (qui, cueillez), f (fleurs, fraises), r (fleurs, fraises), l (les, la). Daphnis ego in siluis, hinc usque ad sidera notus. (Verg. Ecl. 5.43) ‘Daphnis am I in woodland, known hence far as the stars.’ Pagnol, Bucoliques, 5.65 Je fus Daphnis, connu des forêts jusqu’aux cieux . . . (4 + 2 / 3 + 3) I was Daphnis, known from-the forests to the skies . . . ¹³ Regarding the interpolation uel quod de floribus nascitur, see the clarification proposed by de SaintDenis 1962, p. 558.

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Daphnis is not the first word, as in Virgil, but it is emphasized by the mobile accent placed on its second syllable. The rhythm is solemn, as required for praise, because of the sounds repeated three times: u (fus, connu, jusqu’au), o (connu, jusqu’aux, forêts), f (fus, Daphnis, forêts), or twice: s (Daphnis, cieux), i (Daphnis, cieux), k (connu, jusqu’aux).

25.3 Conclusion I return to the principal argument supporting translations in verse: the need to create an equivalent in musicality and rhythm, by comparison with the unique voice of the original text. The poet Antonio Prete, translator of Baudelaire, explains that the main task for the translator is to reread and listen in order to catch the breath and the tone of the poem to be translated.¹⁴ But this is more or less feasible depending on languages. As Latin is not a living language, modern translators cannot easily or fully appreciate the effects of metrical practices. As a result, Valéry and Pagnol are able simply to provide examples of French poetic uses, broadly influenced by their own tastes: for Valéry, his own way of writing; for Pagnol, Romantic and symbolist poetry. Personally I prefer de Saint-Denis’s translation, and for two reasons. I consider the preservation of meaning to be a priority. In the case of scholarly poetry, such as Virgil’s, where intertextual references play a key role, it is important not only to translate the words but also to try to respect their value, their connotations, their positions, and their possible repetition. For example: the adjectives tenuis and deductum in Eclogues 1 and 6 are important markers in referring to the Aitia of Callimachus, whose stylistic choices Virgil takes up.¹⁵ These allusions to Μοῦσαν λεπταλέην (Call. fr. 1.23 Pfeiffer) had not been recognized by French philologists in the early part of the twentieth century, but as de Saint-Denis is careful to respect the meaning of Latin words, he has translated correctly tenui auena (Verg. Ecl. 1.2) by mince pipeau (‘thin pipe’) and deductum carmen dicere (Verg. Ecl. 6.5) by étirer un chant menu (‘stretch a fine song’), whereas Valéry has chosen two trivial adjectives: petit air champêtre (‘little pastoral song’) and air facile (‘easy song’). The other reason why I prefer de Saint-Denis’s translation is that de Saint-Denis is also attentive to the musicality of Latin words. In an article dedicated to Valéry, in which he is very favourable towards the poet, he recalls that the aim he had set for himself was ‘to be precise, like H. Goelzer, and also to render in the translation, if possible, the music of Virgil’ (la musique virgilienne: de Saint-Denis 1958, p. 76). By this he explains that he means the rendering of the balancements (symmetrical arrangements in the sentences), of the correspondances (corresponding expressions), and of Latin alliterations. And he unquestionably succeeded. I give as an example his ¹⁴ See the analysis of his translation of the poem ‘A une passante’ (‘To a Passerby’), in Borutti and Heidmann 2012, pp. 156–60. ¹⁵ The first philologist to note these allusions to Callimachus was Reitzenstein 1931.

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translation of the alliterations in r, which evoke, to him, the hoarse chirping of the cicadas in the second Eclogue (lines 12–13), at mecum raucis, tua dum uestigia lustro, / sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis: mais moi, rôdant sur la trace de tes pas, sous le soleil ardent, je fais, avec les rauques cigales, résonner les vergers (‘but I, roaming on the traces of your steps, under the broiling sun, with the hoarse cicadas I make the orchards resonate’). He has also rendered the Latin assonances in o (rauques for raucis, rôdant for lustro, soleil for sole, résonner for resonant) and in a (traces de tes pas for tua . . . uestigia, ardent for ardenti, cigales for cicadas). Valéry translated mais moi, sous le soleil ardent, qui pas à pas / te suis, mêlant ma voix au concert des cigales (‘But I, under the broiling sun, who step by step / follows you, blending my voice with the concert of cicadas’); he drops the alliterations in r, but reproduces the (less expressive) alliterations in m (mais, moi, mêlant, ma) and the assonances in a (ardent, pas à pas, ma, cigales). Pagnol proved more scrupulous, though with fewer alliterations, in this case in r: Mais moi, cherchant au sol l’empreinte d’un talon, / j’écoute striduler les brûlantes cigales (‘But I, searching the ground for the print of a heel, / I hear the chirping of burning cicadas’). De Saint-Denis also stresses that he was attentive to Virgil’s decision to repeat certain words, ‘especially proper nouns, which possess greater musical richness’ and which ‘create an echo’: Tityre, tu . . . tu, Tityre (Verg. Ecl.1.1, 4); Pana . . . Pan . . . Pan (Verg. Ecl. 2.31–3); Corydon, Corydon (Verg. Ecl. 2.69) and so on (de Saint-Denis 1958 p. 77). I will elaborate on only one of these examples: Pan etiam Arcadia mecum si iudice certet, / Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice uictum (Verg. Ecl. 4.58–9), which de Saint-Denis (1942) translates thus (with respect for the word order and for balancements): Pan même, devant l’Arcadie prise pour juge, aurait beau se mesurer à moi; Pan même, devant l’Arcadie prise pour juge, s’avouerait vaincu (‘Pan himself, in front of Arcadia chosen as judge, could well have tried measuring himself against me; Pan himself, in front of Arcadia chosen as judge, would admit himself defeated’). De Saint-Denis also tried to render, through the use of simple yet evocative words, the suggestiveness of Virgil’s images, which is generally lost when translating into verse. Here is an example from Eclogues 9.39–42: huc ades, O Galatea: quis est nam ludus in undis? hic uer purpureum, uarios hic flumina circum fundit humus flores; hic candida populus antro imminet et lentae texunt umbracula uites. huc ades; insani feriant sine litora fluctus. Come here, O Galatéa. What sport is there in water? Here it is radiant springtime; here by the riverside Earth pours forth the pied flowers; here the white poplar leans Over a cave, and limber vines weave tents of shade. De Saint-Denis, Bucoliques, 9.39–42 Viens ici, Galatée! à quoi bon jouer dans les flots? Ici le printemps rutile; ici, au bord des cours d’eau, la terre épand ses fleurs diaprées; ici, le peuplier blanc surplombe ma grotte, et les vignes souples tissent des ombrages. Viens ici; laisse les vagues folles battre les rivages.

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Come here, Galatea! What good is playing in the waves? Here, the spring shines brightly; here, along the water courses, the earth spreads her variegated flowers; here white poplar white overhangs my grotto, and pliant vines weave their shade. Come here; let mad waves mad strike the shores.

De Saint-Denis takes care to reproduce the colour in the adjective purpureum (with rutile, which carries the connotation of gleaming, vivid red), the diversity of nuances in uarios (with diaprées, which can mean ‘multi-coloured’), and the overhanging position implied by imminet (with surplombe). He reproduces exactly the image of a tissue of shadows created by the vines, without omitting their sinuousness (lentae, translated soupples). He respects the sequence huc . . . hic . . . hic . . . hunc and the position of three of these adverbs in anaphora, and tries to render the alliteration of f in the last line by using the letters f and v: vagues, folles, rivage. I shall close my plea in favour of de Saint-Denis’s musical prose by indicating that he had the playfulness of sometimes inserting—alexandrines. Thus his translation of maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae in Eclogue 1 (l. 83) is very musical, with prolongation of the fourth sound ‘on’ because of the muted e: Et les ombres tombant du haut des monts s’allongent (‘And the shadows falling from-the height of-the mountains growlonger’).

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26 Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid Ulrich Eigler

In Germany the language and style of the vernacular epic, identified as they were with Homer and his translator Voß, were more important for cultural identity than was Virgil—an author who was admired as a European poet rather than as a contributor to that identity.¹ So in 1930 the Catholic and clearly anti-Nazi Theodor Haecker could easily coin the phrase ‘father of the West’ (Vater des Abendlandes) to describe Virgil² without giving up an icon of German national identity (Homer was still considered one by that time). The situation was different in Italy—another ‘late nation’, where not only the language of the translations of Virgil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an issue but also Virgil as a sacrosanct, national poet. As in the other Romance countries, Virgil had continued to be highly esteemed through the centuries. A strong tradition of translations into Italian persisted, all going back to the influential one by Annibale Caro (1507–66), published posthumously in Venice in 1581, which had gained some fame and prevailed over other versions in Italian languages such as Sicilian.³ I shall pass over all these to focus on some exemplary translations of the twentieth century, asking, along with Pier Paolo Pasolini, come tradurre? (‘how to translate?’).⁴ In this chapter I will also offer a

¹ See also Chapter 24 in this volume. ² Haecker 1931. The opusculum was quickly translated into English: see Haecker 1934. ³ For a short overview, see della Corte 1984–90, vol. 5, pp. 244–5, s.v. traduzioni (leaving out the detailed discussion of translations in different Italian dialects). For the translation in siciliano by Tommaso Aversa, published in Palermo between 1654 and 1660 under the title L’Eneide di Virgiliu Siciliani di D. Tomasi Aversa e Castrunovu, see Mineo 1990, pp. 113–26. ⁴ Todini 1995, p. 263. At pp. 263–5, Todini reprints Pasolini’s ‘Lettera del traduttore’, which was written to explain the translation of Pasolini’s Orestiade (published in 1960). Pasolini asked the question come tradurre? when he began with his translation of Aeschylus (published in the same year). There are important similarities between his former experiment to translate the Aeneid (published one year earlier,

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preliminary outline of the traditions and tensions that conditioned the numerous translations of Virgil in twentieth-century Italy. Much more than in nineteenth-century Germany, in Italy Virgil is connected with cultural and political developments—in effect, with the constitution of an Italian nation. At the time of the political unification of Italy in 1860 there were many Italian dialects, but a spoken standard language unitary enough to nourish and sustain the growth of a literature of its own did not yet exist. The issue is closely connected to that of the language used in translations from classical authors. What language was one supposed to use for literary communication with one’s fellow Italians? Just a few decades before unification, on 3 November 1821, Alessandro Manzoni had written to his friend Claude Furiel a letter that became famous, where he points out the Italian problem of communication between author and reader (Manzoni himself was in the middle of writing his novel I promessi sposi at the time): Il manque complètement à ce pauvre écrivain ce sentiment, pour ainsi dire, de communication avec son lecteur, cette certitude de manier un instrument également connu de tous les deux (‘This poor writer is utterly lacking this feeling, so to speak, of communicating with his reader, this certainty of handling an instrument equally familiar to both’).⁵ Manzoni, who was originally from Lombardy, finally published I promessi sposi after having reworked it in the Tuscan dialect during his stay in Florence 1827: this was the famous sciacquare i panni in Arno (‘doing the washing in the Arno’), as he himself called it in a letter to his mother. The language of this classic of Italian literature soon attained the normative status of a canonical work by Machiavelli or Dante and was welcomed by the thin stratum of bourgeois culture between Rome, Florence, and Turin, which promoted the Tuscan dialect as the language of educated nationalistic Italians.⁶ To return to Virgil, he, as a cultural icon, was important mainly to a small, awkward group of highly learned people involved in the movement in the kingdom of Savoy that brought together ‘literary–idealistic, republican–revolutionary and dynastic currents’ with the aim of achieving Italy’s national unification.⁷ They represented only a fraction of that movement, but the most influential one. So the question of translations of Virgil cannot be considered without looking at the turbulent social, political, and linguistic history of Italy. Even a hundred years later, one feels the consequences of this heritage, so that it is completely justified to in 1959) and the way he translated Aeschylus. See also Lago 2012 [2011], p. 28, who sees in the Virgilian fragment some kind of laboratorio for the Aeschylus project. ⁵ I quote from Kramer 2012, pp. 98–9 (who provides further information on Manzoni’s letter and the conditions under which I promessi sposi was written and published). The problems of this process of rewriting are described by Lepschy and Lepschy 1977, p. 24. ⁶ On the still minor significance of the lingua di Dante on Italy’s whole linguistic map, see De Mauro 1987, p. 53. Concerning the particular situation of Italian literary language, Lepschy and Lepschy 1977, p. 25 point out that ‘there was a literary language developed by men of letters for men of letters, which had never become truly national and popular’. ⁷ Kramer 2012, p. 95. See also Kramer’s overview of the close correlation between the unification of Italy and the even harder struggle for standardization of the Italian language (pp. 93–122).

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join Pasolini in asking: come tradurre? Besides, Pasolini himself was well aware of the elitist character of classical authors (especially Virgil) and of the language in which they presented themselves to an Italian public. Translations, particularly those of Virgil in Italy, can be read as testimonies of intensive social, linguistic, and political debate. When Pasolini translated classical authors, not only did he have to deal with a neoclassicist culture and with the language of a minority, but he was also trying to oppose a ‘modern’ standard Italian, which expressed the ‘neocapitalist society’ he didn’t approve of.⁸ I shall therefore start out with a quick look at the enormous but socially limited significance of Virgil as ‘Italian’ poet (§26.1) and an overview of some outstanding translations of the twentieth century (§26.2). Then I will consider more closely a specific experiment: the opening part of the Aeneid in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s translation of 1959, contrasted with the same passage in traditional translations and in the modern Italian version by Vittorio Sermonti (§26.3).⁹ This will enable me to evaluate the position of Pasolini’s experiment (§26.4) and will lead me to some cautious generalizing conclusions on the Italian tradition of translating Virgil, also looking back to what I say about the situation in Germany (§26.5).

26.1 Virgil as ‘Italian’ Poet O gloria de’ Latini, . . . per cui mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra O glory of the Latins, you through whom our tongue revealed its power¹⁰ Dante, Purgatory 7.16–17

It is symptomatic that Giuseppe Lipparini (1877–1951), professor of Italian literature, opens the Preface to his prestigious and prominently published translation of Virgil with a quotation from Dante (the very lines used as an epigraph here) that not only praises Virgil as the best Latin poet but also refers to his language as lingua nostra.¹¹ For Lipparini and his well-educated contemporary readers, la lingua di Dante, just like the Latin of his guide, was a homogenous and legitimate part of their own linguistic identity. It enriched modern Italian with authors like Ariosto, Leopardi, and Manzoni, who were thus put together in the same tradition, as canonical authors

⁸ Lepschy and Lepschy 1977, p. 32. See also de Mauro 1987, pp. 180–2. ⁹ Lago 2012 [2011] compares Pasolini’s fragment from the Aeneid with the same selection of older translations and comes to similar results, which I will refer to in sections 26.3 and 26.4 of this chapter. (The original paper on which this chapter is based was delivered without my knowledge of Lago’s very interesting analysis.) ¹⁰ The translation is taken from Mandelbaum 1995. ¹¹ Lipparini 1946 [1930].

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of Italian culture.¹² In Leopardi’s case it has been shown how deeply his own early translation of the second book of the Aeneid influenced the language and style of his later poetry, which would become a measuring stick for the Italian of the educated.¹³ It was mainly during the period of the unification of Italy—the Risorgimento—that this canon became the basis of a universal Italian: a literary language that encompassed and united all Italian dialects, at least for the literati. La lingua parlata (‘the spoken language’) remained for the most part the dialects.¹⁴ After the First World War the rising fascist movement was fundamentally hostile to all dialects,¹⁵ but with little success.¹⁶ It privileged even more the literary Italian, with its canonical authors such as Manzoni or Leopardi and its classical authors such as Virgil.¹⁷ Consequently the influential translations of Virgil in the 1920s were generally welcomed by the totalitarian system, since the ideology of Mediterranean hegemony articulated in epic poetry fit Mussolini’s political aims to perfection. Lipparini pointed this out in 1930, the year of the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth, connecting the topic of language even more programmatically with Mussolini’s political programme of mare nostro: Ma in verità, per noi Italiani, il latino non deve essere una lingua morta. È la lingua dei padri Romani, è l’italiano antico dei dominatori del mondo (‘But in fact, for us Italians, Latin is not supposed to be a dead language. It is the language of the Roman fathers, it is the old Italian of the rulers of the world’).¹⁸ But literary Italian also represented a language that could claim to unite the learned ruling class across the whole peninsula. So Virgil’s translators, partly willingly, partly without the declared intention of supporting the fascists, wound up in the shadow of fascist ideology. Neoclassicism, the explicit desire to re-create a cultural backbone for the Italian nation by bringing together the classical literature of antiquity and the Italian literary heritage, was used and abused by the fascists. Things did not happen in the same way in German fascism, given its orientation towards a Germanic past; but this process of re-creation formed a particular feature in the Italian cultural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. A programmatic expression

¹² De Mauro 1987, p. 52 stresses the fact that this particular form of Italian was the language of highly learned people who knew Latin as well. This elite brought forward the Risorgimento and remained influential for the next decades until the period of fascism. ¹³ See Corsalini 2014, who also shows how Leopardi used earlier Italian translations, transforming their language into a style of his own, which in Italian neoclassicism became canonical through his poems. See also Chapter 20 in this volume. ¹⁴ De Mauro 1987, pp. 53–4: Nel parlato quotidiano la lingua ‘viva e vera’, per dirla col Manzoni, erano anzitutto i dialetti, in secondo luogo il francese (‘In everyday parlance the “living and true” language, to use Manzoni’s expression, consisted in the dialects in the first place; French came second’). ¹⁵ Lepschy and Lepschy 1977, p. 30, talk about ‘a strong tendency to sweep dialects under the carpet as if they were a national disgrace’. ¹⁶ Ebert 1993, p. 374. ¹⁷ Fascism never touched higher education and the privileges of the learned elite (see Ebert 1993, p. 368). ¹⁸ Lipparini 1930, p. 6.

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of it is found in the parco Virgiliano built in 1928–30 by Mussolini near Naples on the occasion of the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth. Virgil’s alleged tomb was surrounded by a park hosting all the trees mentioned in the Georgics. Finally, in 1939, the mortal remains of Giacomo Leopardi, who had died in 1837 and was originally buried in San Vitale a Fuorigrotta, were transferred to the park and buried near Virgil, thus creating a meaningful ensemble that represented the essentials of Italian neoclassicism.¹⁹ Literary history in the vein of Italian Risorgimento and fascist ideology materialized in this arrangement—which hailed a certain literary language, of almost sacrosanct character, and at the same time could be claimed by fascists for their own political interests. Needless to say, in postwar Italy, after a period of reorientation, this caused trouble, since many members of the linguistic élite, for nationalistic reasons and often out of open sympathy for Mussolini, had supported this policy of culture and language, originally continuing the rather innocent and idealistic traditions of the Risorgimento, whose political aims were focused on the post-Romantic hope of recovering not only the political but also the linguistic unity of the peninsula. So, even in postwar Italy, the decision to prefer a certain language for the translation of Virgil was not just a matter of aesthetics but a political statement. What had to be revised was not only the imperialistic and nationalistic interpretation of Virgil but also the traditional language of translation. And this second part in particular has turned out to be a difficult issue.

26.2 Italian Translations of the Twentieth Century The fact that the preparations for the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth coincided (in Italy) with the fascists’ rise to power evidently had consequences for the numerous translations of Virgil’s Aeneid in the 1920s. Looking back at them, they all stand in a semantic twilight zone, within a cultural atmosphere where, even in the field of literary activities, conservative traditional neoclassicism seemed to match the new fascist ideology of the restoration of Romanness (romanità).²⁰ Although pretty much all the numerous translators of Virgil belonged to the upper and highly educated class and wrote in the same or a similar language (linguaggio), which was very specific and markedly different from Italian dialects and from everyday Italian as used in practice, there were great political differences among the academics who came up with outstanding, internationally renowned translations.²¹ Giuseppe Albini (1867–1933), professor of classics in Bologna, published a poetic, ‘Leopardian’ Aeneid in 1922, which was followed in 1925 by the Georgics and

¹⁹ See the detailed analysis in Capasso 1983. ²⁰ This is nicely shown in Nelis 2008. ²¹ Fragonara and Garbarino 1981, pp. 5–18.

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in 1926 by the Bucolics.²² In 1925 he became member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) and consequently made a career as rector of the university and as a politician.²³ Yet Francesco Vivona (1866–1936), a devoted Catholic who was never involved in fascist activities, published another poetic translation in 1926, in a loose hendecasyllabic metre close to Caro’s version of the Aeneid. It has been very popular in Italian schools up to the present day and saw a (quite flashy) paperback edition in 1995.²⁴ Giuseppe Lipparini (1877–1951), already mentioned, a representative (or so it seems) of the liberal bourgeois class in Bologna, brought out his fine prose translation of the Aeneid in 1930. Despite their different political convictions, in translating Virgil they all participate in the same cultural values, national political desires, and linguistic codes, which materialize in the language and poetry of neoclassicism. One does not have to be a fascist to utter a wish for national grandeur and for the rebirth of an Italian identity, as Lipparini does in the general introduction to his translation of the Aeneid (Lipparini 1946 [1930], p. xiii): La letteratura latina ha carattere universale: essa ha offerto modelli ed impulsi spirituali a tutto il mondo civile. Di qui la sensazione sia come un possesso di tutte le genti: sensazione diffusa e falsa . . . . ma gli eredi legittimi dei Latini sono ben vivi: siamo noi Italiani: la letteratura latina è patrimonio nostro. Latin literature has a universal character: it has offered spiritual models and impulses to the whole educated world. Hence its perception as the possession of all peoples: a perception that is widespread and false . . . but the legitimate heirs of the Latins do still exist: we, Italians, are they: Latin literature is our heritage.

Lipparini is frank about combining neoclassicism and national pride, for instance in the Preface (ibid., p. 31), where he talks about Dante and Virgil giving an indirect but clear and approving hint to the changes brought about under Mussolini (and I mean the final phrase, questo rifiorire di volontà di grandezza e di romanità). So he says about Dante: gli diede un carattere di stupenda altezza ideale, lo volle sua guida nel viaggio oltremondano. E dopo Dante, gran parte della letteratura italiana ed europea deriverà da lui; ma essa è Gloria nostra, ben nostra; e conviene asserirlo anche più chiaramente oggi, in questo rifiorire di volontà di grandezza e di romanità. he gave him [sc. Virgil] the characteristic of an astonishing optimum height, chose him as his guide on his voyage through the other world. And, after Dante, a great part of Italian and European literature will spring from him; but this is surely our glory; one must declare it even more clearly today, amid this resurgence of the desire for greatness and Romanness.

²² The translation was immediately welcomed by the German scholar Eduard Fraenkel (later driven into exile by the Nazis); see Fraenkel 1926, p. 223. ²³ See Terzaghi 1960. ²⁴ See Vivona 1995 [1926].

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And Virgil’s numerous translators and increasing number of interpreters take pride not only in the ‘national resurrection’ of their Italian patria but also in the poetic language they draw upon as the only legitimate medium for Virgil’s text—especially since Virgil too belongs in this patrimonio nostro.²⁵

26.3 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Translation of 1959 In 1959, in postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marxist and classicist, raised again the fundamental question of a new Italian literary language.²⁶ He did it at a time when he was thinking about translating Virgil. So, when he concluded his translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia—for which he had interrupted an experimental new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in the same year—he asked, in a ‘Lettera del traduttore’: Come tradurre?²⁷ This question (which features as my chapter title here) is about the kind of language he was supposed to use in translating: Come tradurre? Io possedevo già un ‘italiano’ . . . sapevo (per istinto) che avrei potuto farne uso . . . La tendenza linguistica generale è stata a modificare continuamente i toni sublimi in toni civili: una disperata correzione di ogni tentazione classicista. Da ciò un avvicinamento alla prosa, alla locuzione bassa, ragionante. How am I to translate? I already had ‘Italian’ . . . I knew instinctively how to make use of it . . . My general linguistic intention was to modify continuously sublime tones into civilian tones: a desperate correction of any classicising temptation. Hence a move towards prose, towards colloquial and rationalising expression.²⁸

Before beginning the Aeschylus project, Pasolini had translated the first 301 lines of Aeneid 1.²⁹ There, as later, he was struggling hard against his own linguistic and classicist training acquired before and during the war, particularly as he was trying to find a new language for rendering classical authors (contro ogni tentazione classicista).³⁰ He had to resist the strong scholastic, academic, and nationalistic tradition, which was deeply imbued with neoclassicist style and looked politically suspicious to him, while no alternative existed yet in his own time. So his own anti-classical, antiLeopardian poetry served as a source for his language of translation.³¹ In that idiom of his own he avoids toni sublimi (just as he says in the ‘Lettera del traduttore’ just ²⁵ Mambelli 1940, vol. 1, pp. 6–17, offers an overview. ²⁶ For the ‘Lettera del traduttore’, see note 4 in this chapter. Lago 2012 [2011], p. 23 stresses a renewed interest in classical literature of antiquity (un rinnovato interesse per i generi e le forme delle letterature classiche), especially visible in Pasolini. ²⁷ The translation of the Aeneid was apparently a collaborative project with other Italian authors that never came to fruition; see Gamberale 2006, p. 11. ²⁸ Pasolini, quoted from Todini 1995, p. 263. ²⁹ I will use here Pasolini 2003, pp. 1332–49. ³⁰ On the possibility of transferring Pasolini’s reflections on translation from the end of his Aeschylean translations to his Virgilian experiment, see Lago 2012 [2011], p. 24. ³¹ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 24.

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quoted) and uses words deriving from the Friulian dialect of his mother and the romanesco of his father.³² Toni civili would characterize the language in which Pasolini tried to express the verse of Virgil, specifically in order to avoid the style of translations he had to read as a pupil and, later, as a teacher of classics. This characterization does not mean that Pasolini used everyday language; rather he tried to offer a well-balanced mixture of elements taken from his own ‘poetic universe’³³ and made recurrent efforts to downgrade particular expressions and passages that had been rendered in sublime tones in earlier translations.³⁴ So Virgil, an Italian linguistic monument, part of the ‘national patrimony’, was somewhat transformed into the paradigm of a new Italian literary language. Arma in the first line of his Aeneid, a word that evokes the heroic fighting of the Iliad, was translated with the ordinary noun lotta (‘struggle’). So Arma virumque cano became Canto la lotta di un uomo (‘I sing of the struggle of a man’). Pasolini sings about the banal toiling of mankind in everyday life.³⁵ In Italy as in Germany, Virgil’s text stood under the spell of a traditional language; and it was still compromised by its use and abuse under fascist rule. So Pasolini wrote in opposition to all the older translations, without distinguishing the political convictions of their authors. One must not forget, however, that at the same time he was opposing the idiom of a new political capitalist establishment that, in spite of all social and political changes after the war, still favoured the traditional authors of Italian culture. Therefore, in Virgil’s case, Pasolini transformed an author who was still considered an icon of the elite, whether new or old.³⁶

26.4 The Political Impact of Pasolini’s Translation Apparently Pasolini was familiar with a reprint of Lipparini’s translation when he wrote his own version.³⁷ So it seems legitimate to compare the same passage in these two translations. The passage I selected for this purpose is the speech of Juno lamenting the Trojans’ approach to Italy (Verg. A. 1.36–49):

³² See de Mauro 1987, p. 9, who stresses that Pasolini was forced by his father—an officer—to speak standard Italian (parlare bene). ³³ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 25. The relationship with the universo poetico personale is brilliantly shown by Lago (p. 26) through the translation of Latin Musa by spirito (‘spirit’), a central notion in Pasolini’s L’usignolo della chiesa cattolica, published in 1958. On Pasolini’s translations from Aeschylus, see Fusillo 2007, p. 149. See particularly Le ceneri di Gramsci and L’usignolo della chiesa cattolica in Pasolini 1993 [1957], pp. 115–28 and 109–11 respectively. ³⁴ See Lago’s 2012 [2011] precise analysis of the style of Pasolini’s translation at p. 25. ³⁵ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 25 stresses Pasolini’s intention to generalize through his wording, in order to avoid any heroic connotation. For a closer analysis of Pasolini’s poetic language of the first eleven lines of his translation of the Aeneid, see Gamberale 2006, p. 12. ³⁶ Lepschy and Lepschy 1977, p. 32. ³⁷ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 24, conjectures that Pasolini used the reprint of 1946.

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cum Iuno, aeternum servans sub pectore volnus, haec secum: ‘mene incepto desistere victam, nec posse Italia Teucrorum avertere regem? quippe vetor fatis. Pallasne exurere classem Argivom atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto, unius ob noxam et furias Aiacis Oilei? ipsa, Iovis rapidum iaculata e nubibus ignem, disiecitque rates evertitque aequora ventis, illum expirantem transfixo pectore flammas turbine corripuit scopuloque infixit acuto. ast ego, quae divom incedo regina, Iovisque et soror et coniunx, una cum gente tot annos bella gero! et quisquam numen Iunonis adoret praeterea, aut supplex aris imponet honorem?’ ‘when Juno, nursing an undying wound deep in her heart, spoke thus to herself: ‘What! I resign my purpose, baffled, and fail to turn from Italy the Teucrian king! The fates, doubtless, forbid me! Had Pallas power to burn up the Argive fleet and sink the sailors in the deep, because of one single man’s guilt, and the frenzy of Ajax, son of Oileus? Her own hand hurled from the clouds Jove’s swift flame, scattered their ships, and upheaved the sea in tempest; but him, as with pierced breast he breathed forth flame, she caught in a whirlwind and impaled on a spiky crag. Yet I, who move as queen of gods, at once sister and wife of Jove, with one people am warring these many years. And will any still worship Juno’s godhead or humbly lay sacrifice upon her altars?’³⁸

Pasolini’s translation obviously attempts to offer a new mode of non-classicist diction:³⁹ Pasolini, L’Eneide, 1.36–49 Ma Giunone, ossessionata dalla sua interna ferita, But Juno, obsessed by her inner wound, pensava tra sé: ‘Che io mi debba arrendere? Che io thought to herself: What? I myself must give-in? What? I non possa tener lontano dall’Italia questo re troiano? am-not able to-keep-off far from Italy this king Trojan? Il destino! Ma Pallade sì, ha potuto incendiare la flotta Destiny! But Pallas indeed was allowed to-burn the fleet dei Greci, e affogarli nel mare, per sola colpa, of-the Greeks, and drown-them in-the sea, for alone guilt, per solo odio di Aiace! Lei sì, scaraventando for alone hatred of Ajax! She, o-yes, hurling ³⁸ The Latin text is Götte 1958. The English translation is adapted from Fairclough 1999. It should be kept in mind throughout the discussion of this same passage in Vittorio Sermonti’s translation (p. 396 here), as both try to present a fairly literal, source-language-oriented text. ³⁹ I quote Pasolini’s translation of the Aeneid from Pasolini 2003, p. 1335 and Lipparini’s from Lipparini 1946 [1930], pp. 1–3.

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il fuoco di Giove dal cielo, con le sue mani, the fire of Jove down-from heaven, with her own hands, ha distrutto le navi, ha sconvolto col vento il mare! she destroyed the ships, she stirred-up with tempest the sea! È lui che agonizzava, col petto ferito dalla flamma, And he while toiling, with-his breast struck from-the flame, lo strappò con un turbine, lo inchiodò a uno scoglio. him she-tore-off with a whirl, him she-nailed on a rock. E io? Io che sarei la regina degli dei, la sorella, la moglie And me? I, who is-supposed-to-be the queen of-the gods, the sister, the wife di Giove, io da tanti anni lotto con un popolo solo, of Jove, I for so-many years have-battled with a people single, e invano. Chi più adorerà il mio nume, chi and in-vain. Who any-more will-worship my power, who, verrà più a pregarmi agli altari?’ will-come any-more to petition-me at-my altars?

Pasolini begins with one of the favourite words in his poetic vocabulary (ossessionata), portraying Juno as an object of her own passion rather than using an active construction, as Lipparini had done in his translation of l. 36 (serbando eternal nel cuor la ferita).⁴⁰ At the same time his construction is much simpler, even colloquial. He leaves out the patronymic epithet (Aiace d’Oileo) and prefers the imperfetto to the passato remoto and the passato prossimo to the passato remoto (pensava tra sè instead of disse fra se, sconvolto in place of sconvolse). Only when he describes the death of Ajax does he use the passato remoto, to create a staccato effect and give more speed, but also a slightly archaizing character to the line in this dramatic scene (lo strappò con un turbine, lo inchiodò a uno scoglio: ‘She tore him off with a whirl and nailed him to a rock’, l. 45).⁴¹ Generally Pasolini tries to present a quite rapid and modern translation (destino, ‘destiny’ instead of the more elevated fato ‘fate’), leaving out parts of the Latin text, while Lipparini presents a literal translation.⁴² So Pasolini’s Juno cries out Il destino! (l. 39), where Lipparini translates Certo me lo vietano i fati; in the same way, he gives per la folle passione del solo Aiace d’Oileo, while Pasolini shortens the sequence to per solo odio di Aiace! All this contributes programmatically to a style that neglects the features of neoclassicist poetry and, even more emphatically, substitutes colloquial for traditional language. Lipparini’s con un popolo solo sto da tanti anni in guerra! is too high style for Pasolini. He again tries a more generalizing translation, which

⁴⁰ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 26 n. 21. Tre ossessioni is also the title of the cycle of poems that opens La religione del mio tempo in Pasolini 1993, pp. 131–8. ⁴¹ Lago 2012 [2011], p. 28. ⁴² The same happens when Pasolini translates fatum in the second line with storia (‘history’), again brushing aside the heroic predetermination of Aeneas. Lago 2012 [2011], p. 27 rightly points out that ‘history is the logos that controls human affairs’ (La storia è il logos che regola le vicende umane).

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brings the goddess’s distress down to the level of everyday human struggle—da tanti anni lotto con un popolo solo (l. 47)—and the more simple essi sommerger nel mare replaces Lipparini’s more Latinizing words affogarali nel mare (l. 40). Lipparini tries much more to create a translation that maintains the high tone of the original (here we have broken Lipparini’s prose into units to facilitate the interlinear translation): Lipparini, L’Eneide, 1.36–49 Giunone serbando eternal nel cuor la ferita, disse fra sè: Juno, nursing undying in-her heart the wound, spoke to herself: ‘Io, desistere vinta dall’impresa, ‘I, to-resign conquered my purpose, e non potere cacciar lontano dall’Italia il re dei Troiani! and to-be-unable to-turn far from Italy the king of-the Trojans! Certo me lo vietano i fati. Doubtless me it forbid the fates! Ma Pallade non potè forse brucciare la flotta dei Greci But Pallas was-she-not-able perhaps to-burn the fleet of-the Greeks ed essi sommerger nel mare, per la folle passione del solo Aiace d’Oileo? and them submerge in-the sea, because-of the frenzy passionate of alone Ajax [son] of Oileus? Ella stessa, scagliando dalle nubi il rapido fuoco di Giove, She herself, hurling from-the clouds the swift flame of Jove, disperse le navi e sconvolse le aque coi venti; scattered the ships and upheaved the waters with-the tempests; e lui, che spirava flamme dal petto squarciato, offerò in un turbine, and he, who breathed flames from-his breast pierced, she-carried in a whirlwind, e lo confisse sulla punta aguzza di uno scoglio. and him impaled on-the point sharp of a crag. Io invece, che incedo regina degli Dèi e che sono sposa e sorella di Giove, I in-turn, who move [as] queen of-the gods and who am wife and sister of Jove, con un popolo solo sto da tanti anni in guerra! with one people alone am since so-many years at war! E dopo ciò vi sarà chi adori la divinità di Giunone, And afterwards there any will-be who worship the godhead of Juno, o chi supplice ponga l’offerta sopra gli altari?’ or who humbly lay the sacrifices upon her altars?

Pasolini’s translation tears apart the illusion of linguistic and semantic unity between the language of Virgil and its modern translations as well as the cultural ideology of Virgil as a patrimonio of contemporary Italians. He stresses the strong ‘alterity’ of his own version and frees it of a neoclassicist heritage and linguistic ideology that are suspect to him and his generation for their massive political impact. But his experiment remained fragmentary and episodic. In the politically more peaceful and restorative times of the new millennium, the poet and writer Vittorio Sermonti came up in 2007 with a ‘postmodern’ version of the Aeneid, which brought together different styles freed from their historical

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connotations.⁴³ He gained much success and publicity when he presented this translation in public lectures. The dust of postwar discussions had settled and it is obvious that the translator draws more freely upon the traditional language of older translations and offers—again—a more periphrastic and detailed version, for example when he chooses a more descriptive phrase instead of Pasolini’s short exclamation, Lo so, mi si oppongono i fati (l. 39). One even has the impression of some similarity with Lipparini’s style of literal translation, as a last brief look at Juno’s speech in Sermonti’s words might show. But Sermonti also uses elements of a lower, more colloquial style when he translates, for example, Aeneas’s title of rex not by re (‘king’) but by capo (‘chief ’). Aeneas comes to Italy not as king, but as the leader of a band of refugees:⁴⁴ Sermonti, L’Eneide, l. 36–49 Giunone, perpetuando nell’animo suo la ferita, Juno, maintaining in mind her the wound, disse fra sè: ‘Io darmi per vinta, e desistere dall’impresa, said to herself: Am-I to-surrender through being-conquered and to-resign my purpose, impotente a sviare io dall’Italia il capo dei Teucri? powerless to divert I from Italy the chief of-the Teucrians? Lo so, mi si oppongono i fati. Ma Pallade non ha potuto It I-know, to-me are-opposed the fates. But Pallas was-she not able bruciare la flotta argiva e inabissarla nel mare, to-burn the fleet Argive and to-sink-it in-the sea, per colpa delle mattane di uno, uno solo, Aiace d’Oilèo? through fault of-the tantrums of one, one alone, Ajax [son] of Oileus? Scagliando lei stessa dalle nubi il celere fuoco di Giove, Hurling herself [NOM.] from-the clouds the swift fire of Jove, ha sbaragliato le navi e sconvolto i flutti coi venti, she routed the ships and stirred-up the waves with-the tempests, e quello, che dal petto trafitto sprigionava fiamme, and which-man, who through-the breast transfixed emitted flames, l’ha ghermito in un vortice e piantato su uno scoglio aguzzo. him seized in a whirlwind and planted on a crag sharp. E io, che figuro regina degli dèi, io di Giove e sposa And I, who figure [as] queen of-the gods, I of Jove both wife e sorella, non faccio da anni che battermi contro and sister, do-not manage for years that fight against un unico popolo. E chi adorerà la maestà di Giunone, one single people. And who will-worship the majesty of Juno, adesso, o supplice porgerà offerte ai suoi altari?’ now, or humbly will-offer sacrifices at her altars?

⁴³ One may also recognize a more relaxed atmosphere in the fact that in 1993 the parco di Virgilio was restored and reopened to the public. ⁴⁴ The text is quoted from Sermonti 2007, pp. 19–20.

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Sermonti himself, as has already been said, gives some examples of colloquialisms in the Preface to his translation (so he translates miserande puer with povero ragazzo, ‘poor boy.’).⁴⁵ But these are exceptions; otherwise he tries to offer a literal translation without omitting too many Virgilian words. This inevitably leads him to an elevated style, sometimes similar to that which characterized older translations and neoclassicist works. The use of words like desistere (l. 37) or inabissare (l. 40) in the quoted passage testifies to that.⁴⁶ Sermonti, however, tries to create some modern kind of ‘alterity’. He still aims at creating identity and continuity between the classical author and the readers of today all the way back to Dante, but without claiming Virgil exclusively for the Italians. Looking at Aeneas, he concludes his preface by taking to a global level the message of the Aeneid as a poem about the fate of an exiled person. So he says, ambiguously, that the country the hero is searching for is also another person’s native land (è sempre anche la patria di altri).⁴⁷ It is not only the language, but also thoughts like these that make Sermonti’s translation into a text that reintroduces Virgil’s Aeneid, as a poem in a new sense, to a world in which refugees seeking new homes offer a challenge to global humanitas. But how is it possible to translate such a global poem? One is tempted to ask again: come tradurre? Sermonti, well aware of the traditionally strong ideological tie between Virgil and the Italian language, almost humbly excuses himself when he comes to the beginning of the translation: Lasciamo dire a Virgilio quel che ha da dirci. Basta e avanza l’impudenza di costringerlo a dirlo in italiano (‘Let us allow Virgil to tell us what he has to tell us. It’s enough and pretty shameless to force him to say it in Italian’).⁴⁸

26.5 Conclusions Come tradurre Virgilio? How shall one translate Virgil? I take over Pasolini’s words, in modified form; in Italy this question does not touch upon a minor issue. Rather it should be examined in conjunction with the complicated linguistic and historical situation of the country. As Virgil was a canonical, all-Italian author, the language into which his poetry was translated has been of enormous political importance. The various Virgilian translations can be viewed as touchstones of cultural and political discussion about Italian identity in the twentieth century. But, even today, Virgil as a Latin author and as a poet translated into modern Italian is received in

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 11 (with further examples). ⁴⁶ In his translation Pasolini leaves out again this half-line in order to maintain a more emotional and aggressively argumentative tone (ragionante, as he himself called it; see the passage quoted earlier). ⁴⁷ Sermonti 2007, p. 16. ⁴⁸ Ibid, p. 13.

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Italy with enormous attention. So Vittorio Sermonti, with his translation, which brings together the Italian of today and the tradition of la lingua di Dante, is welcomed with enthusiasm and keen interest, particularly among younger people. But this translation refuses to stand in the patriotic tradition of former times. It wants to present Virgil as a Weltgedicht—a ‘universal poem’, but still in Italian!

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27 Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics Cillian O’Hogan

‘One definition of Irish that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett’s. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett? To which Beckett replied: Au contraire.’¹ This quotation from Beckett, given by Seamus Heaney in a 1982 interview, serves as a helpful orientation to a key aspect of late twentieth-century Irish culture: a sense of urgency about defining oneself, above all, as not English. Heaney himself was irked by being included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry in 1982 and responded to this in a long poem titled ‘An Open Letter’, which deployed what would become one of his most famous, if not particularly poetic lines: ‘My passport’s green.’ For many writers in recent decades, including Heaney, Greek and Latin literature has provided a way of navigating Irish identity; and this chapter looks at how language choices in Irish translations of Virgil help to gesture towards an alternative classical tradition, one that moves away from the shadow of British classically infused literature by stressing the localized and the particular and by enlisting dialect and local idiom as tools designed to produce a distinctively Irish style of classical reception. Examining in particular two recent translations of Virgil by Irish poets—Seamus Heaney’s ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ from his volume Electric Light (Heaney 2001) and Peter Fallon’s The Georgics of Virgil (Fallon 2004 and 2006), I argue that these poets make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English used in Ireland, to relocate the Virgilian poems in a recognizably Irish landscape.² This strategy of writing against the British literary tradition by incorporating a distinctively Irish-flavoured English can be traced as far back as the turn of the twentieth century.³ For Heaney and Fallon, however, this use of local idiom is coupled with a

¹ Kinahan and Heaney 1982, p. 405. ² For the use of this practice in translations by Irish poets more generally, see Quinn 2012. For an overview of Hiberno-English, see Dolan 2004, pp. xxi–xxix. ³ See Kiberd 2000, p. 323 and passim.

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conscious effort to reclaim the pastoral landscape and, more broadly, literature about the countryside for those who write from a rural perspective and away from those who write from the viewpoint of the city. There are thus two aspects of repossession at play here: a linguistic aspect, in which Hiberno-English is set out as a valid and viable alternative to the Queen’s English, and a generic aspect, in which bucolic poetry is imbued with the grim realities of rural life. These aspects, combined with an indebtedness to the Irish pastoral tradition, help to set out an anticolonial approach to classical reception, in which the long tradition of British translation of classical texts is effaced in favour of a defiantly Irish approach. Both Heaney and Fallon are heirs to a strong tradition of Irish pastoral poetry, which has two main strands in the twentieth century.⁴ On the one hand, there is the idealizing, Yeatsian model, which views the countryside through fairly rose-tinted glasses. Poems such as Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ or ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ exemplify this approach, best summed up by Yeats’s ‘dream of the noble and the beggar-man’ in the poem ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (l. 47). On the other hand is the grittier, more ‘realistic’ model to be found in authors like Patrick Kavanagh and John Montague—a model sometimes called ‘antipastoral’.⁵ The brutal realism of Kavanagh’s poetry, in particular, represented an attempt to respond to uncritical representations of an idyllic rural Irish life by the members of the Irish Literary Revival (including Yeats).⁶ Kavanagh (1904–67), who left school at thirteen, grew up in Monaghan, where his family, like many others, lived on a farm that could barely support them, on land that was not well suited to agriculture. Subsistence farming was the norm in Ireland well into the twentieth century, and the realities of this existence are a recurring theme in Kavanagh’s poetry; they are perhaps best exemplified in his long poem ‘The Great Hunger’ (originally published in 1942), from which I quote the opening lines: Clay is the word and clay is the flesh Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scare-crows move Along the side-fall of the hill—Maguire and his men. If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily. Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods? Or why do we stand here shivering? Which of these men Loved the light and the queen Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en? We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain, ⁴ On Irish pastoral, see Longley, E. 2000, pp. 90–133 and Frawley 2005; the latter stresses the importance of medieval Irish nature poetry as an influence. ⁵ Kiberd 1995, pp. 498–521; Allison 2005. ⁶ See further Gifford 1995, pp. 55–71 and Allison 2005.

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Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way. (Kavanagh 2004, p. 63)

As Kiberd (2000, p. 593) notes, this is effectively an attack on the idealizing tradition: as readers of the pastoral, we are watching peasants work, but, Kavanagh asks, what is the point of this voyeurism? The bleakness of the scene continues for another twentyfive pages, a devastating depiction of the emptiness of Irish rural life, and Kavanagh questions what inspiration any outsider can take from this scene (‘Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?’). The poet later referred to the poem as ‘the tragic thing’, and indeed there is a sense in which many twentieth-century Irish ‘eclogues’ or pastoral poems are tragic in mode.⁷ Before leaving Kavanagh, it is worth noting his importance as a supremely local poet—one who rejects the broader, loftier goals of nationalist poetry in favour of the parochial and the everyday.⁸ Heaney stresses Kavanagh’s insistence on place and localism in an essay titled ‘The Sense of Place’ where he speaks of Kavanagh’s poem ‘Iniskeen Road, July Evening’: In the first line, ‘the bicycles go by in twos and threes’. They do not ‘pass by’ or ‘go past’, as they would in a more standard English voice or place, and in that little touch Kavanagh touches what I am circling. He is letting the very life blood of the place in that one minute incision. The words ‘go by’ and ‘blooming’, moreover, are natural and spoken; they are not used as a deliberate mark of folksiness or as a separate language, in the way that Irish speech is ritualized by Synge.⁹

Kavanagh’s own defence of this approach is perhaps best exemplified by one of the few poems in which he engages with the classical world, ‘Epic’ (originally published in 1951): I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided: who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims. I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’ And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue cast-steel— ‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’ That was the year of the Munich bother. Which Was most important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance. (Kavanagh 2004, p. 184)

⁷ See especially the downbeat cycle of ‘Eclogues’ in MacNeice 1979, pp. 33–51. ⁸ Kennedy-Andrews 2008, pp. 34–5. ⁹ Heaney 1980, p. 138.

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Kavanagh’s decision is to write of ‘local rows’ rather than attempting to deal with ‘the Munich bother’. In a sense, Kavanagh helps to legitimize this ‘sense of place’, which characterizes so distinctively many late twentieth-century Irish poets: we might think of Seamus Heaney’s Mossbawn and Glanmore, Michael Longley’s Carrigskeewaun, and Peter Fallon’s Loughcrew. Heaney himself has spoken of his early anxiety about speech and the sounds of poetry, and of the appropriateness of writing in ‘genuine accents’.¹⁰ His earliest poetic forays, which focused so much on the realia of agricultural life, have been read, in particular, as ‘challenges . . . to the English literary hegemony’.¹¹ Even when he is concerned with larger-scale matters and with addressing the issue of ‘Irishness’ more generally, this localism is crucial to his poetic approach, and to his adaptations and translations of the classics in particular. Heaney has stressed how translation functions as a way of understanding one’s own country and region by approaching it from the outside.¹² By referring to his practice in translation as ‘Mossbawn via Mantua’ in an essay of this title (Heaney 2012), he indicates the way in which his renderings of Virgil enable him to provide a fresh depiction of Irish landscapes, here figured synecdochically as Mossbawn, Heaney’s birthplace.¹³ Heaney presents this as his own version of James Joyce’s comment, uttered by Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that ‘the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead’, in other words that the easiest way to understand Ireland (Tara being the traditional seat of the high kings of Ireland) was to leave it (the port of Holyhead in Wales was the destination of Dublin mailboats).¹⁴ In ‘Mossbawn via Mantua’, however, it is noteworthy that all of Heaney’s source texts are to be found on continental Europe, bypassing the island of Britain altogether.

27.1 Heaney’s Eclogues Heaney’s engagement with and translation of classical literature is well known, from his earliest allusions to the Muses in ‘Personal Helicon’ (in a 1966 collection of poems titled Death of a Naturalist) to his translations of Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Antigone and to his more recent imitations of sections of Virgil’s Aeneid in Seeing Things (Heaney 1991), in a 1995 collection of poems titled District and Circle, and in the posthumously published Aeneid Book VI (Heaney 2016).¹⁵ Yet, despite the emphasis on country life that is particularly to be found in his earliest collections and although the Eclogues had clearly been influential on him throughout his career, Heaney did not directly engage with this work until relatively late in his career.¹⁶ In Electric Light, Heaney includes three eclogues: ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, and ‘Glanmore ¹⁰ See Clark 2006, pp. 104–41. ¹¹ Burris 1990, p. 25. ¹² See Heaney 1988, pp. 40–1; 2012. ¹³ Heaney 2012, p. 19. ¹⁴ Joyce 1992, p. 273. ¹⁵ For Heaney and the classics generally, see Hardwick 2002; for his translations of Greek tragedy, see Hardwick 2006; and for his engagement with the Aeneid, see Putnam 2012. ¹⁶ On Heaney’s debt to the Eclogues in his earlier works, see Burris 1990, pp. 18–20.

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Eclogue’.¹⁷ The ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ has received considerable critical attention.¹⁸ It is a response to Virgil’s fourth eclogue in which Heaney figures Virgil and an unnamed ‘Poet’ as interlocutors who express tentative hope for an age of new beginnings.¹⁹ The third poem, ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, is set in the early 1970s, a time when Heaney began to rent Glanmore Cottage in County Wicklow from the Yeats scholar Ann Saddlemyer.²⁰ In this poem, ‘the Poet’ stands for Heaney himself. Saddlemyer is rendered ‘Augusta’ (after Lady Augusta Gregory, though also with a nod to Augustus), and ‘Meliboeus’ is perhaps W. B. Yeats or J. M. Synge. The poem takes the form of a dialogue between the Poet and a figure called ‘Myles’, whose name may refer to Myles na Gopaleen, one of the pen names of Brian O’Nolan, or perhaps simply to the Milesians, mythical early inhabitants of Ireland.²¹ The topic is the Poet’s stroke of luck in acquiring a home from where he can work, and he is persuaded by Myles to give a rendering of an Irish song. However, it is the second of the three poems, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, that I focus on here. As the only one of Heaney’s Eclogues that is in fact a translation of Virgil, it provides a clear insight into how Heaney makes Virgil his own.²² From the very first words, this is an unmistakably Irish rendering. quo te, Moeri, pedes? an, quo uia ducit, in urbem? (Verg. Ecl. 9.1) ‘Where are you heading, Moeris? To town, where the path leads?’ Heaney, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, l. 1 LYCIDAS Where are you headed, Moeris? Into town?

Moeris’s response similarly invokes specifically Irish contexts: o Lycida, uiui peruenimus, aduena nostri (quod numquam ueriti sumus) ut possessor agelli diceret: ‘haec mea sunt; ueteres migrate coloni.’ nunc uicti, tristes, quoniam fors omnia uersat, hos illi (quod nec uertat bene) mittimus haedos. (Verg. Ecl. 9.2–6) ‘O Lycidas, we’ve lived to see the time when a stranger, owner of our land, could say (as we never thought could happen): ‘These lands are mine: you old tenants move on.’

¹⁷ Heaney also provides his own translation of the opening lines of the first eclogue (see Heaney 2003, p. 3). ¹⁸ Tyler 2005, pp. 50–60; Harrison 2008; Twiddy 2012, pp. 125–47. ¹⁹ It is not, however, wholly optimistic, as O’Donoghue 2009, p. 114 claims. ²⁰ See Tyler 2005, pp. 68–73. ²¹ Suggestions put forward respectively by O’Donoghue 2009, p. 115 and Twiddy 2012, p. 132. According to Susanna Braund, the name ‘Myles’ might suggest the Latin word miles (‘soldier’); space considerations prevent me from exploring this further. ²² For earlier studies of this poem, see Tyler 2005, pp. 61–8 and Putnam 2010. The translations of Virgil’s Latin used in this chapter come from Kline 2001a and 2001b.

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Now sad and defeated, since chance overturns all, we send him these kids (may no good come of it).’ Heaney, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, ll. 2–7 MOERIS The things we have lived to see . . . The last thing You could’ve imagined happening has happened. An outsider lands and says he has the rights To our bit of ground. ‘Out, old hands’, he says, ‘This place is mine.’ And these kid-goats in the creel— Bad cess to him—these kids are his. All’s changed.

‘Bad cess to him’ is an Anglo-Irish phrase and, though its derivation is uncertain, ‘cess’ here may be the term that was used to refer to the military provisions exacted from Irish tenants: ‘Bad cess to him’ thus translates quod nec uertat bene a lot more closely than may first appear.²³ We can take this ‘Irishing’ further, however: the basket implied by mittimus haedos is rendered by ‘creel’, a word that can refer to any type of wicker basket but is commonly applied in the west of Ireland to a turf basket, while another meaning for ‘cess’ (admittedly archaic and rare) is turf: hence the Virgilian land debate becomes something specifically Irish, in the form of a debate over turf (literally, a ‘bit of ground’, reminiscent of Kavanagh’s ‘local quarrel’ perhaps). Moeris’s closing statement, ‘All’s changed’, has been seen by many to be an allusion to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’:²⁴ All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Heaney remains close to the Latin throughout the translation, yet repeatedly, specific turns of phrase or idioms remind us that the translator is Irish; so does the postponement of adverbs and adverbial phrases to the end of a sentence or phrase (‘for Menalcas even’; ‘Our very music, our one consolation, / Confiscated, all but’), and so do phrases such as ‘the boyo’. Yet perhaps the clearest hint that this Virgilian scene is half set in Ireland comes towards the end, where Lycidas says: hinc adeo media est nobis uia; namque sepulcrum incipit apparere Bianoris. hic, ubi densas agricolae stringunt frondes, hic, Moeri, canamus; (Verg. Ecl. 9.59–61) Half our journey lies beyond: since Bianor’s tomb is coming in sight: here where the labourers are lopping the dense branches, here, Moeris, let’s sing:

²³ Wall 1998 provides an overview of Heaney’s use of Hiberno-English, though that use predates the poem under discussion. Additional assistance with specific words can be found in the invaluable work of Dolan 2004. ²⁴ Potts 2011, p. 72; Washizuka 2011, p. 110; Twiddy 2012, p. 128.

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Heaney, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, ll. 73–6 We’ve come half-way. Already you can see Bianor’s tomb Just up ahead. Here where they’ve trimmed and faced The old green hedge, here’s where we’re going to sing.

Heaney retains the reference to Bianor’s tomb, locating this passage in the Virgilian landscape. Yet his rendering of ubi densas agricolae stringunt frondes is striking. As Clausen notes, this is most readily interpreted as a reference to the practice, widespread among Italian shepherds, of feeding leaves to their herds in the absence of hay.²⁵ Heaney, however, makes frondes into a hedge, of the sort that would line a country road: it has been ‘trimmed and faced’ and serves as a boundary. The hedge is where Lycidas wants to sing, with Moeris. The specific choice of a ‘hedge’ is surely a reference back to the hedge schools of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland and, more specifically, to Heaney’s words at the opening of the ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’: Help me to please my hedge-schoolmaster Virgil.²⁶

But Lycidas and Moeris live in changing times; dissent and argument are dangerous, and Moeris has already experienced the threat of violence: quod nisi me quacumque nouas incidere lites ante sinistra caua monuisset ab ilice cornix, nec tuus hic Moeris nec uiueret ipse Menalcas. (Verg. Ecl. 9.14–16) ‘So that if a raven hadn’t warned me from a hollow oak on the left hand side, to cut short the dispute somehow, neither Menalcas himself, nor your Moeris, here, would be alive.’ Heaney, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, ll. 15–19 The truth is, Lycidas, If I hadn’t heard the crow caw on my left In our hollow oak, I’d have kept on arguing And that would’ve been the end of the road, for me That’s talking to you, and for Menalcas even.

Lycidas responds by lamenting: ‘Our very music, our one consolation, / Confiscated, all but.’ Later on, as I have noted, Lycidas urges Moeris to pause and sing by a hedge, thus inscribing this Virgilian scene into an Irish landscape of hidden dissent. Moeris, the dispossessed, will reject the invitation and the poem will end on a downbeat note.²⁷

²⁵ Clausen 1994, p. 286; see Cato Agr. 54. ²⁶ Noted by Potts 2011, p. 71. For the significance of hedge schools for the transmission of classical learning, see O’Higgins 2007 and McElduff 2008. ²⁷ I see, then, this conclusion as fitting with Virgil’s pessimism rather than as representing an ‘artistic moment’—as Putnam 2010, p. 10 reads it. Heaney 2003, pp. 5–6 emphasizes the broader pessimism of the ninth eclogue.

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Heaney has written many poems that are much more explicitly about Irish politics; and indeed, even in his translation of Philoctetes, he introduced terms familiar from contemporary Northern Irish life: A hunger striker’s father Stands in the graveyard dumb. The police widow in veils Faints at the funeral home. (Heaney 1990, p. 77)

In ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, however, he is much more subtle. Indeed, his approach to translation here is closer to that employed by Michael Longley, who frequently provides otherwise straightforward renderings of passages from Homer, but gives them titles that add a contemporary significance (e.g. ‘Ceasefire’, his translation of a passage from Iliad 24, or ‘The Butchers’, a rendering of part of Odyssey 22). In Heaney’s case, specific choice of words helps us to see an Irish context, but this context is also provided by the poem’s placement within Electric Light. The poem immediately before ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, ‘Red, White and Blue’, addresses, towards its end, the destruction of ‘Big Houses’ in the course of the Irish Civil War, setting up the theme of land dispossession, albeit from the perspective of the other side. The poem that follows is the ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, which expresses anxieties about not being dispossessed but rather benefitting from the largesse of a foreigner (as Myles states, ‘Outsiders own / The country nowadays’). The Poet, in the 1970s, is the tenant of an absentee landlord, and consequently is free to write poetry. His situation is in stark contrast with that of Moeris at the close of the previous poem. In closing, it is worth asking why Heaney chose to translate the ninth eclogue in particular. There are several reasons: first, this poem highlights the similarities between the dispossessed of Italy in the decade 40–30 BCE and the Irish farming poor of the twentieth century. More importantly, however, Heaney himself has stressed the eclogue’s focus on the difficulty of writing poetry in an age of violence and has linked this eclogue to his own poetic career, which developed in the shadow of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.²⁸ The poem forms a clear diptych with the ‘Glanmore Eclogue’. In ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, we see poets concerned about whether it is safe to compose in turbulent times; in ‘Glanmore Eclogue’, a poet considers the unexpected costs of a safe haven for creativity.

27.2 Fallon’s Georgics Peter Fallon, born in 1951, writes one generation after Heaney, and his language of farming and the countryside is less politicized than the older poet’s. Raised on a farm in County Meath, he founded The Gallery Press as an undergraduate at Trinity ²⁸ Heaney 2012, p. 22.

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College Dublin and has had a long and distinguished career as both editor and poet. Like Heaney and Longley, Fallon has returned repeatedly in his poetry to a specific locale—in his case, Loughcrew, County Meath—and the agricultural and pastoral realism that characterizes his work reveals his indebtedness to Patrick Kavanagh as a major influence.²⁹ The Gallery Press published Fallon’s translation of the Georgics in 2004 (Fallon 2004) and, two years later, the translation was reproduced, with minor revisions, in the Oxford World’s Classics series, with an introduction and notes by Elaine Fantham (Fallon 2006). In the ‘Afterwords’ to the 2004 edition, Fallon speaks of how he came to write the translation: Though I’ve been acquainted with The Georgics for most of my life, and though its examples and values have resonated in writers who have become vitally important to me . . . I resisted my first impulses to begin translating the poem. Yet I felt an affinity with its actual, practical world and with Virgil’s description of the griefs and glories of a place in which people tried to establish their lives while their days were adumbrated by a civil war. In Meath I was participating in a farming life while my country worked to find new ways to advance in the tender aftermath of ‘Troubles’. (Fallon 2004, p. 124)

Fallon stresses the practicalities of the poem. Although elsewhere he notes that ‘its literary reality is subordinate to its imaginative truths’ (ibid., p. 122) here, in describing how he came to write his translation, he makes it clear that it is the ‘vocabulary’ of rural, agricultural life that speaks to him in the first instance (ibid., pp. 123–4). The translation has been criticized by Denis Feeney for the way in which it moves between registers, from the elevated to the colloquial—as he puts it, ‘Fallon has evidently aimed to present an unpompous Virgil, and this is highly commendable, but if Virgil is not pompous he does not veer into bathos or colloquialism either’.³⁰ I am not sure, however, that this is entirely fair, since what Fallon is doing is not so different from the practice espoused by Heaney; he presents a Georgics that is very firmly grounded in the everyday language of the farmer. Rather than the idealizing, ‘view-from-the-city’ tradition of rural poetry written by the leisured class,³¹ Fallon gives us a poem that makes use of slang and local dialect to present a more realistic picture.³² Fallon’s approach is perhaps best exemplified by his translation of these famous lines from the Georgics: felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari:

²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ ³²

Fallon adapted Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn for the stage. Feeney 2007, p. 37. On this approach to the Georgics, see further Thomas 2001a. On the earthiness of Fallon’s language, see Quinn 2013.

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fortunatus et ille deos qui nouit agrestis Panaque Siluanumque senem Nymphasque sorores. (Verg. G. 2.490–4) He who’s been able to learn the causes of things is happy, and has set all fear, and unrelenting fate, and the noise of greedy Acheron, under his feet. And he’s happy too, who knows the woodland gods, Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the Nymphs, his sisters. Fallon, Georgics, 2.490–4 That man has all the luck who can understand what makes the world tick, who has crushed underfoot his fears about what’s laid out in store for him and stilled the roar of Hell’s esurient river. Indeed he’s blessed, who’s comfortable with country gods— Pan and old Sylvanus, and the sorority of nymphs.³³

Virgil’s Latin speaks of a man of the past, who was able to ‘come to know’ rerum causas, in what is generally seen as a reference to Lucretius’s De rerum natura.³⁴ Fallon, however, puts this in the present tense in his translation—‘That man has all the luck who can understand what makes the world / tick’—and takes Virgil’s qui in line 490 and ille in line 493 as referring to the same person: the ideal farmer. Whereas Virgil is alluding here to deeper issues of understanding how the world works and of philosophical doctrine more generally, Fallon’s lucky man becomes simply a contented country dweller. Let me point out that this is not simply a case of Fallon missing the reference, which is glossed in the Oxford edition with an explanatory note. It is also clear from Fallon’s ‘Afterwords’ that he has read some scholarship on the Georgics. This must, then, be seen as a conscious decision not to spell out the Lucretian allusion in his translation. This deliberate omission signals that, for Fallon, the Georgics is not primarily a poem about poetry that explicitly inserts itself into the didactic tradition,³⁵ nor is it merely a ‘coffeetable book’ guide to farming.³⁶ Instead, it is a poem grounded in the realities of rural life.³⁷ It is with this in mind that I would like to examine some other passages where Fallon uses colloquialisms or Hiberno-English phrases. First, the section in the third georgic where Virgil speaks of training a horse for war: atque haec iam primo depulsus ab ubere matris audeat, inque uicem det mollibus ora capistris inualidus etiamque tremens, etiam inscius aeui. at tribus exactis ubi quarta accesserit aestas,

³³ Throughout this chapter I quote from the 2004 edition of Fallon’s translation of the Georgics, noting the changes proposed in the later 2006 edition when they occur. ³⁴ See Gale 2000, pp. 42–3, with further references. ³⁵ So e.g. Gale 2000. ³⁶ An approach suggested by (among others) Dalzell 1996, pp. 110–22 and by Thibodeau 2011. ³⁷ Quinn 2013, p. 170 stresses the practicality of Fallon’s language choices as a way of localizing the European literary tradition.

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carpere mox gyrum incipiat gradibusque sonare compositis, sinuetque alterna uolumina crurum, sitque laboranti similis; tum cursibus auras tum uocet, ac per aperta uolans ceu liber habenis aequora uix summa uestigia ponat harena: (Verg. G. 3.187–95) And as soon as he’s weaned from his mother’s teats, let him now and again dare to trust his mouth to soft halters, while powerless and quivering, still, and ignorant of life. But when three summers are past and the fourth arrives, let him start trotting round the ring, his paces falling evenly, bending his legs in curves alternately, and seeming as if labouring hard: then let him challenge the wind to race, and, flying over the open ground, as if free of reins, let him barely touch the surface of the sand with the tips of his hooves: Fallon, Georgics, 3.187–95 Accustom him to these when he’s but barely off the teat and still unsteady on his feet; next, fit him with a light bit and bridle before he gets cute in his ways. Three years on, and coming into his fourth summer, take him to the training ring where he’ll step out in equal paces, his legs will fall and rise in a rotating motion, and him the very picture of work. Then he’ll take on to race the wind and fly across open spaces (as if he’s been given his full head), leaving only faintest hoof-prints in the dirt . . .

At least three phrases or words here, though not exclusively Irish, are common colloquialisms in Ireland: ‘cute’—which means ‘sharp’ or ‘shrewd’, particularly when applied to roguish men (as in the phrase ‘cute hoor’)—is applied here to a young horse, not only providing a vivid characterization of untamed stallions, but also perhaps responding to Virgil’s humanizing of animals in Georgic 3, something that has long been noted. Virgil’s sitque laboranti similis is rendered ‘and him the very picture of work’—again, a phrase that is resonant of Irish diction: note in particular the exclamatory qualities of ‘and him’ and the characteristic use of ‘very’ (compare phrases such as ‘the very man’). Similarly, the sequence ‘he’ll take on to race / the wind’ (translating tum cursibus auras / tum uocet) uses an idiom common in rural Ireland, ‘to take on to’. The effect is to ground the instructions in the practical and the specific: the voice is that of a local sage imparting wisdom rather than that of an educated, allusive poet. This is not to say that Fallon is always down to earth: he retains an elevated style in other parts of the poem, particularly in passages where mythological motifs are prominent. Nor is he afraid to introduce his own allusions: uere nouo (at Verg. G. 1.43) is rendered ‘Come the sweet o’ the year’, the title of a poem by George Meredith and a

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line from Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale 4.3.3). Yet the repeated use of the language of the everyday reminds us that, for Fallon, the voice in this poem is not that of a poet, but that of a farmer-poet.³⁸ A few more examples from the first georgic should suffice: ‘fit to burst’ (immensae ruperunt horrea messes, l. 49); ‘it’s a fact and true’, perhaps an attempt to render the emphasis Virgil attains through repetition (urit . . . urit . . . urunt, l. 77); ‘Still and all’ (sed tamen, l. 305). Fallon also makes use of words or forms that are very specifically Irish: the kid who is sacrificed at Georgics 2.395 is called a ‘sacrificial puck’, while the hairs on a goat’s chin are described as ‘smigs’ (l. 3.311). Archaic words that remain in use in certain parts of Leinster (including Meath), such as ‘spins’ (= teats), are included (e.g. ll. 3.178 and 310 in Fallon), while variant forms of verbs are also employed: ‘he’ll get all het up for nothing’ (l. 3.100 Fallon); ‘And what they do is jizz them up by galloping’ (l. 3.132 Fallon, for Virgil’s saepe etiam cursu quatiunt). More generally, Fallon’s use of contractions adds to the casual, almost conversational tone of his poem. His decision to emphasize assonance, occasional internal rhyme, and alliteration over rhyme also lends the poem an Irish flavour; his style in many ways recalls Kavanagh above all, as can be seen particularly well in the opening lines of the Georgics: quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram uertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere uitis conueniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis, hinc canere incipiam. (Verg. G. 1.1–5) I’ll begin to sing of what keeps the wheat fields happy, under what stars to plough the earth, and fasten vines to elms, what care the oxen need, what tending cattle require, Maecenas, and how much skill’s required for the thrifty bees. Fallon, Georgics, 1.1–5 What tickles the corn to laugh in rows, and by what star to steer the plow, and how to train the vine to elms, good management of flocks and herds, the expertise bees need to thrive—my lord, Maecenas, such are the makings of the song I take upon myself to sing.³⁹

Both Heaney and Fallon, in their rendering of Virgil’s poetry, use specifically Irish diction to inscribe their poems into the gritty, realistic tradition of rural poetry best ³⁸ See Kiberd 2000, pp. 595–6 on Patrick Kavanagh’s prizing of everyday language as a way of emphasizing the importance of the local and as a rejection of the revivalist movement. ³⁹ The later Oxford translation is slightly different (‘What tickles the corn to laugh out loud, and by what star / to steer the plough’). Here the half-rhyme rows / plow is replaced by the closer loud / plough, the association being made clear by the alternative spelling of ‘plow’.

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exemplified by Patrick Kavanagh. In so doing, they depict Virgil’s poetry as coming very much from a rural perspective and reclaim the landscape of the Eclogues and Georgics from those who seek to idealize country life. At the same time, however, they both strive to break down the dichotomy between the stylized literariness of pastoral and the everyday realities of rural life. It is helpful to recall here Heaney’s formulation of ‘Mossbawn via Mantua’.⁴⁰ Both poets set Virgil in an Irish setting, and do so in particular by making translation choices that localize and domesticate the text for an Irish audience. Yet in so doing, they make the Virgilian text more difficult and less familiar for an English audience. Providing Irish versions of the European classics necessitates bypassing the English tradition: this sort of writing is not postcolonial but anticolonial in its erasure of the British literary heritage.

⁴⁰ Heaney 2003, pp. 3–6.

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28 Limiting Our Losses A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid Alessandro Fo Translated by Jelena Todorovic and Susanna Braund

Vergil placed insuperable problems in the way of translators William S. Anderson (2004, p. 101)

Knowing well the difficulties that pave the translator’s pathway, the poet and polymath Valéry Larbaud looked for a particularly suitable and mighty saint under whose auspices he could place the entire category of translators, of which he felt to be a part; hence he chose none other than ‘God’s translator’ himself—St Jerome, who, in years of most patient work conducted almost entirely in an ascetic cell in Bethlehem, had established the Latin tradition of the Holy Scriptures for centuries to come, with his Vulgate (as his version came to be called). Larbaud suggests starting each new translation on 30 September, the day of St Jerome’s celestial rebirth, which thereafter remained dedicated to him. First, one ought to offer the saint a ‘translator’s prayer’, which Larbaud composed by resorting to some expressions of Jerome himself: Sublime Doctor, luminary of the Holy Church, Blessed Jerome, I am about to undertake a task fraught with difficulties, and I beg you to help me from now on with your prayers so that I can translate this work into my own language in the same spirit in which it was composed.¹

If I may be permitted a confession, I would never have thought of trying to translate the Aeneid—not even on 30 September, or under the protection of such an authoritative intermediary. However, when the publishing house Einaudi asked me to prepare a new translation, which was to be placed in the catalogue side by side with the memorable one by Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, I soon had to resign myself to the fact that it was one of those

¹ Larbaud 1989 [1946], p. 43; see also pp. 125–7. For this ‘pamphlet’ (and other aspects of Jerome’s fortune as translator), see Giannotti 2009, esp. p. 111.

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offers that one ‘cannot refuse’.² For years, I was to have the possibility of enjoying a close dialogue with one of the greatest poets of the West. And not in the same capacity as anybody else, just for my own private pleasure; no—my task was to reproduce Virgil’s voice. It was a task and a challenge whose charm, however limited one might consider his or her own powers, eventually wears down even the wisest resistance. It is well known that every translation is destined, as a matter of historical fact, soon to give way to others, which follow; and such transience could be a further discouragement. However, it is a huge investment of time that gets crystallized in the beloved work, filtered by one’s own thought. And the days acquire, on paper, their own existence; somehow, at least at the subjective level, they are rescued from total oblivion—in a special guise. I dare express an even more personal consideration. In the long period required to carry out such a task, it is impossible not to be confronted with some current hardships; those who translate Virgil naturally draw from pain a kind of nourishment and ‘homogeneous’ fuel for the deep structures of the text that need to be conveyed. Hence, in the end, even the suffering can find its own meaning. At any rate, every fate must be overcome through acceptance; do not give in to evil, rather face it boldly (Verg. A. 5.710, 6.95). Moreover, Jerome himself—Larbaud claims—began translating ‘in order to console his disillusionment and bitterness . . . after the fall of Rome and Saint Paula’s death’.³ Nevertheless, all this stands only to a certain point. The really important question, if any, was whether there was room for a new translation. In the end I thought there was, especially because some of the aspects that we may call ‘technical’ seemed not to have been emphasized enough. I will give a brief account of the criteria that inspired me: a system of rules and exceptions dictated by the context, by the problems of rhythm, by a kaleidoscope of technical issues and semantic nuances; a set of regulations inspired by an underlying precision that, among its own rules, yet again embraces the possibility of deviating from that very same precision. In other words, a certain awareness that objective conditions (beyond subjective limits), in order to reach the best final results, can often dissuade from too strict a translation. All this was in the spirit of that quest for the ‘best possible compromise’ to which, even after centuries of speculation, literary translators are still forced to resign themselves.⁴

² As my work was coming to its end, notice of the passing of the great translator on 7 August 2011 reached me. I pay homage to her talent and her passionate work in the field of classics. ³ Larbaud 1989 [1946], p. 62. The statement is certainly true, although Larbaud puts it wrongly in a quotation from the praefatio to Commentarii in Hiezechielem, where he alludes not to the activity of translation, but more strictly to exegesis: itaque lucrativis, immo furtivis noctium horis, quae hieme propinquante, longiores esse coeperunt, haec ad lucernulam qualiacumque sunt dictare conamur, et aestuantis animi taedium interpretatione digerere (‘And so, in the precious—or rather stolen—night-time hours that have begun to grow longer with winter’s approach, I struggle to set down these [lines] by lamplight, for what they may be worth, and to steady an anguished mind by the drudgery of exegesis’). ⁴ See Morini 2007 passim, and particularly p. 73: noi ci limitiamo a osservare che seguire un singolo metodo e perseguire una sola forma di equivalenza in modo esclusivo e aprioristico non rende giustizia alla complessità dei testi e delle situazioni traduttive (‘We can merely observe that following a single method and

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In approaching Virgil’s epic poem, I took a risk and opted for a metrical translation. I attempted the ‘barbaric’ hexameter. However, I did not compose fixed kola, as Gabriele Ventre does, for instance, with his isometric translations achieved by joining an eight-syllable line to a nine-syllable line. My interpretation is more liberal, since I tried to reproduce the flexibility of the original line. Therefore ‘dactylic’ metra (metra with a ‘heavy’ element followed by a ‘weak’ bisyllabic one) alternate with ‘spondaic’ metra (metra with a ‘heavy’ element followed by a ‘weak’ monosyllabic element), more or less according to the pattern of the Latin hexameter. Of course, the position of a ‘heavy’ element (i.e. bearing the ictus) is marked by a stressed syllable. In some cases—which I endeavoured to avoid as much as possible—the ‘heavy’ element is marked by a secondary accent; this happens in extra-long words, or in some places where I faced major metrical difficulties.⁵ In many other cases, no matter how hard I tried to limit them, it inevitably happened that the ictus fell on monosyllables, even though to a sensitive ear these positions could sometimes seem too weak to stand for a ‘heavy’ element of a foot. If one is to respect a theoretically rigorous conformity with the hexameter model, the line endings should have only one syllable after the last long one; however, I took the liberty of submitting that last metron to the law of current Italian prosody, according to which, for the sake of calculation, there is always a hypothetical ‘flat’ measure,⁶ even if the line is proparoxytone (i.e. the final word has an accent on the antepenultimate syllable). On the other hand, I avoided truncated lines.⁷ In my Italian adaptation of hexameter versification, I basically tried to avoid a strong break after the third weak element that divides the verse into two exact halves. Still, there are a few exceptions to this rule as well. At the level of pure prosody, I took some liberty in using synaloepha here and there (and hiatus after it), as well as syneresis.⁸ For the accentuation of ancient names— names of characters from the poem or from myth, different peoples, regions, cities, and so on—it was obviously necessary to stick to a uniform criterion that would treat all cases consistently. I have therefore chosen the practice of Italian Latinists: that is, pursuing only one form of equivalence a priori and in an exclusive manner does not do justice to the complexity of the texts and situations in a translation’). ⁵ In the case of ictus marked by a secondary accent, I mostly tried to find a sort of legitimacy to my choice in the configuration of the word itself (as in the case of compound words with prepositions, or constructed with combinations of terms: e.g. Verg. A. 2.650 ínamovíbile; 9.17 ínnalzó; 6.591 fálsificáva) or in expressive reasons related to the context (e.g. imponente as a canonical translation for ingens, which is tolerated in initial position at Verg. A. 10.446 so as to convey iconically the relevance of Turnus’s stature; or the choice to make a calque of ineluctabile tempus at Verg. A. 2.324, in order to preserve the expression of ‘tiring/exhausting’, so evocative of the Trojans’ vain struggle against Fate). ⁶ Translators’ note: piano, translated here ‘flat’, denotes a line that ends in a paroxytone word (i.e. a word with the accent on the penultimate syllable). ⁷ Translators’ note: i.e. oxytone lines (lines with the accent on the final syllable; the Italian has tronco, lit. ‘truncated, chopped off ’). ⁸ In the case of d eufonica—that is, ‘d’ in front of vowels—in Italian, I deliberately followed the current norm, according to which it should be placed only between identical vowels. Sometimes, however, I deviated from this fundamental rule—either for prosodic and metrically contingent reasons or simply because I was aiming at some higher harmonies (based, of course, on personal taste).

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I followed the accentuation that these words would have had in Latin, according to their prosodic structure and to the ‘rule of the penultimate syllable’, which dictates where the accent falls in Latin (if the penultimate is long, it will bear the accent; if it is short, the accent will move back to the antepenultimate). In consequence, it is possible to encounter an accentuation that is quite different from what an Italian ear would expect, such as Tèseo or Nèreo instead of Tesèo or Nerèo.⁹ Whether in the translation or in the notes, we (F. Giannotti and I) thought it was more appropriate to indicate the accents, thus sparing the reader uncertainties or errors. Hence the only names I decided not to put an accent on are those that are either well known and recurring in the poem (Dido, Aeneas, Evander, Pallas) or otherwise common in Italian (as e.g. Agamennone, Alcide, Diomede, Paride). This decision naturally applies to unambiguous cases as well (e.g. Lat. Gyas, It. Gia, or Lat. Tyrus, Tyri, It. Tiri—which, on the other hand, becomes the adjective tìrii where necessary). My major effort, however, was to find a compromise between obeying the laws that require the translation of a work of poetry to be done with verbal material arranged in a parallel rhythmic system on the one hand, and not letting this very obedience to metrical laws push me towards a peculiar or too stately Italian, full of truncation or similar tricks, on the other. I tried as much as possible not to deviate from the principle of giving a consistent translation to every single word, at least among those more frequent and relevant. This is a trend, naturally destined to see many exceptions, not only because that one same word does not always have the same sense (or at least the same semantic nuance), but also because sometimes the target language context raises contingent phonic or rhythmic problems that require particular solutions.¹⁰ ⁹ I allowed myself an exception in the case of the names of Orfèo (instead of Òrfeo) and of the giant Briareus (on this matter, see Giannotti on Aeneid 6.287–8 in Fo 2012; the notes supplied by Filomena Gianotti to Fo’s translation are at pp. 591–846). The Latin scansion is Brĭ-ă-reus, which calls for Italian accentuation Brìareo; however, this seemed to me excessively ‘barbaric’ to the Italian ear, so I decided to violate the rule and adopt in this case the precedent of Dante’s ‘Briarèo’ at Inferno 31.97–9 (E io a lui: ‘S’esser puote, io vorrei / che de lo smisurato Brïareo / esperïenza avesser li occhi miei’, ‘And I to him: “If it can be, I would wish my eyes to have experience of the immense Briareus” ’, Durling 1996). I shall add that, in resolving the many doubts concerning the open or closed e and o, I availed myself considerably, both in the translation and in the notes, of Canepari 2009. ¹⁰ For instance in Book 5, not being able to find a fixed solution for translating either donum, munus, and praemium or palma and honor, I treated each case separately, according to the nuance that the context seemed to suggest (dono or premio), trying, however, to limit myself to dono for donum and premio in other cases—with some exceptions, of course. Yet I would like to emphasize that I did not aim for a fixed translation that would be consistent and exclusive for all words—especially in the case of generic words such as the verbal forms ait or inquit, which in Latin are often chosen according to metrical preference. I tried, for my part, to colour them with the nuances that seemed most appropriate in each context. I gave the same treatment to the short formulae (or paraformulae) that introduce a speech or a speaker, which present very little variety by comparison to analogous formulations. Thus, for instance, there is no similarity between my translation of Sic ore effata at Verg. A. 2.524 (e questo dicendo, ‘and saying so’) and my translation of Quae postquam vates sic ore effatus amico at Verg. A. 3.463 (Dopo che questo svelò con voce amica il profeta, ‘After the prophet revealed this in a friendly voice’). On the other

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In this context I should also mention the issue of repetitions of the same word at a short interval, which did not appear so inelegant to ancient ears as it does to ours today. I asked myself, as a methodological question, whether to repeat the same word, thus respecting the original, or to change it, thus favouring modern Italian taste. Naturally, I was more inclined to repetition because I felt that this would generally help to reproduce the flavour of the Virgilian arrangement. But even in this area I allowed myself a margin of freedom in order not to utterly distort some passages with solutions that would seem too clumsy to a contemporary Italian reader.¹¹ This leads me to one of the most difficult problems: the consistent translation of stereotyped phrases, formulaic or paraformulaic, and of lines or parts of lines that in the original remain identical. Here, too, my effort was directed towards reflecting the original arrangement with the greatest possible fidelity, aiming at repeating identical translations of the same phrase, starting of course from the ‘formulae’. It seems to me that in the Italian tradition of translating the Aeneid inadequate attention has been given so far to this entire cluster of problems. Sometimes, in order to preserve as much as possible a formulaic phrase together with its petrified and somewhat solemn appearance, certain choices seemed to me necessary, even if they are rather peculiar from the point of view of the modern language. So, for example, for the distinctive haec ubi dicta dedit I chose the sequence Dopo che dette quei detti,¹² trying then to handle as best I could those places where Virgil used the formula in a shortened version.¹³ Here, however, there are layers of complications. In tasks of this kind it is difficult to keep the material under proper control so as to be able to recognize a consistent hand, dopo che (‘after’) is a rather fixed translation for postquam at the beginning of a line. Despite the general tendency to have a fixed translation for the same word, a special problem was posed by some famous expressions. Miser, for example, is frequent in the Latin text and a rather awkward adjective for a translator; relatively rarely I translated it with misero (‘miserable’), but I did use it at Verg. A. 1.630 because of the familiarity of the original, wishing not to distance the Italian translation from the original too much, at the formal level as well; thus I rendered Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco with Non ignara di mali imparo a soccorrere i miseri (‘Not unfamiliar with evil, I learn to aid the miserable’). Here is an example conditioned by the micro-context: for egregius, which is rather frequent in Virgil, I did not adopt a generalized egregio (‘outstanding’) but oscillated between nobile, eccellente (‘noble’, ‘excellent’) and some other solutions as well; however, in one particular case, quos deinde secutus / regius egregia Priami de stirpe Diores (Verg. A. 5.296–7), I felt obliged to respect the sound play and rendered the line e quindi li segue / regio, dell’egregia stirpe di Priamo—Diore (‘then there followed them / the royal Diores, of outstanding Priam’s line’). ¹¹ For this set of problems, both general and more particularly Virgil-related, I suggest the works of Moskalew 1982, Wills 1996, and Facchini Tosi 1983. I treated the question in greater detail in Fo 2017, pp. 186–96 section II.1. We often find in Virgil a rather insistent use of a certain word in a restricted context. I wondered whether such cases reflected a psychological tendency in a writer who, on a certain day, had a particularly insistent cluster of words in his mind. If so, this would give us a vaguely suggestive clue about the layering of the composition of the Aeneid. ¹² Literally, ‘after those sayings were given’. ¹³ Cf. Verg. A. 5.32, 7.175. After all, the often elliptical character of these formulae should also be reproduced, since it represents a certain tacit agreement between author and reader about the rare, artificial, and stylized nature of solemn epic diction—for instance in cases such as Verg. A. 1.559, which I translated Tali parole Ilionèo (‘with such words Ilioneus’).

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element, especially if it is reduced to the size of a iunctura and is perhaps not particularly eye-catching or recursive. In dealing with such passages, I availed myself of commentaries and concordances. Still, the consistent translation of repeated elements should also make them fit well among themselves and be in harmony with the different combinations recognizable in Virgil. His own taste for very small variations on an expression, even when the latter is repeated overall, imposes a truly challenging task on any translator who aspires to render it. The problem of how to arrange the mosaic of stereotypical tesserae, identical or minimally different, is followed by specific difficulties connected to Virgil’s immense variability and technical imagination. It occurred to me that sometimes, even if he repeats the same line without the slightest change, Virgil loves to play with it in different contexts and in different ways.¹⁴ I am convinced that what we have here is sophisticated artistic intention and that Virgil enjoys himself, knowing that this way he obtains, simultaneously, consistency and variation. In all the places where I identified this, I made every effort to reproduce as faithfully as possible this nuance of his compositional art. Returning again to issues of a rather linguistic nature, which I have already tackled in the example of haec ubi dicta dedit, one cannot help but keep in mind that Virgilian diction is epic diction often characterized by solemn coinages which are rather eccentric for everyday linguistic usage. I have mostly tried to respect Virgil’s stylistic peculiarities with their effect of foreignization and with their elevated tone, as for instance in the case of Vulcan’s epithets ignipotens and armipotens (Verg. A. 12.90; 2.425), which I translated ignipotente (‘fire-mighty’) and armipotente (‘war-mighty’), or in the case of the compounds in -fer and -ger.¹⁵

¹⁴ He does so in the Aeneid, for example at 5.142–3 and 8.689–90; and also at 4.672–3 and 12.870–1. I deal with these problems in greater detail in Fo 2017, pp. 192–6. ¹⁵ I list here a few examples of my choices in such cases: for Verg. A. 1.663, alìgero Amore; for 3.660, lanìgero pecore; for 3.680, cipressi coniferi; for 4.248, capo pinifero; for 8.77, fiume cornìgero; for 8.430, alìgero Austro; and see also destrieri cornìpedi for 7.789, fulgori terrìfici for 8.431, vulnìfico càlibe for 8.446, and carro nottivago for 10.216. In other cases I did not dare to follow the original. Thus in Terrae omniparentis alumnum at Verg. A. 6.595 I corrected the primitive onnipartoriente to ‘which generates all’, and at Verg. A. 8.116 I translated paciferae . . . ramum . . . olivae as ‘olive branch of peace’. In a debate after a conference, a colleague asked me with funny and provocative mischievousness: ‘And how did you translate Troiugena?’ (In Italian, the most natural translation, ‘figlio di Troia’, ends up ambiguous because the word ‘troia’ is the equivalent of the English word ‘bitch’.) This name appears actually in three places in the Aeneid (in the singular at 3.359 and in the plural at 8.117 and 12.626), which are to be evaluated against the two occurrences, both in the plural, of Graiugenae (3.550 and 8.127: in Book 8, the two words occur at an interval of ten lines), and against the two occurrences, both in the plural, of nubigenae, used of Centaurs (7.674 and 8.293). Now, for Graiugenumque domos and optime Graiugenum, discarding a calque that is all the more awkward and impractical as the word occurs in the plural, it seemed to me that there were no other ways but case dei nati da Greci (‘houses of those born to Greeks’) and o tu eccellente fra i nati da Greci (‘O you, outstanding among those born to Greeks’; and a parallel translation for nubigenae as nati da nube, ‘those born to clouds’). For Troiugena, discarding both the calque and ‘Trojans’ (too simple and flat), first I tried to settle it with stirpe troiana (‘Trojan race’), but that was unfeasible for the plurals at 8.117 and 12.626 (especially the second). So the best solution seemed to be to adopt, although in different contexts, the Italian expression nato / nati a Troia (‘born in Troy’), which does not lose entirely the ‘genetic’ meaning and remains as much as possible in line with the parallel Graiugenae.

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Similarly, at the level of ornamentation, I aimed to avoid translations that sounded like glosses, that is, translations where a particular figure is not translated as such, but rather ‘explained’ through a more standard expression, which sounds only roughly equivalent, if not even a blunt paraphrase.¹⁶ In this respect, too, I opted for conformity with the original in all the situations where it appeared at least plausible that such conformity can be maintained in our language and in my metrical scheme (and the majority of situations were in this category). In the case of Virgil, a special battlefield is that of enallagē, a very frequent and characteristic figure of speech, sometimes so deeply rooted in his mode of expression that it is not easy even to perceive the foreignizing phenomenon hidden in it.¹⁷ Since I consider it an error of method and, above all, an arbitrary reduction of the author to ‘water down’ or simplify metaphors such as classique immittit habenas (at Verg. A. 6.1) or purpuream vomit ille animam (at Verg. A. 9.349), I deemed it wrong and misleading to intervene and ‘attune’ sudden leaps in style, for example the famous enallagē ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (Verg. A. 6.268), which is so evocative. A particular problem is caused by verb tenses. Virgil often alternates present and perfect tenses in narration, even at a very short distance or in the same context. Although acknowledging that this is often motivated by reasons of metrical convenience, I tried in principle to reproduce the situation I found in the original text; nevertheless, I sometimes allowed myself to modestly adapt the translation to different solutions, for expressive or metrical reasons in my target language. Virgil sometimes resorts to the narrative infinitive and, where this did not deeply damage the sharpness of the Italian translation, I set out to follow him on this path as well.¹⁸ Within the boundaries of the possible, I tried to reproduce other characteristics of Virgil’s style as well, on which I cannot dwell in detail. There is, for example, the ‘theme and variation’ or dicolon abundans, which I sometimes rendered literally, with a coordinating conjunction acting as a fulcrum, sometimes by using a gerund in lieu of the coordinated segment (e.g. at Verg. A. 2.231 and 5.309–10).¹⁹ I usually followed the accumulation of coordinate clauses with et and -que, which can sound annoying to an Italian ear but is a characteristic of Virgil’s epic diction (e.g. 3.554, 572, and 8.9). Frequently there was also the correlation et . . . et . . . (or -que . . . -que, or various combinations) meaning sia . . . sia (‘either . . . or’) in Italian, which I could not always reproduce (e.g. at 1.264, e mura e costumi, ‘both city walls and customs’, and again at 1.399, 1.612, 2.729, 5.471, 8.94, 8.169, 11.192, 11.840, 12.127–8 and so on). ¹⁶ Previously I found myself talking about gloss-type translations regarding this kind of approach. However, I now prefer to modify this phrase slightly (traduzioni-chiosa), so as to avoid overlap with another term that is already present in the field of translation studies but has a different meaning (see Morini 2007, pp. 67 and 75). ¹⁷ Fundamental is Conte 2007, pp. 5–63 (especially pp. 40, 41, 45, 47, 49, 51, 54, 62–3). For problems in translation, I refer, again, to Fo 2017, pp. 196–200. ¹⁸ For instance at Verg. A. 2.685 (and Book 2 passim), 5.685–6, 6.557, 7.15–18, 9.509–11, 9.789–92, 10.288–90, and 11.883–4. ¹⁹ For ‘theme and variation’ or dicolon abundans see also Conte 2007, p. 35 (and passim, for example pp. 34 and 43). The material gathered by Barabino 1985 is of some value.

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Overall, starting with metrical decisions, I tried to reach an adequate epic tone, which would not be spoiled by unnecessary concessions to the trivial or the mundane, would fit into contemporary Italian taste, and would strive to respect and reflect the substance of the words, and sometimes their studied disposition, the harmony of the sounds, the recurrence of phonemes (alliterations, assonances) and repetition of the same words and, even more, of formulae. Illustrations of these criteria should be sufficient to indicate the specific place my translation aspires to hold among the great number of already existing Italian translations of the Aeneid. Naturally, while I was working I had many of them at hand: as poets read other poets, so translators read other translators, and it would be both foolish and incorrect to pretend otherwise. Sometimes the coincidence with one or another translation is random, or motivated by reasons rooted in the lexical patrimony of the target language. I would often deliberately adopt a solution found by a predecessor of mine, seeking not my own glory as interpreter, but what seemed to serve best a particular passage of Virgil’s text; if another translator has found the most appropriate word or a solution that honoured the poet, I would not struggle to avoid it because it was somebody else’s invention; I would go along and acknowledge its felicity. But this means that I could not, of course, indicate my debt each and every time with a note of acknowledgement.²⁰ The translations that I consulted the most, be it for the appreciation of poetic tone or for the accuracy of the rendering, are those of Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, Luca Canali, Enrico Oddone and Riccardo Scarcia. But I would also like to mention those of Carlo Carena, Francesco Della Corte, Mario Ramous, Vittorio Sermonti, Cesare Vivaldi, and the well-known anthology of Giovanna Bemporad. The complex of choices elaborated upon above falls under the mythical category of ‘fidelity’. I believe that, in the game of binary oppositions that governs translation studies, this attempt of mine is more likely to be placed among those oriented towards the source text than among those oriented towards the target text: in other words, my translation tends to the choice, matured through long meditation in this field, of a source-oriented translation, which favours the interests of the author rather than the ‘smoothness’ that would produce easy reading for the recipient.²¹ However, it is only natural that the translator’s quest is, even in this case, for a compromise that struggles to respect the

²⁰ By way of example, I state here some of my debts concerning Virgil’s Aeneid: for creberque procellis / Africus at 1.85, I owe to Calzecchi Onesti l’Africo ricco di raffiche (‘African wind, rich with gales’). To Canali I owe, among many solutions, arruffa (‘ruffles’) at 10.712 and cimento (‘ordeal’) at 11.476; to Sermonti I owe frotte (‘droves’), used of deer at 4.154. In Oddone’s careful and elegant translation—which, like that of Calzecchi Onesti, is oriented towards achieving a vague hexameter rhythm—I would like to point out, for example, an almost total convergence at 3.117. At 12.743, for et nunc huc, inde huc incertos implicat orbes, I owe Scarcia the solution un groviglio confuso di giri (‘a confusing knot of gyration’). See also the end of Fo 2017, pp. 199–200. ²¹ For these concepts and the history of various oppositions, such as foreignizing vs. domesticating translation, formal vs. dynamic equivalence, semantic vs. communicative translation, illusionist vs. antiillusionist methods, covered vs. uncovered translation, source-text-oriented vs. target-text-oriented translation, see generally Morini 2007 (the quotation of these oppositions is from p. 77; on smoothness, see also p. 26 and the entire first part of the book). A more ‘poetic’ approach to these issues can be found in Prete 2011.

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‘rights’ of all. Every translation operates in practice more than on the theoretical plane, where it gets consumed by the attempt to find a reasonable balance between two poles: fidelity on the one hand, expressive and musical ‘beauty’ on the other. Along with fidelity, I naturally also pursued taste and readability, both for the whole work and for single lines and words as individual subunits; these already represent a world of their own and must contribute to the harmony of the whole through their sharpness and attractive precision. Within the limits of what is possible and of my own capacities, I aimed at fidelity not only (obviously) through the semantic content, but also through Virgil’s formal values and particular underlying technical choices. This is conditioned by an easily perceptible fact: in Italy today, in comparison with past phases of this country’s humanist tradition, the opportunity to enjoy a classical text fully, by reading it in the original, seems to be in decline, and the direction that the educational system has been taking does not seem to favour its revival in the near future. In these conditions, the voice of a translator tends more and more to overlap with and replace the voice of the author instead complementing it. In fact the translator has the right of exclusive representation of the author for a large and ever growing number of readers. It is a huge responsibility, which includes every tiny detail of the translation, where the one who translates wishes to save as much as is possible of the author for the readers’ appreciation. Maybe it is really a matter of the translator’s humility, as advised by Carlo Izzo long ago (Izzo 1970 [1966]), and of the authentic (and more ethical) spirit of ‘service’ when it comes to realizing and then peacefully accepting that, in the field of translation (as in any other, for that matter), there are no perfect solutions: we can aspire only to a compelling consistency, to polishing our methods and results. And, in addition to the inevitable criticisms, we are exposed to and fiercely attacked by the same principle of uncertainty that ultimately, I would say, permeates literary and artistic creativity in general. Anyone who translates conscientiously knows that this is a losing battle, in which the first objective is to limit the losses, especially in the case of an author so rich in precious inventions, nuances, and resonances as to deserve to be crowned by a severe judge, one no less great than himself, with the title of degli altri poeti onore e lume.²² Without wanting to sound too presumptuous,²³ as a sort of excuse for the failings and as a captatio benivolentiae, I would repeat Dante’s ‘prayer’ to him: vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore / che mi ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.²⁴ *

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²² ‘O honour and light of the other poets’ (Dante, Inferno, 1.82, as translated by Durling in Durling 1996). ²³ Actually twice as much, because I saw how a scholar as great as Norden, in the epigraph to his commentary on Book 6 (highly appropriately!), dared make the words of Dante’s tercet at Inferno 1.82–4 refer to Virgil. See also MacCormack 1998, p. 1. ²⁴ ‘Let my long study and great love avail me, that has caused me to search through your volume’ (Dante, Inferno 1.83–4 in Durling 1996; see previous note in this chapter).

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Over the years that I have dedicated to this demanding job, many friends supported me, helping me both with bibliographic researches (allow me to thank especially Sergio Casali, Maria Teresa D’Anna, Marco Fernandelli, Caterina Lazzarini and Lara Nicolini, as well as the Library of the Faculty of Arts of University of Siena and its director Luca Lenzini, who were amenable to the purchase of many Virgilian titles) and with their precious advice throughout different phases of translation that made my work less imperfect. I owe a lot to Alida Airaghi, Pierluigi Cappello, Anna Elisa De Gregorio, Anna De Simone, Viviana Ettorre, Filippo Gioffrè, Mario Laghi Pasini, Andrea Rodighiero, Maria Rosa Tabellini, Roberto Venuti. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to those who patiently discussed with me many individual problems: Mauro Bersani, Maurizio Bettini, Caterina Lazzarini, Elisa Merisio, Claudio Vela and—in a natural continuous exchange of views on shared work—Filomena Giannotti, who prepared the commentary. On this journey I have lost my father Fulvio, who was following with pride my endeavour. I wish to dedicate my work to him and to my mother Clara, who preceded him thirty years before.

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Afterword: Let Go Fear Future Virgils Josephine Balmer

‘For the first time in literary history,’ Fiona Cox has recently noted, ‘it is women writers who are creating and defining this new aetas Vergiliana.’ Here, Cox argues, is an ‘innate paradox . . . for thousands of years Virgil has been the quintessentially male poet, singing of “arms and the man” ’.¹ In this Afterword I will be examining this kind of feminization of Virgilian reception, particularly through the prism of my own poetic transformations of the Aeneid, both past and forthcoming. But Cox’s assertion raises an initial question. What has happened to the men? For T. S. Eliot in 1945, Virgil’s greatest poetic achievement was as a versioner, a rewriter who opened out epic, turning it from the inward-looking Greek city states of Homer to an entire new world of Virgilian ‘relatedness’ (Eliot’s own italics).² Yet, ironically, in our own age, when anglophone poets have turned more and more to revisioning classical verse, Virgil is often cast as the poor relation. Instead, as the Irish poet Michael Longley has confirmed of his own continuing poetic explorations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, contemporary poetry has ‘been Homer-haunted’ for decades.³ In Britain and in Ireland, at least, this interest in Homer was influenced by E. V. Rieu’s democratizing prose translations of Homeric epic, published by Penguin Books in 1946 (the Odyssey) and 1950 (the Iliad). By contrast, W. F. Jackson Knight’s (1956) prose version of the Aeneid for Penguin does not appear to have had the same impact. Clearly Rieu’s Odyssey—the inaugural edition of the soon-to-be iconic Penguin Classics series—with its tale of a hero returning home from a long and bloody war, and against great obstacles, would resonate with the postwar generation of Allied nations. Against this, the Aeneid’s narrative of a defeated and broken nation rebuilding itself around a charismatic leader could have too many echoes of recent German history for their comfort. Paradoxically, at the same time Virgil’s epic texts also appear to have been treated with far more awe and reverence than those of

¹ Cox 2011, pp. 1–2.

² Eliot 1975, p. 123.

³ Longley, M. 2009, p. 97.

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Homer; many contemporary reviewers of Cecil Day-Lewis’s (1952) verse translations, for instance, considered the poet’s colloquial mannerisms too jarring for Latin epic.⁴ Day-Lewis’s brief translator’s preface adds to the gloom: ‘though there is seldom any insuperable difficulty about putting into English what Virgil meant’, he maintains, ‘it is all but impossible to convey how he said it’.⁵ And so, in Britain and Ireland, at least, Virgil has remained the unwelcome outsider. In Michael Longley’s poem ‘Remembering the Poets’ (Longley 2000), for instance, Virgil is characterized as ‘our homespun internationalist, sighted / At some government reception’, so that Eliot’s conqueror of new worlds here becomes a dull, grey bureaucrat.⁶ More revealingly, in ‘A Poppy’, where the poet revisits a Homeric simile—a poem rewritten here for those fallen in the First World War—Longley admits to ‘an image Virgil steals . . . and so do I’.⁷ For Longley, Virgil might be the doppelgänger, but Homer is still the archetype. Longley’s fellow Irish poets provide some exceptions. In his sequence ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, Paul Muldoon (1998) recontextualizes Aeneas’s flight from Troy in terms of an Irish migration to Australia. Meanwhile the poet meets his own Creusa in the Latin Quarter of Paris.⁸ More recently, in poems such as ‘Menoetes’, Bernard O’Donoghue has uncovered an echo of his own Cork childhood—and of its Troubles—in the Aeneid.⁹ But it is no surprise that it is Seamus Heaney, one of the most rigorous and successful rewriters of ancient texts in contemporary English, who has engaged most with Virgil. His use of the Eclogues in Electric Light (Heaney 2001) and other collections is discussed elsewhere in this volume.¹⁰ But in Seeing Things (Heaney 1991) and in Human Chain (Heaney 2010) he turned to the Aeneid, most notably Book 6. In the former collection, Aeneas’s journey to the Underground in ‘The Golden Bough’ represents Heaney’s response to his father’s then recent death, while in the latter, written after Heaney had himself suffered the trauma of a stroke, the poet, like Aeneas, enters the realm of the dead unscathed. In particular, Human Chain’s twelve-poem sequence ‘Route 110’ transforms Virgil’s gloomy Stygian geography into Heaney’s childhood Derry; the crowded ghosts of Charon’s barge, which Virgil likened to falling autumn leaves, become a tightly packed rack of market stall coats. Similarly, lost souls waiting to be directed to their otherworldly destinations are bus station passengers called out by an inspector to their respective routes. Heaney later returned to Aeneid 6 in a translation published posthumously in 2016, which, as he claims in the surviving draft of his Translator’s Note, offers ‘neither a “version” nor a crib . . . more like classics homework’.¹¹ Once again, here Aeneas’s reunion with his father Anchises forms the emotional fulcrum of the work,

⁴ For a discussion of critical reviews, see Cheney 1983, p. 435. ⁵ Day-Lewis 1952, p. 7. On the issue of Virgil’s perceived conservatism and triumphalism in later decades, see also Chapter 7 in this volume. ⁶ Longley, M. 2000, p. 61. ⁷ Ibid., p. 20. ⁸ On this, see also Fowler 2009, pp. 251–2. ⁹ O’Donoghue 2016. ¹⁰ See Chapter 27 in this volume. ¹¹ Heaney 2016, p. vii.

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made even more powerful by the restraint of Heaney’s narrative: ‘I always trusted that your sense of right’, Anchises tells his son, ‘Would prevail and keep you going to the end.’¹² For Heaney, it seems, the terrifying punishments and tortures of Virgil’s Underworld present more a reassuring means by which to return to beloved childhood landscapes and presences, even—or perhaps especially—when faced with his own mortality. Yet perhaps what fascinates here most are the differences between Heaney’s previous poetic versions of the Aeneid and this translation. For instance, in his poem ‘The Golden Bough’, the plucked branch grows back with ‘the same metal sheen’.¹³ In Aeneid 6, it is ‘golden again, emanating / That same sheen and shimmer’. Throughout, Heaney’s exquisite line placement never misses a beat, turning on its head the traditional hierarchy of translation, with creative version at the top and literal at the bottom.¹⁴ But, as Fiona Cox points out, women poets, Irish, British, and North American, seemed to have found the richest poetic source material in Virgilian epic—perhaps because, unlike their male counterparts, their classical education was far less likely to have extended beyond Latin to Greek.¹⁵ Even more tellingly, as both Fiona Cox and Rowena Fowler have underlined, for women poets, Virgil still seems part of the schoolroom, which takes us back to Heaney’s own ‘classics homework’.¹⁶ For instance, in her poem ‘The Bottle Garden’, Eavan Boland revisits her past as a ‘gangling schoolgirl / in the convent library’ reading the Aeneid ‘as the room darkens / to the underworld of the Sixth book’. And in ‘Purple Shining Lilies’ Fleur Adcock remembers puzzling over the meaning of Latin colour terms in her ‘greyish, pencilled-over Oxford text’ of the Latin poet.¹⁷ As Fowler comments, ‘for the contemporary poet the Virgilian starting-point may be the site and experience of reading the text’.¹⁸ Certainly, for such poets, the (then often single-sex) classroom seems to provide a safe, feminized space in which the future woman poet can quietly and confidently discover her own calling. In addition, for many women poets, second-wave feminist revisionism provided a compelling impetus: the task of gifting speech to the silent women of Greece and Rome.¹⁹ Virgil’s women, in particular, have often been given a new voice, which enabled them to move beyond their original roles as the lost wife or the doomed love interest, superfluous to the hero’s quest for new territories to conquer. In work by poets as diverse as Louise Glück, U. A. Fanthorpe, Ruth Fainlight, Rachel Hadas, Linda Pastan, Rosanna Warren, as well as the Australian Kate Llewellyn and the young American Anne Shaw, Virgil’s pale ghosts, particularly that of Dido, become flesh and blood again.

¹² Ibid., p. 37. ¹³ Heaney 1991, p. 3. ¹⁴ Heaney 2016, p. 10. See also Balmer 2016. ¹⁵ On the issue of a woman poet’s education in ancient Greek language and culture, see Balmer 2013, pp. 52–5. ¹⁶ See Cox 2011, pp. 2–8; Fowler 2009, pp. 238–43. ¹⁷ Boland 1986, p. 23; Adcock 2000, p. 39. ¹⁸ Fowler 2009, p. 243. ¹⁹ Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife represents a prime example of this approach; see, for example, Duffy 1999, pp. 58–60 (‘Eurydice’), although it is in The Bees (Duffy 2011) that the poet turns fully to reimagining Virgilian epic (there the Georgics).

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Women translators have also recently engaged with Virgil, although not always with the same revisionist agenda—or in the same numbers—as their fellow poets.²⁰ Interestingly, their paucity is in marked contrast with the ratio of women poets to translators in earlier centuries; as Jane Stevenson has pointed out, of the earliest surviving published works by women writers in English, mostly dating from the sixteenth century, over half are translations, as if, Stevenson concludes, ‘translation offered a means of self-expression which was seen as relatively legitimate because the writer was not herself claiming the dignity of an author, but merely representing the work of someone else’.²¹ In the twenty-first century, Sarah Ruden’s (2008) critically acclaimed Aeneid stands out as the first complete version of the epic in English by a women translator. Although her work was critically acclaimed on publication, Ruden’s initial fear, as she notes in her brief and characteristically modest translator’s preface, was that ‘of cheating the reader’.²² At the same time she believes that, as a woman translator of male works, she is ‘never consciously subversive’ but rather ‘a conscious crony of the author’.²³ Ruden’s comments hark back to the reticence of early woman translators such as Elizabeth Carter, the daughter of a clergyman who translated Epictetus in 1758. Apologizing for her source text’s ‘uncouthness’, she nevertheless declares her intention to be as literal as possible in order ‘to preserve the original Spirit, the peculiar Turn and characteristic Roughness of the author’.²⁴ Such humility, if centuries apart, might explain the reticence of women translators to approach Virgil, particularly the Aeneid; its standing as an alpha male text of war piled on war, of conquest on conquest, of patriotic fervour and patriarchal state intimidates as much as it repulses. For myself, as a writer, I have a foot in both camps. Having produced ‘straight’ translations of Sappho, classical women poets, and Catullus, I can appreciate the woman translator’s impetus not to ‘cheat’ the monolingual reader, as well as the constant anxiety, probably familiar to many women classicists, that we are here, working on the text, only by favour or default. Yet, at the same time, as a classicist poet I was drawn to the text as a creative stimulus, viewing my own task as one of transgression and disruption as well as of revision. And yet the more I worked in both fields, the more I realized that, whether linguistic or creative, each was indivisible from the other. As for Virgil, here I was drawn to Creusa, the wife killed offstage as the Greeks overrun Troy in Aeneid 2, who subsequently appears to her fleeing husband Aeneas as a ghost.²⁵ As with Heaney’s ‘homework’ and the classroom preoccupations of other woman poets, Aeneid 2 had been a favourite set book text when I was a classics undergraduate at university in London. Later, as a young graduate, I had

²⁰ See Chapter 7 in this volume. ²¹ As quoted in Stevenson 2006, pp. 129–30. ²² Ruden 2008, p. ix. ²³ In an email to the author. ²⁴ As quoted in Stevenson 2006, p. 143. ²⁵ Such revoicing was a natural progression from my work on translating—and excavating—women poets overlooked at the time, such as Corinna, Erinna, and Sulpicia. See Balmer 1996.

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taught it to an evening class of mature adult students. In my collection Chasing Catullus (Balmer 2004), the third and final section of the volume is prefaced by a translation of Aeneid 2.361–9, Virgil’s description of the moment the city falls to the besieging Greeks. My poem ‘Creusa’ also appears in this section, a series of meditations on ancient epic that follow in the wake of the book’s central preoccupation with the then recent death of my young niece from cancer. As I explained in my introduction, the work as a whole represented ‘a journey into the border territory between poetry and translation, offering versions of classical authors interspersed with original poems, re-imagining epic literature, re-contextualising classic poems, redrawing the past like the overwriting of a palimpsest’.²⁶ At the heart of this journey was a descent into the Underworld, into the darkness of impenetrable grief and sense of loss that a child’s death places at the centre of a family, which was now articulated through the prism of classical texts, a means to say the otherwise unsayable. In retrospect, I realize that here Creusa could become the ghost who speaks back to us, as my niece Rachel now could not. Indeed, the concluding stanza of the poem ‘In Coventry’, which ends the previous, central section of Chasing Catullus, starts with the words: ‘I know she’ll never speak to us again.’²⁷ And so the interplay between my translations of Aeneas’s own lines from Virgil’s text and the new words that I had given Creusa was crucial to the integrity of the work as a whole—as well as to my own dual practice as a poet-translator. As I wrote in my introduction, this was a dialogue, ‘not just between the Trojan hero Aeneas and his dead wife, but between Virgil’s original text and my rewriting of it’.²⁸ As Fiona Cox observed in her own perceptive discussion of the poem, it articulates the ‘anguish at the gulf carved within Balmer’s own family between the living and the dead’.²⁹ Creusa Did she lose her way or just stop running, sink down to rest, unable to trace tracks? We don’t know. We never saw her again. I didn’t think, didn’t even look back, but when all regrouped, this one was missing, comrades, husband, son, sharing the same loss. I went home, hoping she’d do the same, hoping; it was seething, shuddering with Greeks like rats. Now I shook too, frightened by the quiet but somehow in the dusk I found courage, called out to my wife again and again, filling the streets with the sound of her name . . .

²⁶ Balmer 2004, p. 9. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 37. As Fiona Cox 2011, p. 42 has pointed out, like Troy, Coventry, too, was a city ravaged by war damage. ²⁸ Balmer 2004, p. 10. ²⁹ Cox 2011, p. 44.

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If the city was an ancient rowan hacked by farmers’ axe deep in forest, trembling, teetering, threatening, and then at last uprooted with thundering groan, I was the hare in its lengthening shadow, racing on and on, running down darkness until, at last, the light was all but gone. Through the gloom, ghosted, I saw Aeneas, heard him call but it was as if, as if he was fading fast, faint mountain echo; tried to speak but it was as if, as if my voice was mud, words crumbled into dust. She told me not to grieve for what was lost: all that had passed was the will of the gods: we weren’t meant to travel on together, ahead I faced exile, vast seas to cross, the joy of all things, new lands now, new loves, fresh hopes for a future in the making – yet begged me to cherish the son we’d shared. Then she was gone, vanished into thin air; three times, in vain, I tried to embrace her, three times I sensed her wraith escaping, like clouds dispersed or a dream on waking. I didn’t know what I might be saying. I thought he’d put a finger to my lips the way he did when Iulus stirred in sleep and I saw this fever or that illness, laughing away my terrors, bad and good; I half-hoped he’d throw his arms around me, promise that he’d stay, always had, always would. I watched as he took up his gods and shrine, set his ageing father on his shoulder, wrap our son’s hand in his, in miniature, walk towards the hills through the blackened vines. It was then I knew I’d been left behind.³⁰

In my latest collection, Letting Go (Balmer 2017), a sonnet sequence written after the sudden death of my mother from a heart attack, I have returned, among other classical texts, to Aeneid 2 and Creusa. But in this work I wanted to move on from the feminist revoicing of women protagonists and subvert instead the voice of the epic hero.³¹ And ³⁰ Balmer 2004, pp. 45–6. ³¹ Rosanna Warren’s ‘Turnus’ (Warren 2003, p. 6) and Louise Glück’s ‘Roman Study’ (Glück 1999, p. 10) are also examples of poems told through the viewpoint of the Aeneid’s male protagonists, although here both are in the third person.

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so I cast myself as a transgendered Aeneas, with Heaney’s interplay between dead father and living son in ‘The Golden Bough’ (Heaney 1991) and Aeneid Book VI (Heaney 2016) transformed into that between mother and daughter. Standing in for Aeneas’s retracing of his steps as he realizes that his wife is missing is a night-time drive from my house to that of my parents following a frantic telephone call from my father, moments after I had spoken to my mother myself. And, although my own version is much condensed, here I overwrite the text fairly precisely—it is an important factor of the work that, like Eavan Boland or Fleur Adcock, I can read the original—so that its phrases and images in Latin are echoed in my own English. For example the repetition of si forte in line 756 becomes ‘they had, they had’, while Aeneas’s girding on of physical armour in line 749 becomes my own metaphysical defence to the shock:³² Lost Up to that point, I was still in the dark. I was retracing steps, staring down paths I saw as ours, not thinking she had been ripped from us already, had slipped unseen as she sat down to rest. We’d just spoken – I heard her laughing, hanging up the phone – but when next we gathered, friends, family, one of us would be missing, tricked away. I bargained with gods I did not worship; I blamed, I begged ambulance men, medics. Reaching home, I tried to put on armour, convincing myself that they had saved her, that they had been in time, they had, they had . . . In response there was only silence, dread.³³

Similarly, in one of the last sonnets in the sequence, I revisited the Aeneid to write another version of the same passage from Book 2 I had reworked for ‘Creusa’. The new poem is based on a dream—a very classical inspiration in itself—in which my mother had appeared to me, like Creusa, out of a crowd in our local High Street. In vivid detail, she had been dressed in her favourite crimson trilby hat and coat with her trademark matching lipstick, which at once suggested a means to echo—and subvert—Virgil’s martial imagery. As in ‘Lost’, I was looking once again to transcend gender, voicing my own narrative through Aeneas’s first person. This was partly due to logistics; I wanted Creusa’s ghost to become my mother’s, so this cast me, in turn, as Aeneas. But I also looked to turn Creusa’s perhaps somewhat stark and (to us)

³² At a first reading and subsequent discussion of these sonnets with Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos at an Open University colloquium in London in July 2016, both pointed out how ‘Lost’ had become a translation of emotion as well as of language. I am very grateful to them both for their perceptive and supportive comments on these then poems in progress. ³³ Balmer 2017, p. 13.

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ominous prophecies of long journeys and future conquests into a hopeful, warm message of maternal encouragement—very much the sort of thing I was sure my mother would have wanted to say to me if she could. It is interesting that, for Elena Theodorakopoulos, the language I give my mother here exemplifies more that of a warrior than that of a dutiful wife, as she addresses me as one might a young man, in ‘masculine’ words such as ‘guard’, ‘travel’, ‘anger’.³⁴ This is not something I had consciously devised but seemed a fitting memorial to my mother’s always unwavering support of my ambitions: Let Go Those nights I called her name in vain again and again, filled ruined cities with tears. I dreamt I reached familiar streets, my fear fixing tongue to roof of mouth, hair on end; again she came to me through parted crowds smarter than ever in weathershield mac, blood red lipstick and jaunty, matching hat like a warrior plume. ‘I can’t stay long now,’ she said, ‘yet am always here. Remember to hold your hopes close, guard your ambition. Love. Travel. Most of all, let go anger or this exile of grief will be too long.’ I tried and tried and tried to embrace her but, like a thought on waking, she was gone.³⁵

In the future, I would like to take such transformations, in particular these reimaginings of Virgil’s military milieu, much further. For it seems that there is still much work for women translators and poets to do. As in Alice Oswald’s (2011) undermining of Homeric simile in her work Memorial, or as in Anne Carson’s (2010) radical repackaging of Catullus in Nox, Virgilian epic seems ripe for destabilization— that long parade of battleground heroes, of victories and defeats, which even Seamus Heaney perceived as a shift ‘from inspiration to grim determination . . . a test for reader and translator alike’, and which has perhaps long deterred both men and women translators and poets from engaging more creatively with his work.³⁶ Most of all, it seems time to take Virgil out of the classroom and set him free, not only from the student’s reverence or the translator’s modesty but also from the perceived grey conservatism of the set text. To transform him, as he in turn transformed Homer, yet again. We have Eliot’s new world to gain. And nothing to lose but our fear.

³⁴ See note 25 in this chapter.

³⁵ Balmer 2017, p. 41.

³⁶ Heaney 2016, p. ix.

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Notes on Contributors R ICHARD H. A RMSTRONG (BA University of Chicago; MPhil, PhD Yale University) is associate professor of classical studies in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He specializes in cultural reception, with a focus on the history of psychoanalysis and translation studies. He is author of A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Cornell University Press 2008) and of numerous chapters and articles on Freud’s deployment of ancient studies and on the history of translation. With Alexandra Lianeri, he is co-editor of the forthcoming A Companion to the Translation of Greek and Latin Epic (Wiley Blackwell). He is also finishing a book on Freud and the theatre, Theory and Theatricality: Classical Drama in the Age of Grand Hysteria (Oxford University Press). J OSEPHINE B ALMER ’s most recent poetry collections are The Paths of Survival (Shearsman 2017) and Letting Go: thirty mourning sonnets and two poems (Agenda Editions 2017). Previous collections include The Word for Sorrow (Salt 2009) and Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe 2004). She has also translated Catullus, Classical Women Poets and Sappho (all published by Bloodaxe). Piecing Together the Fragments, her study of classical translation and contemporary poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. She writes on poetry and translation for publications such as Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, and Times, for which she sets the daily Word Watch and the weekly Literary Quiz. G ORDON B RADEN was educated at Rice, the University of Texas, and Yale. He taught at the University of Virginia until 2014, when he retired as professor emeritus of English. He has published on Renaissance and classical literature, with particular emphasis on Petrarchan love poetry, Senecan tragedy, and Renaissance English translation. He is author of The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (Yale 1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (Yale 1985), The Idea of the Renaissance (with William Kerrigan; Johns Hopkins 1989), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (Yale 1999), and Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475–1700: A Compendium of Printed References and Allusions (with Jackson Campbell Boswell; Ashgate 2012). He also edited an anthology, SixteenthCentury Poetry (Wiley Blackwell 2005), and co-edited the second volume of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie; Oxford University Press 2010). He is currently at work on a book on English Renaissance Petrarchism; he is editing the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus for the forthcoming Oxford edition of the works of Edmund Spenser; and he is a regular reviewer for Translation & Literature. S USANNA B RAUND moved to the University of British Columbia in 2007 to take up a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Latin poetry and its reception, after teaching previously at Stanford University, Yale University, and the Universities of London, Bristol, and Exeter in the United Kingdom. She was awarded her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Cambridge (1978 and 1984). She has published extensively on Roman satire and Latin epic poetry among other aspects of Latin literature. She has translated Lucan for the Oxford World’s Classics series, Persius and Juvenal for the Loeb Classical Library, and Seneca’s tragedies. She has published

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eleven books and about fifty articles and chapters and she has edited or co-edited a further six books. She is a former president of the UK Virgil Society. She was awarded a medal as a Visiting Scholar at the Collège de France in 2014 and a Killam Research Fellowship in the 2016 national competition for her project ‘Virgil Translated’; the resulting major study will be published by Cambridge University Press soon. S ÉVERINE C LÉMENT -T ARANTINO is lecturer in Latin language and literature at the University of Lille, France. In her thesis Fama ou la renommée du genre: Recherches sur la représentation de la tradition dans l’Enéide (Diss. Lille 3, 2006), taking as a starting point the description of Fama in Book 4 of the Aeneid, she highlights the centrality of Fama in the Virgilian epic tradition. She has published several articles on this subject and on other aspects of Virgil’s poetry and its reception. She has also been working on the commentaries of Servius, Tiberius Claudius Donatus, and Juan Luis de la Cerda. With Alban Baudou, she has published a translation of the first book of Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid titled Servius: À l’école de Virgile (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion 2015). For years she has been coordinating a project devoted to the presence of Greco-Roman antiquity in northern France: Traditions de l’Antiquité à Lille et dans l’Eurorégion (TALIE). The effort to make the richness of the ancient resources of the region visible and better known has led her to work on several older translations of the Aeneid, in particular the seventeenth-century translation by Pierre Perrin. F IONA C OX is associate professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She has published widely in the fields of translation and classical reception. She is the author of Aeneas Takes the Metro: Virgil’s Presence in Twentieth Century French Literature (Legenda 1999), Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press 2011) and Strange Monsters: Ovid’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing (forthcoming). With Elena Theodorakopoulos she is co-editing a volume on women’s receptions of Homer entitled Homer’s Daughters—Women’s Receptions of Homer 1914–2014 (forthcoming); the two of them have already co-edited a special issue of Classical Receptions (2012). She has also published widely on Victor Hugo and Michel Butor. Ç İĞDEM D ÜRÜŞKEN is professor and chair of the Department of Latin Language and Literature at Istanbul University. She has published on various topics, including Greek and Roman religions, classical rhetoric, and ancient philosophy. Her most recent books in Turkish are Antikçağ Felsefesi: Homeros’tan Augustinus’a Bir Düşünce Serüveni [Ancient Philosophy: An Adventure of Thought from Homer to Augustine] (Alfa, 2014; 2nd edn 2016) and Felsefecilere Özel Latince: Descartes Latince Öğreniyor [Descartes Learns Latin: Latin for the Students of Philosophy] (Alfa, 2014; 2nd edn 2017). A prolific translator of Latin authors of all periods (Cicero, Virgil, Vitruvius, Ovid, Seneca, Boethius, Augustine, Bacon, Erasmus, Thomas More, Descartes, Spinoza), she has also initiated two Greek/Latin–Turkish bilingual series of Classics, Humanitas and Veritas, and she is the editor-in-chief of the latter. Her 2006 Georgics is the most recent Virgil translation in Turkish. She is currently writing a monograph on the Greek and Roman concepts of the afterlife. U LRICH E IGLER has studied history, classical philology, medieval Latin and Latin and Greek paleography at Freiburg, Kiel, Vienna, Pittsburgh, and Rome. As full professor of Classics (Latin literature), he teaches at the University of Zurich, having previously held the position of full professor of Classics at the Universities of Freiburg and Trier. His research and teaching

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cover Latin literature from Republican Rome to Renaissance humanism. He has special interests in late antiquity and the processes of transformation from antiquity to medieval times. He has also published on neo-Latin literature, literary tradition, book culture, and the history of libraries in European culture. At the moment his interest focusses on media representations of Pompey and Cleopatra in modern movies and novels and on slavery in ancient and modern literature. He is co-editor of the Handwörterbuch der antiken Sklaverei at the Academy of Literature and Sciences at Mainz. Currently he is co-editing (together with Carmen Cardelle de Hartman) a volume on literature and culture along the river Rhine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (forthcoming). J ACQUELINE F ABRE -S ERRIS is professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Lille, France. She has written three books, Mythe et poésie dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide: Fonctions et significations de la mythologie dans la Rome augustéenne (Klincksieck 1995), Mythologie et littérature à Rome: La réécriture des mythes aux 1ers siècles avant et après J.-C. (Payot 1998), and Rome, l’Arcadie et la mer des Argonautes: Essai sur la naissance d’une mythologie des origines en Occident (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion 2008), and has published many articles on Latin literature, especially on Augustan poetry, mythology, and mythography, gender studies, and on the reception of antiquity. She is co-director of the electronic journals Dictynna, Eugesta, and Polymnia and of a series on mythography published by Les Presses du Septentrion. A LESSANDRO F O is professore ordinario of Latin literature at the University of Siena and has long pursued the study of late Latinity. He has translated and edited Rutilius Namatianus’s De reditu suo (Einaudi 1994), Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Einaudi 2010), and Apuleius’s The Fable of Cupid and Psyche (Einaudi 2014). His translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, with an introductory study by him and with notes by Filomena Giannotti, was published in 2012, in the series Nuova Universale Einaudi (http://www.einaudi.it/speciali/L-Eneide-letta-da-Fo), and was awarded the Von Rezzori Prize in 2013, the Camaiore Prize in 2013, and the Catullo Prize in 2016. He has contributed translations and editions to the Anthology of Latin Poetry (Mondadori 1993) and has made various contributions to a handbook of Latin literature edited by Maurizio Bettini (La Nuova Italia 1995). He writes on the literary fortune of classical texts by authors such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Rutilius Namatianus—he penned a large introductory essay to Andrea Rodighiero and Sara Pozzato’s edition of Namatianus, De reditu suo (Aragno 2011)—as well as on contemporary Italian literature (especially Angelo Maria Ripellino). He has authored poetry books, including Corpuscolo (Einaudi 2004) and Mancanze (Einaudi 2014, Viareggio Award 2014). H ÉLÈNE G AUTIER is a former student at the École Normale Supérieure de Lettres et Sciences Humaines with an agrégation in modern French literature and has recently completed a PhD dissertation entitled ‘Joachim Du Bellay lecteur de Virgil’ at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Her specific interest in humanist culture and its founding texts arises from her studies at the École, where she dedicated particular attention to the analysis of Du Bellay’s poems. From there she moved to understanding how authors of the Renaissance read and write in the light of the influence of the Greek and Latin Classics. Du Bellay’s poems then became the playing field for her analysis, and the first step was to highlight Horace’s and Juvenal’s legacy in Du Bellay’s odes and satires. Her current focus is on bringing out the legacy of Virgil (who was

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a model for all the authors of the Renaissance) from Du Bellay’s entire poetic uvre. She has delivered several papers and lectures on these topics. Parallel to her research, she teaches economically disadvantaged secondary school students at Science Po Paris and has published two papers relating to this teaching. G EOFFREY G REATREX is professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada; he undertook his studies at Exeter College, Oxford. He has held posts at the Open University UK, at Cardiff University, and at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. He learnt Esperanto at school in the mid-1980s and has been president of the British and Canadian Esperanto associations. His research focuses on late antiquity, in particular Procopius of Caesarea and the reign of Justinian: his monograph, Rome and Persia at War, 502–532, was published in 1998, while a source book, The Roman Eastern Frontiers and the Persian Wars, AD 363–630, co-authored with Sam Lieu, appeared in 2002. More recently he coedited, with two collaborators, a translation and commentary on The Chronicle of PseudoZachariah Rhetor (Liverpool, 2011) while in 2015 he co-edited a volume on Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity. He publishes in English, French, and Esperanto and is a member of the editorial board of several learned journals as well as of the Esperantic Studies Foundation. P HILIP H ARDIE is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and honorary professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Corpus Christi Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, University of Oxford (2002–6). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Academia Europaea, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was the Sather Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in Spring 2016. He is the author of Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford University Press 1986); The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge University Press 1993); Virgil Aeneid 9 (Cambridge 1994); Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge University Press 2002); Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge University Press 2009); Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge University Press 2012); The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid (I. B. Tauris 2014); and Ovidio Metamorfosi, vol. 6: Libri XIII–XV (Fondazione Valla 2015). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge University Press 2002), co-editor (with Stuart Gillespie) of The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge University Press 2007), and co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 2: 1558–1660 (Oxford University Press 2015). C RAIG K ALLENDORF is professor of Classics and English at Texas A&M University. He is the author or editor of twenty-one books devoted in general to the classical tradition (e.g., A Companion to the Classical Tradition, Wiley Blackwell 2007) but focused primarily on Virgil and his influence. The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford University Press 2007) has helped uncover the roots of the so-called Harvard School, while A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil 1469–1850 (Oak Knoll 2012) offers access to more than 5,000 Virgilian editions and their commentaries. His most recent monograph, The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics (Oxford University Press 2015), combines these two lines of inquiry by stressing the importance of the physical book in interpreting poetry. He is currently coordinating the Virgil volumes for the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, in order to provide information on all the

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Virgilian commentaries that were produced from late antiquity to 1600. Professor Kallendorf is past president of the US Vergilian Society. A LISON K EITH teaches Classics and women’s studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and genre in Latin literature and Roman culture. She has authored three books (on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Latin epic, and Propertius) as well as a textbook of Latin epic; and she has edited or co-edited six volumes of articles dedicated to the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Roman dress, Latin elegy and the Hellenistic epigram, intertextuality in Latin literature, women and warfare in antiquity, and Roman literary cultures. She is currently completing a book on Virgil for the series Understanding Classics at I. B. Tauris. Ongoing projects include a commentary on the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a monograph on the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin imperial epic. J INYU L IU received her PhD in Roman history from Columbia University and is professor of classical studies at DePauw University. She was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship (2011–2014) and currently holds the Shanghai ‘1000 Plan’ Distinguished Guest Professorship at Shanghai Normal University (2014–2019). While the social and economic history of the Roman Empire and Latin epigraphy have been two of her main research areas, she has also published a series of articles in both Chinese and English on the reception of Graeco-Roman Classics in China. As the principal investigator of ‘Translating the Complete Corpus of Ovid into Chinese with Commentaries’, a multiyear project sponsored by a National Social Science Fund of China Major Grant (2015–2020), Professor Liu has shifted her focus to translating Ovid’s poetry, especially Tristia, into Chinese. M ARKO M ARINČIČ is professor of Roman and Greek literature at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. His main fields of interest and publication are Hellenistic and Roman poetry (Catullus, Virgil, Appendix Vergiliana, Ovid, Statius), Greek prose fiction (Life of Aesop, Achilles Tatius), and the reception of ancient literature in the nineteenth century. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Moralised Lives and Cosmic Histories: Reinvention of Greek Myth in Roman Epic. He is a prolific and renowned translator of Latin, Greek, and French literature into Slovenian (Greek lyric poetry, especially Sappho; Aeschylus, Euripides; Plautus, Terence, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Tertullian; Racine, Claudel, twentieth-century French poetry). C ILLIAN O’H OGAN is assistant professor of medieval Latin at the University of Toronto. He studied at Trinity College Dublin for his BA and at the University of Toronto for his PhD. He previously worked at the British Library, the University of Waterloo, and the University of British Columbia. His research interests include Latin poetry and its reception in medieval and modern Ireland. He has published articles on a number of Latin authors and a book, Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press 2016). He is now working on the history of the book in the late Latin West. E KİN Ö YKEN is assistant professor in the Department of Latin Language and Literature of Istanbul University, where he teaches Latin grammar and Roman poetry. He obtained his PhD at the same university, with a thesis on the concept of furor. His research interests cover a range

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of topics in ancient and modern reception, from ancient and medieval musical thought to the reception of Classics in Turkey. In 2013 he held a postdoctoral position in the Classics Department at University of California, Berkeley. Having published a number of articles on musical elements and references in Greek and Roman literature, and recently edited a special issue ‘Music and Society in Classical Cultures’ of the Turkish Journal of Sociology, he is currently writing a book titled ‘Musical Ethos as a Meaning-Making Process in Antiquity’. S OPHIA P APAIOANNOU is professor of Latin literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of numerous articles on Augustan literature (especially epic) and on Roman comedy, as well as of two books on Ovid: Epic Succession and Dissension: Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.623–14.582, and the Reinvention of the Aeneid (De Gruyter 2005); and Redesigning Achilles: The ‘Recycling’ of the Epic Cycle in Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.1–13.620 (De Gruyter 2007). She has published the first translation of Plautus’s Miles gloriosus in modern Greek, along with the first interpretive commentary of the play since 1963 (Smili 2009); and she is also editor and principal author of Terence and Interpretation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014). Several of her studies involve the reception of Virgil across various genres and authors, and one of her current projects includes the tracing of Virgilian influence in the subtext of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca. M ICHAEL P ASCHALIS is emeritus professor of Classics in the Department of Philology at the University of Crete. He has published over one hundred articles and thirteen books on Hellenistic literature, classical Roman literature, the ancient novel, the literature of late antiquity, the reception of the Classics (in modern Greek as well as in Italian, English, and French literature), and modern Greek literature. He is the author of Virgil’s Aeneid: Semantic Relations and Proper Names (Clarendon 1997); the editor of three volumes of Rethymnon Classical Studies; and a co-editor of five volumes in the series Ancient Narrative Supplementa. In the field of modern Greek he has published the books Re-Reading Kalvos: Andreas Kalvos, Italy and Classical Antiquity (Crete University Press 2013) and Nikos Kazantzakis: From Homer to Shakespeare: Studies on his Cretan Novels (Society of Cretan Historical Studies 2015). He is currently working on a monograph about Cretan Renaissance literature and the Cretan academies. M ARCO R OMANI M ISTRETTA received his PhD in classical philology at Harvard University in 2018. His research is on a number of ancient philosophical and intellectual–historical issues, focusing primarily on the idea of craftsmanship and technical creation in antiquity. His doctoral dissertation examines Greek and Roman conceptions of invention and discovery. He has also written on Latin poetry of the Augustan age and its reception in Renaissance and early modern Europe (especially as it unfolds through the medium of translation), as well as on the history of classical scholarship in Italy and elsewhere. His work has been published in Materiali e discussioni, the Classical Quarterly, and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. S TEPHEN R UPP is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He conducts research on literature and the culture of empire in early modern Spain, on questions of genre in ancient and early modern poetics, and on the interaction of classical and Renaissance literary forms in Spanish authors. His recent publications include Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War (University of Toronto Press 2014). He has worked on translations and adaptations of Horace and Virgil in the Spanish Renaissance. His current

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project centres on the reworking of themes and motifs from the canonical genres of Virgilian poetry in the works of Cervantes. G IAMPIERO S CAFOGLIO is professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and senior fellow in the Research Center ‘Cultures et Environnements— Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Age’ (CEPAM), belonging to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is also research associate at the University of Nantes, where he held the position of visiting professor in 2015. He works on Homer and the Greek epic cycle, Roman tragedy, Virgil, Homeric reception in Greek and Latin literature of the imperial period, poetry and poetics in late antiquity, and the classical heritage in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. He has published several articles and three books: L’Astyanax di Accio: Saggio sul background mitografico, testo critico e commento dei frammenti (Latomus 2006), Noctes Vergilianae: Ricerche di filologia e critica letteraria sull’Eneide (Georg Olms 2010) and Ajax: Un héros qui vient de loin (Hakkert 2017). He is also editor of three multicontributor volumes: La légende de Troie de l’Antiquité Tardive au Moyen Âge: Variations, innovations, modifications et réécritures (with E. Amato and E. Gaucher-Rémond; Université de Nantes 2004), Studies on the Epic Cycle (Pisa 2015), and Revival and Revision of the Trojan Myth: Studies on Dictys and Dares (with G. Brescia, M. Lentano, and V. Zanusso; forthcoming). He is director of the international journal Philologia Antiqua and a member of the editorial board responsible for the Bibliographical Bulletin of the Revue des Études Tardo-Antiques. S TEPHEN S CULLY is professor of classical studies at Boston University. His interests include Greek and Latin epic, translation, reception, and Renaissance studies. Recent publications related to the topic of the present book include the Introduction to Chapman’s Homeric Hymns and other Homerica (Princeton University Press 2008), ‘A Homer for the Twenty-first Century’ (Arion, 2009), and Hesiod’s Theogony: From Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost (Oxford University Press 2015). M ATHILDE S KOIE is professor of Classics at the University of Oslo. Her main research interests are Roman elegy and pastoral poetry, reception of antiquity, and the history of classical scholarship (in particular the genre of commentaries); and in most of her work she combines several of these aspects. Her books include Reading Sulpicia: Commentaries, 1475–1990 (Oxford University Press 2002), Reinscribing Pastoral in the Humanities: Essays on the Uses of a Critical Concept (co-edited with Sonia Bjrnstad-Velásquez; Bristol Phoenix Press 2006), and Romans and Romantics (co-edited with Tim Saunders and Charles Martindale; Oxford University Press 2012). Her articles on translation include ‘Telling Sulpicia’s Joys: Narrativity at the Receiving End’, in Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of a Story (edited by Genevieve Lively and Patricia Salzman; Ohio University Press 2008) and ‘Didactic Translation: The First Scandinavian Translation of the Eclogues: Peder Jensen Roskilde, Bucolica (1639)’ (Symbolae Osloenses, 2009). R ICHARD F. T HOMAS is George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. He was educated at the University of Auckland (BA 1972; MA 1973) and at the University of Michigan (PhD 1977). His teaching and research interests are focused on Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature (chiefly Callimachus, Theocritus, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Tacitus), intertextuality, translation and translation theory, the reception of classical literature, and the works of Bob Dylan. Publications include more than 100 articles and reviews

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and the following books: Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (Cambridge Philological Society 1982), Reading Virgil and His Texts: Studies in Intertextuality (University of Michigan Press 1999), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge University Press 2001), Why Bob Dylan Matters (HarperCollins 2017); commentaries on Virgil, Georgics (1988) and on Horace, Odes 4 and Carmen Saeculare (2011). He has co-edited and contributed to the volume Classics and the Uses of Reception (Wiley Blackwell 2006), ‘The Performance Artistry of Bob Dylan’, in Oral Tradition (vol. 22.1 of 2007), and the Virgil Encyclopedia (with Jan M. Ziolkowski; Wiley Blackwell 2014). Z ARA M ARTIROSOVA T ORLONE is professor in the Department of Classics at Miami University. She received her BA in classical philology from Moscow University and her PhD in Classics from Columbia University. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (Duckworth 2009), Latin Love Poetry (with Denise McCoskey; I. B. Tauris and Oxford University Press 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (Oxford University Press 2015). She has also authored articles on Roman poetry and the novel, Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume on Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, to which she also contributed a chapter (Wiley Blackwell 2017). P AULO S ÉRGIO DE V ASCONCELLOS is professor of Latin at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil. He is the author of Efeitos intertextuais na Eneida de Virgílio (Humanitas/ Fapesp, 2001), Sintaxe do período subordinado latino (Editora da Unifesp, 2013), and Persona poética e autor empírico na poesia amorosa latina (Editora da Unifesp, 2016). He coordinates a research group that has been preparing annotated and commented editions of poetic translations of Virgil by the Brazilian Manuel Odorico Mendes (1799–1864). The Bucolics and the Aeneid have already been published in 2008; the edition of Odorico’s Georgics is forthcoming. Vasconcellos has published articles about Catullus, Virgil, intertextuality, and the poetic translation of classical authors. He is currently working on a project about the representation of the underworld in elegiac and lyric poetry.

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Index Locorum Adcock, Fleur ‘Purple Shining Lilies’ in Poems, 1960–2000 424 Ahl, Frederick Virgil: Aeneid 1.399 243 4.320–30 241 7.601–6 242 7.702 242 8.321–2 242 9.334 243 10.810 288 Anonymous (trans.) Sixain pentameter stanzas (Aeneid) 4.250 85 4.748 94 4.803–4 88 Apollodorus 1.9.12 164 Aratus Phaenomena 783–7 243 Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando furioso 35.28 83 Balmer, Josephine Chasing Catullus 426–7 Letting Go 428–9 Berveling, Gerrit Antologio latina: Aeneid 4.1–9 131 Aeneid 4.1–8 133 Bible Ecclesiastes 1:2–3 34 Ecclesiastes 1:11 34 Ruth 1:16–18 99 Boland, Eavan ‘The Bottle Garden’ in The Journey and Other Poems 424 Briusov, V. and Solov’ev, S. Virgilii Eneida 2.533–50 338–9 Callimachus fr. 1.23 Pfeiffer 382 Cato the Elder Agr. 54 405 n. 25

Catullus 62.39–47 66 Caxton, William Eneydos 83, 85, 88, 94 Cervantes Saavedra, M. de El cerco de Numancia ll. 277–8 60 ll. 286–8 61 ll. 541–2 60 l. 1208 61 ll. 1213–14 60 ll. 1225–8 60 ll. 1792–5 61 ll. 2016–23 61–2 ll. 2162–3 62 ll. 2361–5 62 l. 2405 62 Charpentier, Pierre Oeuvres de Virgile: Les Bucoliques 4.46–7 193 n. 49 9.46–8 190 n. 39 Chaucer, Geoffrey Legend of Good Women ll. 1230–9 82 ll. 1285–7 82 l. 1323 83 ll. 1326–9 83 l. 1340 83 l. 1345 83 Chew, Kristina Virgil: Georgics 1.406–9 248 1.429–33 243 3.322–38 253 Cicero De oratore 3.155 349 Tusc. 3.26 201 n. 27 Conington, John The Aeneid of Virgil Translated into English Prose 1.10 230 1.148–56 230 1.151 230 1.220 230 1.305 230 1.378 230 1.545 230 1.603 230

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Cotton, Charles Scarronides, or, Virgile Travestie IV, p. 15 94 n. 12 IV, pp. 37–8 86 IV, p. 115 91 IV, pp. 121–2 88 Danielsen et al. ‘Bukoliske dikt IV’ ll. 1–5 204–5 Dante Divine Comedy Inferno 1.83–4 420 31.97–9 415 n. 9 33.4–5 311 Purgatorio 7.16–17 387 30.48 39 Day-Lewis, C. The Aeneid of Virgil (1953 ed.) 7.37–45 71–2 7.50–7 72 The Georgics (1948 ed.) 1.406–9 247 1.505–11 71 3.322–38 253 de Gournay, M. Les advis ou Les présens de la demoiselle de Gournay 2, p. 284 105 2, pp. 684–5 102–3 2, p. 686 105 2, p. 695 104 2, p. 696 103–4 2, p. 698 104–5 2, p. 712 104 Delille, Jacques L’homme des champs; ou, Les Géorgiques françaises pp. 203–5 302 n. 58 Virgile: Géorgiques p. 141 295 p. 149 296 p. 159 296–7 p. 185 301 p. 199 299–300 p. 204 294 n. 31 p. 231 298 p. 269 301 p. 287 303 p. 291 299 p. 315 290 p. 320 291 p. 327 294 n. 37, 296 n. 43 p. 334 293 n. 27

p. 344 303 n. 61 p. 335 304 n. 64 1.60–1: p. 139 295 1.300–4: p. 157 300 3.68–9: p. 219 300 3.457–63 301 4.142–3: p. 265 302 4.260–3: p. 273 298 Denham, John I: Books II–VI: MS in Nottinghamshire Archives (1638) 4.190 85 4.598 93 4.635 88 II: ‘The Passion of Dido for Æneas’ (1668) 4.58 87 4.106–7 84 ‘The Destruction of Troy’ (1656) 546–9 326 Dev, Anton Feliks Skupspravlanje Kraynskeh pissaniz od lepeh umestnost 177–8 Orthographia pure elementaris linguae Carniolicae 178 Digges, Dudley Didos Death (1622) Sig. A7V 85 Sig. B8V 94 Sig. B9V 88 Diski, Jenny Apology for the Woman Writing (2008) 99–100 Donatus Vita Vergilii 43 201 Douglas, Gavin Aeneid (1957–64 ed.) p. 14 84 p. 15 84 p. 16 84 p. 153 84 p. 164 85 p. 183 93–4 p. 185 87 Dryden, John Æneis (1697 and 1987 eds) 1.1–10 284 1.3 327 n. 17 1.9–10 327 n. 19 1.54–9 276 1.56 278 1.58 278 2.760–3 326 3.442 325

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4.1–12 130 4.249–50 86 4.331 86 4.607 92 4.757–72 92 4.819 87 7.52–61 67 7.79–87 67–8 7.84 70 10.1146–58 287 10.1057–9 288 12.100–11 68 Aeneis, Dedication of the, in The Works of John Dryden (1987) vol. 5, pp. 297–8 93 vol. 5, p. 298 87 vol. 5, p. 299 87 vol. 5, p. 302 87 vol. 5, p. 303 87 vol. 6, pp. 330–1 326 Æneis, Dedication of the, in The Poems of John Dryden (1958) l. 334: vol. 3, p. 1011 283 ll. 367–8: vol. 3, p. 1012 283 ll. 370–1: vol. 3, p. 1012 283 l. 426: vol. 3, p. 1014 283 ll. 430–1: vol. 3, p. 1014 283 l. 455: vol. 3, p. 1014 275, 283 l. 470: vol. 3, p. 1015 275 ll. 470–1: vol. 3, p. 1015 283 ll. 666–73: vol. 3, p. 1020 287 ll. 1633–50: vol. 3, pp. 1045–6 286 Æneis, Postscript to the, 285 Eclogues (1987 ed.) 1.1–10 257 4.28–30 249 8.46–51 245 10.19–20 245 Examen Poeticum, Dedication to, in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 4 (2000–5) ll. 355–6 276 n. 2 ll. 374–7 276 n. 2 ll. 375–7 288 ll. 406–9 278 n. 8 Fables Ancient and Modern in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 5 (2000–5) ll. 165–75 275–6 Georgics in The Poems of John Dryden (2000–5) 1.406–9 247 3.322–38: vol. 5, p. 5 252 Ilias in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 5 (2000–5) 1.257 278 1.258–65 279 1.259 278 1.265 278–9 1.257–66 276–7

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1.279–83 277 1.281–3 278 1.284–96 279 ‘Lines on Milton’ in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 3 (2000–5) 276 n. 2 ‘Preface to Ovid’s Epistles’ in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 1 (1995) 277 n. 5 ‘Preface to Sylvae’ in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 2 (1995) 277 ll. 261: vol. 2, p. 245 282 ll. 301–7: vol. 2, p. 247 282 ll. 369–81: vol. 2, pp. 248–9 282 ‘To My Honored Friend, Dr. Charleton’ in The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 1 (1995) 285 n. 20 Du Bellay, J. Deux livres de l’Eneide de Virgile, à scavoir le quatrieme et sixieme (1560) 6.23 269 6.128 269 6.238 269 6.403–86 272 n. 36 6.450 269 6.517 270 6.635 269 6.817 270 6.908 270 6.1308 272 6.1392 269 Divers jeux rustiques in Œuvres poétiques (1987, vol. 5) ‘Chant de l’amour et du printemps’ 273 La deffense et illustration de la langue francais (2000 ed.) I, 5: p. 36 261 I, 5: p. 38 261 I, 6: p. 41 261 Le Quatriesme livre de l’Eneide de Vergile (1552) 4.5–8 265 4.8 270 4.9 269 4.9–14 265–6 4.15–20 266–7 4.21–6 267–8 4.33–40 268 4.43 269 4.164–6 272 4.170 270 4.244 270 4.252 269 4.270 269 4.657–60 270 4.914 269 4.998 273 4.1129 269–70

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Du Bellay, J. (cont.) 4.1265 269–70 6.654 273 Les antiquitez de Rome in Œuvres poétiques (2000, vol. 2) Sonnet 6 272 Sonnet 16 272–3 Œuvres poétiques (1931 ed.) 6, pp. 243–396 293 n. 28 6, p. 331 271 Œuvres poétiques (1991 ed.) 6, pp. 249–50 262–3 6, p. 256 271 Regrets in Œuvres poétiques (2000, vol. 2) ‘A Monsieur D’Avanson’ 273 Sonnet 16 273 Sonnet 31 272 Sonnet 149 273–4 Seconde préface de l’Olive (Œuvres poétiques (2002 ed.) 270, 274 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1993 ed.) 292 n. 22 Eşref, Ruşen Virgilius: Çoban Şiirleri: Bükolikler (1929b) pp. 9–10 187–8 pp. 15–16 188–9 p. 169 189 p. 208 193 p. 256 190 Euripides Hecuba 563 164 Eusebius Life of Constantine 4.32 137 Fagles, Robert Virgil: The Aeneid (2006) 1.89–90 116 7.39–50 74 7.57–65 74 7.63 74 7.64 75 7.79 74 7.371–3 75 10.619 117 10.634–40 116 10.654 117 10.656–60 117 10.669 117 10.682–3 117 10.708–10 116 11.30 117 11.46 116 Fairclough, H. R. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6 (1999)

Georgics 4.260–3 352 Aeneid 1.36–49 393 1.430–6 363 n. 36 2.1–13 309 2.212–24 312 2.14–17 314 2.559–63 315 4.402–6 364 n. 37 Fallon, P. The Georgics of Virgil (2004 ed.) 1.1–5 410 1.49 410 1.77 410 1.305 410 1.406–9 248 2.395 410 2.458–74 169 2.483–94 171 2.490–4 408 3.100 410 3.132 410 3.178 410 3.187–95 409 3.310–11 410 3.322–38 255 Fanshawe, Richard On the Loves of Dido and Aeneas l. 203 85 ll. 601–4 92 ll. 605–6 93 l. 607 92 ll. 611–12 93 ll. 648–9 88 Fei Bai Anthologia romana (2000) 235 Ferry, D. The Eclogues of Virgil (1999) 1.1–10 258 4.28–30 249 8.46–51 246 10.19–20 245 The Georgics of Virgil (2005) 1.406–9 248 3.322–38 255–6 Fet, Afanasii Eneida Vergiliia (1888) 2.533–60 335–6 Fitzgerald, Robert The Aeneid (1981; 1983) Postscript 111–12 2.533–50 334–5 7.47–59 72 7.70–6 73

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INDEX LOCORUM

7.100–1 73 7.435–6 73 10.759–62 113 11.9 112 11.11 112 11.12 112 11.28 112 11.90 113 11.93 112 11.99–100 112 11.103 112 11.110 112 11.117 112 11.118 112 11.130–3 112 11.137 112 11.148–53 112 11.172 112 11.190 112 Fo, Alessandro Publio Virgilio Marone: Aeneid (2012) 1.85 419 n. 20 1.399 418 1.559 416 n. 13 1.612 418 1.630 416 n. 10 1.663 417 n. 15 2.231 418 2.324 414 n. 5 2.425 417 2.524 415 n. 10 2.650 414 n. 5 2.685 418 n. 18 2.729 418 3.117 419 n. 20 3.359 417 n. 15 3.463 415 n. 10 3.550 417 n. 15 3.554 418 3.572 418 3.660 417 n. 15 3.680 417 n. 15 4.154 419 n. 20 4.248 417 n. 15 5.296–7 416 n. 10 5.309–10 418 5.471 418 5.685–6 418 n. 18 6.1 418 6.268 418 6.287–8 415 n. 9 6.557 418 n. 18 6.591 414 n. 5 6.59 417 n. 15 7.15–18 418 n. 18

7.674 417 n. 15 7.789 417 n. 15 8.9 418 8.77 417 n. 15 8.94 418 8.116–7 417 n. 15 8.127 417 n. 15 8.169 418 8.293 417 n. 15 8.430–1 417 n. 15 8.446 417 n. 15 9.17 414 n. 5 9.349 418 9.509–11 418 n. 18 9.789–92 418 n. 18 10.216 417 n. 15 10.288–90 418 n. 18 10.446 414 n. 5 10.712 419 n. 20 11.192 418 11.476 419 n. 20 11.840 418 11.883–4 418 n. 18 12.90 417 12.127 418 12.626 417 n. 15 12.743 419 n. 20 Fu Donghua Vergil, the Modern Poet (1930) 1.10 230 1.148–56 230 1.151 230 1.220 230 1.305 230 1.378 230 1.545 230 1.603 230 Goethe, J. W. Achilleis (1994 ed.) 412–18 362 Harrington, James Virgil’s Aeneis: The Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books (1659) III–IV 86, 91 Heaney, Seamus Aeneid Book VI (2016) 423, 424, 429 ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ in Electric Light (2001) 405 ‘The Golden Bough’ in Seeing Things (1991) 424 ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ in Electric Light (2001) 403–5 The Cure at Troy, i.e. Philoctetes (1990) 406 Preoccupations (1980) 401

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Heath, Robert Virgil’s Æneis, Translated into English Heroick Verse (1644–6) 85, 88 Heinsius, Daniel Eclogue 10 (1603) 140, 142 Eclogue 10 (1604) 141–2 Hernández de Velasco, Gregorio La Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso (1555), Preface 50 n. 36 La Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso (1793 ed.) 52–9 Homer Iliad 1.172–7 276–7 1.177 279 1.184–7 277 1.188–95 279–80 1.189 279 2.194–5 280 2.851–2 180 9.105 163 9.527 163 Odyssey 19.517 165 Horace Ars Poetica 388 167 Saturae 1.10.44–5 201 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey) Books II and IV (1964 ed.) 4.100–6 89 4.222 85 4.714 94 4.715 93 4.762 88 Howard, Robert ‘Of the Loves of Dido and Æneas’ (1696) 86, 88, 93 Ioannou, Philippos Philologika parerga (1874 ed.) ‘Selected Eclogues’ 5.20–3 149–50 Jackson Knight W. F. Virgil: The Aeneid (1956) 233 n. 42 Jerome Epistles 57.5 139 Johnson, Kimberley Virgil’s Georgics: A Poem of the Land (2009) 1.406–9 248 3.322–38 256

Johnson, Samuel Life of Dryden in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 2 (2006 ed.) 151 281 n. 15 202 276 n. 3 330 286 344–50 279 n. 9 p. 197 328 Life of Pope in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 4 (2006 ed.) 285 277 n. 5 310 281 Johnston, Patricia A. The Aeneid of Virgil (2012) 7.37–40 76 7.601–6 242 Jonson, Ben Poetaster 5.2.73 85 Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1992 ed.) 402 Kaloscay, Kálmán Tutmonda Sonoro, ‘Aeneid’ (1981b) 4.1–9: vol. 1, p. 183 130–1 4.3–4: vol. 1, p. 183 132 4.4–5: vol. 1, p. 183 132 4.8: vol. 1, p. 183 133 4.9: vol. 1, p. 183 132, 133 Kavanagh, Patrick Collected Poems (2004) ‘Epic’ 401 ‘The Great Hunger’ 400–1 Kline, A. S. Virgil. The Eclogues (2001) 5.20–3 149 9.1–6 403–4 9.14–16 405 9.59–61 404 10.1–8 139 Virgil. The Georgics (2001) 1.1–5 410 2.490–4 408 3.187–95 409 4.485–502 145 Virgil. The Aeneid (2002) 2.1–13 147 Larbaud, Valéry Sotto la protezione di san Girolamo (1989 ed.) 412, 413 Le Plat du Temple Virgile en France (1807–8) 1, p. xxvi 27 1, pp. 65–6 28 1, p. 123 28

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1, p. 128 28 1, pp. 135–6 27 1, p. 136 27 1, p. 213 28 1, pp. 292–6 27 2, pp. 1–28 28 2, p. 165 27 2, pp. 189–93 27 2, pp. 207–8 28 2, pp. 244–5 28 2, pp. 379–80 28 Lee, Guy Virgil: The Eclogues (1984) 1.1–10 258 2.6–7 373 3.66–7 371 3.78–9 372 3.92 381 4.1–5 203 4.28–30 249 4.60–3 377 5.43 381 6.21–2 374 7.6–8 373 8.46–51 246 8.47–50 372 10.19–20 245 Leopardi, Giacomo ‘Discorso sopra Mosco’ in d’Intino (1999) 306 Libro secondo dell’Eneide (1817) 307–8 2.1–20 309–12 2.22–3 316 2.37–8 316 2.45–6 316 2.95–6 316 2.126–7 316 2.142–3 316 2.187–8 316 2.210 316 2.218 317 2.234 317 2.254 317 2.280–2 317 2.301–17 313–14 2.321–3 317 2.330–1 317 2.352–3 317 2.366–7 317 2.399–400 317 2.431–6 314–15 2.445–6 317 2.448–50 317 2.456 317 2.483–4 317 2.502–3 317

2.535–6 317 2.633–5 317 2.658–60 317 2.700–1 317 2.756–64 315–16 2.798 317 2.841–2 317 2.870–1 317 2.904–5 317 2.990–4 317 2.1013–14 317 2.1035–7 317 2.1077–8 317 Lewkenor, John ‘The Deserted Queen’ (1693) 85–6, 88 Lipparini, G. Virgilio: L’Eneide 390 1.36–49 395 Livy 1.1.1–3 180 Lombardo, Stanley Virgil, Aeneid 8.807 115 9.577–85 115 9.878–9 114 10.668–72 115 10.693 114 10.698 114 10.712 114 11.15 114 11.20–3 114 Lucretius De rerum natura 1.586 295 Maitland, Richard (Earl of Lauderdale) The Works of Virgil (Aeneid) 4.202 86 4.585 94 4.622 88 Mandelbaum, Allen The Aeneid of Virgil 10.764–7 111 11.51–4 110 11.89 113 11.116–8 110 11.125–7 110 Martin, C. Ovid, Metamophoses 1.1–5 159 Mendes, Manuel Odorico Bucólicas 1.1 349 4.248–51 352

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Mendes, Manuel Odorico (cont.) Virgílio Brasileiro (1858) 348 n. 10, 349 n. 14 Virgílio Brasileiro (2016) p. 21 347 n. 6 p. 53 350 p. 54 349 n. 14 p. 95 350 1.739 350 2.250–1 351 12.924 353 Milton, John Paradise Lost 1.84–7 329 2.652 329 3.40–55 90 6.329–31 321 8.615–16 321 8.627–8 321 Morgan, George The Eclogues of Virgil 1.1–10 257–8 4.28–30 249 8.46–51 245 10.19–20 245 Morris, William The Aeneids of Vergil Done into English (1876) 7.37–44 69–70 7.52–7 70 7.55 70 Mure, William ‘Dido and Aeneas’ 2.325–6 85 2.337–8 85 2.339–42 85 2.348 85 3.137–9 94 3.200–2 88 Ogilby, J. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, ‘Aeneid’ I (1649) [Ogilby I, second pagination] p. 280 86 p. 291 93–4 p. 292 88 The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, ‘Aeneid’ II (1654) p. 282 91–4 p. 283 88 1.5–7 327 n. 17 1.6 327 n. 18 1.11–12 327 n. 19 Ovid Met. 1.1–4 159 1.3–4 160

1.143 295 1.452–60 137–8 15.783 295 Trist. 2.307 201 n. 28 Pagnol, Marcel Virgile, Bucoliques (1958) p. 9 374–5 p. 12 375 p. 13 376 p. 16 376 p. 18 375 pp. 39–41 380 p. 56 377 pp. 98–100 377 p. 101 378 pp. 134–5 379 1.2 382 1.56 380 1.81–2 381 3.92 381 4.60–3 378 5.43 381 6.5 382 10.1–5 379–80 Pasolini, Pier Polo Virgilio 1.36–49 393–5 Perret, Jacques Latin et culture (1947) pp. 135–6 217 p. 139 217 p. 142 218 p. 148 218 pp. 166–97 218 pp. 182–3 218 p. 186 219 n. 25 p. 188 219 p. 191 219 p. 196 218 p. 201 219 n. 26 Virgile (1959) p. 163 222 n. 31 pp. 163–76 221 n. 28 p. 170 221 p. 174 222 n. 29 p. 176 219 1.142–56 220–1 1.145–6 221 Virgile: Énéide (1977–80) 1, p. 8 213 n. 8 1, p. 23 209 1, p. 34 212 n. 6 Petrarch Canzoniere 164.1–8 90

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Phaer, Thomas The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne 1.14 94 n. 12 4.184 85 4.426–7 88 4.586 94 4.587 93 7.36–40 65 7.51–7 65 7.57 66 7.327–33 67 Philitas, Christophoros Ἰλίου Πέρσις, ἤτοι Π. Οὐιργιλίου Μάρωνος Αἰνειάδος βιβλίον τὸ δεύτερον ll. 1–13 148 Pitt, Christopher The Æneid of Virgil 1.3 327 1.9–10 327 n. 19 Plan(o)udes, Maximos Μάξιμου Πλανούδη μετάφραση των Μεταμορφώσεων του Οβιδίου (1999 ed.) 1.452–60 137–8 Ὀβιδίου Περὶ Μεταμορφώσεων (2002 ed.) 1.1–5 159 1.3–5 160 Pope, Alexander The Iliad of Homer (1996 ed.) 1.251–8 280–1 ‘Preface to the Iliad’ 281 Prešeren, France Nova pisarija (1966 ed.) 1 181 Propertius 1.7.19 201 n. 28 Quintillian Inst. 6.3.20 201 Rat, Maurice Virgile: L’Énéide 1.26–8 192 n. 46 Reşit, Ahmed Virgile: L’Énéide 1, pp. 44–5 191–2 1, p. 46 192 2, p. 29 193 Ruden, Sarah The Aeneid. Vergil (2008) Preface 121 1.8–11 209 1.493 101–2 1.748–56 211

2.1–5 102 n. 22 2.3 105 2.36–7 105 2.238–9 104 2.250–1 351 2.265–6 103 2.268–9 104 2.298 104 2.301 104 2.325–6 104 2.588 104 4.1–5 265 4.6–8 266 4.9–11 267 4.15–19 268 7.37–45 75 7.50–7 77 7.52–7 76 7.57 76 8.452–3 213 9.491 119 10.513–14 119 10.554–6 118 10.601 119 11.24 119 11.28 119 11.31 119 11.39 119 11.47 119 11.85–92 119 12.69–71 77 Saint-Denis, Charles de Marguetel de ‘Encore le frondator de la première églogue virgilienne’ p. 8 376 p. 558 380–1 ‘Les variations de Paul Valéry sur les Bucoliques’ p. 76 382 p. 77 383 Virgile: Bucoliques 1.2 382 1.83 384 3.66–7 371 4.58–9 383 6.5 382 9.39–42 383–4 Sappho fr. 17LP 165 Scaliger, Joseph Eclogue 10 (Heinsius 1603) ll. 1–8 140 l. 2 142 Eclogue 10 (Heinsius 1604) ll. 1–8 141 l. 2 142

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INDEX LOCORUM

Schröder, Rudolf Alexander Ilias in Gesammelte Werke (1952 ed.) 4, p. 598 355–6 n. 3 4, p. 601 364–5 4, p. 616 365 n. 41 Vergil, Aeneis (1963) 4.402–7 365 Sermonti, Vittorio L’Eneide di Virgilio p. 11 397 p. 13 397 p. 16 397 1.36–49: pp. 19–20 396 p. 396 393 n. 38 Servius ad Ecl. 1.56 380 Vergilii carmina commentarii 201 Shakespeare, William The Winter’s Tale 4.3.3 409–10 Sørensen, Ernst ‘Gullalderbarnet’ (Eclogue 4) (1950) ll. 1–5 203 ll. 1–4 204 l. 22 203 l. 40 206 Sovre, Anton Homer, Iliada 1.1 174 Sponde, J. de Homeri quae exstant omnia p. 11 280 Stanyhurst, Richard Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil: His Aeneid, Translated intoo English Heroical Verse (1582) p. 69 85 p. 70 85 p. 81 88 p. 82 85 p. 83 85 Stapylton, Robert Dido and Aeneas (1634) Sig. B6v 85 Sig. D2r 93 Sig. D3r 88 Šubic, Jožef Georgikon čvetere bukve p. 4 167 pp. 6–7 168 2.458–74 169–70 2.483–94 171 4.563–6 167 Suetonius Verg. 44 294 n. 34 Vitellius 7 212

Tao Yuanming Returning to Dwell in Gardens and Fields 234 Teixeira, Bento Prosopopeia 49.1–2 345 n. 3 27.5 345 n. 3 Tennyson, A. The Poems of Tennyson (1969) 2, p. 651 240 Tottel, Richard Songes and Sonettes (1557) Sig. B1v 90 n. 9 Sig. D4v 86 n. 5 Trapp, J. The Æneis of Virgil 1.1–2 327 n. 17 1.3 327 n. 18 1.7–8 327 n. 19 Twyne, Thomas The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne 12.68–75 69 Valéry, Paul Virgile: Bucoliques (1997) p. 301 368–9 pp. 302–4 369 p. 305 369–70 p. 306 370 p. 308–9 370 p. 310 369 pp. 311–13 371 2.6–7 373 3.66–7 371 3.78–9 372 4.60–3 379 4.91–6 378 6.21–2 374 7.6–8 373 8.47–50 372 Vallienne, Henri Eneido 4.1–9: p. 68 130 4.6: p. 68 132 4.8: p. 68 132 4.9: p. 68 132 Van Sickle, J. Virgil’s Book of Bucolics: The Ten Eclogues Translated into English Verse 1.1–10 258 4.28–30 249 8.46–51 246 9.24–38 244 10.19–20 245 Varro R. R. 2.2.10–11 251

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Veyne, Paul Virgile, L’Énéide (2012 ed.) p. 9 216 n. 18 p. 15 210 n. 1, 213 n. 10 pp. 15–16 214 n. 13 Virgile, L’Énéide (2013 ed.) 1, p. 5 209 1, p. 28 212 1, p. 28 n. 1 212 1, p. 45 212 n. 7 1, p. 71 211–12 1, p. 144 213 1, p. 144 n. 27 213 1, p. 169 212 n. 7 1, p. 322 n. 66 214 n. 11 2, p. 94 213 2, p. 94 n. 61 213 2, p. 144 n. 42 214 n. 11 2, p. 165 212 n. 7 2, p. 349 n. 127 214 n. 12 Vicars, John The XII Aeneids of Virgil 4.19 85 4.532 94 4.569–70 88 Villena, Enrique de Obras completas ‘Eneida’ (2004 ed.) 2, pp. 24–5 46 2, p. 27 47 2, p. 53, gloss 99 47 2, p. 54, gloss 100 46 2, p. 55, gloss 105 49 n. 35 2, p. 67 48 2, p. 68, gloss 129 48 2, pp. 68–9, gloss 130 48 Virgil Aeneid 1.1–7 161–2, 284, 327 n. 17 1.1–11 234 n. 50 1.6–7 327 1.8–11 209 1.10 230 1.22 193 1.34–156 356 1.36–9 276 1.36–49 392–3 1.37 278 1.76 116 1.81–105 234 n. 50 1.85 419 n. 20 1.93 212 1.107 348 1.110–11 348 1.113 348 1.120 348 1.142–56 220–1 1.145–6 221

1.148–56 230 1.151 230 1.152 221 1.220 230, 233 1.239 232 1.242–9 180 1.254–96 234 n. 50 1.264 418 1.305 230, 233 1.378 230, 233 1.399 243, 418 1.418 233 1.430–6 363 1.462 321 1.493 102 n. 22 1.545 230 1.559 416 n. 13 1.603 230 1.612 418 1.630 416 n. 10 1.663 417 n. 15 1.739 350 1.748–56 211 1.750 212 n. 6 2.1–5 102 2.1–13 147, 309–12 2.3 105, 311 2.3–8 54 2.13–16 54 2.15 316 2.26 316 2.31 316 2.36–7 105 2.43–5 56 2.65–6 56, 316 2.90 316 2.100 316 2.132 316 2.147 316 2.152 316–17 2.164 317 2.178 317 2.196–8 317 2.199–233 308 n. 9, 312 2.207–8 329 2.212–24 312–14 2.228–9 317 2.324 414 n. 5 2.237–8 317 2.250–1 351 2.255 317 2.265 317 2.265–6 103 2.268–9 104 2.274–5 329 2.290 317 2.298 104 2.301 104

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INDEX LOCORUM

Virgil (cont.) 2.313 325 2.314–17 58, 314–15 2.316–17 330 2.325–6 104, 317 2.328–9 317 2.231 418 2.333 317 2.336 59 2.238–9 104 2.354 317, 329 2.355 59 2.368–9 317 2.389–91 57 2.396 317 2.425 417 2.451 58 2.469–70 317 2.487–8 317 2.516 317 2.524 415 n. 9 2.533–50 334 2.559–63 315–16 2.588 104 2.591 317 2.622–3 325 2.624–5 317 2.645–6 317 2.646 330 2.650 414 n. 5 2.670 317 2.729 418 2.738–40 317 2.749 428 2.755 317 2.756 428 2.771–804 234 n. 50 2.772–3 317 2.783 234 2.789 234 2.804 317 3.287 213 3.298 212 n. 7 3.339 234 3.359 417 n. 15 3.426–8 329 3.441–7 325 3.442 325 3.463 415 n. 9 3.550 417 n. 15 3.554 418 3.572 418 3.660 417 n. 15 3.668 212 n. 7 3.680 417 n. 15 4.1 132–3 4.1–5 162, 265

4.1–9 129 4.2 132 4.2–5 164 4.3 132 4.5 132–3 4.6–7 133 4.6–8 266–7 4.8 132–3 4.9–11 267–8 4.15–19 268 4.19 84 4.23 39 4.80–3 89 4.129–68 234 n. 50 4.136–43 163 4.169–70 82 4.172 84 4.220–1 86 4.225 87 4.248 417 n. 15 4.266 87 4.320–30 241 4.327–30 83 4.365–87 234 n. 50 4.366 83 4.376 84 4.393 233 4.591 85 4.391–2 84 4.402–6 363–4 4.422–32 88 4.569–70 87 4.591 85 4.615–20 81 n. 3 4.641 85 4.651–66 234 n. 50 4.653 83 6.672–3 417 n. 14 4.688–92 319 4.698 83 5.2 233 5.32 416 n. 13 5.142–3 417 n. 14 5.296–7 416 n. 10 5.309–10 418 5.471 418 5.553–602 234 n. 50 5.685–6 418 n. 18 5.710 413 5.779–871 263 6.1 418 6.2 269 6.83–129 234 n. 50 6.86 232 6.95 413 6.179 222 6.190–211 234 n. 50

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INDEX LOCORUM

6.268 418 6.557 418 n. 18 6.576 303 6.591 414 n. 5 6.595 417 n. 15 6.635 273 6.636 214 n. 11 6.640–1 321 6.688 233 6.682 272 6.868–86 234 n. 50 7.5 233 7.15–18 418 n. 18 7.37–45 64, 234 n. 50 7.52–7 65 7.53 66 7.53–4 66 7.56–7 76 7.57 66, 68, 73 7.72 74 7.74 295 7.78 73 7.175 416 n. 13 7.318–19 72–3 7.750–60 234 n. 50 7.601–6 242 7.674 417 n. 15 7.691 348 7.702 242 7.789 417 n. 15 8.9 418 8.77 417 n. 15 8.94 418 8.116–17 417 n. 15 8.127 417 n. 15 8.169 418 8.293 417 n. 15 8.321–2 242 8.337–66 319 8.430–1 417 n. 15 8.446 417 n. 15 8.452–3 213 8.608–29 234 n. 50 8.689–70 417 n. 14 8.705 115 9.17 414 n. 5 9.334 243 9.349 418 9.412 214 n. 11 9.481–7 115, 122 9.481–97 110 9.491 119 9.509–11 418 n. 18 9.729 212 n. 7 9.741–2 114 9.789–92 418 n. 18 10.1–15 234 n. 50

10.216 417 n. 15 10.288–90 418 n. 18 10.446 414 n. 5 10.513–14 119 10.513–605 110 10.523 117 10.537–41 116, 122 10.540–1 113 10.552–3 117 10.554–6 111, 115, 118 10.554–60 122 10.554–7 117 10.563 117 10.576 114 10.579 114 10.596 114 10.601 116, 119, 122 10.783 233 10.808–16 287 10.810 288 11.1–138 110 11.14 114 11.19–21 114 11.24 119 11.28 119 11.31 119 11.36–7 277 11.39 116, 119 11.39–41 110, 122 11.47 119 11.59–84 234 n. 50 11.67 113 11.70 112 n. 25 11.85–92 119, 122 11.89–90 110 11.96–8 110, 112, 122 11.108–11 112, 122 11.192 418 11.362 178 11.840 418 11.883–4 418 n. 18 12.64–71 68–9 12.90 417 12.127–8 418 12.128 348 12.435–6 80 n. 1 12.550 348 12.626 417 n. 15 12.743 419 n. 20 12.870–1 417 n. 14 12.919–52 234 n. 50 Eclogues 1.1 383 1.1–10 258 1.2 382 1.4 383 1.5 251

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INDEX LOCORUM

Virgil (cont.) 1.21 202 1.27 345 1.56 380 1.74 203 2.6–7 373 2.13 251 2.31–3 383 2.69 383 3.59 206 3.66–7 371 3.78–9 372 3.92 381 4.1 199 4.1–5 203 4.22 203 4.28–30 249 4.31 234 4.40 206 4.58–9 383 4.60–3 377 5.24–6 178 5.43 374, 381 6.5 382 6.21–2 374 7.6–8 373 8.46–51 246 8.47–50 372 8.55–6 181 9.1–6 403 9.14–16 405 9.34–8 244 9.39–42 383 9.59–61 404 10.1–5 379 10.1–8 139 10.19–20 245 Georgics 1.1 349 1.1–5 410 1.43 409 1.49 410 1.60–1 295 1.77 410 1.84–8 295 1.196–200 296 1.266–7 245 1.300–4 300 1.305 410 1.322–34 296–7 1.406–9 247 1.429–33 243 1.505 302 n. 58 1.505–11 71 2.176 301 2.362–70 299–300 2.395 410 2.458–74 168–9

2.483–94 170 2.490–4 407–8 3.68–9 300 3.132 410 3.187–95 408–9 3.242–9 298 3.258–9 303 n. 61 3.311 410 3.322–38 250–6 3.457–63 301 4.8–50 234 n. 50 4.70–2 298 4.142–3 302 4.210–18 301 4.260–3 298, 352 4.481–4 303 4.485–502 144 4.525–7 299 4.563–6 167 n. 5 4.490–1 146 Voß, Johann Heinrich Publii Virgilii Maronis Georgicon libri quatuor 2.470–1 173 Publius Vergilius Maro. Werke, vols 2–3 (1832) 1.430–6 363 4.402–7 364 Voulgaris, Eugenios Τῆς Αἰνειάδος Πουβλίου Οὐιργιλίου Μάρωνος τὰ ιβ βιβλία, ἐν ἡρωϊκῷ τῷ μέτρῳ ἑλληνιστὶ ἐκφρασθέντα (1791–2) 1.1–7 161–2 4.1–6 162–3 Τῶν Γεωργικῶν Πουβλίου Οὐϊργιλίου Μάρονος τὰ Δ΄ Βιβλία (1786, 4 vols) Dedication 143 4.485–502 145–6 Warton, Thomas The History of English Poetry vol. 3 326 West, D. The Aeneid (1990) 1.1–7 161 2.207–8 329 4.1–5 162 6.640–1 321 Wiik, Matti Bucolica: Gjetarsongar (2016) 1.21 202 1.74 203 3.59 206 4.1–5 205 Wordsworth, William Aeneid 1.1–9 327 1.370–2 329

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INDEX LOCORUM

1.633–4 321 2.275 329 2.424–5 324–5 2.430–1 329 2.476–7 329 2.834–5 325 2.866–7 329–30 3.610–11 325 8.365–6 320 Laodamia ll. 29–30 321 l. 61 321 ll. 97–8 321 ll. 105–8 321 ll. 115–19 321 n. 9 ll. 160–2 320 ll. 164–7 321 Letters to Lord Lonsdale 9 November 1823 322 n. d. December 1823 322 23 January 1824 323 5 February 1824 323, 325 n. 14, 328 17 February 1824 323–4 Lyrical Ballads ‘Preface’ 319



Yang Zhouhan Aeneid [Ainie’asiji] (1984) p. 10 233 p. 16 233 p. 21 232 pp. 34–5 227 n. 22 1.220 233 1.305 233 1.378 233 1.418 233 4.393 233 5.2 233 6.688 233 7.5 233 10.783 233 ‘Virgil and the Chinese Poetic Traditions’ (1988) p. 108 234 Yeats, W. B. ‘Easter 1016’ 404 ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ 400 Zhukovskii, Vasilii ‘Razrushenie Troi’ 341–2

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General Index Abas 214 Abbayes, Henry de 376 Abdülhamid II 193, 194 n. 51 accents 126, 128–9, 133–5, 167–75, 219, 221, 351–2, 373, 382, 414–15 accessibility of translation 49, 71, 75, 113, 117, 126, 132, 156, 160, 162, 174, 189–90, 192–3, 200, 207, 209–15, 216–17, 222–3, 235, 269, 299, 304, 310–11, 340–3, 348–9, 357, 361, 365–7, 375, 415, 419–20 accuracy of translation 14, 39, 41, 46–8, 72, 74, 100–1, 105, 110–11, 114–17, 132–3, 137–8, 144, 146, 152, 157, 160, 162–5, 167, 175, 192–3, 203–6, 209–10, 212–15, 216–18, 221–2, 230–1, 235, 246–8, 249–50, 256–7, 259–62, 265–70, 277–81, 284, 286–8, 293, 295–303, 307–8, 310–16, 324–9, 336, 338–40, 342–4, 347–53, 356, 358, 363, 365–6, 369–74, 378–84, 404, 416, 418–20 semantic 72, 74, 104–5, 110, 113, 117, 132–3, 138, 152, 162–5, 202–6, 209–10, 212, 217–18, 221–2, 230, 235, 265–9, 288, 311–13, 315–16, 325, 327–9, 342–3, 348, 371–2, 381 see also equivalence Achilles 114–15, 174, 211–12, 234, 279–81, 317, 329, 334–6, 339, 342, 353, 362 Acoetes 119, 122 acrostics 239, 241–4 Adam (biblical) 321 adaptation 1–2, 16, 37, 40, 136–7, 150, 166 n. 2, 171 n. 6, 184, 266, 268–70, 277, 303, 329, 402, 414, 418 Adcock, Fleur 424, 428 addition see expansion Aegisthus 359 Aegle 374 Aeneas 27, 37–8, 40–1, 50, 52–9, 62–4, 67, 72, 82–5, 87, 89, 93, 102–3, 110–13, 115–17, 132–3, 147–8, 162–5, 180, 188, 192, 212, 222, 226, 228–30, 232–5, 241, 263–71, 273, 285, 287–8, 303–20, 323, 327, 329, 334, 343, 353, 363, 396–7, 415, 423–8 and pietas 229–30, 233–4 as national hero 38, 81, 111, 229, 232, 235, 334 as Stoic hero 8, 52, 59, 62 as traitor 38, 82–4

Aeneid 1, 8–15, 16–17, 23, 25–8, 31, 36, 38–9, 41, 43–9, 52–60, 62–77, 80–9, 91–4, 97, 100–4, 107–23, 125–32, 135–6, 142–4, 147–8, 150–8, 160–5, 179, 184, 188–9, 191–4, 197–8, 209–35, 241, 247, 259–79, 284–8, 305–30, 331–51, 353–8, 360, 362–7, 371, 385, 387–97, 402, 412, 416, 419, 422–8 Aeolus 116 Aeschylus 127, 359, 385–6 n. 4, 391 Aesop 184–5 aesthetics of translation 5, 8, 12–14, 17, 23, 26, 176–7, 208, 210, 214 n. 13, 217, 235, 239, 244–6, 256, 270, 282, 287 n. 27, 290, 292–3, 304, 306–7, 362, 389 Aethon 110, 119, 122 aetiology 241 Affair of the Placards 32 Africa 63, 84, 121, 184, 363 see also Egypt; Libya Agamemnon 276–80, 359, 415 agriculture 17, 29, 65, 71–2, 156, 181–2, 189, 201–4, 206–7, 249, 251, 257–9, 290, 299–300, 380, 400–1, 404, 408 idealization of 166–7, 170–1, 175–7, 179, 182, 199, 201–4, 206, 273, 400–1, 408, 411 language of 65, 71–2, 201–6, 300 n. 54, 301, 404–7 Ahl, Frederick 78, 105, 107 n. 2, 113, 240–3, 288, 341 n. 23 Ajax 393–6 Al-Azmeh, Aziz 186 Alba 161, 242, 284, 326–7 Albini, Giuseppe 389 Alcalá 52 alchemy 44 Alexander, Caleb 78 Alexander, Caroline 97 Alexandrian poetry 36, 66 n. 10, 370, 382 alexandrines see metre, alexandrine Alexis 373, 377 Alfonso V el Magnánimo of Aragon 43 Alfonso X of Castile 42 Alhambra Decree 41 Alison, Jane 97 allegory and allegorizing 26, 28, 39–40, 61, 82, 137, 150, 179, 201, 271, 301 n. 56 alliteration 104, 110, 115, 132–3, 148, 164, 204, 207, 221, 245, 249, 257, 288, 296–8, 321, 326, 328, 373, 381–4, 410, 419

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GENERAL INDEX

allusion 66, 71, 73, 76, 129 n. 18, 181, 184, 201, 204, 240, 251, 272, 285, 295, 301, 303 n. 61, 319, 377–8, 382, 402, 404, 408–9 Amaryllis 190, 251, 257–9 Amata 65, 68–70, 72–7, 192 Amazons 97, 101–2, 106 America, United States of see United States of America American translators and translations 9, 17, 64, 72–7, 97, 105–21 Amiens 32 amoebaean singing 372 amplification 54–5, 72–4, 164, 269, 301, 378 amphibrach 127–8 Amsterdam 33, 293 n. 29 Amyntas 371 Anacreon 176 see also metre, Anacreontic ode Anacreaontea 151 n. 1, 154, 176 anagram 241–3, 353 anaphora 164, 245–7, 250, 272, 298, 378, 384 Anastasio 39 see also Nastagio Anatolia 154, 183–4 see also Turkey Anchises 315, 320, 423–4, 427 Ancien Régime 26, 28, 31 Andersen, Hans Christian 124 Anderson, William S. 412 Andrews, Robert 78 Andromache 99 n. 13, 282 n. 18 anger 48, 52 n. 5, 57–8, 61, 81, 83, 89, 93–4, 104, 138, 161, 174, 209, 273, 280, 284, 314, 429 see also emotion; fury animal husbandry 156 see also farmers and farming; shepherds and shepherding animals, humanizing of 409 Ankara 189 Anna (sister of Dido) 27, 39, 129–32, 266–7, 269–70 anthropomorphism 300 anti-Christianity 180 anticolonialism 182 n. 50, 399–402, 406, 411 see also imperialism, opposition to and subversion of anti-Nazism 385 anti-war movement (esp. Vietnam) and sentiment 107–11, 115, 118, 232 Antwerp 52 anxiety 12, 14, 77, 98, 119, 130, 140, 165, 232–5, 302 n. 58, 315, 324, 326, 402, 406, 425 of influence 12, 18 see also emotion apiculture 249, 301, 347 see also bees Apollo 58, 138, 177–8, 181, 261, 379



Apollodorus (Pseudo) 164 Apollonius of Rhodes 65 apostrophe 299 Appelrot, V. G. 337 Appendix Vergiliana 19, 129 appropriation 5, 66 n. 10, 90–1, 178, 182 n. 50, 215, 267, 304, 354 cultural 165 Aquileia 179–80 Arabic (language) 42, 47, 185, 190 Arabic literature 42, 185, 188 Aragon 40–5 Aragonese 42 Aratus 243–4 Arcadia 198, 202, 346, 374, 383 ‘arcadismo’ (arcadianism) 345–6 archaism and archaizing language 10–11, 18, 69, 99, 144, 150, 156, 157 n. 20, 159, 172, 193, 200, 206, 218, 246, 270, 328, 340, 342, 349, 366, 394, 404, 410 archetypal hero 56, 226 archetypes 43, 56, 97, 183, 226, 423 Arethusa 139–41, 379 Ariosto, Ludovico 52, 83, 85, 317 n. 20, 387 aristeia 164 aristocracy 2, 27, 37, 41, 44, 49–50, 52, 65–77, 80–9, 91–4, 112, 129–31, 162–3, 198, 234, 265, 267, 284–5, 294, 311 n. 12, 400 army see war and warfare Arnold, Matthew 232 Arrian (1st c. CE) 136 art of translation 12, 217, 221 articles, definite and indefinite 129, 132, 310, 369, 376 artificial language 10, 124–8, 134 n. 25, 153, 156, 340 artificiality 25, 37, 53, 153, 168, 172, 174–5, 179, 226, 298, 306, 318, 340, 343, 361, 363, 366, 416 n. 13 Asia 11, 16, 186–7, 301 n. 57, 326 Asia Minor see Anatolia; Turkey Assembly of the Saints 136, 137 n. 2 assessment of translation 26–7, 30, 77, 85, 108–9, 111, 114, 116–21, 126, 132–3, 144, 146, 152, 157, 160, 162–5, 167, 170–2, 174–5, 191, 203–7, 209–15, 218–21, 240–1, 243–4, 246–8, 249–50, 256–7, 259–60, 265–72, 276–81, 284–7, 295–303, 308–16, 324–30, 332, 334–44, 347–53, 356–9, 362–6, 369–74, 377–84, 392–6, 403–10, 422–4 assonance 148, 239, 373, 381, 383, 410, 419 astrology 42, 44–5 atheism 199 Athena 55, 279–81, 393–6 see also Minerva Athens 10, 147–8, 181 Augustine 159, 179

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

GENERAL INDEX

Augustus 26, 28, 111 n. 20, 143, 158, 178, 188, 191, 215, 229, 232, 241, 285, 287, 371, 403 and revival of Rome’s agricultural traditions 178, 290 relationship with Virgil 107, 114, 188, 215, 229, 232, 287, 371 see also Octavian Auld, William 129 Ausonia 64–5, 67, 70, 72–4, 76–7, 110, 122, 143 Ausonius 271 Australia 423 Austria 175–6, 357 Avernus 144–6, 325 Bade, Josse 263 Balbi, Girolamo 184 Balkans 154–5 balladry and ballad translations 69, 227, 319, 322, 324, 328 Ballard, Harlan Hoge 78 Balmer, Josephine 97–8, 422–9 Balzac, Honoré de 29 Barce 85 Barcelona 43 Bariato 62 Batteux, Charles 292 Battle of Drăgăşani 149 Baudelaire, Charles 382 Beatrice (Dante’s) 39–40 Beaudin, Jean–Dominique 261 Beaufront, Louis de 127 Beckett, Samuel 399 Beelzebub 329 bees 298, 301, 304 n. 64, 362–3, 381, 410 Belgium 27 Bein, Kazimierz (Kabe) 126 n. 8 Belin 177–8, 180 Bellona 72–3, 75 Bemporad, Giovanna 419 Benjamin, Walter 4, 125 n. 5, 303 n. 62 Bentley, Richard 277 n. 5 Bérard, Victor 222 n. 29 Beresford, James 78 Berkeley 108 Beroaldo 263 Bertault 101–3 Berveling, Gerrit 124 n. 1, 126 n. 11, 127–8, 129 n. 18, 131–3, 135 n. 30 Bethlehem 412 Bhabha, Homi 5 Bianor 404–5 Bible 99 Alba Bible 42 Old Testament 42, 124 Translations of 42, 139, 199

bilingual edition or translation 155, 157, 165, 175, 191, 211, 263 Bitias 350 Black Death, the 40 Black Sea 155 Bleiweis, Janez 182 Bleuet, Claude 29 blindness 31, 90 Bloom, Harold 12, 18 see also anxiety, of influence Blois 33 Blumauer, Aloys 26 Boccaccio 39, 43, 46, 83 Boethius 127, 137–9, 159 Bogomila 179 Bohorič, Adam 178, 180 Boland, Eavan 424, 428 Bologna 389–90 Bonaparte, Napoleon 28, 176–7, 333–4 book history (i.e. field of ) 4, 23–4, 33 Bosse, Abraham 25 Boswell, James 232 Bouhier, Jean 375 Bourdieu, Pierre 193 Bowra, C. M. 52 n. 5, 232 Bracciolini, Poggio 41 Brammall, Sheldon 3, 19, 80 n. 1, 86 n. 5, 91 n. 11 Braund, Susanna 126, 133 n. 23, 294 n. 32, 333 n. 3, 335, 341 n. 23, 403 n. 21 Braunschweig 356 Brazil 14, 345–54 Brazilian translators and translations 14, 345–54 bridging of gaps 5, 225 Briseis 277 Brisson, Pierre 375 Britain 47, 106 Brittany 34 Briusov, Valerii 14, 126 n. 9, 332–3, 335–44 Broadribb, Donald 127 Brosses, Charles de 292 Brundisium 215 n. 16 Bruni, Leonardo 41 Brussels 27 Buchanan 262–3 bucolic poetry see pastoral poetry Bucoliques see Eclogues Burrow, Colin 3, 64, 81 n. 2, 101–2 n. 19, 125 n. 5, 135 n. 29, 230 n. 36, 329 Busbecq, Oglier Ghiselin de 187 Bush, George W. 115 Byalistok 124 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 226, 228, 337 Byzantine empire and era 11, 137, 152, 154, 159, 165 Byzantium (the city, Istanbul, Constantinople) 137, 147 n. 25, 154, 159, 185

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GENERAL INDEX

Caesar, Julius 159, 178, 190 caesura 148, 157, 162, 178, 296, 311 Calderini, Domizio 263 Caldwell, Tanya 3, 330 n. 25 Callimachus 241, 382 Cambiatore, Tommaso 1, 41, 46, 50 Camena 171 n. 6, 177 Camões, Luis de 345, 347 Campos, Haroldo de 351 Camps, W. A. 232 Canali, Luca 419 Cao, Xueqin 231 Cao, Hongzhao 233 n. 42 capitalism 387, 392 see also neocapitalism Capitoline Hill 320 Capodistrianus, Andrea Divus 160 Caravino 60–1 Carcopino, Jérôme 376–7 Carena, Carlo 419 Carniola 177–81 Caro, Annibale 1, 19, 350, 385, 390 Carson, Anne 16, 97, 429 Carter, Elizabeth 425 Carthage and the Carthaginians 63, 86–7, 270, 320, 362–3 see also Dido Cassandra 359 Castile 41–5, 50, 53 Castilian language 6, 42, 47 Castilian translators and translations 1, 8, 17, 18, 38, 40–50, 52–60, 62 catabasis 302–3 Catalan language 42–3 Catalan translators and translations 43, 46, 134 Catalonia 42 Catherine the Great 2, 10–11, 17, 142–3, 151–2, 154–5, 157–8, 165, 332 Cato the Elder 179, 182, 405 n. 25 Catullus 16, 66, 97, 127, 149, 321, 425–6, 429 Caxton, William 1, 9, 46–7, 63–4, 78, 81, 83–5, 88, 94–5 Čelakovský, František Ladislav 173 censorship 44, 104, 178–9, 194 n. 51, 225 Cerberus 303 Ceres 295 Cervantes 8, 52, 60–2, 121 n. 59 Chamard, Henri 263 Chapman, George 278, 280–2 character 54–62, 64–70, 72–4, 81–9, 91–4, 102, 120–1, 226, 228–30, 232–5, 264–71, 278–80, 287–8, 315, 342–3, 409 Charles I 283 Charles II 81 n. 3, 283, 285 Charon 423 Charpentier, Jean–Pierre 187, 189 n. 36, 190 n. 39, 193 n. 49



Charybdis 366 Chaucer, Geoffrey 63, 82–4, 87, 91, 93, 95, 324 Chaumeix, André 375 Cherson and Slavyansk, Russian Orthodox Diocese of 10, 143, 151, 153–5 Chew, Kristina 243–4, 248, 253–4, 257 children 62, 65, 67–8, 70, 72–7, 98, 100, 104, 138, 143, 153, 189, 206, 234, 241, 246–7, 267, 269, 283, 372, 377–8, 381, 423–6, 428 child-rearing 104, 300 see also daughters; sons China 12, 224–6, 228–31, 234–6 Chinese translators and translations 12, 18, 224–36 chivalric romance 48, 51, 82, 182 n. 51 chorus 104, 193 Christ, Jesus 136 Christianity and Christians 10–11, 27–8, 32–4, 41–3, 64, 67, 79, 118–20, 136, 142–3, 152, 154–5, 166, 177–8, 180, 184–5, 283–5, 385, 390 Calvinism 79 Catholicism 41, 64, 67, 166, 283–5, 385, 390 Counter-Reformation 43–4 Greek Orthodoxy 10–11, 142–3, 152, 154–5 Presbyterianism 79 Protestant Reformation 32–3, 43 Protestantism 32–4, 67, 178, 180, 283–4 Quakerism 79, 118–20 see also Adam (biblical); Bible; Christianization; Church of England; clergy; Eve; God (Judeo-Christian); Jesuits; Satan Christianization 11, 179–80, 184–5, 215, 268–9, 320, 377 chronology 3, 6–7, 9, 12, 36, 107, 127, 290, 294, 305 n. 2 Church of England 284 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 50, 53, 137, 159, 201 n. 27, 349 Cipión 60–2 see also Scipio Aemilianus Africanus cities see urbanity civil rights movement (American) 108 Cixous, Hélène 106 clarity of translation see accessibility of translation; fluidity/flow of translation Clark, Brendon 134 class and classism 37, 77, 182, 388–9, 390, 407 see also aristocracy; education and schooling; elitism; monarchism classical languages 53, 126, 165, 172, 188, 217, 305 see also Greek translators and translations, ancient; Latin language classical reception see reception, history of Classicism 154, 156, 175–7, 179, 186, 241, 336, 366, 391

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

GENERAL INDEX

Classicism (cont.) Baroque 176 Enlightenment 176 see also neoclassicism classicizing 85, 156, 173–7, 360, 366, 391 classics and classical studies 36, 108, 144, 183, 191, 198, 222–5, 231, 247, 306, 343, 348, 357–61, 366, 391, 408, 425 Clausen, Wendell 108, 117, 201, 232, 405 clemency 62, 335 Clement VII 184 clergy 27, 78–9, 137, 159, 166, 178–9, 425 Clinton, Bill 31 Clough, Arthur Hugh 240 Clytemnestra 359 Coelho, Jorge 345 n. 3 coherence 183, 229, 379 see also accessibility of translation Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 322, 324, 330 colloquialisms see register, colloquial colonialism 399–402, 406 see also anticolonialism Columbus, Christopher 41 comedy and the comic genre 201, 286 commentaries 39, 40–1, 45, 47–9, 81 n. 2, 106 n. 25, 137, 144, 148, 151, 154–7, 159, 161, 201–2, 205, 209, 217, 263, 271, 279–80, 301–2, 304, 326, 328, 341 n. 24, 356, 368–9, 380, 413 n. 3, 417, 420 n. 23 on particular translations 40–1, 45, 47, 148, 155–7, 159, 161, 217, 304 as translation aids 161, 209, 263, 369, 417 Commodianus 128 comparative literature 4, 109, 116, 225, 231–5 compensation 5 n. 19, 18, 87–8, 119, 262, 293, 323, 329 see also translator’s debt compound words 133 n. 24, 160, 190, 204, 270, 376, 414 n. 5 compression and concision 117–19, 298, 310, 348–9 concordances 417 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 292 Confucianism 225 Conington, John 78, 230, 322, 328 Conjuration Mineira 345 Constantine 136–7, 150 consul 28, 109, 203–5 context 15–16, 23, 28, 37–8, 51–2, 58–9, 69–70, 77, 84, 107–8, 113, 124, 150–4, 176, 180, 184, 192, 199, 203–6, 212, 216, 219, 222–5, 228, 230, 232–3, 244–5, 260, 266, 294, 303–4, 316, 341, 349 n. 15, 353, 355, 403, 406, 413–18, 423, 426 continuity between ancient and modern worlds 15, 36, 397

contractions 410 see also register, colloquial conversion 5, 125, 180, 283–4, 306 cooking 176, 233 Čop, Matija 173, 179 Copley, Frank Olin 78, 108 Corfu 147, 151 Corinna 425 n. 25 Cork 423 Corneille, Pierre 186 Coroebus 57 correlation 386 n. 7, 418 Corydon 376, 383 cosmopolitanism 293 Costa, Cláudio Manuel da 345 n. 1 Costanzi, Antonio 263 Cotton, Charles 26, 86, 88, 91, 94 n. 12, 96 countryside see rusticity court literature 37, 47–8, 78, 193–4, 215, 326, 332, 359 Cowley, Abraham 81 n. 3 Cox, Fiona 422, 424, 426 creative writing 4, 306 creativity 4, 103, 105, 306–7, 319, 337, 350–1, 353–4, 370, 406, 420, 424–5, 429 Crenne, Hélisenne de 98 n. 9, 118 n. 45, 260 Creusa 315–7, 320, 423, 425–8 Crimea 151, 153, 156, 184 n. 7 Critobulus 184 Cromwell, Oliver 67, 78, 283, 285 Črtomir 179–80 Crusades, the 89, 137, 184 cryptogram 353 culture cultural agenda 10–11, 17, 26, 53, 151–6, 176, 179–82, 185, 190 cultural appropriation see appropriation cultural capital 5–6, 10, 23, 25, 26, 193, 343 cultural context 37, 40–2, 44, 50, 53, 153–6, 176, 294, 330, 341, 355, 386, 389, 397 cultural criticism 226 cultural identity 11, 151–6, 184, 186, 188, 208, 226–7, 385, 388 cultural studies 4, 75, 183 cultural traditions and values 36, 47, 303, 343, 357, 390, 395 Cumae 203–5 Cunyngham, Antoine 8, 30–1, 34–5 Cupid 138, 163, 271, 325 curriculum 2, 10, 25, 77, 160, 176, 359 see also education and schooling curses 60, 73, 75, 81, 83, 89, 93, 363–4 Cyclops and Cyclopes 213 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 292–3 D’Alençon, Margeurite 32 Dacier, Anne 98, 99 n. 13

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GENERAL INDEX

dactylic hexameter see metre, dactylic hexameter Daedalus, Stephen 402 Damoetas 372 Danielsen, Bjørg Tosterud 195, 200, 202–7 Danish language 35, 195–6, 198 n. 14, 199 n. 22 Danish translators and translations 19, 198 n. 14, 199 n. 22 Dante 8, 36, 38–41, 43–5, 48, 50, 111, 120, 126, 179, 186, 216, 218, 228, 305 n. 1, 311, 386–7, 390, 397–8 imitation of 40–1 influence of 8, 36, 39–41, 43, 45, 48, 50, 311, 386 Daphne 137–8 Daphnis 149–50, 178, 190, 373–4, 381–2 Darrieussecq, Marie 97, 106 Dati, Agostino 263 daughters 65, 67–8, 70, 72–7, 283, 425, 428 Davidson, Joseph 69 n. 13, 78 Day-Lewis, Cecil 13, 64, 70–5, 78, 107, 112 n. 22, 113, 227, 232, 247, 253, 257, 423 de Gournay, Marie 9, 17, 97–106, 118 n. 45 death and dying 27, 41, 43–5, 58, 61–2, 64, 70, 72, 74–5, 81–3, 89, 93, 99 n. 10, 100 n. 15, 109–13, 115–17, 125, 144–7, 149, 158, 163–4, 177–8, 181, 232, 234, 246–8, 268, 283, 287, 289, 298 n. 48, 300 n. 54, 301–2, 312–13, 315–16, 319–20, 333–6, 338–9, 341–2, 347, 353, 362, 373–4, 394, 400, 413, 423, 426–8 Decembrio, Pier Candido 139 decision making in translation 12, 26–7, 45, 81, 88, 104–5, 125, 160, 170–1, 175, 190, 192–3, 218, 222 n. 30, 225, 261, 307, 346, 353, 367, 375–6, 383, 389, 402, 406, 408, 410, 415, 419 dedications 26, 64, 87, 93, 99, 137 n. 2, 142–3, 149, 151 n. 3, 155, 158, 178, 180, 273, 275, 283–7, 288, 382, 412, 421 deictic 267, 270 Delacroix, Eugène 216 Delia 371 Delille Abbé 376, 380 Delille, Jacques (Jacques Montanier) 8, 12–13, 17, 29–31, 34–5, 289–304 Della Corte, Francesco 385 n. 3, 419 delle Colonne, Guido 333 democracy 2, 225, 294 see also republicanism and republics Denham, John 81, 84–5, 87–8, 91, 93, 94 n. 12, 95–6, 326, 333 Denmark 196–7 Derry 423 Des Masures, Louis 260–1, 263 Descartes, René 29 Desfontaines, Pierre 375, 380



Dev, Anton Feliks 177–80 Devon 71 dialects Attic Greek 10, 142, 144, 147, 149 Demotiki Greek 156 Doric Greek 10, 136, 139, 142, 149–50 Hiberno-English 16–17, 19, 399, 403–4, 408–10 Homeric/epic Greek 10, 136, 142, 144, 151–3, 155–8, 160 Italian 386–9, 391–2 Kathareuousa Greek 156–7, 159–60 see also Castilian language; Castilian translators and translations; Catalan language; Catalan translators and translations; Norwegian languages Diana 102 n. 19, 116 dictionaries 186, 190, 193, 197, 205, 263, 270, 295, 349 didactic genre and literature 17, 54, 178, 181, 184, 218, 289–90, 294–5, 360, 408 Diderot, Denis 29, 292 Dido 27, 39, 53–4, 56, 63, 80–9, 91–4, 102–3, 129–33, 147–8, 158, 162–5, 211–12, 241, 263–71, 309–11, 319–20, 330, 332, 363, 415 difficulties of translation see translation, difficulties of Digges, Dudley 85, 88, 94–5 Diomedes 211–12, 415 Dion, J. 210 n. 2 diplomats 26, 63, 78 direct translation 46, 48–9, 97, 191, 333, 366 Diski, Jenny 99–100, 106 dispossession of land 54, 406 Disraeli, Benjamin 69 divorce 87, 94 see also marriage; gender, roles Dolet, Etienne 261 Domenichi, Coppo di Borghese Migliorato 39 domestication 4–5, 11–14, 17–18, 157, 193, 195, 199, 202, 206–7, 235, 239, 244–5, 294, 299, 301, 303–4, 308, 324, 330, 411 see also foreignization Donatus 201, 263 Donghua, Fu 227, 229–31, 235 Donoghue, Steve 73 n. 16, 75, 110 n. 14, 119–21 Dorat 262 Doris 139–41 Dorset 71 Dostoyevskii, Fyodor 199 doublets 86, 266, 268–9 see also repetition Douglas, Gavin 1, 19, 47, 64 n. 4, 78, 81–3, 85–7, 93–5, 105, 125, 326, 328

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

GENERAL INDEX

dreams and dreaming 57, 82, 104, 130–2, 229, 231–2, 235, 267, 291, 305, 314, 329, 332, 378, 400, 427–9 Dresden 328 Dryden, John 1, 9, 12–13, 17–18, 34, 64, 67–72, 75, 77–8, 81, 86–7, 91–4, 96, 105, 110 n. 14, 129–30, 227, 245–7, 249–50, 252, 257, 279–88, 322–9, 355, 359–60 du Bellay, Joachim 1, 12–13, 17–18, 260–74, 293 Dublin 402, 407 Du Bos, Jean–Baptiste 292 Du, Fu 234 Duchesne, Nicolas–Bonaventure 33 Duffy, Carol Ann 97, 424 n. 19 Duncker, Patricia 100 Durão, José de Santa Rita 345 Dutch translators and translations 7, 19, 25, 35, 127–8, 134 Eclogues 2, 8, 10–13, 15–17, 31–2, 34, 70–1, 127, 136, 139–42, 149–50, 178, 187, 189–91, 193, 195, 197–208, 224, 225 n. 8, 228–30, 233–4, 244–7, 249–50, 257–60, 319, 345–8, 356–7, 368–84, 390, 399, 401–6, 411 economics 23, 154, 189, 293, 303 Edebiyat–ı Cedide (New Literature) 194 education and schooling 25, 29–30, 33, 77, 80, 99–100, 105–6, 111, 121, 126, 137, 143, 147, 150–60, 165–8, 175–8, 181, 184–9, 191, 196, 200, 207, 209–11, 213–14, 217–18, 222, 224–5, 231, 234, 256, 322, 328, 332–3, 336, 343, 348, 356–61, 364, 369, 376, 380, 386–91, 405, 408–9, 420, 424–6, 429 of women 99–100, 105–6, 186, 333, 424–6 translation intended for 10, 18, 143, 151–3, 155–60, 165, 184, 188–9, 200, 210–11, 214, 217, 222, 261, 328, 333, 358, 360, 390 Edward III 63 Egunov, A. N. 157, 333 Egypt 27, 301 elegy and the elegiac genre 129, 142–3, 149, 178, 201, 240, 251, 270–1 see also metre, elegiac couplets Eliot, T. S. 108, 232, 422–3, 429 Elísio, Filinto (Francisco Manuel do Nascimento) 349 n. 15 elision 84, 129, 132, 301, 352 elitism 2, 99, 154, 158, 175, 182, 200, 332, 361, 386–9, 391–2, 409 ellipses 214, 311 Elysian Fields 23, 320–1 emotion 58–9, 62, 68, 93, 94 n. 12, 98, 101–3, 163, 225, 234–5, 241, 271, 278–81, 287, 293–4, 296, 298–9, 306–7, 314–15, 320, 323, 334–6, 343, 370, 392–4, 423, 425–7

versus reason 8, 58–9, 62, 144–5, 162–3, 267, 271, 278–81, 314, 320 see also anxiety; fear; fury (including furor and furia); grief; love and desire empire 9–10, 26, 28, 43, 80, 102–3, 107–8, 124, 142–3, 154–5, 158–9, 176, 180, 184–5, 193, 235, 242, 286, 302 n. 58, 346 see also imperialism Empson, William 201 n. 31, 232 emulation 13–14, 36, 104, 189, 304, 349, 353–4 enallagē 418 England 9, 13, 18, 29, 40, 64 n. 4, 77, 80, 240, 275, 283–5, 288, 291, 326, 360 English Civil War 79, 283 English language 47, 71, 80–1, 110, 117, 125–6, 196, 230, 239–40, 246, 248, 278, 325–6, 329–30, 336, 399–401 see also dialects, Hiberno-English English translations and translators 13–14, 26, 47, 63–75, 77, 80–96, 105, 107, 113, 239–59, 275–88, 318–30 Eneti 180 enjambment 74, 76, 162, 221, 239, 241, 264–5, 269, 277, 280, 284, 312 n. 15, 324 Enlightenment 13, 176–7, 299 French 29, 34, 290, 292–3 Greek/neo-Hellenic 136, 142, 144, 151, 157 n. 20 epanalepsis 246–7 Epic of Gilgamesh 127 epic poetry 8, 10, 37, 46, 48, 50–3, 57, 60, 64, 77, 81, 83, 134, 138, 153, 157–60, 172, 192, 209, 215, 222, 225–7, 264, 319, 328, 345, 347, 349, 358, 361–2, 388, 422–3, 426 diction of 53–4, 77, 85, 93, 112, 115, 117, 119, 157, 164, 174, 190, 192, 211, 219–20, 294, 308, 323–4, 328, 347, 349, 358, 363, 393, 417 tone of 60, 64, 81, 105, 112, 117, 172, 192, 215–16, 308, 319, 366, 395, 417, 419 Epictetus 425 Epicureanism 232, 282 n. 16 epigram 51 n. 1, 149, 174, 271, 296 epiphany 245 epiphora 298 epithalamion 66 epithet 27, 142, 201 n. 29, 222, 280, 299, 301, 325, 328, 394, 417 see also formulaic phrases equivalence aesthetic 17, 148, 189, 221–2, 239, 244, 246–7, 257, 258, 261–2, 270, 277, 292–3, 296–9, 349–53, 362, 373–4 dynamic 349–51 formal 136, 160, 204, 208, 215, 221–2, 246–7, 258, 262, 277, 280, 284, 316, 336, 338, 349, 356–7, 365, 416–17, 420

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GENERAL INDEX

metrical 142, 146, 148, 150, 160, 167, 172–3, 221, 316, 415–16, 417–19 semantic 37, 72, 85, 104–5, 110, 113, 117, 132–3, 136, 138, 152, 157, 162–5, 175, 193, 202–6, 208–9, 212–14, 217, 221–2, 230, 265–70, 288, 295–8, 303, 311–13, 315–16, 325–9, 336, 340, 342–3, 348–9, 353, 365, 367, 369, 371–2, 380–2, 392, 395, 404, 409–10, 415, 418–20 Erato 64, 67, 69–76 Ercilla, Alonso de 52 Erinna 425 n. 25 eroticism and erotic literature 65–74, 76–7, 82, 84–94, 138, 162–3, 181–2, 225, 266, 271, 298–9, 330 see also love and desire Erskine, John 229, 235 escapism 2, 32 Esperanto 2, 10, 16, 124–35 invention of 2, 10, 124 pronunciation of 129 syntax of 126, 132 translations into 10, 124–35 Eşref, Ruşen 11, 187–91, 193–4 Estienne, Robert 263 ethics of translation see translation, ethics of ethnography 180, 184, 301 Etruscans 71–2, 74–5 eulogy 151 n. 3, 158, 187 Eumenides 303 Euripides 127, 321 Euryalus 110, 115, 122, 282 n. 17 Eurydice 144–6, 299 Eusebius of Caesarea 136–7 Evander 319, 415 Eve 321 exegesis 41, 48, 137, 304, 352 n. 24, 413 n. 3 expansion 46, 48, 52, 73, 83, 85, 91–3, 116–17, 146, 160–1, 163, 192, 214, 260, 264–5, 268–70, 277, 279–81, 284–5, 287–8, 295, 298–303, 310–11, 323, 341, 363, 376 Fagles, Robert 9, 64, 73–5, 78, 107, 110 n. 14, 111 n. 19, 113, 115–18, 120 Fainlight, Ruth 424 Fairclough, H. R. 79, 107, 129–30, 134 Fallon, Peter 12, 16–17, 167 n. 5, 248, 254–5, 257, 399–400, 402, 406–10 family 59, 153, 230, 233 n. 42, 234, 315, 336, 400, 426, 428 see also daughters; fathers and fatherhood; mothers and motherhood; sons Fanshawe, Richard 85, 88, 92–3, 95 Fantham, Elaine 407 Fanthorpe, U. A. 424



farmers and farming 29, 66, 71, 166–7, 170–1, 175–7, 179, 181–2, 189, 201–4, 206–7, 245, 249, 251, 257–9, 273, 290, 299–300, 380, 400–1, 408, 410 see also agriculture; apiculture; shepherds and shepherding fascism 2 German 392 Italian 388–90, 392 fatalism 231 fate and the Fates 48, 55, 72, 83, 110, 112–13, 144–6, 161, 193, 226, 229, 232, 234–5, 276, 278, 284, 287, 326, 330, 393–4, 397, 413 fathers and fatherhood 65–7, 70, 100, 105, 161, 234, 315, 334–6, 338–9, 341–2, 421, 423–4, 428 Faust 44 fear 87, 130–1, 171, 206, 219, 234, 277, 279, 308, 315, 407–8, 425, 429 see also anxiety Febrer, Andreu 43 n. 25 Federico III of Sicily 40 Fedorovna, Alexandra 333 Feeney, Denis 407 Fei, Bai 224, 234–6 feminism 18, 77, 83, 97–8, 102, 106, 120, 422, 424, 427 Fénelon, François 185 Ferdinand II (of Aragon), V (of Castile), III (of Naples) 41 Ferdowsi 188 Ferrara 32 Ferry, David 13, 245–50, 255–9 Fet, Afanasii 14, 332–3, 335–7, 339, 342–3 feudalism 231, 268–9 fidelity see accuracy, of translation Fields of Mourning 320 financing of translation 26, 197, 285 see also patrons and patronage Finden, Synnøve 199 n. 19 First World War 78–9, 111 n. 20, 364, 388, 423 Fitzgerald, Robert 9, 64, 72–5, 78, 107, 111–13, 115–16 Flaubert, Gustave 29 Flemish 26, 27 n. 10 Florence 38–9, 65 n. 7, 386 fluidity/flow of translation 12, 118, 211, 214, 294–5, 336 flyting 81 Fo, Alessandro 412–21 folk poetry and songs 149, 177, 193, 198–9, 202, 205 n. 37, 206, 227, 371 folk tradition 177, 198–9, 207 folklore 44, 199, 227 foreignization 4–5, 11, 13–14, 18, 193, 195, 202, 206, 208, 239–40, 244, 294, 324, 330, 332, 340, 417–18

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

GENERAL INDEX

Forest Farm (near Ankara) 189 formalism 4 formulaic phrases 272, 280, 295, 348, 415 n. 10, 416–17, 419 consistent translation of 348, 416–17 Foucault, Michel 4, 23, 34 foundational myth 38, 53, 59, 60 n. 14, 180, 184, 364, 403 fourteeners see metre, fourteener Fowler, Rowena 424 France 8–9, 12, 15, 25–34, 43, 63, 210, 215, 260, 263, 283, 290–1, 293–4, 346–7, 364, 368 free speech movement 108 free translation 4, 137, 234, 263–4, 338 free verse 227, 234, 376 French Academy 29, 31–2, 295, 374, 376 French Revolution 27–8, 31, 33 French translators and translations 12–13, 15, 17, 25–34, 46–7, 63, 86, 97–106, 126, 184, 187, 190–1, 209–23, 260–74, 289–304 Frihagen, Anne Katrine 195, 200, 202, 204–7 Fulgentius 47 function of language 208, 348 see also language function of translation 225, 292, 402 functionalism 4, 207–8 Furiel, Claude 386 fury (including furor and furia) 52, 54, 57–62, 67–8, 77, 84, 89, 92–4, 99, 104, 119, 270, 276–80, 284, 287–8, 314, 340, 343, 392–4 Galatea 244, 383 Gallego-Portuguese 42 Gallus 139–41, 379–80 Gama, José Basílio da 345 Ganymede 192 gaps 5, 291, 311, 376 Garborg, Arne 197 Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison, Jean–Baptiste 144 Gasparov, Mikhail 331–2, 337–8, 340–1 Gantar, Kajetan 171–2, 176 n. 25 Gate of Dreams 216 n. 20 Gates of War 241 gender 9, 18–19, 51, 57, 63–77, 81–94, 97–102, 104–6, 115, 118, 120–1, 225, 234, 241, 264, 268, 270–1, 320, 330, 377, 393–6, 400, 422, 424–9 dynamics 68–70, 75, 83–94, 98–102, 104–6, 118, 120–1, 225, 270, 320, 330, 377 roles 19, 51, 57, 65–77, 83, 86–7, 89, 93, 98–102, 105–6, 115, 121, 225, 234, 241, 264, 268, 271, 320, 377, 393–6, 400, 424–5 reception of, in the Aeneid 57, 63, 65–77, 81–9, 91–4, 115

relationship with translation 9, 16, 18–19, 63–77, 82–9, 91–4, 97–8, 99 n. 13, 100–6, 118, 120–1, 270, 300, 422, 424–9 Geneva 32–3 genre 8, 10, 12, 46, 50–1, 53, 136–7, 139, 149, 153, 157, 198, 201–2, 208, 215, 224–7, 233, 289, 303–4, 347, 359, 401 see also comedy and the comic genre; didactic genre and literature; elegy and the elegiac genre; epic poetry; novel; pastoral poetry; tragedy and the tragic genre geography 27, 77, 183, 185, 290 Georgics 2, 8, 10–13, 16–17, 23, 28–31, 70–1, 127, 136, 142–6, 150, 155–6, 158, 166–73, 175, 182, 187, 189, 198, 219–20, 224, 234, 243–5, 247–8, 250–7, 289–90, 293–304, 319, 323, 347–50, 352–3, 356–7, 389–90, 399, 406–11 German translators and translations 15, 17, 26, 46, 173–5, 355–67 Germany 15, 18–19, 28, 31, 71, 149, 173, 240, 356–7, 360–1, 364, 385–9, 392 gesture 60, 101, 212 ghosts 320–1, 323, 329, 401, 423–8 Gillespie, Stuart 3, 19, 319, 325 Giono, Jean 374 Glorious Revolution (1688) 283 glosses and glossing 45–9, 52, 72–6, 104–5, 116, 148, 161, 192–3, 200, 213–14, 263, 269, 304, 325–6, 347, 376, 380, 408, 418 Glück, Louise 424, 427 n. 31 Gnedich, Nikolai 14, 155 n. 15, 331–2 goals of translation 12, 14, 23, 26–7, 125, 131–2, 143, 151–2, 155, 157–9, 165, 180, 200, 217, 324, 341, 344, 401 see also motives for translation God (Judeo-Christian) 47, 84, 99 n. 12, 120, 181, 260, 321, 412 Godolphin, Sidney 86, 88, 96 gods and goddesses 49, 55, 57–9, 61, 64–5, 67, 69–76, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 94 n. 12, 104, 112, 116, 129–32, 138–41, 143–6, 149–50, 159, 161, 163, 167, 170–1, 177–81, 190–3, 201, 203–6, 209, 220–1, 226, 230, 232, 234, 241–4, 251, 255, 257–8, 261, 263, 266, 269, 271, 274, 276–80, 284–5, 287–8, 295, 302–3, 316, 320, 325, 327, 334, 338–9, 341–2, 371, 377–9, 383, 392–6, 402, 408, 417, 423 see also Aeolus; Apollo; Athena; Belin; Ceres; Charon; Cupid; Diana; Erato; Eumenides; fate and the Fates; Hephaestus; Hermes; Janus; Juno; Jupiter; Mars; Mercury; Minerva; Muses; Neptune; nymphs; Pan; Penates; Phoebus; Prometheus; Proserpina; Saturn; Sylvanus; Triton; Vulcan; Živa

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GENERAL INDEX

Goelzer, Henri 187, 190, 378, 382 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 124, 172–5, 182, 186, 333, 337, 356–67 Gogol, Nikolai 331 Golden Bough 423–4, 428 ‘golden line’ 188, 239, 245, 248–50 Goldsmith, Oliver 30 González de Guzmán, Luis 42 Goodheir, Albert 127 Goold, G. P. 113 n. 26 Gopaleen, Myles na 403 Göttingen 356 Grabowski, Antoni 126 n. 8 grammar 53, 77, 87, 124, 147, 152, 159–60, 162–3, 176, 178–80, 189, 218, 228, 291, 310, 338–9, 348, 363, 371, 376, 388, 394, 404, 418 Grammaticus, Theodosius 142 Granada 41 Grant, Michael 232 Grässe, Johann Georg Theodor 25 Graver, Bruce 318–19, 322, 324–5, 327–8, 330 Graves, R. P. 319 Great Books movement 229 n. 28 Greece 136, 142, 153, 155, 226, 424 ancient literature of 50, 126–7, 155, 159, 183, 185–6, 226, 262, 371, 388, 399 Greek translators and translations ancient 1, 19, 42, 136–165 Gregor, Douglas B. 127 Gregory, Augusta 403 Gresset, Jean-Louis 8, 31–5 grief 12, 53–4, 61, 81, 83, 89–94, 102–5, 109–12, 115, 119, 121, 129–31, 147–50, 161, 164–5, 229, 232–5, 241, 265, 269–71, 279, 286, 301, 305, 309–11, 320–2, 334–6, 342, 372, 413, 426–7 Grieg, Edvard 198–9 Grossman, Edith 121 Gustafson, Kjell 195, 200, 202, 204–7 Gustav III 197, 202 Gutenberg press 24 Guyot, Thomas 29 Hacquard, Georges 215 n. 16 Hadas, Rachel 424 Haecker, Theodor 134, 385 Haemus mountains 170–1 Hafez 188 Hague, the 33 Haiti 27 Halloween 400 hapax legomenon 66, 70, 142, 164 Hardwick, Lorna 3, 402 n. 15 Hare, Julius Charles 318



harmony and harmonization 13, 117, 218, 221, 229, 234, 251, 261, 286, 296, 298, 304, 323, 350, 369, 375, 417, 419–20 Harrington, James 86, 88, 91, 96 Harrison, Stephen 108 Harrison, T. W. 3, 69 Harvard School, the 108 Heaney, Seamus 12, 16–17, 259, 399–407, 410–11, 423–5, 428–9 Heath, Robert 81 n. 2, 85, 88, 95 Hebrew 42 translations into 2, 35 Hector 57, 211–12, 314, 323, 329, 334–5, 342, 362 Heidelberg 361 Heinsius, Daniel 10, 136, 139–42 Helen 63–4 Helicon, Mt 240, 402 hell, Hell 170–1, 303 n. 60, 311 n. 12, 329, 408 see also Underworld, the Hellenism and Hellenists 44, 165, 174 Hellenistic poetry 241, 370, 382 Hellespont 105 hemistich 128, 162, 272, 311 Henry, James 322, 328 Hephaestus 280 n. 10 see also Vulcan Hercules 415 heresy 32 hermeneutics 2, 4–5, 17 Hermes 320 see also Mercury Hernández de Velasco, Gregorio 1, 8, 50, 52–60, 62 heroes archetypal 225–6 epic 56–7, 59–62, 229, 232–5, 280, 287–8, 315, 392, 397, 422, 426–7, 429 see also heroism heroic couplet see metre, heroic couplet heroism 225 epic 51–2, 56–7, 59–62, 105, 117, 229, 232–5, 362, 392, 424 Hesiod 203, 301, 379 Heuzé, Ph. 210 n. 2 Heyne, Johann Gottlob 356 Hillman, Richard 106 historiography 60, 67, 78, 178 n. 39, 283 history of reception see reception, history of; Virgil, reception history of history of translation see translation history; Virgil, translation history of Hobbes, Thomas 280 n. 10 Holberg, Ludvig 198 n. 13 Hölderlin, Friedrich 364–5 Holy Roman Empire 143

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

GENERAL INDEX

Homer and the Homeric epics 13–14, 16, 25, 36, 56, 61, 72–4, 91, 97, 102, 105, 111, 115–16, 120, 134, 139, 153, 157–8, 160–5, 172–5, 189, 194, 197, 226–7, 235, 240, 275–83, 288–9, 306, 322–3, 331–4, 337, 344, 347, 356–62, 364–6, 385, 401, 406, 422–3, 429 in comparison to Virgil 134, 161, 226, 235, 275, 282, 288 praise of 226 style of 226, 275, 279–82 see also dialects, Homeric/epic Greek honour 62, 71, 87, 177–8, 192, 260, 266, 289, 301, 339–40, 346, 379, 419 Honshu, attack on 112 Hopkins, David 281 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 240 Horace 43, 149, 167, 176–7, 181, 201, 218, 231, 289, 292, 306, 319, 331 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey) 1, 19, 82, 86, 88–90, 93–5, 326, 328 Howard, Richard 111 Howard, Robert 86, 88, 93, 96 Hu, Shi 226 Hugh, Lord Clifford 284 Hugo, Victor 182, 188, 337 Hulubei, Alice 260–1 human sacrifice 110, 113, 314 humanism 1–2, 16, 33, 37–8, 41–5, 50, 52, 139, 183, 188, 222, 304, 361, 420 Castilian 45 Catalan 43 Christian 33 French 33, 304 Italian 37, 41, 43, 50, 420 Renaissance 1–2 Spanish 41–5, 50 Turkish 188 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 174, 291 Humphries, Rolfe 107 Hundred Years War 63 Hungarian translators and translations 35, 127–8, 133 Hutchinson, Lucy 98–100 Hhybris 280 n. 11 Hydra, the 303 Hymenaeus 271 hyperbaton 49, 311 iambic heptameter see metre, iambic heptameter iambic pentameter see metre, iambic pentameter Iarbas 241 Ibsen, Henrik 199 ideal translator, concept of 12, 18, 121, 157, 217–18 identical translation 357–8, 365–7 ideology 2, 5, 8, 23, 26, 28, 31, 136, 150, 177, 179, 182, 189, 230, 244, 332, 388–9, 395, 397

idioms 13, 37, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 81, 152, 154, 157, 179, 195–7, 199, 202, 207–8, 291, 326, 340, 399, 404, 409 of source language 13, 152, 239 imitation translation as 219, 261, 292–3, 296, 298, 349, 357, 366 of Virgil 178, 272–4, 287, 289, 298, 304, 327, 329, 338, 349–50, 353–4, 356–7 see also mimesis imperialism 2, 10, 12, 80–2, 84, 108–9, 113–14, 121, 180, 389 celebration of 108–9, 121, 389 opposition to and subversion of 12, 82, 108–9, 114, 121, 180, 225, 229, 232, 235 translation as justification for 2, 8, 10, 59, 80–1 see also colonialism; empire Imtheachta Aeniasa (Wanderings of Aeneas) 1 India 42, 68, 79, 242 Indian languages 42 infandus, –a, –um 53–4, 102–3, 105, 147, 309–11 intelligibility see accessibility of translation intended audience 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 49, 109, 113, 136–7, 143, 147, 151–2, 156–7, 166, 176, 233–5, 343, 411 experts 156 non-experts 49, 156, 343 students 18, 143, 151–2, 156–7 intentionality 38, 53, 87, 152, 168, 178, 214, 235, 240, 280, 292, 299 n. 49, 340, 350, 358, 370, 388, 391, 417, 425 intermediary texts 46, 63, 83, 86, 187, 227, 230 intermediary translations 19, 42, 46, 63, 83, 86, 137, 187, 189, 191, 225, 227, 230, 236 internationalism 228, 423 vs. nationalism 134 intersectional analysis 75 intertextuality 36, 65, 209, 223, 272–4, 348, 354, 362, 370, 382 invisibility of translator 5 Ioannou, Demetrios 149 Ioannou, Philippos 10, 136, 148–50 Ioannou, Rigios 149 Iollas 372 Ionian Academy 147 Iphigenia 127, 292 n. 22, 359 Iraq War 115 Ireland 16, 283, 399–400, 402–9, 411, 422–3 Irish Civil War 406 Irish Literary Revival 400 Irish translators and translations 1, 15–16, 18, 259, 328, 399–411, 422–4 Isabella I 41 Islam 11, 42, 142, 185

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GENERAL INDEX

Italian language 14, 50, 313–16, 349, 386–9, 391–2, 397–8, 414–15, 418 see also vernacularization (volgarizzamento) Italian translators and translations 6–8, 12, 15, 18, 25–6, 35, 37–41, 43, 46–7, 50, 305–17, 350, 385–98, 412–21 Italy 8, 17, 24, 37–41, 43–5, 48–50, 59, 64–5, 70–2, 161, 177, 180, 229, 249, 260, 276, 381, 385–96, 420 see also Risorgimento Iulus 315, 427 Ivanov, V. I. 337 Ixion 303 Izzo, Carlo 420 Jackson Knight, W. F. 78, 134, 225 n. 7, 227, 233 n. 42, 422 Jacobeanism and Jacobites 283–4 Jacobinism and Jacobins 27 Jakobson, Roman 208, 370 n. 3 James II 67, 79, 283, 285 Janus 263, 274, 320 Jena 361 Jerome (Saint) 139, 412–13 Jerusalem 90 Jesuits 32–3, 224 Jews 28, 41–2, 124 see also Judaism Jocs florals 42 Johnson, Kimberly 248, 256–7 Johnson, Samuel 276, 278, 281, 286, 323, 328 Johnson, W. R. 114 Johnston, Patricia A. 9, 64, 76–8, 118 n. 45, 126, 240–2 Jonson, Ben 85, 95, 329 n. 23 Joseph II 175 n. 24 journalism and journalists 78, 176, 178, 182, 185, 186–7, 194 n. 51, 200, 346, 399 Jove see Jupiter Joyce, James 402 Juan II of Castile 44 Juan II of Navarre 45, 47 Judaism 41–2 Juno 48–9, 64, 67, 72–3, 75, 94 n. 12, 116, 161, 192, 209, 276–9, 284, 288, 327, 377, 392–6 Jupiter 59, 86–7, 251, 255, 276–8, 320, 341, 393–6 justification for translation see translation, justification for Juvenal 85, 319 Kadri, Yakup 191 Kalocsay, Kálmán 126–33, 135 Karamzin 154 katabasis see catabasis Kavanagh, Patrick 400–2, 404, 407, 410–11 Kazantzis, Judith 97



Keats, John 228 Kelmarneck, Édouard 33 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) 188–9, 191 Kennedy, Charles Rann 78 kenning 328 Kermaleck, Édouard see Kelmarneck, Édouard Kherson and Slavyansk, Russian Orthodox Diocese of see Cherson and Slavyansk, Russian Orthodox Diocese of King Francis I 32 kingship theory 3, 59, 62 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 361–2 Klossowski, Pierre 105, 126 n. 9, 133 n. 23, 210 n. 1, 222 n. 30, 341 n. 23 Knox, Bernard 116 Kopitar, Jernej 178–81 Korais, Adamantios 144 Kraggerud, Egil 198 Krisak, L. 118 n. 47, 120 l’Hospital, Guillaume de 262 L’vov, Nikolai 154 La Fontaine, Jean de 188, 376 Lactantius 47 Lalli, Giovanni Battista 26 Lancia, Andrea 38–40 land development, as symbol of wealth 290 see also physiocracy and physiocratic movement Landino, Cristoforo 263 language evolution of 13, 53, 125, 153, 190, 195–6, 261, 272, 290–1, 348, 386–91 origin of 124, 153, 290–2, 386 politics of 17, 53, 190, 195–6, 208, 290–1, 294, 303, 386–91, 397, 399–402 role in society 17, 125, 153, 196, 290–1 ‘spirit’ of ( genie) 261, 277 n. 5, 291, 293 n. 27, 294, 337, 412, 425 source 156, 208, 240, 244, 261, 348, 357, 361, 367 structure of 126, 129 n. 20, 153, 157, 189, 214, 218, 239, 262, 310, 340, 348, 376 target 4, 152, 156, 190, 208, 239, 261, 269, 348, 365–6, 415, 418–19 universal aspects of 239, 244, 361 Laocoön 55–6, 308, 312–13, 329 Laodamia 320–1, 329 n. 21, 330 Laporte, Michel 215 n. 16 Larbaud, Valery 412–13 Latin language 25, 37, 42, 47, 71, 294, 307, 388 difficulty of learning 100, 105–6, 307–8, 369 features of 19, 37, 139, 150, 218–19, 246, 249, 310, 340, 348, 369, 376, 415 ‘strangeness’ of 323–4, 328 Latin translations 43, 65 n. 7, 139, 150–1, 160, 412

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

GENERAL INDEX

Latini, Brunetto 50 Latinisms 218, 270, 311, 316, 324–5, 330, 338, 341, 348 Latinization 330, 341, 348, 395 Latinus 65, 67–8, 72 Latium 64–5, 67, 69, 71–7, 161, 241–2, 284, 327 Lauderdale, Earl of see Maitland, Richard Lausus 287–8 Lavinia 9, 48–9, 63–77, 120 n. 56, 179 n. 42 law and lawyers 28, 37, 52, 64–7, 107, 179, 242, 301 n. 57 see also legal training Le Plat, Victor Alexandre Chrétien 8, 26–8, 31, 34–5 Le Roy, Louis 263–4 Leander 303 n. 61 Lee, Guy 13, 203, 245–7, 249–50, 258, 369 n. 1 legal training as reflected in translation 64–7 Leopardi, Giacomo 12, 14, 17–18, 305–17, 387–9 Lembke, Janet 118 n. 45 Leroy, Guillaume 260 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 299 Levitan, William 277 Lewkenor, John 85–6, 88, 94 n. 12, 96 libertarianism 69, 79 libraries 24–6, 33 n. 21, 40, 44, 100, 105, 185, 263, 421, 424 Liburnio, Niccolò 1 Libya 63, 84, 241, 298 Lima, Jorge de 354 line-by-line translation 47–8, 71, 75, 107, 118, 120, 132–3, 141, 146, 148, 150, 160–1, 163, 249, 280, 337, 348–9, 368, 371 linguistic analysis 13, 53, 150, 152, 179–82, 194, 199, 225, 290, 294, 308, 343, 352–3, 390, 400, 417 linguistic capital 53 linguistic sign 353 Lipparini, Giuseppe 387–8, 390, 392, 394–5 literal translation 4, 77, 160, 202, 212, 265, 280, 316, 322–5, 327–9, 338, 365, 394, 396–7, 425 criticism of 262, 264, 338 see also equivalence literary criticism 26–7, 30, 77, 85, 108–9, 111, 114, 117, 120–1, 144, 158, 172–5, 186–8, 191, 201, 220–2, 227, 240–1, 251, 278, 281, 289, 291, 305–6, 322, 330, 332, 337, 339–40, 346, 357, 420 literary history (i.e. mentions of ) 30, 81, 99, 176–9, 182–8, 195–7, 234, 283–4, 305–6, 320, 322, 326, 345–6, 354, 358–61, 385–9, 412 see also translation history literary theory (i.e. mentions of ) 36, 51–2, 62, 81, 113, 152–3, 216, 289 n. 4

Livius Andronicus 171 n. 6, 177, 202 Livre des Eneydes 46 Livy 53, 175, 180 Llewellyn, Kate 424 localism 18, 81, 167, 175, 177–9, 399, 401–2, 407–11 as rejection of nationalism 399, 401–2 localization 81, 225, 399 Lombardo, Stanley 9, 107–8, 111 n. 19, 113–20 Lombardy 386 Lomonosov, Mikhail 154 London 31, 33, 333, 347, 425 Longinus 281 Longley, Michael 402, 406–7, 422–3 Louis XIII 101 Louis XVI 27–8 love and desire 65–8, 71–4, 76–7, 82, 84–94, 144–6, 162–4, 179, 225, 234, 247, 257–9, 264–71, 287–8, 298–9, 320–2, 330, 372–3 conflict with reason 144–5, 162–3, 267, 271, 320 connection with agricultural vocabulary 65–6 Lonsdale, Lord 322, 327–8 Lucian 127 Lucretius 98–9, 170, 186, 281–3, 295, 297, 319, 408 allusions to in the Georgics 170, 408 compared to or confounded with Virgil 186, 281–2 lullabies 206 Lycidas 244, 403–5 Lyons 32–3 Lycoris 139–41, 377, 379–80 lyric poetry 37, 42, 69, 90, 92, 305 McCrorie Edward 107 n. 2 Machiavelli, Niccolò 386 Macrobius 137, 159 Maecenas 26, 143, 410 Maenalus 247 Maeterlinck, Maurice 337 magic and superstition 44, 89, 104, 225, 377 see also curses; witchcraft Maitland, Richard (Earl of Lauderdale) 79, 86, 88, 92, 94, 96 Makin, Bathsua 98 n. 9 Mallarmé, Stéphan 337 Mambelli, Giuliano 24, 391 n. 25 Mancinelli, Antonio 263 Mandelbaum, Allen 9, 107–19, 121 Manders, W. J. A. 134 mannerism 345 n. 2, 423 Mantinband, James 108 Mantua 379, 402, 411 Manzoni, Alessandri 386–8 March, Ausias 43

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GENERAL INDEX

Marlowe, Christopher 63 n. 3, 80 n. 1, 95 Marmontel, Jean-François 292 Marot, Clement 8, 31–5 Márquez, Gabriel García 121 marriage 27, 41, 43, 64–8, 70, 72–7, 82, 84–7, 119, 121, 179 n. 42, 234, 241, 264, 268, 271, 283, 320, 377, 393–6, 400, 424–5 Mars 112–13, 242 Martindale, Charles 2, 293 n. 29 Martynov 154 Marxism and Marxists 230, 391 Mary I 64, 66 Mary II 67, 283 Mary (biblical) 260 masculinity 99 n. 10, 106, 113 n. 29, 429 see also fathers and fatherhood; gender; sons materialism 199 Mazarin, Cardinal 26, 31 meaning 45, 49, 72, 74, 116, 160, 214, 232, 261–2, 271, 286, 292 n. 23, 293, 350, 352–3, 382, 413 construction of 12, 48, 303, 352 see also semantics Meath 406–7 medical treatises 37, 44, 64 medicine and doctors 44, 64, 166 Medieval period 6, 16, 37–8, 41–4, 46, 48, 54, 56, 69–70, 84, 159–60, 179, 183–4, 260, 264, 271, 320, 366 Mehmed the Conqueror 183–5 Meleniko 147 Meliboeus 215 n. 16, 257–9, 403 Melmoth, William Henry 78 Mena, Juan de 50 Menalcas 245, 372, 404–5 Mendes, Manuel Odorico 12, 14, 17–18, 346–54 Mercury 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 320 mercy see clemency Meredith, George 409 Messina, Angilu di Capua di 40 metaphor 5, 29, 37, 71, 91, 99 n. 13, 116, 175 n. 23, 186, 188, 207, 218, 299–301, 332, 339, 349, 418 metaphrase 277 n. 5 see also paraphrase metapoetics 223 n. 33, 298 methodology of translation 15–16, 18, 23, 136, 152, 158, 160, 208, 217–19, 221, 261–4, 290–4, 306–9, 323, 337, 350–1, 357, 364–5, 368–70, 375–8, 382, 391–2, 401, 413–20 metre 11–13, 19, 48, 50, 52, 64, 71, 73–4, 76, 81, 85, 92–3, 99, 103, 116, 118–19, 121, 126–9, 131–6, 139, 142, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 160, 162–3, 167–75, 177–8, 200–1, 208, 210, 220–1, 224, 227–8, 235, 239–41, 243, 246, 249–50, 257, 264, 269, 277–80, 288, 308, 310, 316, 319, 323–4, 328, 332–3, 351–2, 356–67, 369, 373, 379, 382, 384, 390, 414–15, 418–19



Aeolic Sapphic 149 alexandrine 71, 92–3, 103, 134, 177–8, 210, 220–1, 264, 277–80, 357, 369, 373, 384 Anacreontic ode 154 blank verse 323, 326, 328, 376 dactylic hexameter 19, 71, 74, 76, 81, 118 n. 45, 126–8, 131, 133–6, 139, 142, 147–50, 153, 160, 162–3, 167–75, 200–1, 221, 227, 239–41, 243, 246, 249–50, 264, 277, 310, 323, 332–3, 356–67, 379, 414 decasyllabic 95–6, 128 n. 16, 264, 269, 272 difficulty in rendering 19, 126–9, 132, 382, 414 elegiac couplets 129, 142, 149, 240 fourteener 277–80, 328 see also metre, iambic heptameter hendecasyllabic 52, 134 n. 28, 310, 390 heptasyllabic 103 n. 24 heroic couplet 81, 228, 257, 277–8, 280, 323–4, 328, 330 hybrid or polymetric 11, 357 iambic heptameter 64 iambic pentameter 73, 81, 92–3, 118–19, 121, 228, 278, 280, 323, 351–2, 367 see also metre, heroic couplet octameter 128 ottava rima 50, 52 Pindaric 328 seven-character 227 sloka 128 six-stress 71 Spenserian Stanza 92 spondee 126, 131, 170, 172–5, 240, 278, 351 theory of 128 trochee 128, 148, 174 metrical translation, difficulties of 168, 227 see also metre, difficulty in rendering Michel, Albin 210 Middle Ages see Medieval period Midhat, Ahmed 186, 188 Milbourne, Luke 326 Milesians, as mythical early inhabitants of Ireland 403 military language of 18, 51–2, 55, 57–62, 113–15, 270 service 63, 71, 111–13, 379 tactics 51–2, 54–62 technology 51–2, 55 see also war and warfare Milton, John 90, 227, 276 n. 2, 321–3, 329 mimesis 244, 296, 298 mimetic harmony 291 n. 18, 296 Minas Gerais 346 Minerva 316, 377 misogyny 85, 87–8, 120 see also women, oppression of Modern Literature 228

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

GENERAL INDEX

modernism and modernity 191, 225, 229, 235 modernization of original texts 158, 367 resistance to 69, 200, 204, 206–7, 226–7, 389 of a society 187 Moeris 244, 403–6 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 29, 101, 188, 337 Molins, Marine 262–3, 269 Monaghan 400 monarchism 26, 33–4, 46, 52–3, 59, 62, 64, 67, 101, 283–6, 288, 294, 301–2, 326, 371 monarchists 26, 64, 67, 69, 101, 283–6, 294 monks and monastic life 32, 137 n. 4, 159, 166, 178 monosyllables 239, 241, 278–9, 351 Montagu, Mary Wortley 187 Montague, John 400 Montagut, Abel 134 Montaigne, Michel de 98–100, 118 n. 45 Montenegro 79 monuments 176 n. 29 morality 8, 13, 17–18, 51, 56, 58–9, 62, 108, 184, 208, 239, 269, 271, 287 n. 27, 305, 336, 420 moralizing 8, 18, 54, 62, 300, 320 Morel, Jean 262–4 Morgan, George Osborne 245–6, 249, 258 Morrice, Bezaleel 281 n. 15 Morris, William 64, 69–71, 79, 328, 341 n. 23 Moschus 306 Moscow 154–5, 334 Moser, Barry 109–10 Mossbawn 402, 411 mothers and motherhood 104, 115, 203–5, 234, 246–7, 372, 377–9, 386, 421, 428–9 motives for translation aesthetic 5, 26, 176, 282, 304, 306 cultural 17, 26, 125, 131–2, 151, 155–6, 180, 185, 189, 196–7, 225, 357 ideological 5, 8, 26, 28, 31, 77, 136, 150, 189, 332, 391 literary 131–2, 158 material 26, 31, 119, 276, 282 moral 5, 18, 27 nationalist 5, 11–12, 80–1, 149, 155, 157–8, 165, 176, 180, 187–9, 275, 290, 334, 357, 361, 364, 390–2 pedagogical 10, 12, 17, 27, 143, 151–3, 155–9, 165, 188–9, 200, 217, 222, 261, 304 philological 12, 46, 158 political 8, 17, 28–9, 32, 64, 77, 80–1, 137, 152–8, 165, 185, 196–7, 275, 283, 285–6, 388, 391–2 religious 8, 32–3 as self-definition 155, 176, 274 social 27, 29, 77, 149, 152, 185

mourning see grief Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 215–16 Muldoon, Paul 423 Munich 148, 401–2 Mure, William 85–6, 88, 94–5 Murner, Thomas 1 Muses 64–5, 67, 69–76, 139–41, 143, 167, 177–8, 180–1, 191, 201, 203–6, 209, 240, 244, 257–9, 261, 263, 379, 402 music 63 n. 3, 193, 198–9, 216–18, 240, 246–7, 257–9, 292 n. 23, 303 n. 60, 336, 375, 404–5 relationship with translation 193, 216–19, 227, 292–3, 336 musicality 14, 110–11, 126, 128, 164, 175, 228, 239, 251, 261, 296–9, 307–8, 316, 324, 328, 336, 339–40, 350–3, 369, 373–4, 381–4, 402, 415 Mussolini, Benito 388–90 Mynors, R. A. 54 n. 9, 64 n. 5, 66 n. 10, 144 n. 22, 147, 149, 167 n. 5, 189 n. 36, 251, 299 n. 49, 350 n. 17 Myrmidons 54, 147–8, 309–10, 362 mythology 63, 71, 97, 180, 183–4, 187, 190, 216, 225–6, 272, 285, 303, 364, 409, 414 historicization of 71, 225, 403 Naomi (biblical) 99 Naples 5, 43, 167 n. 5, 305, 389 Napoleonic empire 176–7 see also Bonaparte, Napoleon narrative 9, 36–8, 45, 47–8, 53, 64, 67, 69, 76–7, 82, 99, 163, 179, 204, 214, 228, 271, 276, 279–80, 308–14, 332–3, 345, 418, 422, 428 Nasjonalromantik 198 see also Romanticism Nastagio 39 nation building 2, 16–17, 235, 334 national identity 2, 5, 11–12, 15–17, 188, 334, 361, 385, 397, 399–402 nationalism 2, 5, 11–12, 16, 134, 149, 155, 157–8, 166, 173, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 187–8, 215, 225, 275, 334, 386, 389–92, 399, 402 vs. internationalism 134 resistance to 18, 134, 215, 391 nativism 179, 182 naturalization 262, 264, 269–70 Nausicaä 172 Navarre(a) 42–5 Nebrija, Antonio de 53 necromancy 38, 44 neo-Aristotelian poetics 51, 62 neocapitalism 387 neoclassicism 93, 185, 318, 324, 328, 387–91, 394–5, 397 neologism 167, 270, 363 neoPlatonism 271–2

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GENERAL INDEX

Neoptolemus 315, 334–6, 339, 342 see also Pyrrhus neo-Romanticism 182 see also Romanticism neo-Stoicism 8, 62 see also Stoicism Neptune 220 Néraudeau, Jean-Pierre 260, 271 Nereus 415 new historicists 4, 8, 17, 23 New Literature movement 194, 228 Nicaea, council of 136 Nicholas I (Tsar) 333 Nicholas V (Pope) 184 Nisus 282 n. 17 nobles and nobility see aristocracy normalizing 68, 308, 326 Norway 196, 198 Norwegian languages Bokmål 196–7, 199–200, 202–8 Høgnorsk 196 Nynorsk (Landsmål) 196–7, 199–200, 202–8 Riksmål 196, 200, 204 Norwegian translators and translations 11, 16, 195–208 novel 75 n. 18, 99–100, 106, 120 n. 56, 125, 185, 215–16, 231, 260 Numantia 52, 60–2 numerology 239 nymphs 149–50, 170–1, 408 O’Donoghue, Bernard 403 n. 19, 423 O’Nolan, Brian 403 Octavian 232 Oddone, Enrico 419 Odysseus 148, 165 see also Ulysses Oftedahl, Lars 198 n. 14 Ogilby, John 79, 81, 86, 88, 91–4, 96, 282, 325, 327–8 Old Norse 199–200, 205, 207 Olympus, Mt 192, 280 omission 46, 49, 66–7, 77, 84, 87, 91, 93, 132–3, 150, 162, 221, 244, 248, 250, 260, 268, 299, 303, 323, 373, 376, 378–9, 381, 394, 397, 408 Onesti, Rosa Calzecchi 412, 419 onomatopoeia 239, 297, 353 optimism 108 n. 7, 113, 118, 179–80, 226, 403 n. 19 Orpheus 144–6, 181, 302–3, 354, 415 Osherov, Sergei 332, 343 Ošlak, Vinko 134 Oslo 200 Ostia 376 Oswald, Alice 16, 429



Ottoman Empire 11, 142–3, 149, 153–5, 183–8, 190, 192–4 Ovid 53, 82–3, 97, 100 n. 15, 119, 137, 149, 159, 177–9, 216, 231, 262–3, 270–1, 289, 321 pacifism 79, 118–20 see also anti-war movement and sentiment Pagan Fortress, fall of 179 paganism and pagan religion 136, 179–80, 285 n. 20 Pagnol, Marcel 15, 126 n. 11, 368, 374–83 painting 199, 216 relationship with translation 291–3, 296 n. 43, 299, 304 ‘Palaeologian Renaissance’ 159 n. 25 Palinurus 263 Pallas (goddess) see Athena; Minerva Pallas (warrior) 110, 112–13, 115–17, 415 Pammachius 139 Pan 170–1, 383, 408 panegyric 83 Panofsky, Erwin 374 Panthus 58 parallel formations 160, 311 n. 14 parallelism 114–15, 165, 234, 248, 279, 353 between Aeneas and Achilles 234, 353 between Aeneas and Odysseus 165 between Turnus and Achilles 114–15 paraphrase 63, 83, 136–7, 139, 146, 260, 264, 269, 277, 316, 339, 350, 418 paratext 37–8, 47, 99 n. 13, 105, 187 Parcae 193, 287 see also fate and the Fates Paris (city) 25–7, 31–2, 100, 423 Paris (Trojan) 64, 67, 415 Parnassus, Mt 178 Parry, Adam 108–9, 117 Parthia and Parthians 242, 301 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 12, 15, 17–18, 385, 387, 391–7 passions see emotion; fury; love and desire Pastan, Linda 424 pastoral lifestyle idealization of 166–7, 170–1, 175–7, 179, 181–2, 199–201, 204, 206–7, 273, 400–1, 408, 410–11 realistic portrayal of 16, 207, 369–71, 380, 400–2, 406–11 see also shepherds and shepherding pastoral poetry 10, 16, 32, 170–1, 177, 179, 189, 195–207, 233, 251, 289–90, 303–4, 319, 347, 369, 372, 400–11 landscape of 32, 197–8, 201, 204, 400–2, 405 in response to English hegemony 15, 400–2, 406, 411 paternalism 179, 182

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/8/2018, SPi



GENERAL INDEX

pathos 69, 110–11, 119, 266, 271, 307–8, 312–14, 320–1, 323–4, 336 Virgil as poet of 69, 109–11, 119, 307–8, 312, 314, 320–1, 323–4 see also emotion; grief; Virgil, as poet of pathos patriotism 2, 5, 158, 166, 215, 226, 334, 425 see also nationalism Patroclus 353 patrons and patronage 26, 101, 143 n. 12, 285 see also dedications Paul, Grand Duke 158 Paula (Saint) 413 Pearl Harbor 78, 112 Pedro I 346 Pedro II 346 Peletier du Mans, Jacques 261, 264 n. 25 Pelliccia, Hayden 114, 116 n. 39 Peloponnese 153 Penates 269 Penelope 98, 165 Peneus 138 Penthesilea 102, 106 People’s Republic of China 230 see also China; republicanism and republics Perret, Jacques 12, 16–17, 135 n. 29, 209–13, 216–22 Perrin, Pierre 8, 26, 28, 31, 34–5 Persia and Persians 188, 301 Persian language and literature 42, 188, 190 personification 61, 234, 280, 300, 350 see also Bellona pessimism 12, 113, 179–80, 229, 231–3, 235, 286, 296, 305, 371 Peter the Great 155 Petőfi, Sándor 228 Petrarch 41, 43, 86, 90, 139, 179, 262, 266, 271 Petronius 118 n. 45, 119 Petrov, Vasilii 158, 332, 343 Phaer, Thomas 1, 9, 64–7, 69–71, 77, 79, 81 n. 2, 88, 93–5, 328 Phanariots 185 Phelan, J. P. 240 philhellenism 226 Philitas, Christophoros 10, 136, 147–8 philology and philologists 8, 12, 47, 154, 191, 194, 210, 216–18, 222–3, 225, 240, 256, 306, 359, 369, 376, 378–9, 382 philosophy 4, 8, 225, 232, 293, 332, 408 school 148, 166 works 42, 98, 127, 144, 184, 293, 305 Phoebus 116, 122, 129–32, 138, 243, 266 see also Apollo phonics 175, 415 see also musicality phonomimetism 292, 296, 298 Phylargirius, Junius 380

Phyllis 372 phylloxera 127–8 physiocracy and physiocratic movement 289–90, 293, 295, 303 pietas/pius 70, 209, 233–4, 286–8, 334 translation of 209, 229–30, 233, 288, 334 see also piety piety 51, 286–8 Pilatus, Leontius 139, 160 Pisa, Guido da 40 Pitt, Christopher 79, 322, 327–30 Plan(o)udes, Maximos 137–9, 159–60 Plato 127, 272 Plautus 212 n. 6, 240 plays 52, 60, 118 n. 45, 124, 127, 199, 359, 410 Pléïade poets 33, 210 n. 2, 266 n. 27 Pliny the Elder 321 Poe, Edgar Allan 127, 337 poésie pittoresque 292 n. 25 Poet Laureateship 41, 70, 78, 283 poetic technique 13, 38, 41, 46, 50–2, 71, 74, 104, 115–19, 131–3, 148, 164–5, 178–9, 204, 207–8, 210, 213–14, 218–19, 221, 224, 227–8, 239, 241–5, 248–50, 257, 262, 264–70, 277, 279–80, 284, 288, 292, 296–300, 310–11, 313–14, 321, 323–6, 328, 339, 344, 347–9, 353, 362–5, 373, 381–4, 410, 416–19, 423, 428–9 see also alliteration; compression and concision; doublet; ellipses; enjambment; kenning; metaphor; onomatopoeia; repetition; rhyme; simile; variation poetic translation 14, 74, 115, 208, 245, 350, 369, 390 criticism of 261 poeticisms 206 poetics 12–13, 38, 48, 51, 53, 71–5, 108–10, 112–21, 132–3, 139, 144, 148, 150, 160, 164, 167, 172, 179, 189–91, 194–5, 197, 201, 206–7, 210, 214–16, 218–19, 224, 235, 240, 245, 261, 275, 281–2, 286–7, 291–6, 299, 303, 306–8, 311–12, 315–16, 324, 340, 347, 353, 356, 359, 361–2, 364–7, 372, 392, 394, 397, 409, 417–18 see also style poetry vs. prose 48 Pohlin, Marko 178 Poland 10, 124 Polish translators and translations 19, 25, 35 politicians 63, 67, 78–9, 182, 187, 191, 194 n. 51, 311 n. 12, 333, 346, 390 politics of translation 26, 29, 69, 81, 108, 152–8, 232, 269, 275–6, 283–6, 288–90, 347, 386–92, 395–7 see also language, politics of; motives for translation, political; translation, as form of resistance, as instrument of power, as

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GENERAL INDEX

legitimizer, as propaganda, as reflection of contemporary issues, as tool of creating national identity, as tool of self–determination Poliziano, Angelo 139 Pollio 377 Polo, Marco 50 Poltava 143, 153, 155, 157 Polybius 1, 136 polyglotism 42, 157, 165, 184, 277 polyphony 113–14, 117 Pompadour, Madame de 32 Pope, Alexander 14, 30, 81, 232, 280–1, 288, 322–3 Portugal 347, 349 n. 15 Portuguese language 349–54 Portuguese translators and translations 345–54 postcolonialism 5, 411 postmodernism 395 Potemkin, Grigorii Aleksandrovich 142–3, 155–6, 158 Poussin, Nicolas 374 Powell, Barry B. 107 n. 2 power connection with poetry 18, 23, 29–31, 34, 80, 152–8, 182, 302, 343, 389 mechanisms of 28, 34, 37, 80, 343, 371 prayer and ritual 89, 111, 177, 213, 230, 235, 284–5, 412, 420 pre-romanticism 15, 356 Prešeren, France 175, 179–82 Prete, Antonio 382, 419 n. 21 Priam 27, 59, 114, 211–12, 315, 334–6, 338–9, 341–2 print culture 16, 25, 32–4, 44, 64, 182, 185–7, 284–5, 375 printing and materiality of texts 24–5, 27–34, 39–41, 44–7, 52, 63–4, 67, 69–70, 72, 109, 113–14, 116, 125, 139, 142, 185, 187, 190–1, 210, 217, 263–4, 284–5, 318, 326–7, 360, 390, 407 problems with translation see translation, difficulties of Prometheus 127, 226 propaganda 126, 158, 189, 215, 241 see also translation, as propaganda prophecy 70, 203–5, 231, 235, 264, 415 n. 10, 429 prose 1, 8, 17, 45–6, 48–50, 63, 260, 305, 333, 336, 375 prose translation 1, 8, 11–12, 15, 17, 19, 39, 43 n. 25, 45–6, 48–50, 63, 69, 78, 107, 137, 139, 154, 160, 189–91, 200, 207, 219, 222, 227, 230–1, 260, 357, 360, 366, 368, 390–1, 422 criticisms of 139, 219, 222, 369, 375 Proserpina 144–6



prosody 12, 15, 43, 49, 172, 334, 414–15 see also metre; musicality Protesilaus 320–1 Proust, Marcel 29 Provence 43, 374 provincialism 181–2 Prud’homme, Louis–Jean 34 Psalidas, Athanasios 144 Psalms (books of Bible) 32 public life, public careers 63, 69, 99–100, 154, 200, 233, 283–4, 376, 396 publishers 29, 33–4, 46, 72, 78, 116, 156, 160, 182, 186–7, 191, 197, 200, 283–4, 346, 375 publishing 24–5, 27, 29, 31–4, 39–41, 44–7, 52, 63–4, 67, 69–70, 72, 78, 109, 113–14, 116, 119, 125, 139, 142, 147, 149, 154–8, 160, 166, 179–8, 186–7, 191, 197, 200, 210, 217, 222, 228–9, 231, 261–3, 276, 283–5, 304–5, 318, 320, 326, 328, 332–3, 345–7, 354, 356–8, 360, 368, 374–5, 385–7, 389–90, 402, 406–7 posthumous 127, 147 n. 24, 166, 259, 261–3, 305, 320, 345, 347, 356 n. 6, 385, 402, 423 publishing houses and presses 29, 33–4, 46, 72, 78, 116, 119, 125, 142, 187, 191, 197, 200, 210, 217, 318, 332, 346, 368, 406–7, 412, 422 see also printing and materiality of texts Pulci, Bernando 260 puns 90, 177 n. 33, 241–4, 277 Purcell, Henry 63 n. 3, 80 n. 1 purism 133, 179, 181, 192, 196 Putnam, Michael 108, 113, 117, 232 Pygmalion 241 Pym, Anthony 152 Pyrrhus 317, 334–6, 338–9, 342–3 Qing Dynasty 231 Qu, Yuan 234 Quérard, Joseph-Marie 30 Quinn, Kenneth 232 Quintilian 201 Qur’an 42 Racine, Louis 291–2, 337 rage see anger; emotion; fury Ramous, Mario 419 Raphael 321 Rat, Maurice 191 rationalism 117 rationalization 391 readability see accessibility of translation realism 182, 343 see also pastoral lifestyle, realistic portrayal of reason for translation see motives for translation reason 40, 58, 279–81, 320 vs. emotion 8, 58–9, 62, 144–5, 162–3, 267, 271, 278–81, 314, 320

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

GENERAL INDEX

Recanati 305–6 reception history of 2–4, 36, 52, 56, 97–8, 155, 175, 176 n. 25, 182–9, 194, 210–11, 215–16, 224 n. 1, 226, 230, 236, 289, 292, 330–2, 345–6, 358, 360–1, 385–8, 400, 422 studies of 4, 11, 183, 345 Virgil’s 36, 155, 175, 182–9, 194, 211, 215, 226, 230, 236, 289, 300, 332, 345–6, 358, 360–1, 385–8, 400, 422 recovery 5, 51 n. 3, 86, 389 Reeser, Todd W. 260, 270–1 refugees 48, 396–7 register colloquial 114, 117, 167, 189–90, 212–13, 218, 261, 318–19, 324, 366, 391–2, 394–7, 407–10, 423 difficulties with 200, 308 ‘divine middle way’ 308, 312, 314, 324 equivalence with the Latin 85 high 73, 103 n. 24, 111–13, 115, 117, 119, 191–2, 194, 199, 202, 204–6, 213, 218, 245, 318, 323, 392, 395, 407, 417 see also epic poetry, tone of inconsistency of 85, 117, 213, 407 low 85, 114–15, 117, 181, 194, 202, 206, 219, 245, 294–6, 392 as tool of alienation 417 Reign of Terror 27 religion 28, 34, 42, 51, 180, 302 n. 58, 323 see also Christianity and Christians; Confucianism; Islam; Jews; Judaism; Zen Buddhism religious translators 137, 139 Remonstrantism 127 Renaissance 2, 6, 8, 13, 43, 50–1, 53, 82–3, 89, 97–9, 136, 138, 139, 160, 179, 183–4, 260, 320, 366 renderings poetic 71, 113, 116, 132–3, 160, 200, 207, 278, 324–5, 327, 329, 376, 382 prose 48–9, 160, 189–91, 200, 230 repetition 105, 110, 115–17, 132–3, 165, 204, 207, 248, 249, 296, 299, 325, 348, 378, 382–3, 410, 416, 419, 428 Virgil’s fondness for 110, 132–3, 383 repossession 11, 16, 400 republicanism and republics 26, 28, 91 n. 11, 184 n. 7, 188–94, 225, 230, 283, 285, 333, 386 Reşit, Ahmed 191–4 Restoration, the 67, 285–6 reviews see assessment of translation revision 52, 81, 86–7, 139, 160, 167, 174, 187, 231, 318–20, 322, 328, 338, 354, 385, 389, 392, 407, 425 process of 322

Revivalist movement 410 n. 38 revolution and revolutionary literature 24, 27–33, 42, 144 n. 20, 176 n. 29, 194 n. 51, 210, 230, 283–4, 302 n. 58, 318, 338 n. 13, 386 Rhetorica ad Herennium 45 rhetorical figure 54, 88, 239, 298 rhetorical question 278 rhyme 41, 46, 50, 221, 227–8, 257, 262, 265–9, 277, 279, 284, 323, 326, 328, 376, 410 difficulties with 323 end 41, 265–8, 277, 279, 284, 326, 328 internal 410 ottava rima 50 terza rima 41, 46, 50 rhythm 13, 112, 126, 128, 133, 148, 172, 175, 177, 207, 210, 227–8, 246, 250, 261, 272, 296–8, 324, 350–3, 370, 373–4, 376, 382, 394, 413, 415 Richard, Earl of Lauderdale 79, 96, 326 Richelieu, Cardinal 29 Rieu, E. V. 422 Rimbaud, Arthur 337 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 336 ring composition 245, 257–9 Risorgimento 386–9 rivalry between translators 12, 30, 41–2, 46–7, 81, 83–4, 101, 116, 139, 282, 322–4, 326, 328, 337, 339 see also translation, as competition Rıza, Selma 186 Roman alphabet 187 Roman civilization 28, 64, 80, 226, 229 see also Roman Empire; Roman Republic; Rome Roman d’Énéas 1, 37, 46 Roman Empire 80, 109, 188, 241–2 Roman Republic 60 Fall of, i.e. transition to Empire 188, 283 Romanness (romanità) 389–90 Romanticism 37, 46, 226, 289, 318, 332, 361, 378, 382 German 179 Italian 37 Norwegian (‘nasjonalromantik’) 198 Rome 26–8, 38, 59–61, 64, 80, 100 n. 15, 143, 161, 178, 180, 229, 232, 262, 272–3, 275, 285, 288, 319, 327, 386, 413 Romero, Sílvio 346 n. 5 Ronto, Matteo 43 n. 25 Roudinesco, Alexandre 368 Rouen 32–3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29, 289 royalism see monarchism Ruban, Vasilii Grigorievitch 156 Ruden, Sarah 9, 64, 75–6, 79, 97, 105–7, 113, 118–21, 209, 211, 264, 355, 358–9, 366–7, 425

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GENERAL INDEX

Rufo, Juan 52 Russell, Bertrand 232 Russia 10–11, 14, 17, 69, 124, 142–3, 152, 154–8, 165, 331–44 Russian Academy of Sciences 142, 157–8, 332 Russian translators and translations 14, 126, 142, 144, 154, 156, 158, 331–44 rustic voice 11, 17, 71, 167, 170–1, 179, 181, 409–11 rusticity 16–17, 71, 167, 170–1, 179, 181, 195–6, 200–2, 207–8, 400, 411 Ruth (biblical) 99 Saadi 188 sacrifice 257–9, 312–14, 410 see also human sacrifice Saddlemyer, Ann 403 Said, Edward 187 Saint-Brieuc 33 Saint-Denis, Eugène de 15, 368, 371, 376, 378 n. 9, 380–4 Saint-Dié-des-Vosges 31 Saint-Gelais, Octovien de 1, 260 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de 289 Saint-Rémy, Abbé 380 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 190, 289 n. 1, 289 n. 5 Saintsbury, George 240 Salamanca 44 Sallust 43 n. 23, 127 Saloninus 377 Salutati, Coluccio 41 Salzburg 180 San Vitale a Fuorigrotta 389 Sanadon, Noël–Étienne 375 Sandys, George 187 Sanskrit 128 Santillana, Marqués de 40, 43, 45, 48 n. 34 Sappho 165, 425 Sardinia 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul 29 Satan 321, 329 satire 32, 81, 85, 87, 180–1, 201, 286, 319 Saturn 48, 320 Sava River 178 Savoy 386 Scaliger, Joseph 10, 136, 139–42 Scandinavia 25, 197–8 Scandinavian translators and translations 196–200 scansion 128, 157, 168, 172, 174, 415 n. 9 see also metre Scarcia, Riccardo 419 Scarron, Paul 26, 86 scepticism 62, 216, 232 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 358 n. 13, 367



Scherr, Barry 338 Schiller, Friedrich 15, 19, 149, 172, 182, 356–8, 361, 365 Schlegel, A. W. 174 Schlegel, Friedrich von 179 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 157 n. 22, 348 scholarly poetry 8, 37–8, 44, 150, 159, 243, 306, 370–1, 382 the Eclogues as 150, 370–1, 382 schools, gymnasia, and universities 2, 5, 29, 30, 32–3, 37, 70, 72, 78, 119, 127 n. 13, 147–8, 153, 155–7, 160, 168, 176, 194, 196, 200, 229 n. 28, 231, 322, 332, 337, 353 n. 26, 356–61, 364, 366, 390, 405, 407, 421, 424–5 see also education and schooling Schröder, Rudolf Alexander 12, 15, 17, 355–9, 364–7 Schrott, Raoul 359, 366–7 Schulhof, Stanislav 133–4 Schwab, Raymond 186 science and scientific works 37, 42, 126, 144, 154, 170, 225, 294 n. 31 Scipio Aemilianus Africanus 60–2 Scotland 64 n. 4, 283 Scots language 1, 47, 64 n. 4, 125, 135, 326 Scott, Sir Walter 328 Scottish translators and translations 47, 64 n. 4, 81–3, 85–7, 93–5, 105, 125, 326 Scribonia 87 Scylla 247–8, 329, 366 Sébillet, Thomas 262 Second Sophistic 160 Second World War 78–9, 111–12, 357, 364, 371 German Occupation 371 Segal, Erich 108–11 Segrais, Jean Regnault de 29, 87 self-canonization 177, 179–80 self-censorship 225 see also censorship self-control 8, 52, 59, 62, 82 self-definition 176 translation as a tool of 155, 399 self-harm 99 see also suicide semantic requirements 152 semantic translation 152 semantics 56, 72, 117, 152–3, 202–6, 208, 212–14, 217, 230, 265–70, 295, 303, 310, 315–16, 336, 340, 349, 353, 365, 369, 372, 380–2, 389, 392, 404, 409–10, 413, 415, 420 see also equivalence, semantic Seneca the Younger 127, 231 sententia 296 sentimentality 218, 235, 282 n. 18, 286 Sermonti, Vittorio 15, 17, 387, 395–8, 419 Serravalle, Giovanni de 43 n. 25 Sers, Oliver 210 n. 2

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

GENERAL INDEX

sertanejos 347 Servius 47, 201, 263, 380–1 sexism 120 see also gender; misogyny; women, oppression of Sforza, Francesco 232 Shakespeare, William 124, 186, 216, 231, 410 Shaw, Anne 424 Sheffield, John 284 shepherds and shepherding 178, 181, 197–9, 201–4, 206–8, 245–6, 251–9, 273, 306, 347, 371, 374–5, 404 see also pastoral lifestyle Short Story Magazine 228–9 Sibyl, the 203–5, 232, 269, 271 Sicilian language 40, 385 Sicilian translators and translations 40 Sicily 40, 43, 46, 205–6 Siena 38, 421 ‘silver line’ 248–50 simile 66, 163–4, 230, 298, 300, 313–14, 362–5, 423, 429 simplification 75–6, 81, 166, 175 n. 24, 190 n. 37, 301, 358, 418 Singleton, Robert 79 Sisson, C. H. 79 Slavic language and literature 25, 166–79 Slavs 173 n. 11, 179, 180 sleep 83, 88–93, 103–4, 145–8, 163, 165, 266, 273 Slovenia 11, 166, 175–80 Slovenian translators and translations 11, 166–82 social structure 153, 290 socialism 69, 79, 343 Solov’ev, Vladimir 332, 338 sonic quality of translation see musicality; phonics sonnet 43, 90, 126 n. 9, 272–4, 427–8 sons and fathers 67, 288, 315, 334–6, 338–9, 341–2, 423–4, 428 and mothers 110, 115, 246–7, 372, 377–9 Sophocles 127, 402 Sørensen, Ernst 195, 199, 202–7 sorrow see grief sound effects and patterns see musicality source culture, foreignness of 208, 239, 323 source text 4–5, 12, 18, 38, 46, 152, 187, 208, 228, 240, 244, 262, 297, 354, 419 South Africa 121 Sovre, Anton 172, 174 Sowerby, Robin 3, 84 n. 4, 160 n. 28, 276 Spain 8, 17, 38, 40–5, 49–50, 52–3 Spanish Inquisition 41 Spanish language 47, 53, 349 see also Castilian language; Catalan language

Spanish translators and translations 17, 37–8, 40–50, 52–60, 62 see also Castilian translators and translations; Catalan translators and translations Sparta 170–1 spectator, reader as 270 Spercheus River 170–1 ‘spirit’ of the language see language, spirit of ( genie) Spondanus (Jean de Sponde) 279–80 St Petersberg 333 Staiger, Emil 356 n. 4, 359 Stallings, Alicia 73 n. 16, 117 Stanhope, Philip 284 Stanyhurst, Richard 85–8, 95 Stapylton, Robert 85, 88, 93, 95 Steiner, Rudolph 200 Stevenson, Jane 425 Stoicism 8, 52, 58, 62 n. 17, 232, 320 storm scene 85, 93–4, 212, 220–1, 273, 296–8, 348, 356 Strahan, Alexander 79 Strasbourg 360 stress (metrical) 71, 126, 128, 167–74, 210, 220, 241, 278, 352, 373, 414 Strindberg, August 127 Stritar, Josip 175, 182 structure 38, 47–8, 133 n. 23, 157, 159–60, 177, 189, 211–12, 214, 220–1, 239, 246–59, 311, 316, 338, 413, 415 aesthetics 248–59 patterns 177, 239, 246–59 see also epanalepsis; ‘golden line’; repetition; ring composition; ‘silver line’, syntax; word play style 13, 37, 48, 51, 53, 71–5, 108–10, 112–21, 132–3, 139, 144, 148, 150, 160, 164, 167, 172, 179, 189–91, 194–5, 197, 201–2, 206–7, 210, 214–16, 219, 224, 235, 240, 245, 261, 275, 281–2, 286–7, 291–6, 299, 303, 306–8, 311–12, 315–16, 323–4, 340, 347, 353, 356, 359, 361–2, 364–7, 372, 392, 394, 397, 409, 417–18 Styx and Stygian shores 269, 273, 423 Šubic, Jožef 11, 17, 166–73, 175, 182 Suetonius 213 suffering see grief suicide 62, 83, 89 see also death and dying Sulpicia 425 n. 25 Sumarokov 154 Surrey, Earl of see Howard, Henry Sutton, Geoffrey 134–5 Sweden 174, 197 Swift, Jonathan 279 Switzerland 27, 31–2

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GENERAL INDEX

Sychaeus 89, 93, 269 Sylvanus 170–1, 408 symbolism French 337–8, 378, 382 Russian 332, 337 Symmons, Charles 79 synaesthesia 104, 292–3 synaloepha 414 syneresis 414 Synge, J. M. 401, 403 syntax 126, 132–3, 150, 153, 157, 160, 162–3, 189, 204–6, 209, 211–12, 214, 218, 228, 239, 250–1, 277, 296, 307–8, 311–13, 316, 328, 338, 340, 342–3, 347–9, 351, 369, 404 Tacitus 149 Tagore, Rabindranath 127 tanci (Chinese folklore genre) 227 Tao, Yuanming 233 Tara (traditional seat of the kings of Ireland) 402 target language 4, 152–3, 190, 208, 239, 261, 269, 348, 365–6, 415, 418–19 Tarquitus 111, 117 Tasso, Torquato 51, 88–9, 179 taste 69, 221, 273, 289, 304, 323, 338, 369–70, 414 n. 8, 416–20 Tate, Nahum 80 n. 1 Taygetus mountains 170–1 Taylor, Edward Fairfax 79 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 336 teachers 9–10, 29–30, 33, 40, 50, 70, 98, 109, 113, 115, 121, 127, 147–9, 176, 178, 210, 231, 304, 333, 359, 361, 369, 387, 389, 392, 405 technical vocabulary 270, 348 technology 24 n. 3, 51, 290 Tegnér, Esaias 174 Teixeira, Bento 345 Tel Aviv group 125 temporal perception 269 Tennyson, Alfred 232–4, 236, 240 Teógenes 62 textbooks 124, 155, 159, 176, 231 Theocritus 10, 142, 149, 189, 201, 204 Theodorakopoulos, Elena 118 n. 47, 429 theology 40, 52, 137, 155, 159 Theresa, Maria 175 n. 24 Thessaly 149 ‘Third Rome’ 154–5 ‘third space’ 5 Thorsen, Thea Selliaas 197 n. 7 Thott, Birgitte 98 n. 9 Thucydides 189 Ti, Tang 225 n. 8 Tityrus 181, 189, 251, 257–9, 383 Toledo 42, 52



Tolstoy, Leo 228 tone 105, 112, 117, 150, 163, 174, 192, 207, 215–16, 221–2, 228, 241, 269, 280, 294–5, 300, 307–8, 314–15, 319, 366, 376, 382, 391–2, 395, 410, 417, 419 didactic 181, 218, 294–5 prescriptive 294–5 see also epic poetry, tone of Tonson, Jacob 283–4, 286 totalitarianism 388 Tottel, Richard 86 n. 5 Tours 33 Toury, Gideon 185 tragedy and the tragic genre 164, 197, 225, 292 n. 22, 346 n. 4, 359, 402 n. 15 transcreation 351 transformative translation 357, 365 translatability 12, 105, 187–8, 351, 367 see also translation, difficulties of translatio imperii et studii 3, 9, 16, 80, 178, 180 translation aids 144 as art 158, 217 as commentary 13, 19, 29, 144, 148, 376 as competition 12, 30, 41, 46–7, 49, 81, 83–4, 101, 116, 139, 180, 217, 282, 304, 322–4, 326, 328, 330, 337, 339, 354, 368–9, 376, 392 definition of 152 difficulties of 16, 103, 105, 125–7, 132, 154, 217–19, 227, 235, 262, 307–8, 316, 323–4, 329, 337, 350, 360–1, 369, 389, 412–14, 416–17 ethics of 239 as form of resistance 8, 18, 399–402, 406, 411 as instrument of power 18, 23, 29–31, 34, 80, 152–8, 182, 302, 343, 389 instrumental approach to 5, 17 interlinear form 6–7, 335–6, 395 justification for 16, 46, 48, 101, 104, 125, 213, 369, 376, 379 as legitimizer 7, 8, 12, 16–17, 80–2, 87, 154 pleasures of 23, 275, 318–19, 375, 413 as propaganda 126, 158, 189 as reflection of contemporary issues 1, 13, 15, 17, 29, 31–4, 71, 102, 104–21, 151–2, 268–9, 275–6, 283–6, 288–90, 295, 391–2, 422 as tool of creating national identity 12–13, 17, 80–2, 87, 154, 176, 182, 225, 390–2, 402 as tool of self–determination 155 see also aesthetics of translation; art of translation; assessment of translation; bilingual edition or translation; direct translation; financing of translation; fluidity/flow of translation; free translation; identical translation; intermediary translations; line-by-line translation; literal

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

GENERAL INDEX

translation (cont.) translation; methodology of translation; metrical translation; motives for translation; music, relationship with translation; poetic translation; politics of translation; prose translation; semantic translation; transformative translation; translation history; verse translation; word-for-word translation translation history 2, 11, 15, 25–50, 52–3, 63–4, 69–76, 80–6, 97–101, 105–9, 111–13, 115–16, 118–19, 124–9, 131–2, 134–9, 142–4, 147–60, 165–7, 171–6, 182–91, 197–200, 209–10, 215–19, 224–36, 260–4, 275–6, 283–6, 289–90, 292–3, 305–6, 316, 318–20, 322, 326–8, 331–4, 336–8, 343, 346–7, 355–62, 364–5, 368–9, 385–92, 395–8, 402–3, 406–7, 412–13 of the Aeneid 2, 15, 25–31, 35, 44–9, 52, 63–4, 69–76, 80–6, 98–101, 105–9, 111–13, 115–16, 118–19, 124–9, 131–2, 134–6, 142–4, 147–8, 150–8, 160, 165, 197, 209–10, 218, 224, 227–34, 260–4, 275–6, 283–6, 306, 316, 318–20, 322, 326–8, 332–4, 336–8, 343, 346–7, 355–62, 364–5, 390–2, 395–8 translation studies 4–5, 97, 183, 185, 195, 358, 419 translation theory binaries in 4, 206, 337, 419 general 4, 15, 52–3, 153, 156, 172, 195, 206, 217–18, 239–40, 261–2, 289–94, 296, 298, 303–4, 306–9, 323, 337, 351, 357, 364–5, 369–70, 375–7, 419–20 translator ideal qualities of 18, 121, 137, 158, 217–18, 277, 369–70, 382 relationship with source author 4, 14–16, 36, 49, 87, 91 n. 11, 108–14, 119, 121, 275–6, 281–3, 289, 413 relationship with Virgil 14–16, 36, 49, 87, 91 n. 11, 108–14, 119, 121, 275–6, 281–3, 289, 413 translator’s debt 293, 303–4 transliteration 198 n. 14, 311 transplantation 5, 80 Trapp, Joseph 79, 325, 327–8 ‘travesty’ (type of translation, ‘Travestie’) 26, 86, 91, 365 Tredehan, Pierre 29 tricolon 245 triplets 278–9, 282 n. 17, 287–8 Triton 220 Trojan ancestry 2 Trojan horse 27, 55–6, 103 Trojan War 27, 52–9, 102–5, 147–8, 180, 211–12 Trojans, Turks as 183–4 ‘troubadour revival’ 43

Troy 27–8, 38, 52–9, 101–5, 147–8, 161, 179–80, 211–12, 309–10, 317, 334, 351, 362, 423, 425–6 destruction of 52–9, 101–5, 147–8, 179–80, 211–12, 309–10, 334, 423, 425–6 see also Trojan War Tudor, Mary see Mary I Tullin, C. B. 198 n. 13 Turin 32, 386 Turkey 11, 17, 183, 187 Turkish Language Reform 190–2 Turkish Republic 188–91, 194 Turkish translators and translations 11, 185–94 Turkish War of Independence 188–9 Turnus 67–70, 72–4, 76–7, 114, 119, 234, 353 Tuscan literature 386 Tuscany 38, 40 ‘two voices’ theory 117, 121 see also polyphony Twyne, Thomas 1, 64, 69, 328 typography 222, 307 n. 8 Tyre and Tyrians 241, 415 USA see United States of America Ugolino, Count 311 Ugurgieri, Cecco di Meo degli 39 Ugurgieri, Ciampolo di Meo degli 38–40, 46 Ukraine 143, 151, 153–6 Ulysses 54–5, 147–8, 309–10, 316 understandability of translation see accessibility of translation Underworld, the 144–6, 234, 269, 271, 273, 320–2, 408, 423–4, 426 see also Elysian Fields; Fields of Mourning Union of the Eastern and Western Churches 159 n. 25 United States of America 9, 77, 106–9, 113, 118 n. 47, 424 universalism 179, 183, 186, 291, 299 untranslatability 256, 291, 351, 356, 367 n. 52 see also translatability; translation, difficulties of urban voice 11, 17, 181, 200, 204, 207 urbanity 17, 181, 195–6, 200–2, 204, 207–8, 400 utilitarianism 152, 178, 181 Valeriano, Piero 263 Valéry, Paul 12, 15, 219, 368–76, 378–9, 382–3 Valla, Lorenzo 41, 139 Vallienne, Henri 124–35 Vallon, Annette 330 valour 51, 60–1, 72, 130, 162, 230, 265 Van Schurman, Anna Maria 98 Van Sickle, John 245–7, 249–50, 258 variatio 250, 348 see also variation

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GENERAL INDEX

variation 5, 51–2, 54, 178–9, 208, 210, 213, 250, 270, 323, 325, 347–8, 372, 417 Varro 251 Vasio, Giampaolo 41 Vatican Library 40 Vega, Lope de 52 vegetation 189, 203, 205, 254–8, 269, 273, 380, 389 Vegio, Maffeo 41, 179 Veldeke, Heinrich von 46 Veneti 180 Venice 39, 41, 385 Ventre, Gabriele 414 Venus 59, 67, 179, 190, 232, 325 Venuti, Lawrence 13, 195, 206, 208, 239, 244, 303, 324 verb tense 129, 376, 408, 418 Verlaine, Paul 337 vernacular language 7, 25, 37, 41–3, 46–50, 52–3, 80, 154–6, 262, 331 prose 227 translation 7, 37–43, 45–50, 53, 80, 154, 202, 207, 261, 331, 385 vernacularization (volgarizzamento) 7, 8, 18, 37–43, 45–50 Verona, Guarino da 41 Versailles 302 verse translation 69–70, 92, 107, 113, 134, 139, 141, 154, 160, 172–3, 188, 219–20, 227, 234, 289–90, 323–4, 326, 328, 347, 360–1, 375, 382, 414, 423 impossibility of 139, 188, 290, 323–4, 360–1, 375 Veyne, Paul 12, 209–16, 223 Vicars, John 79, 85, 88, 94–5 vices 28, 58, 234, 306 Vienna 33, 178, 182 Vietnam War 9, 17, 107–9, 111–14, 118, 121 Villena, Enrique de 1, 8, 18, 37–8, 40–50 Vinje, A. O. 196–8 violence 51–2, 54, 57–8, 60–2, 99, 103, 109–13, 115–19, 121, 163–4, 234, 246–7, 369, 405–6 see also death and dying; self–harm; suicide; war and warfare Virgil 1, 23–33, 35–50, 53, 63–8, 71, 73–5, 82–3, 85–6, 93, 108–11, 113–14, 120–1, 134, 136, 143–4, 147, 149–58, 160–7, 173, 175–208, 210–11, 212–16, 219–36, 240–1, 243–50, 257, 258, 260–78, 279 n. 10, 281–91, 293–304, 306–26, 328–34, 336–40, 343–68, 370–7, 379, 381–3, 385–93, 395–414, 416–26, 428–9 Christianization of 184–5, 269 criticism of 26, 83, 226, 306, 369–70, 379 influence of 36, 90, 134, 224, 271–4, 289–90, 304, 347, 360



as magus and necromancer in folklore 38, 44 as poet of pathos 69, 109–11, 119, 121, 232–5, 266, 307–8, 312, 314, 320–1, 323–4 praise of 109–11, 121, 229, 262, 286–8, 290–1, 306–7, 319–20, 387 reception history of 3, 36, 175, 183–9, 194, 211, 215–16, 226, 228, 230, 236, 289, 330, 332, 345–6, 358, 360–1, 385–8, 400, 422 relationship with Augustus 26, 107, 114, 188, 215, 229, 232, 275, 283, 287, 290, 371 relationship with empire 9, 63, 80, 82, 87, 107–9, 111, 113–14, 180, 188, 215, 229, 232, 275, 283, 290, 371 style of 37, 77, 104, 108–10, 112, 139, 148, 179, 195, 201, 210, 214–16, 219, 226, 241, 275, 281–2, 286–7, 291, 293–4, 306, 311–12, 323–4, 339, 353, 356, 417, 423 tomb of 389 translation history of 2–3, 14, 24–6, 28–36, 38–9, 43–50, 63–4, 69–76, 80–6, 97–101, 105–9, 111–13, 115–16, 118–19, 124–9, 131–2, 134–9, 142–4, 147–55, 160, 165–7, 171–3, 175–6, 182–91, 197–200, 209–10, 215–19, 224–36, 260–4, 275–6, 283–6, 289–90, 293, 306, 316, 318–20, 322, 326–8, 331–4, 336–8, 343, 346–7, 355–62, 364–5, 368–9, 385–92, 395–8, 402–3, 406–7, 412–13 translator’s relationship with 14–16, 36, 82, 87, 108–14, 119, 121, 143, 275–6, 281–3, 289, 413 Virgil Society 108 virtues 8, 48, 51, 57, 59–60, 62, 83, 133, 162–4, 273, 287–8 see also heroism; honour; self-control Vivaldi, Cesare 419 Vivona, Francesco 390 vocabulary 14, 71, 99, 126, 131, 133, 142, 153, 179, 199, 201, 205–7, 218, 228, 269–71, 280, 296, 313, 318, 324, 329, 349, 363, 394, 407 see also agriculture, language of; archaism and archaizing language; classicizing; compound words; contractions; dialects; epic poetry, diction of; language; Latinisms; register; technical vocabulary Vodnik, Valenin 176–9 voice 11, 13, 27–8, 36–8, 98, 109, 113–14, 117, 121, 132, 165, 180, 188–9, 204, 206–7, 222–3, 271, 275, 280, 286–8, 307, 319, 374, 382, 401, 409–10, 413, 420, 424, 427 Voltaire 29, 289, 299 Voß, Johann Heinrich 12, 15, 17, 173–5, 355–67, 385 Voulgaris, Eugenios 10, 17–18, 136, 142–4, 150–65 voyeurism 341, 401

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

GENERAL INDEX

Vretos, André Papadopoulo 144 Vršac, Mt 178 Vulgate 139, 412 Vulcan 377–8, 417 Waller, Edmund 3, 86, 88, 96 Walsh, P. G. 232 war and warfare 8, 9, 17–18, 51–2, 54–62, 64, 67–8, 71–7, 93, 102–3, 106–19, 121, 161, 178, 184–5, 188, 230, 232, 234, 241–2, 273, 287, 314, 321, 323, 329, 333–6, 338–9, 342, 408–9, 422, 425 siege warfare 52, 54–61 see also military Waringhien, Gaston 125–8, 132 n. 21 Warren, Rosanna 424, 427 n. 31 Warring States period 234 Warton, Joseph 79 Warton, Thomas 326 Washington, DC 113 Wells, H. G. 111 n. 20 Wells, Margaret 260, 262 Wendi 180 Wessel, J. H. 198 n. 13 West, David 113 n. 26 Westernization 235 Whigs 284 Wiik, Matti 195, 200, 202, 205–7 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 360–1, 365, 367 Wilde, Oscar 337 Wilhelm, August 179 William III (William of Orange) 67, 283–4 Williams, Gordon 112 n. 22 Williams, R. D. 232 Wills, Gary 118 n. 46, 120, 355, 358, 366 n. 49 Wilson, A. N. 120 Wilson, Emily 97, 117 Wilson, Woodrow 111 n. 20 witchcraft 89, 104 see also curses

Wittig, Monique 102, 106 Wolf, Johann August 356 women as journalists 186 oppression of 28, 84–8, 99–101, 105–6, 120, 425 portrayal of 63–77, 80–9, 91–4, 99–102, 105, 120, 424–5, 427 as translators 16, 64, 73, 75–7, 97–106, 118–21, 422, 424–8 see also gender women’s studies 75 see also feminism Woodstock Festival 108 word order see syntax word placement 160, 162, 164 word play 239–44 word-for-word translation 47, 49, 139, 141–2, 146, 150, 160, 162–3, 261–4, 307–8, 313, 315 Wordsworth, Christopher 319, 322 Wordsworth, William 12, 14, 17, 318–30 Worth, Valerie 260, 262 Wroth, Thomas 333 Wyatt, Thomas 85 Yang, Xianyi 224–5, 228 Yang, Zhouhan 224, 227, 230–6 Yeats, William Butler 400, 403–4 Yquem, Michel 99 Zamenhof, Ludwig 10, 124–6, 131, 134 Zante 147 Zelinskii, F. F. 337 Zen Buddhism 114, 120 Zheng, Zhenduo 228 Zhukovskii, Vasilii 12, 14, 17, 331–5, 337, 341–4 Ziolkowski, Theodore 2, 70–1 Živa 179 Zurich 359