Virgil Translations
After posting my thoughts on Homer translations, one of my commenters asked me what I thought were the best Virgil translations. This is my response, along with a few other thoughts about the great latin poet.
I.
Virgil is almost the epitome of the highly sensitive person. Doubtless many poets fall roughly under that description, but Virgil, like Tennyson, the closest equivalent in English, seems to have been more sensitive than most. Again as with Tennyson, this sensitivity, when applied to the proper use of words, resulted in a phenomenal technical perfection. Both their verse is exquisitely nuanced. Furthermore, such sensitivity gave them a deep well of feeling from which to draw. Both poets were finely attuned to the pain of others. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Virgil’s great theme was suffering. In fact, feeling in Virgil often seems like it is almost about to break all bounds. Frequently, he nearly loses control. Reading, say, the story of Dido, the prevailing impression is often one of near hysteria, held in check only by the strictest artistic control:
It must be said that neither Virgil nor Tennyson were great thinkers, but they did not need to be. Such flawless technique and deep feeling are more than enough to propel them into the first ranks of literature.
As Robert Royal of the Weekly Standard notes:"There are many signs that the young Virgil was an Epicurean and that he never wholly repudiated that philosophy in adulthood." Virgil was without doubt deeply influenced by the latin poet Lucretius, himself a devout follower, if one may use the term, of the materialist philosopher Epicurus. The Epicureans emphasized knowledge, contemplation, and moderate pleasure as the only way to avoid suffering. They were also harsh critics of religion, the ancient equivalents of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins (though, to be fair, they did grant the gods a kind of platonic existence). It was undoubtedly the Epicurean emphasis on how to avoid suffering that initially attracted such a sensitive soul as Virgil. However, while the Epicureans were quite concerned with suffering, it was mostly with their own. Like many elite philosophers, they were quite prepared to write off most of humanity:
But for someone so attuned as Virgil to suffering, his own and that of others, this kind of detachment was doubtless all but impossible to achieve.
I myself recently had a bit of an online dialogue with Razib Khan about whether an atheist vision of the universe was objectively horrible or not. I contended that any world with so much wanton cruelty was indeed objectively horrible, and that supernatural intervention, likely or not, was the only way out of this mess. I was struck by the idea that he didn’t seem to have ever given the suffering of others much thought. After all life isn’t so terrible for him. I suppose if you have a relatively nice life, and you do not feel emotional pain very deeply yourself, and you are more interested in systems than in other people, and you yourself have the kind of nerdy mind that does not easily identify with others, then the immense suffering of the human and natural world won’t much disturb your sleep. This doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad fellow, but it does mean that you may not have given the suffering of the world as much thought as it deserves. For Virgil, though, highly sensitive fellow that he was, this was not really an option; he doubtless made a miserable Epicurean.
Furthermore, as Royal notes:
Harold Bloom, in his incessant jihad to cleanse literature from any relationship with Christianity, would have us believe that Virgil, while clearly influenced by Lucretius, slavishly followed him in all things. This is patent nonsense. In his own way, Virgil seems to have been a deeply religious man. Piety is one of his prime virtues. He advises his farmer:
The Virgil who emphasizes his hero's piety, who centres his epic on a vision of Heaven and Hell, and whose pity for his fellow creatures, human and non-human alike, animates all his work could hardly be more different than the haughty, aloof Epicurean philosopher-poet, who identifies with no one and who, wrapped up in his own heroic self-image, thinks perhaps a bit too well of his own opinions.
II.
It is perhaps one of the ironies of history that it is Virgil the pagan homosexual who, as far as any writer may be put to blame, may have done most to bequeath to the West its strain of sexual puritanism. Here he sounds frankly envious of the asexual bees:
Augustine and Jerome, the usual suspects in any polemic against sex-hating Christians, were themselves steeped in Virgil. But they have nothing on the pagan. Where else could they have found the words and ideas to express their distaste for the merely physical? I don’t recall much of this kind of thing in the Greek fathers, and there is far more agonizing over sex in Virgil than there is in the Bible. Even for St. Paul, who urged his followers not to marry, it was, as C.S. Lewis long ago pointed out, marriage itself, not the marriage bed that was the married person’s prime obstacle to God. That is, it is the mundane, day to day struggle of maintaining a household, not the act of congress, that distracts us most easily from those first things.
I’m still not convinced, however, that there have ever been many people, devout Christians or no, who have really, in fact, been anti-sex. Doubtless there have been some. But even Augustine, who did say some pretty silly things about sex, was in his pastoral duties surprisingly easy-going. Then, who actually doesn’t like sex? Perhaps a few people who have been really burned by their desires. But, if that is the case, who can actually blame them? Our fear of sex’s power over us seems to me entirely legitimate:
Is there any better way to describe the effects of desire than “bewildered into heedlessness”? Sex urges us on into unhealthy emotional entanglements, and drives to do bad things we otherwise wouldn’t do. It is directly or indirectly the cause of much violence, emotional and physical, that we inflict on each other:
Sex, then, is not an unqualified good. I am further reminded the quote from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, “I always considered you a man of some integrity, except in your dealings with women.” How many men are there who would never think of lying for any other material advantage, but who would lie as a matter of course to get a woman into bed. Who, even among the most upright of men, hasn’t at least had the thought flit across the mind, “Its only a little lie, and besides she’ll enjoy it too once we get there.” I don’t think any decent male human being could be any thing but appalled at the things sex has at least tempted him to do.
At least in a society like ours, mostly free as it is from material want, I don’t think its too much to say that the vast majority of people’s intense suffering is rather closely related to sex. Who can fail to note the anguish and self-doubt of being alone, the terror of rejection, the lies and misunderstandings of courtship, the sting of betrayal, and, even in the best case, the inevitable difficulties of living with another flawed human being. I remember reading David M. Buss’ Evolution of Desire and remarking that it made one want to burn every bed in the country. I don’t want to be too negative, most of the good things in life, including sex itself, come out of sex too, but we do well to note its easy transformation into a thing of the night. Along with its immense potential for good comes an immense potential for evil.
III.
We also do well to remember that Virgil, in contrast to Homer, is a poet of civilization. Camille Paglia has pointed out that while Homer’s heroes give each other gifts of immense practicality, in Virgil they give objets d’art. We tend to forget that Homer comes only at the dawn of civilization. The Greeks of Homer’s time were indeed in some sense civilized, but, as William Morris’ translation has the virtue of reminding us, his Greeks have as much or more in common with the Viking raiders as they do with us.
Christian writers and poets, from Augustine and Jerome to Dante, from Dryden on to Tennyson, have always felt an immense affinity for Virgil. With his emphasis on family, piety, and suffering, it is not hard to see why. But Virgil also, unlike Homer, writes with a sense of history. Rome, as an entity, has a purpose, and so everything that has led up to it shares in that purpose. In the Iliad, the sack of Troy has no ultimate meaning; its cause really is nothing but a random quarrel over a beautiful woman, and the motive behind it is nothing but private revenge. It has no other ultimate purpose than to be a showcase for individual heroics, whether of the martial prowess of Achilles or the cunning of Odysseus, that provide entertainment for the Gods. For the Greeks, the sack of Troy, however magnificent in itself, doesn’t move towards anything, while for Virgil it is the prelude to the founding of the Roman state. In this sense, Virgil is closer to the Judeo-Christian view that history is moving towards an end. The fourth eclogue, while obviously not the Christian prophecy it was sometimes made out to be, does share something of Christianity’s messianic sensibility:
Of course, for Virgil, this messianism was almost entirely secular and imperial. Rome was the culmination of history, bringing peace and order to a world filled with chaos and blood; it was the culmination of all that had come before and it would last forever.
Virgil’s political program has come in for much criticism. His idealization of order, restraint, discipline and piety is not much in favour these days amongst our elites, though it must be said that Virgil shared with many among them an intense horror of war:
Harold Bloom once made fun of Virgil, suggesting that given Virgil’s nightmarish apprehension of reality, his idealization of Augustus was much like Thomas Pynchon going into the service of Ronald Reagan. But Bloom's irony falls flat. It is hardly surprising that those most sensitive to the shadows should most appreciate order and restraint. Furthermore, left-liberal alternatives to traditional virtue have all been notorious failures. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society. (The sexual revolution may have been nothing but good, clean fun for our upper middle classes, but it was it, not the legacy of white racism, that eviscerated the black family.) Law and order are the first duty of the state. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace. Handouts to the poor are a moral hazard and often do cause more harm than good. It may not be pleasant to say it, but in this realm as in others, two and two really do equal four.
But all of these policies have a terrible, terrible cost. Human beings will suffer because of them. Tough divorce laws may make marriage stronger overall, but individual people will end up trapped in appalling marriages. Locking up criminals may be the right thing to do, but it will deprive thousands of children of a father's support, and his paycheck. A strong military may be necessary, but it does come with the temptation to overreach. Welfare reform may keep the many off of dependancy, but some who truly cannot help themselves will slip through the cracks. These policies may indeed be for the best overall, but we cannot flinch from their darker consequences. The instruments of state are all blunt, and it is to Virgil's credit that he so intensely mourns their inevitable victims.
There is, it is true, something of the artist’s political naivite in Virgil’s program. Rome didn’t, obviously, last, and its history, far from exemplifying an ideal order, was for the most part one of plunging from political crisis to political crisis. Furthermore, much of Roman empire building was taken on, not so much in order to bring Roman virtues to the barbarians, as to fill the coffers of predatory elites. Finally, no mere political order can truly shield us from ourselves. We live in a fallen world. Virgil’s over-idealization of Rome is fair warning of how even ostensible conservatism can lapse into quasi-utopianism. I would note that this seems a particular temptation for Americans. Much as I admire Ronald Reagan, he was wrong, America is not a shining city on a hill. It may indeed be an example for the world, but we should never forget that, even in the best of all political orders, there is still eminent scope for human evil. America may be significantly less awful than just about any human society in history, but it is still far from the City of God.
Once again I don’t want to be too negative. I am frequently amazed at just how much good we have been able to make out of such stuff as we are. Who can fail to join in Virgil’s celebration of man’s accomplishment:
Though man remains deeply flawed, and though in every society a thousand heartbreaking things happen each day, we still really should be grateful for what we have. Things could be a lot worse. But neither should we relax our guard. Civilization is a fragile thing and cannot be taken for granted. Everything we have accomplished is waiting to fall apart. We too are part of nature and as Virgil, in one of his wisest moments, notes:
What is truly disturbing about Virgil however, is not so much his imperialism or his somewhat naïve hopes for Rome, but that his quest for order can lead him to endorse a kind of collective totalitarianism:
Virgil’s bees live in harmony, but they have no individuality. There is no pain in their lives, but no real joy either. One cannot help but feel that Virgil’s obsessive quest to alleviate the sorrows of this world has let him to advocate the individual’s complete absorption in the state. Its as if somehow only a grey, colourless, monotony, of the kind found in socialist realism, were the solution to the problem of pain. But of course the sensual, artistic Virgil, lover of Falernian wine and Tyrian purple dye, could never have standed living in such a place for a minute. No one could. It is not a fit environment for human beings. As E.O. Wilson, the world’s authority on social insects, once said of Marxism, “Wonderful theory, wrong species."
IV.
Virgil is said to be notoriously difficult to translate. So, while numerous eminent translators have taken up the challenge, only a few are really worth taking a look at. Here are my recommendations, ranked from first to last:
The Aeneid
1. Robert Fitzgerald
2. Allen Mandelbaum
3. Robert Fagles
4. John Dryden
Eclogues and Georgics
1. David Ferry
2. John Dryden
3. L.P. Wilkinson
4. C. Day-Lewis
As I have noted before, Virgil’s foremost excellence lies in the fineness of his verse, and this demands an answering fineness in his translators. As Harold Bloom has noted, he is a master of nuance. Some writers can survive indifferent translation, but not Virgil. In this case, two translators stand clearly above the rest: Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry. Ferry especially is a superb verse artist. Even John Dryden, superb translator that he was, cannot really compete with the two Bostonians. Dryden, a superb comic poet, was perhaps too hearty and robust a fellow to fully capture Virgil’s fragile art. And, once again, I have reservations about his decision to render a long narrative poem like the Aeneid in rhymed couplets.
(In fact, though they styled themselves Augustans, the English neo-classicists (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, and Fielding) did not, in general, have much in common with the greatest of the original Augustans. Though they lived in an age of elegance, they were all men of rough common sense and tough minded humour. They were at their best in comedy and satire, and had little enough use for an art of twilight and whispers. Their poets were Horace and Juvenal, not the pale Mantuan. In fact, it was the Romantics and their successors, the Wordsworths and Tennysons, who were the most authentic Virgilians in the language. What with their fellow emphasis on depth of feeling, they could not help but respond to this great personalizer of the the epic. It is to our great loss that Wordsworth never completed his translation of the Aeneid, and to our even greater loss that Tennyson never even attempted it.)
When I started writing this review, my impression was that there wasn’t much to choose between Mandelbaum and Fitzgerald as translators of the Aeneid. I was wrong. Mandelbaum’s version is excellent, but, as a poet, he is just not up to Fitzgerald’s standards. Mandelbaum’s strengths are his clarity and his storytelling ability. You always know what is going on. His weakness is that he sometimes misses the telling detail. As I noted in my review of Homer translations, his approach works marvelously in the Odyssey, but it works far less well with the Aeneid.
Virgil is not primarily a storyteller, and, with him, detail really matters. A lack of intellect will show itself most in weak construction and failure of large scale craft, and it is here that Virgil is at his worst. Even the Georgics tend to lack structure. By nature a poet of the small and beautiful; his gift was not really for the epic. The Aeneid, powerful as it is, reads more like a series of fragments than a unified narrative. It doesn’t burn all the way through as one star, like the Iliad, but, rather like a comet that breaks into pieces once it hits the atmosphere, it shines now here now there, always brilliantly, but always apart.
Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid has many of the same virtues and problems as Mandelbaum, with the addendum that Fagles is both plainer and rougher. I am an immense admirer of Fagles’ Odyssey, a superb performance in which he fully comes up to the standards set by Fitzgerald’s own classic version. Sadly, his Virgil is not quite up to the mark. Virgil may praise the virtues of rough and plain folk, but his verse is anything but.
(L.P. Wilkinson's translation of The Georgics has many of the same virtues and limitations of Fagles.)
C. Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was once very well known for his translations of Virgil. However, I personally can’t stand his version of the Aeneid. He had something of a genuine poetic gift, but he was not a particularly fine stylist and his versions are generally too clumsy and heavy handed to work for a poet like Virgil. It was, however, in his translations that I first read the Eclogues and the Georgics around ten years ago, and I can report that his version of the Georgics still holds up fairly well. I suspect that this is because it is Virgil’s meatiest poem, and consequently the one that survives translation best. Good as the Aeneid is, the Georgics are Virgil’s masterpiece. Still, while Day-Lewis is adequate, if at all possible you should try to read it in Ferry’s incomparable version.
Though they have done excellent work elsewhere, I was not particularly impressed by the versions of Rolfe Humphries, Stanley Lombardo or C.H. Cisson.
Please note that all translations quoted in the body of this post are by Ferry or Fitzgerald.
I.
Virgil is almost the epitome of the highly sensitive person. Doubtless many poets fall roughly under that description, but Virgil, like Tennyson, the closest equivalent in English, seems to have been more sensitive than most. Again as with Tennyson, this sensitivity, when applied to the proper use of words, resulted in a phenomenal technical perfection. Both their verse is exquisitely nuanced. Furthermore, such sensitivity gave them a deep well of feeling from which to draw. Both poets were finely attuned to the pain of others. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Virgil’s great theme was suffering. In fact, feeling in Virgil often seems like it is almost about to break all bounds. Frequently, he nearly loses control. Reading, say, the story of Dido, the prevailing impression is often one of near hysteria, held in check only by the strictest artistic control:
It came to this then sister? You deceived me?
The pyre meant this, altars and fires meant this?
What shall I mourn first, being abandoned? Did you
Scorn your sister's company in death?
You should have called me out to the same fate!
The same blade's edge and hurt, at the same hour,
Should have taken us off. With my own hands
Had I to build this pyre, and had I to call
Upon our country's gods, that in the end
With you placed on it there, O heartless one,
I should be absent? Your have put to death
Yourself and me, the people and the fathers
Bred in Sidon, and you own new city.
Give me fresh water, let me bathe her wound
And catch upon my lips any last breath . . .
(Book IV)
It must be said that neither Virgil nor Tennyson were great thinkers, but they did not need to be. Such flawless technique and deep feeling are more than enough to propel them into the first ranks of literature.
As Robert Royal of the Weekly Standard notes:"There are many signs that the young Virgil was an Epicurean and that he never wholly repudiated that philosophy in adulthood." Virgil was without doubt deeply influenced by the latin poet Lucretius, himself a devout follower, if one may use the term, of the materialist philosopher Epicurus. The Epicureans emphasized knowledge, contemplation, and moderate pleasure as the only way to avoid suffering. They were also harsh critics of religion, the ancient equivalents of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins (though, to be fair, they did grant the gods a kind of platonic existence). It was undoubtedly the Epicurean emphasis on how to avoid suffering that initially attracted such a sensitive soul as Virgil. However, while the Epicureans were quite concerned with suffering, it was mostly with their own. Like many elite philosophers, they were quite prepared to write off most of humanity:
Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake the waters,
To gaze down from shore on the trials of others;
Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet to us,
But because the fact that we ourselves are free from such ills strikes us as pleasant.
Pleasant it is also to behold great armies battling on a plain,
When we ourselves have no part in their peril.
But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind,
Well fortified with the teachings of the wise,
Where we may look down on others as they stumble along,
Vainly searching for the true path of life.
(Lucretius, On the Nature of Things)
But for someone so attuned as Virgil to suffering, his own and that of others, this kind of detachment was doubtless all but impossible to achieve.
I myself recently had a bit of an online dialogue with Razib Khan about whether an atheist vision of the universe was objectively horrible or not. I contended that any world with so much wanton cruelty was indeed objectively horrible, and that supernatural intervention, likely or not, was the only way out of this mess. I was struck by the idea that he didn’t seem to have ever given the suffering of others much thought. After all life isn’t so terrible for him. I suppose if you have a relatively nice life, and you do not feel emotional pain very deeply yourself, and you are more interested in systems than in other people, and you yourself have the kind of nerdy mind that does not easily identify with others, then the immense suffering of the human and natural world won’t much disturb your sleep. This doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad fellow, but it does mean that you may not have given the suffering of the world as much thought as it deserves. For Virgil, though, highly sensitive fellow that he was, this was not really an option; he doubtless made a miserable Epicurean.
Furthermore, as Royal notes:
. . . Adler believes Virgil detected a fatal flaw in the Epicurean system, which he presents most memorably in the contrast between Aeneas and Queen Dido, and between Rome and Carthage. It may be true that the radically rational philosopher is freed from fear of both the gods and death--while limiting himself to rationally moderate pleasures. But such philosophers are so rare as to be of almost no social effect. Almost always, those who free themselves from traditional religion find themselves, like poor Dido, subject to furor: anger and lust. Epicurus was far too optimistic about our ability to tame these demons, and in his desire to spread this philosophy to the entire populace, Lucretius threatens the civic order. Indeed, he invites his own destruction, for the retired life of the Epicurean philosopher depends upon the existence of a peaceful city, which the passions unleashed by disbelief in the gods will not produce.
Harold Bloom, in his incessant jihad to cleanse literature from any relationship with Christianity, would have us believe that Virgil, while clearly influenced by Lucretius, slavishly followed him in all things. This is patent nonsense. In his own way, Virgil seems to have been a deeply religious man. Piety is one of his prime virtues. He advises his farmer:
Above all else,
Be sure to pay due reverence to the gods.
When spring has come and winter is over and done with,
Yield to great Ceres the yearly rite you owe her.
(Second Georgic)
The Virgil who emphasizes his hero's piety, who centres his epic on a vision of Heaven and Hell, and whose pity for his fellow creatures, human and non-human alike, animates all his work could hardly be more different than the haughty, aloof Epicurean philosopher-poet, who identifies with no one and who, wrapped up in his own heroic self-image, thinks perhaps a bit too well of his own opinions.
II.
It is perhaps one of the ironies of history that it is Virgil the pagan homosexual who, as far as any writer may be put to blame, may have done most to bequeath to the West its strain of sexual puritanism. Here he sounds frankly envious of the asexual bees:
And you will be surprised that the bees are never
Known to indulge in sexual intercourse; they never
Dissipate or enervate their bodies
By making love.
(Fourth Georgic)
Augustine and Jerome, the usual suspects in any polemic against sex-hating Christians, were themselves steeped in Virgil. But they have nothing on the pagan. Where else could they have found the words and ideas to express their distaste for the merely physical? I don’t recall much of this kind of thing in the Greek fathers, and there is far more agonizing over sex in Virgil than there is in the Bible. Even for St. Paul, who urged his followers not to marry, it was, as C.S. Lewis long ago pointed out, marriage itself, not the marriage bed that was the married person’s prime obstacle to God. That is, it is the mundane, day to day struggle of maintaining a household, not the act of congress, that distracts us most easily from those first things.
I’m still not convinced, however, that there have ever been many people, devout Christians or no, who have really, in fact, been anti-sex. Doubtless there have been some. But even Augustine, who did say some pretty silly things about sex, was in his pastoral duties surprisingly easy-going. Then, who actually doesn’t like sex? Perhaps a few people who have been really burned by their desires. But, if that is the case, who can actually blame them? Our fear of sex’s power over us seems to me entirely legitimate:
And a sudden madness seized him, madness of love
A madness to be forgiven if Hell but knew
How to forgive; he stopped in his tracks, and then,
Out into the light, suddenly, seized by love,
Bewildered into heedlessness, alas!
His purpose overcome, he turned and looked . . .
(Fourth Georgic)
Is there any better way to describe the effects of desire than “bewildered into heedlessness”? Sex urges us on into unhealthy emotional entanglements, and drives to do bad things we otherwise wouldn’t do. It is directly or indirectly the cause of much violence, emotional and physical, that we inflict on each other:
All living creatures on earth, no matter whether
It’s human beings or other kinds - fish, cattle
Beautiful birds - they all rush into the fire:
Love is the same for all. There is no other time
When the lioness forgets her cubs and prowls
With such avid savagery across the plains;
When the shapeless bear rampaging in the woods
Is the cause of the so much havoc and destruction;
It’s the time when the boar is at his very fiercest,
The tigress at her worst. Ah! Not the right time
To dare to go out in deserted Libyan fields.
Haven’t you seen it, your horse begins to tremble,
His whole body shivers, because he’s snuffed
A hint of a familiar scent on the breeze?
The reins won’t hold him back then, nor the whip,
Nor wide opposing rivers, whose rising can
Bring mountains down into their roiling waters.
(Third Georgic)
Sex, then, is not an unqualified good. I am further reminded the quote from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, “I always considered you a man of some integrity, except in your dealings with women.” How many men are there who would never think of lying for any other material advantage, but who would lie as a matter of course to get a woman into bed. Who, even among the most upright of men, hasn’t at least had the thought flit across the mind, “Its only a little lie, and besides she’ll enjoy it too once we get there.” I don’t think any decent male human being could be any thing but appalled at the things sex has at least tempted him to do.
At least in a society like ours, mostly free as it is from material want, I don’t think its too much to say that the vast majority of people’s intense suffering is rather closely related to sex. Who can fail to note the anguish and self-doubt of being alone, the terror of rejection, the lies and misunderstandings of courtship, the sting of betrayal, and, even in the best case, the inevitable difficulties of living with another flawed human being. I remember reading David M. Buss’ Evolution of Desire and remarking that it made one want to burn every bed in the country. I don’t want to be too negative, most of the good things in life, including sex itself, come out of sex too, but we do well to note its easy transformation into a thing of the night. Along with its immense potential for good comes an immense potential for evil.
III.
We also do well to remember that Virgil, in contrast to Homer, is a poet of civilization. Camille Paglia has pointed out that while Homer’s heroes give each other gifts of immense practicality, in Virgil they give objets d’art. We tend to forget that Homer comes only at the dawn of civilization. The Greeks of Homer’s time were indeed in some sense civilized, but, as William Morris’ translation has the virtue of reminding us, his Greeks have as much or more in common with the Viking raiders as they do with us.
Christian writers and poets, from Augustine and Jerome to Dante, from Dryden on to Tennyson, have always felt an immense affinity for Virgil. With his emphasis on family, piety, and suffering, it is not hard to see why. But Virgil also, unlike Homer, writes with a sense of history. Rome, as an entity, has a purpose, and so everything that has led up to it shares in that purpose. In the Iliad, the sack of Troy has no ultimate meaning; its cause really is nothing but a random quarrel over a beautiful woman, and the motive behind it is nothing but private revenge. It has no other ultimate purpose than to be a showcase for individual heroics, whether of the martial prowess of Achilles or the cunning of Odysseus, that provide entertainment for the Gods. For the Greeks, the sack of Troy, however magnificent in itself, doesn’t move towards anything, while for Virgil it is the prelude to the founding of the Roman state. In this sense, Virgil is closer to the Judeo-Christian view that history is moving towards an end. The fourth eclogue, while obviously not the Christian prophecy it was sometimes made out to be, does share something of Christianity’s messianic sensibility:
The Virgin now returns, and the reign of Saturn;
The new generation now comes down from heaven.
Lucina, look with favor on this child,
-Lucina, goddess, pure- this child by whom
The Age of Iron gives way to the Golden Age . . .
[H]e will be ruler of a world
Made peaceful by the merits of his father . . .
Your cradle will be a cornucopia
Of smiling flowers blossoming around you;
Nowhere will there be serpents anymore,
And nowhere plants where any poison hides . . .
Of course, for Virgil, this messianism was almost entirely secular and imperial. Rome was the culmination of history, bringing peace and order to a world filled with chaos and blood; it was the culmination of all that had come before and it would last forever.
Virgil’s political program has come in for much criticism. His idealization of order, restraint, discipline and piety is not much in favour these days amongst our elites, though it must be said that Virgil shared with many among them an intense horror of war:
O Caesar, the gods begrudge your care for us;
Right and wrong are turned into each other;
War everywhere in the world; crimes everywhere,
In every way and every shape and form . . .
There’s war on the Euphrates; on the Rhine’
Neighboring cities breat their mutual oaths,
Sword against sword; Mars rages everywhere.
(First Georgic)
Harold Bloom once made fun of Virgil, suggesting that given Virgil’s nightmarish apprehension of reality, his idealization of Augustus was much like Thomas Pynchon going into the service of Ronald Reagan. But Bloom's irony falls flat. It is hardly surprising that those most sensitive to the shadows should most appreciate order and restraint. Furthermore, left-liberal alternatives to traditional virtue have all been notorious failures. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society. (The sexual revolution may have been nothing but good, clean fun for our upper middle classes, but it was it, not the legacy of white racism, that eviscerated the black family.) Law and order are the first duty of the state. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace. Handouts to the poor are a moral hazard and often do cause more harm than good. It may not be pleasant to say it, but in this realm as in others, two and two really do equal four.
But all of these policies have a terrible, terrible cost. Human beings will suffer because of them. Tough divorce laws may make marriage stronger overall, but individual people will end up trapped in appalling marriages. Locking up criminals may be the right thing to do, but it will deprive thousands of children of a father's support, and his paycheck. A strong military may be necessary, but it does come with the temptation to overreach. Welfare reform may keep the many off of dependancy, but some who truly cannot help themselves will slip through the cracks. These policies may indeed be for the best overall, but we cannot flinch from their darker consequences. The instruments of state are all blunt, and it is to Virgil's credit that he so intensely mourns their inevitable victims.
There is, it is true, something of the artist’s political naivite in Virgil’s program. Rome didn’t, obviously, last, and its history, far from exemplifying an ideal order, was for the most part one of plunging from political crisis to political crisis. Furthermore, much of Roman empire building was taken on, not so much in order to bring Roman virtues to the barbarians, as to fill the coffers of predatory elites. Finally, no mere political order can truly shield us from ourselves. We live in a fallen world. Virgil’s over-idealization of Rome is fair warning of how even ostensible conservatism can lapse into quasi-utopianism. I would note that this seems a particular temptation for Americans. Much as I admire Ronald Reagan, he was wrong, America is not a shining city on a hill. It may indeed be an example for the world, but we should never forget that, even in the best of all political orders, there is still eminent scope for human evil. America may be significantly less awful than just about any human society in history, but it is still far from the City of God.
Once again I don’t want to be too negative. I am frequently amazed at just how much good we have been able to make out of such stuff as we are. Who can fail to join in Virgil’s celebration of man’s accomplishment:
And then there are so many wonderful cities,
That so much toil has built, and all those towns
The hand of man has made, high up upon
The rocky cliffs above the mountain streams
That flow along beneath their ancient walls.
(Second Georgic)
Though man remains deeply flawed, and though in every society a thousand heartbreaking things happen each day, we still really should be grateful for what we have. Things could be a lot worse. But neither should we relax our guard. Civilization is a fragile thing and cannot be taken for granted. Everything we have accomplished is waiting to fall apart. We too are part of nature and as Virgil, in one of his wisest moments, notes:
All things by nature are ready to get worse,
Lapse backward, fall away from where they were,
Just as if one who struggles to row his little
Boat upstream against a powerful current
Should but for a moment relax his arms, the current
Would carry him headlong back again downstream.
(First Georgic)
What is truly disturbing about Virgil however, is not so much his imperialism or his somewhat naïve hopes for Rome, but that his quest for order can lead him to endorse a kind of collective totalitarianism:
They are the only ones who share their children
In common parentage, the only ones
To share in common the houses where they dwell;
They live together under the rule of law.
It is only they who have a common country
And share an unchanging home, and in the summer,
Knowing that winter is coming, their enterprise
Is to gather together what they’ll have in common.
(Fourth Georgic)
Virgil’s bees live in harmony, but they have no individuality. There is no pain in their lives, but no real joy either. One cannot help but feel that Virgil’s obsessive quest to alleviate the sorrows of this world has let him to advocate the individual’s complete absorption in the state. Its as if somehow only a grey, colourless, monotony, of the kind found in socialist realism, were the solution to the problem of pain. But of course the sensual, artistic Virgil, lover of Falernian wine and Tyrian purple dye, could never have standed living in such a place for a minute. No one could. It is not a fit environment for human beings. As E.O. Wilson, the world’s authority on social insects, once said of Marxism, “Wonderful theory, wrong species."
IV.
Virgil is said to be notoriously difficult to translate. So, while numerous eminent translators have taken up the challenge, only a few are really worth taking a look at. Here are my recommendations, ranked from first to last:
The Aeneid
1. Robert Fitzgerald
2. Allen Mandelbaum
3. Robert Fagles
4. John Dryden
Eclogues and Georgics
1. David Ferry
2. John Dryden
3. L.P. Wilkinson
4. C. Day-Lewis
As I have noted before, Virgil’s foremost excellence lies in the fineness of his verse, and this demands an answering fineness in his translators. As Harold Bloom has noted, he is a master of nuance. Some writers can survive indifferent translation, but not Virgil. In this case, two translators stand clearly above the rest: Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry. Ferry especially is a superb verse artist. Even John Dryden, superb translator that he was, cannot really compete with the two Bostonians. Dryden, a superb comic poet, was perhaps too hearty and robust a fellow to fully capture Virgil’s fragile art. And, once again, I have reservations about his decision to render a long narrative poem like the Aeneid in rhymed couplets.
(In fact, though they styled themselves Augustans, the English neo-classicists (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, and Fielding) did not, in general, have much in common with the greatest of the original Augustans. Though they lived in an age of elegance, they were all men of rough common sense and tough minded humour. They were at their best in comedy and satire, and had little enough use for an art of twilight and whispers. Their poets were Horace and Juvenal, not the pale Mantuan. In fact, it was the Romantics and their successors, the Wordsworths and Tennysons, who were the most authentic Virgilians in the language. What with their fellow emphasis on depth of feeling, they could not help but respond to this great personalizer of the the epic. It is to our great loss that Wordsworth never completed his translation of the Aeneid, and to our even greater loss that Tennyson never even attempted it.)
When I started writing this review, my impression was that there wasn’t much to choose between Mandelbaum and Fitzgerald as translators of the Aeneid. I was wrong. Mandelbaum’s version is excellent, but, as a poet, he is just not up to Fitzgerald’s standards. Mandelbaum’s strengths are his clarity and his storytelling ability. You always know what is going on. His weakness is that he sometimes misses the telling detail. As I noted in my review of Homer translations, his approach works marvelously in the Odyssey, but it works far less well with the Aeneid.
Virgil is not primarily a storyteller, and, with him, detail really matters. A lack of intellect will show itself most in weak construction and failure of large scale craft, and it is here that Virgil is at his worst. Even the Georgics tend to lack structure. By nature a poet of the small and beautiful; his gift was not really for the epic. The Aeneid, powerful as it is, reads more like a series of fragments than a unified narrative. It doesn’t burn all the way through as one star, like the Iliad, but, rather like a comet that breaks into pieces once it hits the atmosphere, it shines now here now there, always brilliantly, but always apart.
Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid has many of the same virtues and problems as Mandelbaum, with the addendum that Fagles is both plainer and rougher. I am an immense admirer of Fagles’ Odyssey, a superb performance in which he fully comes up to the standards set by Fitzgerald’s own classic version. Sadly, his Virgil is not quite up to the mark. Virgil may praise the virtues of rough and plain folk, but his verse is anything but.
(L.P. Wilkinson's translation of The Georgics has many of the same virtues and limitations of Fagles.)
C. Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was once very well known for his translations of Virgil. However, I personally can’t stand his version of the Aeneid. He had something of a genuine poetic gift, but he was not a particularly fine stylist and his versions are generally too clumsy and heavy handed to work for a poet like Virgil. It was, however, in his translations that I first read the Eclogues and the Georgics around ten years ago, and I can report that his version of the Georgics still holds up fairly well. I suspect that this is because it is Virgil’s meatiest poem, and consequently the one that survives translation best. Good as the Aeneid is, the Georgics are Virgil’s masterpiece. Still, while Day-Lewis is adequate, if at all possible you should try to read it in Ferry’s incomparable version.
Though they have done excellent work elsewhere, I was not particularly impressed by the versions of Rolfe Humphries, Stanley Lombardo or C.H. Cisson.
Please note that all translations quoted in the body of this post are by Ferry or Fitzgerald.
posted by Thursday at
11:05 PM
6 Comments:
That was an absolutely fantastic post, Thursday, although I suppose I ought to add that one of the reasons I liked it so much was that your thoughts on the role of sexuality in human misery are rather close to mine. It was also really well done, and I think some of your speculations might even give hard-core rationalists pause.
I did want to ask whether you think "lack of intellect" is really responsible for weak construction and failures of large-scale craft. It makes sense on the surface, but many of the greatest works of literary art, written by what appear to have been women and men of the highest intelligence, have been weakly constructed. Dickens's novels were all over the place, but in spite of certain weaknesses that I think were the result of lack of formal education, I think he was not merely a creative genius, but a man of towering intelligence. Shakespeare, surely a brilliant man in the intellectual as well as the creative sense, constructed his plays extremely loosely, in that there often is no essential reason for a particular scene to appear - other than that it may add to the humour or pathos of the whole. Less happily, Tolstoy interrupted War and Peace with endless musings on Freemasonry and the philosophy of history, which add little to the whole. Yet I think he was probably a man of extraordinary intelligence as well as literary insight. Lolita is loosely put together - its impact comes from its detail, use of words, images - and its insights - but it isn't "tight", and yet Nabokov's intelligence was much above average. So too was that of Flaubert, yet Madame Bovary wanders all over the place.
On the other hand, all kinds of best-selling schlock is very tightly plotted and carefully planned. Are its authors usually exceptionally intelligent, aside from the question of their literary skill or lack of it? Perhaps a few, but not many.
And another issue: most modern literary novels are constructed with extreme care, so that every casual reference or word is clearly intended to add to the larger point - Don De Lillo comes to mind. Yet I don't think most of their writers, intelligent though they may be, show signs of really extraordinary intelligence, again leaving aside their literary quality.
I am uneasy about speculations regarding the intelligence of writers because I think it leads a certain kind of reader to value literary work for reasons other than its creative power and insight into the human condition. The writer Steven Vincenzy (if I am remembering correctly) said something about this issue which I thought very interesting: that a writer's novels should always be more intelligent than he is himself. Writers who are more intelligent than their novels, he added, should find another line of work.
Dryden's rhyme version is best in my view, it gives it a sense of beating urgency. Well, I've only ever read one other version, can't remember what, but it didn't rhyme and I didn't like it
Wow, thanks.
Three brief observations -
I. Your quotation of Lucretius, beginning "Pleasant it is..." in which the philosopher, contemplating the trials of others, reflects on how delightful it is to be free from such ills himself, has its parallel in the old Christian doctrine (as enunciated, for example, by Tertullian) that part of the joy experienced by the righteous in paradise arises from their contemplation of the torments of the damned.
Schadenfreude has to be fundamental trait of human character, when two thinkers as diverse as Lucretius and Tertullian, in their different ways, can assume (and find no fault with) its presence in the most laudable of souls.
II. Your description of "Vergil, the pagan homosexual" makes me very uneasy. To attribute a sexual orientation to someone so long dead, about whom we know what we do mostly from his own literary works, is dubious at best. I assume this conclusion arises from an assumption that the poet wrote from personal experience or as an expression of his personal taste in the second eclogue ("Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin..."), but is this warranted?
The present fashion wants or expects famous artists to have been homosexual, and claims its examples on the flimsiest of pretexts. This is no different from the former fashion, which wanted or expected famous sages of antiquity to have foreseen Christianity, and thus read the Fourth Eclogue in such a way as to number Vergil amongst the prisci theologi. The wish is father to the thought.
The Bucolica are probably the earliest of Vergil's works and are the most imitative of Greek lyric poetry, e.g. that of Theocritus. There is a long tradition of homosexual themes in Greek poetry, dating from the time of Theocritus to that of Strato. The twelfth volume of the Palatine Anthology is exclusively composed of such stuff. Rather than suggest that Eclogue II reflects Vergil's homosexuality, is it not more probable that he included one such effort in a collection of ten (the rest of which do not resemble it in this particular) simply out of literary convention?
III. You write: "Rome didn't, obviously, last, and its history, far from exemplifying an ideal order, is for the most part one of plunging from political crisis to political crisis..."
The problem with this analysis of Vergil's political views is that "plunging from political crisis to political crisis" is what Rome had done during the late Republican period, and compared to what preceded him, Augustus did indeed offer stability and the modicum of prosperity that ordinarily accompanies stability. We look at the period of the principate from the foreshortened perspective two millennia afford. The matter of fact is that imperial Rome lasted much longer than the United States has so far done, and longer than the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, or Portuguese empires did. Apart from tumults that primarily affected its élites, life went on for ordinary Roman citizens in a fashion that was remarkably orderly compared to that of almost any state which had gone before or has followed after the principate.
I.
Ah yes, the African madman. I'd agree that Christians who appeal to such aspects of human nature are worse than merely indifferent atheists.
II.
The idea that Virgil preferred men is an ancient one. Here is Suetonius writing sometime after 100 A.D.:
He was especially given to passions for boys, and his special favourites were Cebes and Alexander, whom he calls Alexis in the second poem of his " Bucolics." This boy was given him by Asinius Pollio, and both his favourites had some education, while Cebes was even a poet. It is common report that he also had an intrigue with Plotia Hieria. But Asconius Pedianus declares that she herself used to say afterwards, when she was getting old, that Vergil was invited by Varius to associate with her, but obstinately refused. Certain it is that for the rest of his life he was so modest in speech and thought, that at Naples he was commonly called "Parthenias," [*"The Maiden"] and that whenever he appeared in public in Rome, where he very rarely went, he would take refuge in the nearest house, to avoid those who followed and pointed him out.
Of course, Suetonius was an old gossipmonger, but he wrote not too too far from Virgil's lifetime. Plus Virgil's elegance and preoccupation with fine clothing, hair styles, objets d'art, feminine characters etc. do seem in line with what we know about gay men and their preferences.
III.
Yes, the pax romana lasted an awfully long time. But Virgil had a well-nigh religious vision that it would last forever. I'll add "forever" to the passage you cite to make this even more clear.
thursday's posts make me feel sick...
i fear for humanity if you actually gained any influence, anyway it is clear you have many issues, but to talk like this :ah yes the african madman and virgil the pagan homosexual... is just disturbing.
from what i have seen from a quick view of your posts, it seems as if you are obsessed with sex yet u criticize others even the dead and wrongfully label people with no respect to that person...
i don't want to read anymore than i have to i practicably forced myself to read that post about virgil which almost sounded like a rant at times.
really though...
"Virgil's elegance and preoccupation with fine clothing, hair styles, objets d'art, feminine characters etc. do seem in line with what we know about gay men and their preferences."
who are you to speak of gay men like they are something to study or a different species than you or any other human, whatever stereotype as much as you want you just make yourself seem more ignorant to me...
so i will just leave it at that but i do hope i never have to see anything from you again hehe
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