Virgil
THE AENEID
Translated by Robert Fagles
496pp. Penguin. £25.
978 0 7139 9968 6

In The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope, Johnny Eames, unhappy in love, proposes to solace himself by translating Homer, before sleeping on the matter and deciding to take up the sanitary condition of the London poor instead. Eames had plenty of counterparts in real life. In the middle of the nineteenth century, twelve complete verse translations of the Iliad were published in a period of little more than twenty years, the translators including the Earl of Derby, who also found time to be Prime Minister. In earlier centuries, the “Englishing” of Homer attracted poets as substantial as Chapman, Pope and Cowper. And in our own time, both Robert Fagles’s translations and the quite different versions by Stanley Lombardo have combined succès d’estime with large sales. Lombardo’s Iliad was even the basis for an off-Broadway show.

After his successes with Homer, Fagles has now turned to the Aeneid, which has less often attracted leading poets, the one enormous exception being Dryden’s Virgil, a classic of English verse, to which Fagles in an interesting “translator’s postscript” pays proper homage. And indeed the challenge is severe. It is a truism that all poetry loses something in translation, but far more than with Homer the essence of Virgil often lies not just in what is said but in the way that it is said. In all European literature Virgil is unsurpassed for sheer skill in the manipulation of metre, and perhaps not equalled. Like all the metres used by the Classical Latin poets, his hexameter is a Greek metre carried across to a language of rather different character. Ancient Greek has many more short syllables than Latin. Matthew Arnold praised Homer for his rapidity and Walter Bagehot called him “the briskest of men” (“The Germans have denied that there was any such person”, he added; “but they have never questioned his extreme activity”), whereas Tennyson described Virgil as “wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man”. “Rapid”, “stately” – the contrast is telling.

Classical Latin poetry, like Greek, scans by quantity (long and short syllables) rather than, as English does, by stress accent. But Latin did have a stress accent too, and Virgil achieves many of his effects through an interplay of quantity and stress, bringing them together so that the verse flows easily, pulling them apart to produce a slower or more impeded movement. At the same time, he is constantly changing sentence-length and the place in the line where sentences end, with a constantly resourceful alertness to variety. To all this he adds a magical power over words. He is not – like Aeschylus, say, or Shakespeare – a great linguistic innovator. He has an acute sense of process – both on the small scale and in the great movements of history – and it is significant that four inceptive verbs make their first appearance in his verses, among them nigresco, rubesco and madesco (“grow black”, “grow pink”, “grow moist”), but more typically he works by giving power and richness to very simple words, like ingens (“huge”, “vast”) and altus (both “high” and “deep”). There may be room to debate what Virgil meant by his evocative “Sunt lacrimae rerum”, but the words themselves are ordinary enough. Fagles finds a simple but resonant tone for this celebrated phrase: “even here, the world is a world of tears”.

The discipline of Virgil’s metre is hard to represent in any form natural to a long poem in our own day. Dryden had the discipline of rhyme; his problem is that the heroic couplet produces a regularity and sobriety of movement which is unlike Virgil’s fluidity. Fagles explains in his postscript that he has worked with “a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six”, but has allowed himself to contract to four or even three beats. This helps to represent Virgil’s flexibility, but the problem this time is that the variation in line-length amounts to a loosening of discipline, whereas Virgil’s flexibility within the restrictions of his hexameter demands from him discipline of the keenest kind. The paradoxical blend of constraint and freedom helps to give the Aeneid its force and compression, as well as its musicality. The problem is no doubt insoluble; Fagles cannot reproduce this side of the poem, but his merit lies in the attention that he pays to Virgil’s text, and the intelligence with which he responds to it.

At times Fagles seems to be in dialogue with Dryden as well as with the Latin original: for example when he translates Virgil’s compactly grand exordium, a passage which shows Dryden at his best. Virgil’s first two words, “Arma virumque”, famously allude to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the poet signalling from the outset that he will compress the themes of both Homeric epics into his single work: “Arma” indicates the epic of war, while “virum”, the accusative form of “vir”, “man”, corresponds exactly to the Odyssey’s first word, Andra. Dryden ensures that Virgil’s point is preserved:

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destined town;
His banished gods restored to rites divine;
And settled sure succession on his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.

This is Fagles’s version:

Wars and a man I sing – an exile driven on
by Fate,
he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
destined to reach Lavinian shores and
Italian soil,
yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above –
thanks to cruel Juno’s relentless rage – and many losses
he bore in battle too, before he could found
a city,
bring his gods to Latium, source of the
Latin race,
the Alban lords and the high walls of Rome.

The first word of the Iliad is “Wrath”, and when Fagles translated that poem he broke the syntax, so that he could begin with the essential noun: “Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”. In similar spirit, he here preserves, like Dryden, Virgil’s syntactical shape. The inversion of word order (object,subject, verb) is less natural today than in an age more tolerant of Latinate constructions, especially in high poetry, but the meaning demands it, and the dash will do for Fagles what the relative pronoun did for Dryden, as for Virgil himself. Dryden’s noble paragraph is energized by discreet alliterations, not exaggerated: “forced by Fate”, “expelled and exiled”, “long labours”, and so on. It is interesting to see Fagles doing something similar: “first to flee”, “relentless rage”, “bore in battle”. He begins with “Wars” not just to keep some distance from Dryden, but presumably because “arms” has a slightly archaic flavour today, and he doubtless remembers also that “Bella”, “wars”, is the opening word of Lucan’s sardonic anti-Aeneid, the Bellum Civile. “A man”, in place of “the man” may seem momentarily surprising, but it does bring out another aspect of Virgil’s powerfully dense texture. Mass battle and a single person are set side by side, and the contrast between state and individual, between public duty and private satisfaction, will indeed be one of the poem’s themes. Fagles cannot match Dryden’s grandeur or the powerful sense of closure that the earlier poet gives to the end of his period, but he has his own virtues. His fourth line, extending to seven beats, expresses the long weariness of the hero’s wanderings. “Before he could found a city” is a more or less literal rendering of the original, which has a simplicity and universality – expressing the human need for rootedness in place and society – which Dryden’s more particularized “built the destined town” has lost.

Fagles measures up to the softer side of Virgil’s imagination. Aeneas describes in three exquisite lines his vain attempt to embrace the wraith of his dead wife, Creusa; the words will return identically when he tries to embrace his father in Elysium – melancholy in the very temple of delight. This is Fagles’s rendering:

Three times I tried to fling my arms around
her neck,
three times I embraced – nothing . . .
her phantom
sifting through my fingers,
light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

Of course, the ellipses and the variations in line length are unlike Virgil’s style and metre, but in their own way they convey a good deal of his spirit; and in the final line Fagles has noticed how Virgil quickens his rhythm in the second half, and so quickens his own English.

In the Eighth Book of the Aeneid the turbid river Tiber is miraculously stilled, and the Trojans row easily along its placid surface:

. . . and the dark tarred hulls go gliding through the river,
amazing the tides, amazing the groves unused to the sight
of warriors’ shields, flashing far, and blazoned galleys
moving on upstream. And on and on they
row, wearying
night and day as they round the long, winding bends,
floating under the mottled shade of many
trees and
cleave the quiet stream reflecting the
leafy woods.

Virgil has various means of making his language drift. The second of these sentences in the original is entirely paratactic – that is, there are no subordinate clauses at all. That is not true of Fagles’s version, but he aims to drift in his own fashion by starting the sentence with “and”, besides placing another “and” at a line end, so that the one line glides resistlessly into the next. There ought to be a comma before that last “and”; probably the omission is a simple mistake, but just possibly it is deliberate, to blur the syntax. One ambiguity has been lost: Virgil has the ships “cut the green woods on the still surface”, a mysterious phrase – are they cutting through the woods themselves as through a jungle, or cutting the reflections of the woods in the water? Fagles plumps for the second possibility, but it would have been more evocative to have preserved the uncertainty.

In the preceding sentence one of Virgil’s strokes of genius is to attribute the marvelling not to the Trojans – their amazement at the miracle can be left unspoken – but to the landscape itself; in literal translation the words are, “The waters wonder, the wood wonders”. One misses the directness of that in Fagles’s version, but perhaps he has another purpose. He has the hulls amaze the tides and the groves, but the sentence can also be construed another way (how amazing those tides and groves are!). Virgil floods the scene with wonder: the Trojans wonder at the landscape, the landscape wonders at the Trojans, and the very fact that inanimate nature has acquired the power of wondering adds to the atmosphere of miracle. Fagles’s landscape, amazing and amazed, preserves some of that sense of reciprocal marvel.

A bonus of this new volume, as of Fagles’s Iliad and Odyssey, is the long introduction by Bernard Knox, humane, graceful and authoritative. He ends with a private memory of lighting upon an abandoned Virgil while fighting in Italy in 1945, opening it at random and finding words which spoke to the current disorder of the world. It is a fitting way to end, for one of Virgil’s achievements was to imbue the traditionally impersonal form of epic with the sense of a personal presence and a distinctive vision, and he asks for a personal response from his readers. Robert Fagles too finds a good blend of the objective and the personal: he wants to serve Virgil, not to draw attention to himself, but his translation is unmistakably, though unobtrusively, of its time and of its maker. It is likely to be the Aeneid for our new century.

Richard Jenkyns is Professor of the Classical Tradition at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His most recent book is Virgil's Experience, 1998.