The Founder of Rome

A new translation of the Roman epic collides with recent trends in English.

A 5th-century portrait of Virgil from the Vergilius Romanus

THE AENEID

By Virgil

Translated from the Latin by Robert Fagles

Viking. 486 pp. $40

Shortly before the beginning of the Christian era, Rome became the center of an empire. The Senate, which had ruled the country while it emerged as the major military and political force in Europe, resigned itself to relative impotency, and an imperial family took the reins of power into its own hands. An empire implies a court, and a court, in the ancient world at least, implied a court poet. The first and greatest court poet of the Roman world was the Emperor Augustus's favorite, Virgil, author of The Aeneid, which self-consciously traces the origins of the new world power and fulsomely praises Augustus.

All this indicates how difficult the task for a modern translator of The Aeneid must be. Some 20 years ago, Oxford University Press published an anthology of war poetry. Almost all the extracts included told the reader what a very bad thing war is -- in reality it was an anthology of antiwar poetry, which is what the modern reader would expect. We are very uncomfortable with poetry that celebrates war, and we insist that a poem that deals with war deal primarily with its victims. To celebrate war's victors seems to us to be in dubious taste. Some Roman writers, such as Tacitus, might register occasional qualms about the condition of the conquered, but this was as nothing to our pervasive feelings of war guilt, our insistence to ourselves that we empathize with those we harm.

This was not at all the case in the ancient world, which viewed war much as our science fiction movies tend to view it (only insofar as we are certain that other civilizations are fantasies can we feel good about destroying them). The very form of the ancient epic poses a major problem of tone for a translator, and this is greatly compounded in the case of The Aeneid, when we are dealing not merely with warfare itself, but with war in the service of a conquering occupying power and an imperial family.

But because of the centrality of Rome within Europe's sense of its historical identity, and because of Virgil's centrality to that sense, The Aeneid has left strong footprints in the soil of English poetry. Books two and four, in the translation of Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, were published in 1554 and 1557. Of the 12 that make up The Aeneid, these two deal directly with the victims. Almost certainly for this reason, they have appealed to the post-Roman world more strongly than all of the rest of the poem. In order to translate Virgil, Surrey invented blank verse and, at a stroke, invested the form with the associations of nobility, not to say sublimity, that it has retained for more than 500 years.

At the end of the 17th century, John Dryden, when his country was embarking on the acquisition of an empire that was consciously to emulate the one Virgil celebrates, produced a vigorous translation of the whole work into English (it is still the best version, by far) and virtually canonized the heroic couplet as the primary narrative form for the next hundred years. The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, for whom Virgil was simply the "wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man," produced in his own Idylls of the King what was perhaps the last, somewhat despairing but still intermittently and wonderfully successful attempt at the Virgilian heroic/elegiac mode in English.

Most readers of poetry probably now lack the Victorian sense that an empire (or at least our empire) is on balance a good thing. And there is a further major, and at the moment well-nigh insoluble, problem for a translator of a long heroic poem: What to do about the meter? In the maelstrom of modernist poetry and free verse, all sense that a long poem might be written in anything approximating "the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man" has almost entirely disappeared.

When translating classical narrative verse, poets since World War II have in the main resorted to a line of varying lengths, containing between three and six stressed syllables, and distributed unstressed syllables with the apparent randomness of sprinkles on a cupcake. When the action is tense, you bunch the stressed syllables; when it's less tense, you have more sprinkles. The model was Ezra Pound's Cantos, and even Pound had the grace to admit, at the end of his life, that The Cantos were a failure.

The sudden disjunctions of meaning and meter favored by Pound produce a texture quite at odds with anything approaching the persuasively fluent rhetoric of a classical heroic line, and this can be seen by comparing the most recent such version, that by Robert Fagles, with a couple of better known versions from the past. Here Book Two has just begun, and Dido has asked Aeneas to recount his wanderings, beginning with the fall of Troy.