The Founder of Rome

. . . Sorrow, unspeakable sorrow,

my queen, you ask me to bring to life once more,

how the Greeks uprooted Troy in all her power,

our kingdom mourned forever. What horrors I saw,

a tragedy where I played a leading role myself.

Who could tell such things -- not even a Myrmidon,

a Dolopian, or comrade of iron-hearted Ulysses --

and still refrain from tears? And now, too,

the dank night is sweeping down from the sky

and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.

For pathos and sheer beauty, Surrey wins hands down; his lines about the declining stars are Shakespearean in their charm. He also has a certain dry efficiency that can be very satisfying ("And whereof no small part fell to my share"). Dryden lets much of the pathos and complication go by with merely a nod (the declining stars don't count for much, and he paraphrases away those pesky Myrmidons and Dolopians), but he has a felicitously exact way of laying out the essentials ("A peopled city made a desert place").

Fagles, by contrast, is much more hit and miss. The repetition of "sorrow" is certainly effective (never mind that it's not there in the Latin), and "unspeakable" is terrific (for the Latin "Infandum"). But the metrical sprawl produces moments of real bathos; "a tragedy where I played a leading role myself" is far weaker than the equivalent lines in Surrey or Dryden, and the declining stars passage comes across as overwritten and too intent on provocative effect ("dank," "sweeping"). The last 60 years or so have not produced a verse rhetoric that will sustain a long poem, except as a series of jolting fits and starts, so jolting fits and starts are what we get.

Fagles, an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton, is obviously a fine classicist with acclaimed translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, but the catch-all form he has chosen simply does not lend itself to sustained heroic narrative. At its best, it can produce beautifully arresting moments among the bumbling and bathos, and Fagles certainly produces more of these than does, say, Robert Fitzgerald, whose popular translation appeared in 1983. But it's a long way from Virgil, or from anyone's notion of "the stateliest measure." ·

Dick Davis, professor of Persian and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, recently published a translation of the Persian epic "The Shahnameh."