Found in translation

NOW here’s an unrewarding subject: translation. The Italians have it right when they insist “traduttore traditore,” for every translator is, of necessity, a traitor to the original text. Robert Frost hit the nail on the head: When asked what poetry is, he said it’s what’s lost in translation.

Nevertheless, we all need translators to open to us masterpieces written in languages we have not enough lifetime to learn. I have tried a few turns at translation, wishing, for instance, to give readers a greater sense of the earthiness of the Bible than its reverend and reverent translators are willing to reveal. But I have never, and will never, attempt to translate in its entirety a vast masterpiece, one of those monuments more lasting than bronze that form the foundation of a Great Books course. How could one go about it, keeping a consistent, yet unflagging, tone for hundreds of pages? And if the work is poetry, the task would loom like the spinning of straw into gold, night after horrifying night for years to come.

A new edition of “The Aeneid,” Virgil’s imperial masterpiece, has arrived just as the whole world is witnessing the stress fractures in our own imperial enterprise. And I’m here to report that it is magnificent. When you are faced with something incredibly complex yet beautifully simple, you must bow your head before inexplicable greatness. That’s the case with Robert Fagles’ translation.

But to leave it at that is still a dishonor to his accomplishment. One must say more: This work, this miraculous beast of a text, is so enjoyable that you will hardly know you are reading an ancient masterpiece. Fagles gives us an “Aeneid” so fresh, so of our moment, that even classicists may fail to recognize it, so long has the original languished in the hands of inadequate translators and academic windbags.

How did Fagles do it, this third monumental achievement in translation (the earlier two being his “Iliad” and “Odyssey”)? I cannot say, because I cannot figure it out. All I can do is point, like a child watching his first parade, at some of the delights he has bestowed upon us. Above all, there is the forward rhythm. The “ocean-roll of rhythm” that Tennyson found in Virgil seems present in Fagles’ lines with all its incantatory pressure, yet never does the translator yield to the temptation of grandiosity. His language is always our language, spoken as any one of us might speak it if the spirit of Virgil came to possess us. He begins the famous beginning thus:

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....

To help you appreciate the difference between Fagles and earlier translators, here is the beginning of the translation that many of us grew up with, C. Day Lewis’:

I tell about war and the hero who first from Troy’s frontier,

Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores,

To Italy -- a man much travailed on sea and land

By the powers above, because of the brooding anger of Juno,

Suffering much in war until he could found a city....

Both Lewis and Fagles know that “arms” is not the best way to translate Virgil’s first word, arma. But Fagles also knows that the word, however translated, must come first and that Aeneas is “a man,” not “the” man. Latin, lacking articles, requires the English translator to choose; surely, Aeneas, the prince escaping the ruin of Troy with his father, Anchises, on his back and his son at his side, is “a man.” It will take him 12 books to become “the man,” progenitor of the Roman race. “The Aeneid” is the story of his (and Rome’s) becoming.

We know that Virgil, dying in 19 BC (less than a month before his 51st birthday), left instructions for “The Aeneid” to be burned. He had not been able to finish it and thought it unworthy of publication. Caesar Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, contradicted those instructions and ordered the poem’s publication. He could not let perish his best hope of everlasting fame. For “The Aeneid” is, as much as it is anything, a hymn to Rome’s heroic prehistory, imagined prospectively as enjoying its culmination in the reign of the August One.

Here we touch on “The Aeneid’s” less savory associations as propaganda for a merciless politician. Try though he may in his fine postscript, Fagles cannot completely exonerate Virgil, except by pointing to “the price of empire” as a lesson for our time and by asserting that Virgil “may speak, from a distance that seems to narrow every year, to our own history as well.” Another, perhaps deeper problem with the poem is the undeniable blandness of its central character, necessitated, I suspect, because he is a stand-in for Augustus. Your only choice with Augustus was to make him nobly bland or a David Levine caricature with blood dripping from both sides of his mouth. Aeneas has none of the tender humanity of Hector in “The Iliad,” none of the robust, sometimes comic craftiness of Odysseus in “The Odyssey.” He’s a symbol with even less individuality than Everyman (who is no one in particular).

On the other hand, Aeneas gives splendid speeches, as this one after a terrible storm at sea:

My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now,

we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us

an end to this as well. You’ve threaded the rocks

resounding with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs,

and taken the brunt of the Cyclops’ boulders too.

Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear.

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this....

But splendid speeches do not an engrossing hero make. Even the severe St. Augustine found Dido, “the tragic queen” of Carthage in Book IV, more to his taste than Aeneas. To some extent, the poem never recovers dramatically after Aeneas’ steely departure from Carthage. He must travel on to his destiny and leave his lover Dido to a fiery suicide; we cannot but relish her brief, unforgiving reappearance in Book VI when Aeneas visits the Underworld. Even the creepy Sibyl of Cumae, whom Aeneas visits to learn the way to the Underworld, has more life in her than does our hero, as she explains the challenge facing him:

... man of Troy, the descent to the Underworld is easy.

Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,

but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air --

there the struggle, there the labor lies....

The way to the Underworld is, in some measure, the way of literature. To be a writer is to pass the gates of Death, find out what lies beyond and return to tell a tale. This Virgil succeeds in doing with skill, for he never loses his sense of the sadness of this world -- and Fagles never loses Virgil’s thread.

In Book X, Aeneas’ enemy Turnus, who means to prevent him from settling in Italy, urges his men to confront the Trojans. Virgil, as capable of sympathy for the human enemies of Aeneas as Homer was for the anti-Greek Trojans, calls Turnus “dauntless,” one who “never lost his faith in his daring.” Turnus cries out to his troops: “Let each fighter think of his own wife, his home, remember the great works, the triumphs of our fathers.... Fortune speeds the bold!” And just as beautiful, royal Hector was killed by petulant Achilles in “The Iliad,” so Turnus is slain by Aeneas in Book XII.

The victory of Aeneas the Roman over Turnus the more real Roman is indeed ambiguous. Even Virgil the propagandist knew that such a victory had a hollow ring to it. It has been customarily taught that Virgil meant to go further, not to end with this ambivalent triumph. But it’s just possible that Virgil here is pushing the cost of violence in our faces, as we think of our own homes and loved ones and “the great works” that only peace provides.

One thing is certain: “Fortune speeds the bold” -- or “Fortune favors the brave,” as an older translation has it. Fortune has certainly favored Fagles for his bravery and sped this bold, unwearied translator to his tripartite kudos. *