The Music of Fatality

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The New York Sun

The life of an exile is a life in suspension. Between a home that is lost, sometimes forever, and a home that has yet to be found, the exile endures a provisional existence. The cities of exile are shadowy; their languages and customs and traditions have a stopgap quality. They never possess the satisfying substance of home.

In the ancient world, exile was the harshest of penalties. When Ovid wrote his poems from exile, he charged them to be his eyes in his native city; his words could go where he himself could not. But Ovid’s older compatriot Virgil (70-19 before the common era) gave the most memorable expression to the uprootedness of exile, in the “Aeneid.” His hero, the legendary Aeneas, wandered for years after the fall of Troy before arriving in Italy and establishing “the Latin race.” There’s a twofold irony here. Virgil wrote his great epic in large part as a tribute to Augustus, and Rome, the “new Troy,” was itself the culmination of years of exile. The empire had been founded on dispossession.

In a new translation of “Aeneid” (Oxford University Press, 529 pages, $29.95), the classicist Frederick Ahl captures the pathos of this ancient dilemma to splendid effect. His version reproduces the fierce, hurtling momentum of the original. In this respect, it easily stands comparison with the superb version by Robert Fagles published a year ago. Tennyson called Virgil the “wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” and this is true enough; but there is also a savagery in Virgil’s stateliness, and this Mr. Ahl brilliantly conveys. Even better, he is acutely sensitive to the intricate texture of Virgil’s Latin. No pun or anagram or play on words escapes his attention; The subtlety as well as the stateliness of the original shines through in every line. In maintaining this difficult balance, Mr. Ahl has produced the finest translation of the “Aeneid” in recent memory.

In his “Translator’s Note,” Mr. Ahl makes a crucial but often neglected point. “An epic poem must sing,” he says. Of course, the song may be harsh: When Laocoön, the priest of Neptune, is caught in the strangling coils of sea serpents, with their “spiralling measureless tails in whiplash whirls of propulsion,” the music is terrible; and yet, it holds firm against the terror. For all his musicality, Virgil never prettifies.

Helen, the cause of the Trojan War, is a “detested Spartan bitch” but she too merits the melody of an epithet and Mr. Ahl is skilled at rendering these small nuances. By such means, he even succeeds in bringing out the humor in Virgil, as when Juno promises Aeolus, god of the winds, “fourteen nymphs with simply outstanding / Bodies” if he will unleash a storm to wreck Aeneas’s ships. He achieves these effects by constant attention not only to what Virgil says, but to how he says it. Mr. Ahl’s alertness of ear gives even well-worn set pieces a new burnish. In Book 4, Virgil describes “rumor” and we know, 2,000 years later, just what he means:

Fast on her feet, and provided with wings of astonishing power, Huge and horrendous, a monster whose body conceals beneath feathers Just the same number of spying eyes (a remarkable feature), Just the same number of tongues, and of mouths, and of ears pricked to eavesdrop, Flying at night between heaven and earth, she screeches through darkness, Nor does she grant any sweetness of sleep to her eyes ever searching.

By portraying rumor as a kind of monstrous peacock, spangled with intrusive eyes, Virgil neutralizes malicious gossip even as he personifies it; but, once again, it is the music of his verses that works the magic. In Virgil, an underlying harmony — the music of fatality — asserts the moral order when it’s most endangered.

Mr. Ahl’s translation, provided with excellent notes and fine maps, as well as a learned introduction by Elaine Fantham, brings us as close as possible to the ultimate toughness of Virgil. He knew that a great city, and a great empire, was built not simply out of bricks and stones but out of the words that contain its collective memory. Those words had to be quarried out of the most distant past. When Aeneas escapes from the ruins of Troy, carrying his father on his back and leading his young son by the hand, he is carrying both his past and his future in a single uncertain progress. And perhaps that is the message of the epic. Perhaps it was intended not so much to glorify Augustus as to remind him that even the mightiest empire is built on the ashes of remembrance.

eormsby@nysun.com

Line By Line: Comparing recent translations of the ‘Aeneid.’

BOOK I

Frederick Ahl:

Arms and the man I sing of Troy, who first from its seashores,
Italy-bound, fate’s refugee, arrived at Lavinia’s Coastlands.
How he was battered about over land, over high deep
Seas by the powers above!
(I: 1-4)

Robert Fitzgerald:

I sing of warfare and a man at war. From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air
(I: 1-7)

Robert Fagles:

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 —
(I: 1-4)

BOOK II

Frederick Ahl:

While he was speaking, he pounced on the quivering Priam,
Dragged the king, slipping in pools of his own son’s blood, to the altar,
Grabbed his hair, yanked back his head with his left, with his right drew his gleaming
Sword which he then buried up to the hilt in the flank of the old king
(II: 550-553)

Robert Fitzgerald:

With this, to the altar step itself he dragged him trembling,
Slipping in the pooled blood of his son,
And took him by the hair with his left hand.
The sword flashed in his right; up to the hilt
He thrust it in his body.
(II: 716-721)

Robert Fagles:

That said, he drags the old man straight to the altar, quaking, slithering on through
slicks of his son’s blood, and twisting Priam’s hair
in his left hand, his right hand sweeping forth his sword —
a flash of steel — he buries it hiltdeep in the king’s flank.
(II: 682-686)

Frederick Ahl:

Now, though, he’s sloughed off his old skin, he’s reborn to youth’s colourful brilliance
Coiling his slippery back, he lifts breast and head high to the sunlight,
Darts forked tongue from his mouth, flashes brightly in flickering menace.
(II: 473-475)

Robert Fitzgerald:

Sprang Pyrrhus, all in bronze and glittering,
As a serpent, hidden swollen underground
By a cold winter, writhes into the light,
On vile grass fed, his old skin cast away,
Renewed and glossy, rolling slippery coils,
With lifted underbelly rearing sunward
And triple tongue a-flicker.
(II: 612-619)

Robert Fagles:

A flash in his shimmering brazen sheath like a snake
buried the whole winter long under frozen turf
swollen to bursting, fed full on poisonous weeds
and now it springs into light, sloughing its old skin
to glisten sleek in its newfound youth, its back slithering,
coiling, its proud chest rearing high to the sun,
its triple tongue flickering through its fangs.
(II: 586-592)

BOOK IV

Frederick Ahl:

Fast on her feet, and provided with wings of astonishing power,
Huge and horrendous, a monster whose body conceals beneath feathers
Just the same number of spying eyes (a remarkable feature),
Just the same number of tongues, and of mouths, and of ears pricked to eavesdrop,
Flying at night between heaven and earth, she screeches through darkness,
Nor does she grant any sweetness of sleep to her eyes ever searching.
(IV: 180-185)

Robert Fitzgerald:

Giving her speed on foot and on the wing:
Monstrous, deformed, titanic. Pinioned, with
An eye beneath for every body feather,
And, strange to say, as many tongues and buzzing
Mouths as eyes, as many prickedup ears,
By night she flies through darkness, and she never turns
Her eye-lids down to sleep.
(IV: 248-255)

Robert Fagles:

Rumor, quicksilver afoot and swift on the wing, a monster, horrific, huge
and under every feather on her body — what a marvel —
an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes
and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news.
By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky,
whirring across the dark, never closing her lids
in soothing sleep.
(IV: 225-233)

Compiled by Charlotte Cowles


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