by Willard Spiegelman
from Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Volume 30, No. 1 & No. 2
IT'S a clear fall day in mid-October, 1961. Outside, the leaves on the maple and gingko trees are fiery crimson, those of the oak bright yellow. Subtler shades also abound. Open windows give onto high school playing fields, from which the sounds of the marching a band, rehearsing for Friday's football game against our archrivals, float in. Eighteen of us—high school seniors bound mostly for Ivy League colleges and all biting our fingernails about applications whose outcomes we shall not know for another five months—are having the time of our lives. We are reading the Aeneid.
Our teacher, Marie Bintner, less than a decade our senior, arrived at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (where Ezra Pound's and H.D.'s childhood homes then still stood) along with us two years before. Fresh from her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, she has taken (we learn later) to dyeing her hair blonde and wearing high heels just to make sure we understand who's boss. She is probably a bit more nervous than we are, but we don't know this. Two years before, when we were sophomores, she led us on the "forced marches" that Caesar took through Gaul with his troops. Last year, she escorted us through the syntactic tangles of Cicero's orations ("Quo usque tandem, abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?") It was our patience, not the Roman senate's, that was being tried. Having gone through all this, having lost our less sympathetic, patient, or linguistically competent fellow students, who fell by the wayside after two or three years of Latin, we are ready for our reward. Virgil is pure heaven. We set out on our unenforced new marches, purely figurative now, with wonder and something approaching joy. Our task is not easy but it gives pleasure. In the next months, through SAT tests, college interviews, spring fever, and "senioritis"—slouching and the sloughing off of responsibilities as the end of adolescence draws near—none of us will ever think of skipping class or not doing Latin homework. This is a testimony to both a great teacher and a great subject.
It is first period, 9 to 9:50 in the morning. We are still in Book 1. The last night of Troy (Book 2), Dido and Aeneas (Book 4), and Underworld (Book 6) remain terrae incognitae, to be charted during the remainder of the school year. Aeneas, having washed up on the shores of Carthage, is offering hope to his weary Trojan countrymen:
"O socii (neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum),
o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis
accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopia saxa
experti; revocate animos maestumque timorem
mittite; forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."(1. 198-203)
Most of us do not use translations to help us. (I have learned from my current students that the words "pony" and "trot," commonplace in my era, have disappeared from the vocabulary.) Sometimes we work out our assignments in small groups; the telephone comes in handy. Mostly, I lie on my bed with a dictionary and try to piece my way through the tangles. Translation of this sort is like doing a jigsaw or crossword puzzle: The basic principle is to begin with the easy stuff, the obvious words and phrases, and hope that context will help with the more obdurate sections.
I see that Scylla and the Cyclops play a part in Aeneas's exhortations. Mrs. Bintner's first rule (borrowed, I suppose, from the German) is "Always go for the verb." This allows us, in lines 198-99, to pass immediately to the end of the sentence, where we find a simple, first conjugation, third-person single, future tense: "he will give" ("dabit"). Who will give? That's easy: a god ("deus"), second declension, masculine, nominative. He will give what? "An end" ("finem"). What's that little "his" doing in the middle? It's a plural dative pronoun, of course: "God will give an end to these." And what exactly are "these"? Back to the previous line and a half to find an antecedent noun. It can't be "socii," who are clearly the vocative/nominative "comrades" whom Aeneas is addressing, and we'd better skip over the parenthetical phrase as being for the moment unnecessary (thank goodness for our editor's parentheses, which Virgil did not use). "Passi" must have something to do with "socii" (it turns out to be a past participle used as a noun: "you who have suffered"), so the antecedent has to be "graviora," which sure looks like, and turns out to be, a comparative adjective (neuter plural): "heavier things."
Equally easy, relatively speaking, is the bulk of line 202: "revocate," a clear imperative ("call back"), is followed by its noun object, "animos," but what does it mean to call back your minds or souls? I'd better return to this one, I think; its place and purpose are unambiguous, but its nuanced meaning is not, at least not yet. And then another accusative adjective-noun combination, with the neat suffix "que" ("and") tailed onto the sadness of "maestum," the easily recognized cognate "timorem" ("fear"), and the plural imperative "put" ("mittite") which must mean "put away" or "dismiss." The speech is coming into focus. Aeneas is encouraging me, his sixteen-year-old reader! The climax comes in the famous formula—we don't know it's famous until we are told so, but all of us have heard or used it countless times since then—"forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit." I—we—have become translators. We are one step away, though this too does not register on me at the time, from being literary critics, and two steps away from being poets ourselves. I always think of what Coleridge said about Shakespeare, that in reading him you become something of a poet yourself—a truth that, in my experience, also applies to reading all poets in foreign languages and, in our own, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.
My literary education has really begun. I have read voraciously and promiscuously since childhood, but translation means a different level of apprehension, active not passive. High school English classes are as nothing compared to this. I have begun to develop a taste for, an interest in, and a capacity for understanding poetry only by way of a foreign language. My native tongue would not be as useful precisely because I know all the words, and therefore can move through texts more quickly, thinking I have done my homework. Even my study of French has not had the effect of Latin, because in French class we spend part of our time speaking the language. Thank goodness for the so-called deadness of the classics.
Years later I will be struck by Robert Frost's remark that he first heard the "speaking voice" in poetry by reading, of all things, Virgil's Eclogues. I will find this extraordinary and comforting in equal measure. Extraordinary in that Frost detected a "speaking" voice in an antique language, at the remove of two millennia, and through pastoral, always deemed the most artificial of poetic genres because of its conventions. (Dr. Johnson on Milton's Lycidas: "Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.") But comforting because my experience in school absolutely duplicated Frost's. Not the pastoral Eclogues but the epic Aeneid: no matter.
Could this really have been almost a half century ago? In suburban Philadelphia, we—middle-class, mostly Jewish, sons and daughters of the "greatest generation"—were raised to succeed during that much-maligned decade, the 1950s. By and large we have: We have become doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, therapists, research scientists, bankers, novelists, business people, labor organizers, architects, State Department officials, and, now, some of us, grandparents. Would we have prospered without Virgil as our pilot? I can't speak for all the others, but it is difficult for me to imagine the trajectory of my own career, of my life, without his guidance. (Twelve years later, my first scholarly article, "Wordsworth's Aeneid," brought together my first poetic love and a more recent one.) Dante knew what he was doing when he chose Virgil as his escort.
Let me return, however, to "forsan et haec," one of those touchstones ("sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" is still 250 lines and several weeks ahead of us) that continue to haunt Virgil's readers, his translators, and those poets who have felt the brush of his sadness. A six-word epigrammatic sentence, it epitomizes the compression available to ancient Greek and Latin but not to us moderns. All translations of Virgil and Homer inevitably use more words than their originals. And since the suppleness of Latin syntax cannot be duplicated in English, with its more or less fixed linearity, a translator must find his own way of producing multum in parvo.
I am back in 1961. I sit at home with my handy Cassell's New Latin Dictionary (1959) and try to parse the sentence. The line lacks adjectives and ends with the verb; in theory it should be easy to render. It is not. "Forsan," I discover, means "by chance." "Olim" seems to mean "once upon a time." But wait: It can also mean "one day." (Cassell's cites Virgil's line as an example.) The fact that the verb—whatever it means—is in the future tense (as reflected by that "bit" ending, which we learned several years earlier) confirms this. "Meminisse" turns out to be a semi-Greek infinitive, "to remember," so now only two puzzles remain. First, I must pin down the meaning of the verb, which I learn comes from "iuvo/iuvare," "to help, assist," which certainly doesn't assist me, but also the more promising "to delight, gratify." I'm left with "et haec," which certainly doesn't seem like a proper subject for a third-person singular verb (though I'll later learn that plural neuters can in fact take such verbs). "And this will be pleasing, perhaps, to remember in the future?" I'm getting close.
The dictionary fortuitously (a word related to "forsan") serves as a trot, once again citing Virgil's line as an example of how the verb can be used impersonally: "It is pleasing." And then it strikes me: "Haec" is not a subject but a pronominal object, neuter accusative plural ("these things"). Eureka: "And perhaps one day it will be pleasing to recall these things." The simple "et" ("and") doesn't merit looking up in the dictionary.
Getting comfy, I have committed an almost fatal error. Too much confidence leads to hubris. It turns out (yet I fail at the time to realize) that the pesky, far from simple "et" can be not only a conjunction but an adverb meaning "also, even." "Even these things it will be pleasing to remember some day. . . perhaps," says the intrepid leader, himself doubting the very cliche he is feeding his troops. Despite the characteristic "forsan," Aeneas wants his speech to encourage his weary countrymen, but Virgil undercuts the leader's enthusiasm with his follow-up: "spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem" ("he feigns hope in his face, he stifles the deep grief in his heart").
An entire history of both criticism and taste can evolve from a study of translation, so let me make a mini-excursion through the land of "forsan et haec" (which we adolescent wags used to chant as a combination football cheer and magic trick: "Forsan et Hike! Olim Meminisse: You're a Rabbit!"). Gavin Douglas, in middle Scots, needs sixteen lines to render Virgil's six, but he finally achieves the mood: "Sum tyme heron to think may help perchaunce / By diuers cacis, seir perrellis and sufferenace." It also takes Dryden an entire heroic couplet to get it: "An hour will come, with pleasure to relate / Your sorrows past as benefits of fate." No "forsan" here: It's all Augustan cheerfulness. Even weirder in its jauntiness is the Victorian effort by John Conington, the Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford, who renders the Aeneid in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, interspersed with other verse forms, especially in the speeches:
Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;
This suffering will yield as yet
A pleasant tale to tell.
The audience of the day—Conington's translation appeared in 1866—must have caught an echo of Tennyson's "Ulysses" ("To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield") and may well have seen Aeneas as a forerunner of muscular Christianity. Not so in the twentieth century: All of the major translations are alert to Aeneas's tentative, hesitant mood. Rolfe Humphries (1953): "Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure." Allen Mandelbaum (1971): "Perhaps one day you will remember even / these our adversities with pleasure." Robert Fitzgerald (1983) simply repeats Humphries: "Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / will be a pleasure." Edward McCrorie (1995) uses the fewest words and a conditional mood: "Remembering all this someday may cheer you."
A month or so after "forsan et haec," we in Mrs. Bintner's class come upon Laocoön, hurling his spear into the hollow belly of the Trojan horse and expressing his own skepticism: "timeo Danaos et dona ferentis." By this point we are aware that the adverbial "et" can be used with ironic force: "I fear the Greeks especially when bearing gifts." We are reminded, looking back, of Aeneas's ambiguous articulation: "Perhaps, one day, it will be pleasing to remember even these things" (because they were so horrible), or "it will be pleasing to remember especially these things" (because we will surmount them with heroic prowess). Much complexity in such a trivial word; multum in parvo indeed.
* * *
Fifteen years after high school, by now a professor myself, I took a summer school course in Homeric Greek taught by a classicist friend. Reading Homer—the greatest poet in part because he is the first—was a walk in the country compared to reading Virgil. Once you have Homer's limited vocabulary, with its many repeated epithets and other phrases, it's a relatively simple matter to get the gist of his poetry. But I could never have done this without having read Virgil first. In My Early Life, Winston Churchill, a famously bad student, said something that now hangs, in a calligraphic rendering, on my office wall: "By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence—which is a noble thing. Naturally, I am biased in favour of boys learning English; and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat." Latin as an honor prepared me for Greek as a treat and also for the rest of my life, but not for the reasons they gave us in school. The brightest kids were supposed to take Latin because it would teach them vocabulary and etymology and prepare them for law and medicine, the professions with really difficult lingoes; it had something to do with anatomy and pharmacology, with stare decisis and habeas corpus and other highfalutin terms. An unsubtle snobbism operated: The smartest of us took Latin, the sophisticated ones (mostly girls) took French, and everyone else took Spanish, on the questionable notion that it was easier than the others. (No language is intrinsically more difficult than any other, although it is true that Latin's syntactical fluidity, as well as its declensions and conjugations, somewhat complicates the process of learning.)
Still, the primary reason to read the so-called dead languages is not to amass a larger, fancier vocabulary or to order one's future vocational arrangements. A colleague in my university's anthropology department once said at a faculty colloquium on the tired subject of "the value of a liberal arts education" that this was the primary benefit he had received from reading Shakespeare in college. I begged to demur; his remark annoyed me. An unintended consequence is merely a collateral benefit, not an essential reason. The reason to read Shakespeare or anyone else is, instead, to generate a specific kind of pleasure, achieved through linguistic mastery and not dissimilar to the mastery of crossword puzzles or other language games. Because it is foreign, Latin poses greater challenges, and then gives greater pleasures. Those pleasures are, first of all, the knowledge of how language works and, second, what it was like to stand with Pliny and watch as Vesuvius erupted, to court with Catullus his Lesbia, and to see with Lucretius the invisible atomic particles that constitute our world.
* * *
"Forsan et haec": It is indeed a pleasure, now, years later, to recall these things, especially because reading Robert Fagles's superb translation of the Aeneid has brought back my schoolboy days. Having already translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, Fagles has now rounded out a lifetime of work in the fields of classical epic. Translation is a game that no one ever wins for all time; each age rediscovers, reinvents, reinterprets the classics, and no one's translation is ever anything more than a sophisticated assay or assault on the material. I am reminded of Richard Bentley's famous remark to the greatest translator of the classics in English: "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you mustn't call it Homer." So we won't call Fagles's book "Virgil," but rather "Virgil for our time," however long that time might be. His triumphant rendering should remain the one to beat for years to come.
Here, for starters, is his rendering of Aeneas's speech of encouragement to his men:
"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.
Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns
our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out
a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree
the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up.
Save your strength for better times to come."
Fagles has "Englished" Virgil in entirely persuasive ways. His diction and syntax are limpid and straightforward, but he embellishes the surface of the verse with many nice and delicate touches. In this passage, for instance, certain alliterations ("weathered worse," "rocks / resounding ... rabid," "brunt ... boulders," "call ... courage") and assonances ("resounding ... howling," "peace ... decree") pass into our ears almost inaudibly, so gentle is their music.
Virgil wrote an impossible language. Latin does not lend itself to dactyls, and it was part of Virgil's uniqueness to have perfected the process—begun by Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus—of hammering, somewhat unnaturally, Homer's mellifluous hexameters (Greek being a more fluid language) into the rugged sounds of spondee-heavy Latin. In addition, where Homer improvised, weaving his ready-made epithets and formulas into an apparently spontaneous pattern, Virgil is entirely of the library, working by the book in order to make a book. If Homer's work is the fons et origo, the first flower of epic, then Virgil's is responsive, an echo and a continuation as well as an original poem in its own right. There's not a single page that does not have Homer behind it, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly. Virgil was perhaps the first poet to labor under what W. J. Bate called "the burden of the past," and what Harold Bloom famously reformulated in a Freudian way as "the anxiety of influence." But, to put it more positively, his Aeneid might be described as the greatest homage ever paid to a precursor poet. This responsiveness works at two levels: a semantic one consisting of story, heroes, and figures of speech (I'll come to these shortly), and a non-semantic one of music and prosody. One perfectly dactylic line is Juno's famous statement at the start of Book 7, used by Freud on the frontispiece of The Interpretation of Dreams: "flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" (in Fagles: "If I cannot sway the heavens, I'll wake the powers of hell," an equally elegant, balanced assertion.) "Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers," Pope famously observed in the preface to his own great Iliad. No one can succeed entirely in rendering the artificial bookishness of Virgil. At least Homer's language, though equally artificial (i.e., poetic), allows his translators to discover their own equivalents for "rosy-fingered dawn," "swift-footed Achilles," and "gray-eyed Athena," and to repeat and vary them at will.
But Virgil also makes us hearers, insofar as anything written in lines rather than prose sentences demands that we attend all the more closely to niceties of sound, rhythm, syntax, to everything we mean by "music." What we hear in Fagles is strong but not entirely regular verse, with the iambic heft that sounds normative in English: "we all have weathered worse," "an end to this as well," "with Scylla's howling rabid dogs," "the Cyclops' boulders too," "Dismiss your grief and fear," "so many twists and turns / our course holds firm," "for better times to come." Fagles's lines generally have either five or six beats, though he occasionally expands to seven stresses to heighten a rich simile. Often he uses a plain iambic pentameter line, or a variation of one, to signal termination, at the end of either a book or an episode. Here's the ten-syllable, somewhat irregular end of Book 6: "Anchors run from prows, the sterns line the shore." And the perfect end of Book 7: "her shepherd's staff of myrtle spiked with steel." The hendecasyllabic end of Book 8: "the fame and fates of all his children's children." The thirteen-syllable but thoroughly iambic end of Book 10: "and across his armor pours his life in waves of blood." A regular iambic pentameter can also mark a pause within the onrush of the narrative, especially in the battle scenes that take up so much of the second half of the poem. Some examples: "speeding them past the churning shoals unharmed" (7. 27); "but Fortune grudged them both safe passage home" (10. 514); "their wailing set the walls on fire with grief" (11. 173, a wonderful turn of phrase). Both together and separately, the iamb and the pentameter provide us hearers with something like a default mode, and a very reassuring one.
Equally reassuring is Fagles's judicious, nimbly handled syntax. Only Milton, or contemporaries mad for hypotactic construction, like Amy Clampitt, Richard Howard, the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary's Castle, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur, can perform syntactic acrobatics that would do justice to the Virgilian sentence. Fagles holds his own with his contemporaries. Take, for a modest instance, "forsan et haec." Virgil begins with "perhaps" and keeps us waiting for the verb until the end of what is for him a short sentence. In his translation—"a joy it will be, one day, perhaps, to remember even this"—Fagles begins with an inversion, perhaps meant to preserve some feeling of pomp and Latinity, but then introduces a series of medial hesitations that allow us to hear the uncertainty and doubts in Aeneas's voice even before we learn of "the anguish buried in his heart." Elsewhere, Fagles makes us hear Virgil as a stalwart, plain-speaking Roman whose affirmation of Augustan pieties and propaganda tends to be complicated, or even undercut, by his deeper understanding of what he famously termed "the tears of things." In Fagles, Aeneas's response to the depiction of himself and his fallen city on the rising walls of Carthage is another straightforward utterance: "even here, the world is a world of tears / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart." As always, it takes the translator more words to render the original: Fagles needs seventeen to translate Virgil's seven-word epigrammatic formula "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." Latin concision can never be duplicated; a translator must find analogical ways of rendering its effects.
Fagles's Aeneid is a piece of poetry in its own right, with its own music and impelling narrative thrust. If his loosely iambic rhythm draws us in and holds our attention over the span of ten thousand lines, he uses other devices as well to ensure our auditory satisfaction and involvement in the action. Consider, for example, alliteration and assonance, which in the absence of rhyme provide musical glue to hold a line, or a longer passage, together. In the funeral games for Anchises, Virgil introduces a giant snake, a benign counterpart to the twin serpents that devoured Laocoön and his sons in Book 2. The passage glitters, rainbow-like, pleasing our inner eye, and also rings with echoing sounds for our auditory pleasure:
. . . a serpent slithered up from the shrine's depths,
drawing its seven huge coils, seven rolling coils
calmly enfolding the tomb, gliding through the altars:
his back blazed with a maze of sea-blue flecks, his scales
with a sheen of gold, shimmering as a rainbow showers
iridescent sunlight arcing down the clouds. Aeneas
stopped, struck by the sight. The snake slowly sweeping
along his length among the bowls and polished goblets
tasted the feast, then back he slid below the tomb,
harmless, slipping away from altars where he'd fed.(5. 103-112)
An especially effective alexandrine ends the passage, giving us additional assurance that the ceremonies have proceeded with efficiency and will continue to do so.
Such music informs the entire poem, but nowhere is it more welcome than in the second half, the so-called Iliadic Aeneid, filled with warfare, roll-calls of soldiers, and a kind of pageantry that holds little intrinsic interest or significance for a modern audience. Virgil's contemporaries would have recognized the sheer power of the names of their ancestors, their history, of everything that made Rome great; the catalogue had its own potency and life. For us, whatever power we still find in these passages can be only of an artistic nature. There is, for instance, an auditory thrill in the repeated "an" and "ian" sounds when Virgil lists the "cloud of troops on foot, / shield-bearing battalions" following Turnus:
Men in their prime from Argos, ranks of Auruncans,
Rutulians, Sicanian veterans on in years, Sacranians
in columns, Labicians bearing their painted shields,
men who plow your glades, old Tiber, the Numicus'
holy banks, whose plowshare turns the Rutulian slopes
and Circe's high-ridged cape.(7. 922-927)
And here is Fagles's wonderful rendering of the passage that evokes Vulcan's workshop, in which blacksmith and Cyclops alike forge Aeneas's shield. Once again visual and auditory elements combine, this time to force home the sense of constant labor:
. . . And some are working the bellows
sucking the air in, blasting it out, while others
are plunging hissing bronze in the brimming troughs,
the ground of the cavern groaning under the anvils' weight,
and the Cyclops raising their arms with their power,
arms up, arms down to the drumming, pounding beat
as they twist the molten mass in gripping tongs.(8.529-535)
Piling present participle upon participle, Fagles guarantees our awareness of the toil involved in producing the shield, on which are depicted scenes from Roman history. These exist in the unknowable future for Aeneas, but as the known past for the poem's readers. "Hoc opus, hic labor est" ("there the struggle, there the labor lies" in Fagles's balanced version) says the Cumaean Sibyl to Aeneas before his descent to the Underworld in Book 6. For the hero, it's the return from below that is unnaturally difficult; for the translator, it's the trick of remaining faithful to his original without losing his contemporary audience. He has a double obligation and must always look backwards and around himself simultaneously.
In Virgil time is always of the essence. For the characters, the past destruction of one empire is balanced by the promise of a new one in the future. For us readers, everything is past, like the archaeological layering at Troy uncovered by Schliemann in the nineteenth century. But throughout, both Virgil and Fagles keep us moving rapidly, making us feel that we are hearing rather than reading a fast-paced narrative in which everything is happening, right now.
If devices such as alliteration and assonance keep us alert to Virgil's music, Fagles's energetic absorption of Virgil's "historical present" verbs (the use of the present tense to render action already achieved) gives his poem a powerful immediacy. Keats does the same to great advantage in "The Eve of Saint Agnes," to name a more recent example. One also sees the technique used in much contemporary fiction, but all too often, irritatingly enough, for no apparent reason—something on the order of "I am sitting in the car next to my boyfriend and we are driving to the senior prom. I am checking my make-up and smoking a cigarette." In the hands of a novice, such writing merely pretends to bring us in. It sounds jittery and tends to make its readers—at least those of a certain age—nervous because it prohibits meditation or any kind of complex temporality. Virgil uses the present, however, with such smart confidence that even when a passage switches apparently at random between present and perfect tenses we are never discomfited.
Here, for example, is Aeneas narrating the fall of Troy to Dido in Carthage. Notice how in the middle he moves from present action to the past perfect tense, and that it doesn't bother us at all:
" . . . into the blaze I dive, into the fray, wherever
the din of combat breaks and war cries fill the sky,
wherever the battle-fury drives me on and now
I'm joined by Rhipeus, Epytus mighty in armor,
rearing up in the moonlight—
Hypanis comes to my side, and Dymas too,
flanked by the young Coroebus, Mygdon's son.
Late in the day he'd chanced to come to Troy
incensed with a mad, burning love for Cassandra:
son-in-law to our king, he would rescue Troy. Poor man,
if only he'd marked his bride's inspired ravings!"(2. 424-434)
When Dido, having learned of Aeneas's imminent departure, flies into a desperate rage, we again move seamlessly nom past to present tense:
. . . but the queen—
who can delude a lover?—soon caught wind
of a plot afoot, the first to sense the Trojans
are on the move . . . She fears everything now,
even with all secure. Rumor, vicious as ever,
brings her word. . .(4.366-71)
Here and elsewhere, Fagles does not follow verbatim Virgil's alternations between past and present, but his temporal manipulations always do justice to the spirit of the original.
What Pound said of his Cantos, that it is a "poem containing history," is equally true for all epics, regardless of language or period. It therefore makes sense for the poet or his translator to keep his readers on their feet as he switches between tenses. Virgil's oft-praised melancholy (he was the man, according to Bruno Snell, who invented the evening), and his attention to the shadows of this world and the shades of the netherworld, derive from his historical sense of the costs of empire, the fragility of the present, the weight of the past, and the uncertainty, however fated, of the future. One passage in Book 2 stands out as an especially poignant example of his weighing of nostalgia against hopefulness. Aeneas encounters Panthus, a priest of Apollo, carrying his gods and his grandchild away from the burning citadel of Troy, and asks what is happening. Panthus replies:
" . . . venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus
Dardaniae. fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens
gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos
transtulit, incensa Danai dominantur in urbe."
I have italicized the verbs, a combination of present and heart-breaking perfect ones. Here is Dryden's noble summary:
"Troy is no more, and Ilium was a Town!
The fated Day, th' appointed Hour is come,
When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom
Transfers the Trojan State to Grecian hands."
Wordsworth, who did an interesting translation of Books 2 and 4 in uncharacteristic rhyming couplets, renders the speech thus:
" . . . 'Tis come—the final hour;
The inevitable close of Dardan power
Hath come:—we have been Trojans, Ilium was
And the great name of Troy; now all things pass
To Argos;—so wills angry Jupiter."
And Fagles thus:
"The last day has come for the Trojan people,
no escaping this moment. Troy's no more.
Ilium, gone—our awesome Trojan glory.
Brutal Jupiter hands it all over to Greece."
Compared to his predecessors, Fagles sounds matter-of-fact, even prosaic. But this is the point. So does Virgil. "Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium" means simply "We have been Trojans, Ilium has been." The simple preterite tense, used in the plural and then in the singular, in reference to people and to the state, packs greater punch than any of the English versions. "Transtulit" is perfect tense, "dominantur" present. Thus does Virgil ensure that we, like his characters, are borne off in a frenzy of activity that stretches through several temporal layers. Yesterday's current events are today's history.
Another way that Fagles keeps the action alive and present is through his dramatic enjambments. Virgil uses long periodic sentences that seldom pause at the end of lines. Fagles matches his master in his sense of what onrush means to his characters and readers. Again, from the last night of Troy:
" . . . And worse still,
the Greeks roaring with anger—we had saved Cassandra—
attack us from all sides! Ajax, fiercest of all and
Atreus' two sons and the whole Dolopian army,
wild as a rampaging whirlwind, gusts clashing,
the West- and the South- and Eastwind riding high
on the rushing horses of the Dawn, and the woods howl
and Nereus, thrashing his savage trident, churns up
the sea exploding in foam from its rocky depths."(2.514-522)
Whether depicting violent carnage, as above, or stately pageantry, as in the scene of Dido and Aeneas riding forth to the hunt (Book 4), before the storm that brings their passion to a climax when they take shelter in a convenient cave, both Virgil and Fagles know how to convert movement into energy by careful attention to sound.
And also to sight. Pope's distinction between hearing and reading elides one other vital quality of any epic poem: It must make us see. Virgil's sense of what are now called "the visuals" is unsurpassed in epic literature. Neither Homer nor Dante nor Milton can give us the sheer stateliness of pageantry, in the epic catalogue or similar roll-calls, or in the depiction of action. Because the Aeneid is a nationalistic epic (the first one, in fact), and because part of its author's purpose was to praise Augustus for his accomplishments both past and to come, it had to convey the inevitability of Rome's destiny by making it visible as well as audible. Augustus's famous, perhaps apocryphal boast, which Virgil did not live to hear, was that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Virgil was, however, keenly aware of the emperor's building campaign, of Roman feats of civil engineering, and he had a film director's eye for action and allegorical plumage. When King Evander, the Trojans' ally in their war with the Latins, asks Aeneas to take his son Pallas into battle, to teach him to "grow hard / to a soldier's life and the rough work of war," he reminds us of the didactic angle to Virgil's patriotism: "Let him get used to watching you in action, / admire you as his model from his youth" (8. 608-611). The reader watches the action too, and admires (a word whose root is "to look") the hero and his various strengths. Through the beauty and music of words, Virgil endows even carnage with its own mellifluousness, especially in the later books, as when Virgil asks Calliope to "help me unroll the massive scroll of war" (9. 603-604).
If the Aeneid were propaganda pure and simple, it would never have maintained its hold on the Western literary imagination for more than two millennia. At one time, part of its appeal derived from the legend of Virgil as pre-Christian magus, an "anima naturaliter Christiana," who in his fourth eclogue was thought to have predicted the birth of Christ. To the British, the Aeneid, with its imperial vision of Rome, served as a mirror to their own predestined empire and as a means of inculcating generations of schoolboys with Latin notions of duty and piety. But to the mythical "common reader," the glory of the poem resides in its chronic and inevitable sadness, and in the modern self-consciousness of its hero. Virgil differs from Homer's stern sense of warfare and tragedy as the essential human condition by giving his hero not only a sense of historical destiny but also a capacity to remain dutiful and duty-bound—"pius," to use his famous epithet. Aeneas has ferocity when needed and sadness whenever he is left to his own thoughts. Such sadness reflects his self-consciousness ("mens sibi conscia recti," "the mind always alert to what is right"), something distinguishing him from his Homeric antecedents, such as Achilles and Odysseus. Self-consciousness, what Socrates called the "examined life," was not available to Homer. It was Virgil who modernized it and made it a Roman ideal. Marcus Aurelius, still several centuries in the future, would not have been possible without Virgil as a predecessor. And as Virgil is always conscious of his debt to Homer, Aeneas is self-conscious in ways that make him our contemporary. Although the plain fisherman to whom Yeats gave a copy of the poem thought the so-called hero was really a priest, Aeneas has become to modern audiences a test case in the struggle between passion and duty, pleasure and obligation, love and war.
"Italiam non sponte sequor," Aeneas says laconically to Dido as he prepares to leave her ("I set sail for Italy— / all against my will" [4. 451-452]). He is weighted down by physical, psychological, and cosmic forces. He lacks free will to define himself for himself. His "pietas," that classic Roman virtue that weaves its way through Italian history up to Mussolini's insistence on dedication to the state, partakes of equal portions of familial love and patriotism. And of course the state is the family writ large. The image—beloved of artists and readers alike—of Aeneas carrying his aged father Anchises on his back, holding the hand of his son Ascanius (his wife Creusa following behind, in order to be conveniently disposed of and to allow Aeneas to make a new, dynastic marriage when he alights in Italy), encompasses all the burdens forced upon the unwilling founder of empire. Such burdens are educational, as he reminds Dido in Book 1: "Schooled in suffering, now I learn to comfort / those who suffer too" (1. 751-752).
Dido does not learn the lesson as well as she might. No wonder St. Augustine remembers having wasted so many tears over her before he found salvation. Whatever her strengths, she is also doubly doomed—as a foreigner and as a woman—and undone by her love for a man. That love is both psychologically realistic in Virgil's presentation and ordained by the collaborative efforts of Venus and Juno. The queen, committed to empire-building, says to her sister that she remains faithful to her dead husband, Sychaeus, but that if anyone could stir erotic passion in her, it would be this gorgeous man recently washed ashore at Carthage. Cupid, the emissary of his mother, works his magic, and the queen is soon won over. She, too, exhibits a modern self-consciousness: "Adgnosco veteris vestigia flarnmae" ("The signs of the old flame, I know them well" [4. 30]). She becomes not an ancient version of a desperate housewife but a tragic figure who gives in completely, as Aeneas does not, to the flames of eros, and who thereby neglects her civic responsibility. Once she learns of his decision to leave, she rages, she begs, she asks for a stay in order to come to terms with her loss, she even hints that pregnancy will salve her wounds. All to no avail. Aeneas remains unmoved, unrelenting, and seemingly heartless.
It is the poem's great achievement to allow us to feel ambivalent toward both the hero and Dido, his alter ego. A first-century Roman would naturally see in her, as we do not, the ancestral source of the Punic wars, with Hannibal playing the role of her avenger. But he would also have been moved, like St. Augustine, by the plight of the abandoned lover. At least for a moment, Aeneas becomes something of a stiff:
. . . heaven blocks his gentle, human ears.
As firm as a sturdy oak grown tough with age
when the Northwinds blasting off the Alps compete,
fighting left and right, to wrench it from the earth,
and the winds scream, the trunk shudders, its leafy crest
showers across the ground but clings firm to its rock.
. . .. . . he takes the full force
of love and suffering deep in his great heart.
His will stands unmoved. The falling tears are futile.(4. 554-565)
Virgil's "placidas auris" ("gentle ears") indicate Aeneas's sympathy, held in check by "heaven" and the fates. The hero feels sympathy in his heart, but "mens immota manet" ("His will stands unmoved")—Virgil's insistent alliteration calls attention to the immobility of Aeneas's mind. No cad he, but rather a hero summoned against his will to a higher calling. The conflict between love and duty has echoed down the corridors of cultural history ever since.
Dido turns out to be as heroic as her abandoning lover, though with different motivation. When she decides to mount her funeral pyre, she proclaims, "I shall die unavenged, but die I will!" (4. 818). Fagles's old-fashioned distinction between "shall" (for futurity) and "will" (for determination) nicely captures the sense of Virgil's "moriemur inultae, / sed moriamur," though he does not allow his Dido to speak of herself in the royal "we." For him, as for the rest of the Aeneid's modern audience, she remains an archetype of majesty, a pawn in the hands of the meddlesome gods who nevertheless achieves dignity through suicide.
"Inultae," along with "inanis" ("empty" as opposed to "worthless" or "senseless," as denoted by the English "inane") and certain other words, ring throughout the poem, with the effect of imparting to it an insistent undertone of futile sadness. Such words are Virgil's way of reminding us of the uselessness of so much in both human history and the human will. Tears fall useless throughout the poem. Even art often fails in its efforts to memorialize the dead and help the living. Thus, at the start of Book 6, Aeneas sees near Naples the work of Daedalus, master craftsman, who attempted to carve his son's tragedy into the walls:
And you, too, Icarus, what part you might have played
In a work that great, had Daedalus' grief allowed it.
Twice he tried to engrave your fall in gold and
Twice his hands, a father's hands, fell useless.(6. 37-40)
Much in Virgil's world, as in ours, turns out to be useless, empty, in vain. The visual splendors of processions, of individual beauty, of nature itself, are severely compromised if not entirely undone by Virgil's melancholy. Or one might say that the melancholy enhances beauty because of the poet's sense that, as Stevens put it, "Death is the mother of beauty."
As the poet of sadness and the evening, Virgil anticipated many modern varieties of nostalgia (literally, "pain of home") from the Weltzschmerz of Goethe's young Werther and the mal du siècle of the French Romantics to Freudian mourning and melancholia. More than Homer, who had a starkly absolute, tragic sense of the lives of warriors and their victims, and of the civilians (women and children) whom they took into slavery, Virgil tends to internalize the suffering of both men and women. Such suffering is clear from the opening of his first eclogue, with its references to the displacements and exiles caused by the civil wars of the first century B.C. It continues in the Georgics. The Aeneid builds upon the earlier works, raising civic disharmony from a pastoral theme to an epic one in the same way that urbanity and empire extend from agriculture and the natural life. "Landscape-lover, lord of language" said Tennyson, by which he meant to praise equally Virgil's combination of local patriotism (his sympathy for shepherds and farmers, the lands they occupied and the trades they plied) and literary savvy. He found in his precursor a Tennyson avant la lettre. "Thou majestic in thy sadness / at the doubtful doom of human kind." Tennyson's Virgil is also Fagles's Virgil, and indeed ours. If both landscape and empire may seem—at the start of our latest century—imperiled by humankind, then Virgil is the poet of today as well as of the nineteenth century. Humanity has run riot over the earth's landscape: Overpopulation, genocide, epidemic diseases, global warming, and internecine warfare all confront us in the news every morning. The cost of maintaining an empire, indeed several of them, mounts constantly. Politics has never seemed more treacherous.
A seemingly ornamental passage in the final book epitomizes Virgil's sympathy for the victims of warfare, and his sensitivity to the inevitable destruction of persons and ways of life under the justification of empire-building. Here is one of Turnus's victims:
. . . Turnus
kills the brothers fresh from Apollo's Lycian fields
and next Menoetes who, in his youth, detested war
but war would be his fate. An Arcadian angler
skilled at working the rivers of Lerna stocked with fish,
his lodgings poor, a stranger to all the gifts of the great,
and his father farmed his crops on rented land.(12. 602-608)
The death of Menoetes is both a casual aside and the essence of the matter. Virgil's lines sound not only elegiac but sweet: ''Arcada, piscosae cui circum flumina Lernae / ars fuerat pauperque domus nec nota potentum / munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat." "Knowing nothing of the gifts of the powerful" ("munera" may refer to the responsibilities of the great as well as their gifts to poor dependants), Menoetes led a simple life, removed, as Virgil himself was not, from the world of patrons and literary or political ambition. A life of anonymity and quiet in no way spares one from the juggernaut of destruction.
Pathos is the inevitable tone here, as it is also in Book 9, when the young warrior Euryalus dies in battle. Rolfe Humphries gives his death this way:
The neck droops over, as a bright-colored flower
Droops when the ploughshare bends it, or as poppies
Sink under the weight of heavy summer rainfall. . .
Among contemporary translators, Fagles remains true to Virgil but he also echoes an earlier admirer. Keats (who did a schoolboy translation of the Aeneid, now lost) writes in "Ode on Melancholy" that the melancholy fit falls
. . . sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud
that fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
and hides the green hill in an April shroud.
In Fagles, Euryalus rolls over in death
. . . limp as a crimson flower
cut off by a passing plow, that droops as it dies
or frail as poppies, their necks weary, bending
their heads when a sudden shower weighs them down.
All flesh is grass.
Let me return to Menoetes. Dryden embellishes his death as follows:
On Lerna's lake a silent life he led,
And with his nets and angle earned his bread.
Nor pompous cares, nor palaces, he knew,
But wisely from the infectious world withdrew.
Poor was his house: his father's painful hand
Is charged his rent, and plowed another's land.
Fagles requires no such extraneous detail. The facts, plain and simple, though adorned with modest alliteration, suffice to give us a sense of both Virgil's pathos and his chiseled verse. If one ignores the "and" at the start of line 608, one has (yet once more) the elegant understatement of perfect iambic pentameter: "his father farmed his crops on rented land." The default mode works wonders.
In his postscript, Fagles says that he has aimed for greater intimacy in his Aeneid than he did in his two Homeric translations, in order to capture Virgil's "unequalled blend of grandeur and accessibility." This certainly hits the right note as an estimate of his accomplishment as well as his aim. He has succeeded in producing a modern Virgil, on the one hand conveying the meaning and feeling of the original and on the other "trying to find a cadence for one's English." The cadences naturally succeed in moments, like those cited above, that appeal to our contemporary sense of belatedness and of the waning of empires. (I wonder what Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra would sound like if Fagles decided to update it, in the way Robert Lowell revised and modernized Melville and Racine.) Intimacy is one pole of the Virgilian temperament. The other—whether one thinks that Virgil is sincere or merely doing what he thought Augustus wanted of him—is patriotism, grandeur, the public voice, the Big Bow Wow. This voice does not appeal to contemporary tastes quite as much, but Fagles manages to make Virgil's claims for Roman glory convincing.
The command given by Anchises's ghost to his son in the Underworld may ring hollow to our ears, but the resemblance between the achieved Pax Romana and our nation's sense of its manifest destiny as policeman to the world is unavoidable. Whatever the differences, nationalistic hubris is at bottom all the same. Fagles's translation, like Virgil's original, has not an iota of irony:
. . . "Others, I have no doubt,
will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines,
draw from the block of marble features quick with life,
plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars
that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.
But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts:
to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
to spare the defeated, break the proud in war."(6. 976-984)
Virgil distinguishes the arts of his country from those of Greece and Babylon—from sculptors, orators, prognosticators, and astronomers—but he does so in full assurance that acts of power are no less significant, indeed no less artistic, than sculpting and public speaking. Virgil is, in fact, a master of "public art." I'm thinking not only of the pedagogic, didactic side of his temperament and his willingness to speak on behalf of Augustus, but also of the way in which he brings his ekphrastic passages into the service of patriotism, and finally of his sense that an individual's destiny is part of his nation's.
The forging of Aeneas's shield, of which I have already spoken, is the central scene for the future of the hero and the empire he will never know. It is also the quintessence of Virgil's distinctive art. Inspired, of course, by the forging of Achilles's shield in the Iliad (Book 18), Virgil's centerpiece takes up almost three hundred lines. In a poem full of sadness and fervor, nothing matches its sober beauties. Interweaving the themes of heroism, labor, and nationhood, it also radiates the full glory of Virgilian didacticism, for the poet designed it as a reminder to his contemporaries and their offspring of their raison d'être. Right from the start, the sheer physicality, conveyed by present-tense participles, takes us in. The Cyclops band of Vulcanian workers digs into its collective task: "They are forging one tremendous shield, one against all the Latin spears." When Venus presents the shield to her son, he delights in it, running his eyes across the piece. Art is disposed in the service of duty, and all of Italy, all of Rome, is depicted on Aeneas's new shield. In the center, at its heart, is the battle of Actium, Augustus on one side and Antony and Cleopatra, his "Egyptian wife" (never mentioned by name), the modern incarnation of Dido, on the other. Everything is present-tense. That's the nature of art, after all, and also the nature of myth.
Caesar triumphs, of course, but Aeneas does not know this. For him, everything is pure futurity, and he is lost in ignorant aesthetic appreciation and wondering doubt without understanding what is meant (for the reader) as an omen. Book 8 ends on an anticlimax: The hero "takes delight / in the likeness [of the events on the shield], lifting onto his shoulders now / the fame and fates of all his children's children." As Yeats understood, having learned his lesson from Virgil, the agents of history seldom know who they are, or what they are doing. Leda did not put on Zeus's knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop. The Aeneid teaches many lessons—about heroism, love, the tragedy of warfare, our inability to free ourselves from a web of circumstances—but perhaps none more persistently and subtly than that of labor, that crucial Roman virtue celebrated in the Georgics. The gods demand hard work of heroes, who must perform it to merit their status. Right before he goes off to his final battle against Turnus, Aeneas draws Ascanius aside, kissing him and offering a final piece of wisdom: "Learn courage from me, my son, true hardship too. / Learn good luck from others. My hand will shield you / in war today and guide you toward the great rewards" (12.513-515). Here are Roman virtues, born out of the Roman sense of duty and work. Where Homer gives us an archaic world in which happiness is fleeting at best and nothing endures, Virgil works teleologically. The myth of Troy and its fall gives way to the building of the Roman Empire. One word for such a vision is progress. History, like heroism, makes demands.
* * *
Literature, too, makes demands, and offers commensurate rewards. By June, 1962, with college drawing near, our band of brothers and sisters, having survived the last night of Troy, Scylla and Charybdis, the death of Dido, and a descent to the Underworld, spends its last three weeks reading the opening sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Next to Virgil, Ovid is ease incarnate: His rhythms, vocabulary, and syntax seem less difficult, tortuous, freighted, troubled. A great burden has been lifted from our shoulders, but, having been severely challenged, we also enjoy a feeling of triumph. The pleasures of other Latin authors remain ahead. Many of us continue with Latin for a term or two in college: Catullus, Horace, Tacitus, and the playwrights stand waiting for the happy few. The year has passed. Older, certainly, and perhaps a bit wiser, we are ready to return to the upper world, not, like Aeneas, through the Gate of Ivory, with its false dreams, but rather through the Gate of Horn, with its true ones.
—for Marie Bintner ("dux femina facti"), and my stalwart "socii" in Latin IV, Cheltenham High School, 1961-62
About the Author
Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University
and the editor-in-chief of Southwest Review. His recent books How Poets See the World (Oxford) and Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt (Columbia) have just been released in paperback. Forthcoming are Partial Accounts: Selected Literary Essays (Oxford) and Pursued by Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "Western Motel," in this issue, is his first published poem; another will appear in the Kenyon Review.
Publisher and Editor: Herbert Leibowitz
Co-Editor: Ben Downing
Assistant Editor: Adam L. Dressler
Copyright © 2008 by Poetry in Review Foundation
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
