Tone is always a key issue in attempting to convey Virgil's difficult mix of elevated poignancy and tender force. His ‘Jupiter, people maintain you wrote hospitality's handbook’ is borderline hilarious. Both Ruden and Fitzgerald put Frederick Ahl to shame, though. Where Ruden has ‘Jove, your laws govern visits, as they say’ (1.731), Fitzgerald offers ‘You make the laws for host and guest’ – smoother and more decorous. Sometimes a whole line just doesn't quite feel right. For example, I would much have preferred some other way to characterize Hector's cohort, followers, entourage, or band of fellow fighters (his comes) at 6.166 than this: ‘He'd gone to battle in great Hector's suite.’ That jars awfully, but this new English Aeneid survives it. She occasionally nods, of course, but these tend to be very brief naps. Her diction is almost unfailingly chaste (as Auden once described Frost's), and the great clarity and force this lends her translation are evident everywhere. And Ruden has it just right: ‘The axe that was half-buried in his neck’ (1.224). But no, it turns out there is no warrant for this unskilled fellow in the Latin. I had somehow convinced myself, for example, that when Laocoon is described as bellowing in pain like an ox struck in the neck by an ‘incertam’ axe (Fitzgerald chooses ‘fumbled,’ though ‘hesitant’ might do about as well), Virgil had also provided us with a clumsy axe- man – a nice little human touch. It was over a year since I had last read an Aeneid (that of Fagles) when I took up Ruden's, so many details of the poem had slipped my memory. The answer, it would appear, is ‘precious little’. Given the speed Ruden achieves by her bold decision, what, if anything, has been sacrificed? Not just in raw numbers, I mean, but in those elements that go to make up the poetry of a verse translation – metre, diction, imagery, music, and highly marked syntax. How else to get everything in? In the battle between highly inflected, suffix-suffused Latin and analytic, word order-driven English, there is really no contest. Fitzgerald, for example, needs 1,031 blank verse lines in Book 1 to convey what Virgil packs into 756 – a 36 per cent differential. There have of course been pentameter Aeneids before, most notably Dryden's and Fitzgerald's, but where they have sacrificed syllables, they have given full measure in line numbers. Her work is that rarity: a line-for-line rendition of Virgil's epic in English that declares ten syllables a fit match for the Aeneid’s hexameters. For Ruden, not just an esteemed classicist herself, but a poet of considerable skill, has chosen boldly. But these luminaries have, in roughly equivalent terms, beaten me to it, and they're onto something. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to call Ruden's work ‘pellucid and propulsive – limpidly austere in its diction and dynamic in its narrative speed’. Thank God for blurb writers – especially the clutch of poets and classicists on the back cover of Sarah Ruden's new verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid.
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