Arms and the man I sing of Troy

The eminent classicist and translator Frederick Ahl has recently published his new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Now I have a little confession to make: I don’t really like the Aeneid. Aeneas may be pius (’pious’) by epithet, but his defining characteristic is really being in a perpetual state of weeping, moping, and Agonizing About His Destiny. He’s also a jerk to basically everybody he meets, especially Dido—it’s been suggested that some parts of Book IV would make a really great angsty LiveJournal entry once Dido discovered that Aeneas had changed his Facebook ‘Relationship Status’ to ‘It’s Complicated’. Basically everything after Book VI is unreadable as well, because it’s all about random battles between people we don’t care about so Aeneas can found his city of Lavinium (code for Rome). And to top it off, the work is filled with the most transparent, perfidious, and insufferable propaganda for Augustus Caesar, filled with ‘prophecies’ that ‘predict’ how much the world will need this Augustus to lead and rule and generally be a great and terrific guy. It’s insufferable, really. This may well get me banned from the Great Fellowship Of Classicists, many of whom seem to have this thing for Virgil, but he’s simply not my thing.

If Virgil is your thing, however, you will probably have something to say about Ahl’s new translation. It is written in something approximating English dactylic hexameter, which gives him a lot of room to play with per line (the line count is the same as in the Latin original). Also, Ahl’s hexameters are a damn sight better and more natural-sounding than Longfellow’s awful

This is the forest primeval: the murmuring pines and the hemlock

But Ahl’s hexameters—especially in terms of versification—are not perfect, and he has to deal with the problem of sustaining the hexameter through thousands of lines in English, which can start to sound quite tiresome even after only a few verses. Additionally, there is a lot of unnecessarily technical vocabulary retained, significantly in some of the crazier battle scenes. Much of this is explained via endnotes linked to asterisks in the text, which seems clunky and inelegant poetry to me. But then again, what is a translator to do?

For example, let me quote twelve lines from Book IX, during one of the interminable ‘fight scenes’ (9.503–514):

Far off, the resonant bronze of a bugle has crackled staccato
Terror. There follows a thunderous cheer bellowed back by the heavens.
Quickly the Volscians approach in an interlocked tortoise formation,
Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts.
Some look for ways to get in and to scale outer walls upon ladders:
Points undermanned, where the crown of defence admits flickers of daylight
Through less dense crenellations of troops. In response, though, the Teucrians
Blast them with all kinds of weapon, prise ladders away with strong levers.
Holding a wall under siege was a skill they’d acquired in prolonged war.
Further, they tried hurling boulders of murderous heaviness, hoping
Somehow to break through this covered attack. But whatever they threw down,
Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled.

In the text, ‘Volscians’ has an asterisk and endnote, referring the reader to a different endnote, in which these people are identified, and a cross-reference to yet a third endnote to explain the ‘interlocked tortoise formation’. Yet I would be doing a disservice to Ahl to carp too much upon this: certainly there are many other features about this translation that are redeemable. The line ‘Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts’ has some terrific alliteration, nicely rendering the Latin alliterative vellere vallum in the same line, for example. Ahl is also a master of making the metre ‘paint’ his text, parallelling this feature in Virgil: the original ferre iuvet subter densa testudine casus, heavily spondaic as it is, is reflected as such in Ahl’s translation: ‘Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled’—a very heavily accentual and spondaic line to reflect the tightness of the soldiers’ formation.

What is more, the reader is drawn in to the action of the text, not left standing as an observer outside the text (this, I feel, is the downside of many modern translations, including Mandelbaum’s celebrated version and possibly even Fagles’ recent effort; a step backwards, in a way, from his masterful Iliad and Odyssey). But I can’t help feeling that this is compromised in some ways by awkwardnesses in the text—’all kinds of weapon’, for instance, does not strike me as particularly elegant English, and the two lines beginning with ‘Points undermanned’ does not read like natural language, and is complicated by needlessly obscure vocabulary (’crenellations‘, for example, are those square bits cut out of the tops of towers at castles; I don’t see how the word is really being applied here to this situation). Finally, there are some nice and some not-so-nice features about the versification—the enjambment of ’staccato / Terror’ is well done, but ‘In response, though, the Teucrians’ smacks of metrical filler, and ‘they’d acquired in prolonged war’ scans badly with respect to the line’s accentuation.

So take the new Ahl translation for what it’s worth (mine cost £16.99 plus postage and packing, though it seems now to be available in North America via the usual outlets)—hopefully it will be able to take its rightful place among the excellent efforts of the modern translators.