Word: aeneid
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...AENEID Translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Random House; 416 pages...
...taking on such a work, Poet and Translator Robert Fitzgerald inherited these general difficulties and a few specific ones as well. Virgil's Aeneid is one of the two or three most influential texts in Western literature, yet it achieved such eminence in part through an accident of history. Latin retreated to monasteries and survived the Dark Ages in manuscript, while Greek was largely forgotten...
When the Renaissance rediscovered the originals of the Homeric epics, Virgil's reputation started to tarnish. The Greeks had clearly borne great gifts to the Roman poet. The Aeneid now looked suspiciously like a pastiche. Its first half, recounting the wandering of Aeneas and his vanquished colleagues after the fall of Troy, owed more than a little to The Odyssey. Its last six books, in which the hero wages war on Italian tribes and fulfills his divine destiny to found the Roman Empire, showed the bloody imprint of The Iliad. Furthermore, Aeneas himself, compared with the Homeric heroes Odysseus...
...sing of warfare and a man at war." Fitzgerald's version of The Aeneid's first words ("Arma virumque cano") veers sharply away from the traditional reading in English, enshrined in the title of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Yet singing of arms and the man was not all that Virgil's fellow Romans in the 1st century B.C. would have understood him to mean. They had already been thoroughly schooled on who Aeneas was and what he had, in legend, accomplished; neither his identity nor his military prowess could have been...
...conference table. There was a communal feeling in the group during the friendly discussion. Galinsky wondered if his class saw any change from Homer to Vergil in the ancient poets' view of man in society. Said Barbara Kane, a classical studies teacher from Spring Lake, N.J.: "In the Aeneid, there's a definite movement away from the focus on the individual per se-you have a national responsibility to the group." Said Tom Ahern, who teaches Latin in Mashpee, Mass.: "The emphasis is on the individual bowing to the needs of the state, rather than the individual heroism...