Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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 in doubt. Fitzgerald's rendition of Virgil...
...early 30s, with no experience whatsoever, Houseman found himself in Harlem, directing the first production of the Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Not long afterward he became Orson Welles' principal collaborator in the renowned and innovative Mercury Theater. In 1955, when this third volume of his memoirs resumes, Houseman is about to rescue the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Conn., after its wobbly first year. He has just finished a stint as a movie producer (Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando; Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas). He goes on to direct some...
...journey takes on a mythico-literary cast. Erofeev is Sheherezade, avoiding one thousand and one train fares by telling obscene stories to chief Ticket Inspector Semyonych. He is Oedipus, parrying the ribald riddles of a drunken Sphinx. He is Dante descending through the Moscow circles of Hell, his Virgil a bottle of Stolychnaya. And in the tragic denouement, Erofeev becomes Christ on Golgotha, crying out in anguish "Why, oh Lord, did you forsake...