Word: virgil
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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...
...translator does not attempt to reproduce Virgil's rolling hexameters, so sonorous in Latin and soporific in English. He chooses instead a blank verse Umber enough to accommodate both dignity and verve. Through this medium, Aeneas can be seen again as he must have first appeared to contemporaries, who now just happen to speak English and live in the latter part of the 20th century...
Fitzgerald's language gives Aeneas his due as a man, without going beyond the character Virgil portrayed: a weapon of national purpose fired in the Homeric forge...