Mouths agape, mocked by the whispering cry. While others raised a battle shout, or tried to, SomeĪnd ran, as once, when routed, to the ships, Through the dark air, they shrank in fear. Seeing the living man in bronze that glowed has then been able to make the obvious artistic transition, not so much a derivation as a growth, to these slower, more tendentiously molded lines from Book VI of the new Aeneid: Not soĪgamemnon's phalanx, chiefs of the Danaans: Had brought from darker hell some saurianĭeath's head. In a pandemonium of whispers, blown together, īut first came shades in thousands, rustling Other great souls who perished in times past. Professor Fitzgerald is the only translator of Homer who, after a passage like this from Book XI of the Odyssey made over 30 years ago:Īnd Herakles, down the vistas of the dead,įaded from sight, but I stood fast, awaiting However, this newest translation, beyond the bookmaking splendors in which Random House has clothed it, has one virtue, one advantage which is primary: it is the only Aeneid that comes to us, as it came to Virgil and to Virgil's public, through Homer. The unconsenting spirit fled to the shadesīelow), and in Allen Mandelbaum's 1970 Aeneid, an acknowledged prologue to his subsequent commitment to the Divine Comedy. There are many reasons to revel in Professor Fitzgerald's translation, but delight in Rolf Humphries' translation, in Day Lewis' (which still offers the best last line of all translations:

And it is precisely our difficulty that the past of poetry is less real for us than its possibility.

We read Virgil, in the same circumstance, to discern what poetry has done. We read Homer, out of school, to discern what poetry can do. Of course there have been quite as many translations of Homer, but for the converse reason- Homer is not difficult, merely essential. VIRGIL is difficult for - perhaps that is why there have been four English translations of the Aeneid since the Second World War, two by British poets, two by American. Will be published in January his translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal wa October 16, 1983

The aeneid fitzgerald