Focus (2020) h/b 424pp £31.99 (ISBN 9781585109647)
Given how very difficult it is to translate the Aeneid into English, it is impressive that so much recent talent should have been devoted to it. David Ferry, already translator of the Eclogues and the Georgics, published his version in 2017. Sarah Ruden’s admirable translation, first issued in 2008, has appeared in a revised edition this year, and Shadi Bartsch’s version (which I haven’t seen) came out in 2020. And now here is Len Krisak.
The problems with translating Virgil are familiar. Much of his meaning lies in his expression, and much of his expression depends on the tautness of language and freedom of word order that a highly inflected language makes possible. There is also the difficulty of finding a natural modern equivalent to the discipline of Virgil’s hexameter. The old solution was to use rhyme: Dryden’s Aeneid, like Pope’s Iliad, is in heroic couplets. Translators in our time have seldom followed suit, with the notable exception of A. E. Stallings, who has turned Lucretius into rhymed fourteeners, following that tour de force by rendering Hesiod’s Works and Days and most recently the anonymous Battle of the Frogs and Mice into heroic couplets.
K. too has chosen rhyme, and imposed on himself a further challenge: his version keeps to the same number of lines as the original. Dryden’s Aeneid is acknowledged to be a masterpiece, but his form (as he would have agreed) is unlike the original in that the rhymed couplet encourages end-stopping, whereas Virgil constantly varies the position in the line where his sentences conclude. Moreover, he has only ten (or sometimes eleven) syllables to each line, whereas Virgil has between thirteen and seventeen, and he therefore needs to spread the sense over more lines (thus the first seven lines of Latin become ten in English). K. has his own striking solutions to these difficulties: he follows Virgil in using a six-foot line, but iambic rather than dactylic (so with twelve or sometimes thirteen syllables). He strongly resists the couplet’s tendency to end-stopping, using enjambment very freely: sometimes his syntax requires there to be not even the hint of a pause at the line’s end. Thus he may rhyme a hyphenated word at the hyphen point: ‘Hecate’ with ‘three- / Faced’ and ‘great- / Souled’ with ‘old’. Or consider this (from Book 7):
… while others vied
At racing or at boxing. Galloping up, a rider
Brought the news to old Latinus: men had come,
In alien armor! So he has these great ones summoned
To his court, then sits on the ancestral throne.
Here, in two successive couplets the rhyme comes a syllable before the end of the word. ‘Vied’ rhymes with ‘rid-‘ – the sense galloping, like the horseman, over the line end – and ‘come’ with ‘summ-’. In each case the last syllable really belongs in the line below, though it would be of course grotesque to write the verse in that way.
Krisak’s verse is vigorous and lucid; the reader is carried forward easily. This is how he ends the poem:
‘Till Turnus’ chill limbs slacken at the lethal blow.
Groaning his bitter soul fled to the Shades below.’
That last line is excellent: Virgil’s sense is strongly conveyed and the energetic rhythm fits the abrupt violence of his conclusion (the rhythm feels suitably dactylic, although technically it is not: the first foot is a trochee and the fifth an anapaest). Here are two famous similes from the Underworld:
‘Thicker than autumn’s first-frost foliage when it flies
And falls; more massed than birds that from the roiling deep
Come flocking toward the shores when winter’s chill winds sweep
Them over seas and send them on toward warmer lands.’
That again reads well. The alliterations in the first clause are K.’s (attractive) addition, but the run over to the fall of ‘And falls’ matches, as it happens, a similar cadence in Virgil’s text. Only the last of these lines seems a little slack.
This is Ruden at the same point:
‘As many as the woodland leaves that fall
At the first frost, or birds that flock to land
From the high seas when freezing winter drives them
Across that great gulf into sunny lands.’
That aims at simplicity and a kind of transparency, aiming to put as little as possible between the reader and the original; there is a touch more idiosyncrasy, more of the translator’s personality, in K.’s version.
K.’s style is mostly what might be called timeless modern, but he does allow some distinctively contemporary vocabulary—not always to this reader’s taste. ‘Refugeed’ is surely a jarring word. Aeneas describes the arrival of the Trojan horse thus:
‘The gates swing open wide. We go to view the Doric
Camp and the abandoned shore. We are euphoric.’
That is lively and entertaining, but it comes close to the comic mode. But perhaps that is the point: the Trojans are foolishly light-headed at this moment.
Readers with some experience of the Aeneid in Latin will enjoy the intelligence, imagination and ingenuity that K. has brought to his task. For readers without, Ruden would still be my recommendation from among those modern translations that I know, but they can also entrust themselves to Krisak’s version with confidence, and they should enjoy it.
Richard Jenkyns