TY - JOUR
AU - Ferry,, David
AB - THIS IS WHAT A. M. JUSTER, in a review in the Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2018), had to say about my translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:1 Unfortunately, the work does not consistently live up to the standard Ferry has established for himself over more than six decades of increasingly impressive work. The most surprising shortcoming is that his translation lacks the precise line breaks of his earlier work. More than a hundred times he ends a line with ‘and’ – the weakest word possible.2 Here is what Wordsworth, in his great 1804 letter to John Thelwall, has to say about line endings: as long as verse shall have the marked termination that rhyme gives it, and as long as blank verse shall be printed in lines, it will be Physically impossible to pronounce the last words or syllables of the lines with the same indifference, as the others, i.e. not to give them an intonation of one kind or an other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of metre merely.3 Here’s an instance of that ‘weakest word possible’, ‘and’, at work in the telling throughout this passage and in the fifth foot of its line: In the lonely gloom of night two figures walk Through the empty rooms of Dis’s empty kingdom, As if upon a path beneath the uncertain Meager light of a moon almost not there, At a time when Jupiter has hidden the sky In darkness, and black night has taken away From all things all the colors that they had. Just at the innermost end of the entrance court, Just at the place where Orcus’s jaws are open, There’s Grief, there’s unrelenting Cares, where they Have placed their beds, there’s ashen-faced Disease, Sad Age, there’s Fear, there’s Hunger, begetter of crime, There’s Destitution, shapes terrible to look at, There’s Death and his brother Sleep, and guilty Desires; And on the other side of the open door, There’s War, dealer of death, and there the iron Cells of the Furies, and insane Discord, With bloody ribbons in her snaky hair. In the midst there is an enormous shadowy elm-tree, Spreading its arms, and false dreams clinging under Every single leaf of its foliage, So men say, and also many forms Of monstrous creatures, centaurs stabled at The threshold there, and biform Scyllas, and Briareus, hundred-handed, fifty-headed, And the striding hissing Beast of Lerna, and The Chimaera breathing fire, and Harpies, Gorgons, And he, the three-bodied Shade. Aeneas, trembling, Terrified at the sight, unsheathes his sword, And turns its edge against them, and he would, Had not his sage companion told him that these Were bodiless empty images of life, Have slashed at fleeting shadows with his sword. (VI. 374-406; pp. 178-9) It’s Aeneas and the Sibyl, having just come down into the Underworld. The two of them, walking like two lonely wayfarers through and past, conducted by ‘There’s’ and by images of what the world up above has been like: Discord, Sickness, Age, Hunger, Guilty Desires, bodiless images of life. The telling is conducted by ‘There’s’, present tense, and you can hear – the versification makes you hear – the awe and fear in the telling voice, and the awe and fear that must be felt by these wayfarers in Hades; it is being felt by them, by Virgil, and by me, the reader, and by you, the reader, too. And then (I just used ‘And then’, the narrator’s traditional key word, to tell you and myself what’s coming next), as the conducting word ‘There’s’ is replaced by ‘and’, heard as a synonym for that word with rising intensity, as the two of them, Aeneas and the Sibyl, go further, awed and terrified by the monstrous shapes, conducted now by, ‘and’ step by step past, a succession of monstrous creatures and beings – and, and, and, and, twice at the ends of the lines, and in the second of these lines ‘and’ also at the beginning of it, insisting to Mr Juster that the word ‘and’ is far from being as weak as he thinks it is. Who is unable to hear this in the sequence ‘and biform Scyllas, and’? – and in the fifth foot, defining the integrity of the line it’s the end of, and anticipating fearing it, with rising dread, in the iambic final foot, undeniably the intonation rising undeniably iambic (‘-as and, / Briareus’)? I doubt that Mr Juster’s ear is unable to hear the intensifying fear now expressively in the activity of the word ‘and’, the word he dismisses as the weakest possible. The fear is in Aeneas, and in the Sibyl, and in Virgil the teller of the tale, in the fear-filled act of telling it, and in the reader, too. Here is another example of this ‘weakest word possible’ in action, including its action in the crucial fifth foot: The stag they scented was a magnificent creature, Beautiful to look at, his head adorned With a great panoply of curved forked antlers. He had, when a foundling fawn, been brought to their home By the little sons of Tyrrhus and been cared for By Silvia, their sister, who petted it, And combed its hair, and fed it with milk, and bathed it In the pure clear waters of a fountain, and Garlanded its horns with pretty ribbons, So, utterly accustomed to his mistress, And tamed, the stag would wander in the fields By day, just as he would, and then at night He’d come back home and enter into the house, No matter how late it was, and be at peace there. (VII. 633-46; p. 224) How young Sylvia, with her pastoral name, led by ‘and’, petted it, and combed it, and fed it, and bathed it, and, finishing the tender loving innocent duty of it, concludes, with the conducting ‘and’ now at the fifth foot, the end of the line, completing the ritual, with ‘and’ – in that sentence it is impossible for the listener, the hearer, not to hear the anticipatory pause awaiting the delight to come in the next line that begins with the beautiful ‘Garlanded’: ‘Garlanded its horns with pretty ribbons’. The fifth foot of the line in question – ‘In the pure clear waters of a fountain, and’ – is clearly, to me and you, iambic (‘-ain, and’) with the authority of all the fifth feet in the ten thousand lines of my translation, my poem, maintaining, and guaranteeing, the pentameter rhythm which is the sovereign continuing strict metrical rhythm of the poem. The placement of that final ‘and’ at the end of the line, with its anticipatory pause, or something like a pause, makes the lovely line ‘Garlanded its horns with pretty ribbons’ feel like a gift to the reader. The context of one’s experience of the lines and the tender ritual of her innocent care is that this creature will be the victim not only of the hounds the Fury Allecto sends to find it but also the beautiful target of Aeneas’s little son Ascanius’s innocent arrow, starting the war. Who is it whose ears can not be hearing this ceremonial and celebratory tenderness and delight in those words ‘and’ in their order, and who can miss the emotions of delight, and also pity, in the manner of the telling? Hearing also that this ritual is, though Sylvia doesn’t know it or intend it, a ritual of preparation of this stag for the sacrifice when Ascanius’s arrow kills it and the war between the Latins and the Trojans begins. ‘And’, far from being ‘the weakest word possible’, is one of the strongest words in the storyteller’s art, as demonstrated here by our pity and our ritual delight as Sylvia pets, combs, feeds, and bathes this creature whose sacrifice will be the initial event in the war. We experience this ritual of delight and pity in the metrical regularity of the lines, ‘in the passion of the metre merely’, and also ‘in the passion of the subject’. Mr Juster also has this to say in his complaints about my line endings: He also ends hundreds of lines by splitting prepositional, adjectival, and verb phrases: to / Compose; in / Her; for / Their; they / Move; with / The; with / A; dear / Mother’s. There is no obvious reason why these lines should consistently end so awkwardly.4 Mr Juster’s notes could make my line endings look, to a reader who hasn’t read my poem, as if they are indeed flat, and therefore, metrically, more than awkward. But in ‘the passion of the metre merely’, each one of these line endings – ‘to’, ‘in’, ‘for’, ‘they’, ‘with’ – is the strong final syllable in the fifth foot of its line. Mr Juster has consistently failed to hear the final fifth foot’s definitive pulse in the ongoing pentameter rhythm of the poem in ‘the passion of the metre merely’. In ‘the passion of the subject’ all of these words in the fifth foot of its line have, each in its own way, strong expressive power. The words he cites as problematic are what linguists call ‘function words’, and they can have, as ‘and’ has in the passages from Book VII and Book VI above, special powers when they occur in the fifth foot. Then there’s Androgeos before us, with A company of other Greeks, and he, Thinking us in the darkness also Greeks, cries out To us as to fellow soldiers he thought we were, ‘Hurry, comrades, why have you been so long? All of the others are busy at the work Of pillaging and plundering Pergamum. Where have you been? Are you just off the ships?’ And as he says this, his voice dies back, because He hears no familiar answer, and suddenly He knows he is among the enemy, Steps back, confused and scared, like one who has Put down his confident foot on a brambled path And there’s a snake unseen in the rough ground cover That rises up and swells its purple neck, Enraged, and strikes at him. And so we strike, Surrounding them in the darkness with our weapons, And they, unsure in this unfamiliar ground, And shocked and frightened by our sudden ambush, Are slaughtered. (II. 543-62; p. 52) The fifth foot of the first line is strongly stressed (‘… us, with’) undeniably fulfilling the fifth-foot obligation of that stressed syllable to complete and guarantee the continuing pentameter sovereign rhythm, as in all the fifth feet of the poem, in the ‘passion of the metre merely’. In ‘the passion of the subject’, ‘with’ at the end of the line vividly speaks to Androgeos’s situation. He’s with a company of Greeks, and he thinks so, but there are others he thinks he’s with, and they aren’t who he thinks they are. Withness is his problem and he dies of it. There’s Massicus, in his bronzen vessel Tiger, Bringing a thousand warriors with him, who Came from the walls of Clusium and Cosae, With bows and, in light quivers on their shoulders, Death-bringing arrows; next was fierce Abas, with The force he was carrying with him in his ship, With its golden Apollo image; six hundred youths, All in their gorgeous armor, skillful in arms, Whose mother country Populonia sent; Three hundred more from the island Ilya of Chalybria, profusely generous In mineral ores. (X. 238-49; p. 308) ‘With’ at the end of its line is a function word, as are all the others that Juster cites, ‘and’, ‘in’, ‘for’, and others like them; they are all anticipatory function words, asking, in one way or another, what is about to happen in the line that follows, as when, in the Sylvia passage given above, that climactic ‘and’ at the end of the line asks what is going to happen in the developing event described, and in these beautiful lines, and the next line ‘Garlanded its horns with pretty ribbons’, is the happening. In the case of the lines just quoted from Book X, the catalogue of the ships that are coming to the scene of battle with him – ‘next was fierce Abas, with’ – anticipates a pause or something like a pause. With what? The lines that follow then answer the question, beautiful orderly lines. The gorgeous six hundred warriors, about to be gorgeous in victory, maybe to be destroyed in battle, coming from their mother country, young men just out for battle, to kill or to die, the ships as they pass going forward to their fate, and as they pass, passing into history. That ‘with’ at the end of the line has organised and governed the lines that follow, teaching us how to read them. In another instance, in Book IX, the Latins are approaching the Trojan stronghold: Turnus, wearing his red-and-gold plumed helmet, And riding a Thracian piebald steed, flew forward Ahead of the slower moving troops, with twenty Young warriors of his choice, and suddenly, There in front of the Trojan camp, cried out To his young comrades, ‘Who’s with me now to be The first of us to get into the fight?’ And saying this he whirled a javelin High into the air, the sign of the battle beginning. Shaking, excited, the youths responded with A great horrific blood-hungry cry, and followed. (IX. 62-72; p. 269) It is, as I’ve said before, a characteristic of these function words that they can have a powerful anticipatory effect. Here the ‘with’ at the end of the line is asking us to ask: with what? What is going to be said next, in the next lines? In this case what follows is equal to the task, Virgil’s ‘clamore excipunt socii fremituque sequuntur / horrisono’, ‘A great horrific blood-hungry cry, and followed’.5 In Book XII, Amata, the Latian queen, who so bitterly resists the divination that Lavinia should not marry an Italian, tries to keep Turnus, whom she so desires to have as her son-in-law, from man-to-man combat with Aeneas: ‘You’re all I have and all that Latium has. Do not engage with your body in combat with The Trojan. I cannot live, a slave, and having To see this Trojan as son-in-law and master.’ (XII. 77-80; p. 377) The Latin is ‘desiste manum committere Teucris’. Several ‘withs’ in ‘committere manum committere’, your body, your hand, as a weapon, the last hope of Latium; and it hears the pathos of it, since she, like the other Latins, is beginning to doubt the powers of his body, magnificent as it is, in combat with the still more powerful body of the Trojan – hero Aeneas is an Achilles in her mind, and Turnus is a Hector. Turnus is the last hope of Latium, for Amata, not only as the last possibly competent warrior, but for her the last hope of Latium, because he would be – she still hopes he would be – the husband of Lavinia and with his body the father and continuer of the Latian nation. Do not risk your body in single combat with the Trojan. But also in ‘committere Teucris’, ‘do not keep this agreement with the Trojan’ – here she sees, and so does the reader, in that ‘with’, which is in the word ‘committere’, the terrible truth that in war the two opponents, the heroes on the opposite sides, and their armies too, are committed to a kind of co-operative enterprise. It is in our grammar – we were at war with Germany, with Japan, both sides committed to being at war as an agreement. Over and over the Aeneid keeps seeing the warfare as such a mutual commitment – ‘with your body in combat’ is a kind of ideogram of mutual killing, closed in, framed, defined between with and with. So it is in the Latin, enclosed and framed and defined inside the word ‘committere’. When, lo, I shudder to speak it, over the tranquil Quiet sea that lies between the island Of Tenedos and the mainland, there comes a pair Of giant serpents swimming toward us, their Immense coils writhing as side by side they make Their steady way through the waters and head for shore, Their breasts held high, impelling the waves before them, Their blood-red crests held high, the rest of their bodies Following along on the surface of the water, Their great sinuous backs coiling behind them; We can hear, as they come, the sound of the foaming water Their bodies displace; we see how with bloodshot fiery Eyes they gaze at the shore as they approach, Licking their hissing mouths with their quivering tongues. The blood drains from our faces at the sight, As we shrink back. They reach the shore and dreadful they Move without swerving toward Laocoön. (II. 303-19; pp. 44-5) Once again Mr Juster’s notebook formulation (‘they / Move’) looks flat to him and maybe to the reader who has not yet read the poem, and it fails to acknowledge the strong fifth-foot pulse in ‘they’ (‘-ful they’) as the strong syllable in the ‘passion of the metre merely’, and the fifth foot therefore undeniably fulfils its obligation to endorse and guarantee the continuity of the sovereign pentameter strict metre of the poem. As a consequence of ‘the passion of the subject’, the line ending is powerfully, very powerfully, expressed: ‘dreadful’ is heard both as an introjection and as an adjective describing the strength of the pronoun ‘they’. In the preceding lines describing how these serpents are terrifying teammates it is as if the ‘dreadful they’ is the name the team is known by. And Virgil’s account of what these teammates do after they’ve devoured Laocoön and his children is bizarrely comic, horrifyingly so, surreal, a circus performance featuring the Dreadful They:   [‘]And then the pair of dragons Slither away and seek the shrine of fierce Tritona, and shelter there beneath The feet of the goddess and her circle shield.’ (II. 36-9; p. 45) The Dreadful They accomplished their mission and end up like two serpent puppies at the foot of their goddess. Until one night, as she was sleeping, in Her dream her unburied husband’s ghost appeared. Its face was ghastly pale beyond all wonder; The vision showed the dagger in his breast, And the altars that he met his death in front of; The unspeakable crime in the house was thus revealed. (I. 474-9; p. 17) Mr Juster doesn’t register that ‘in’ is the strong final stress in the pulsing of the line (‘-ing, in’), like the fifth-foot stress that guarantees the ongoing pentameter of the whole poem, as all fifth feet do. The final ‘in’ is situational, predicting the interiority of her dream, isolated there, hidden from her murderous brother there, as described and brought to vivid dream actuality. Why separate ‘to’ from its verb ‘Compose’? So awkward. For me, though, the instance is moving, and in a sense, the passage in which it culminates is complexly moving and the different meanings of the word ‘to’ are essential to the story it’s telling in Book I: ‘O goddess, if I were able to tell the whole Story of our afflictions from their beginning, And if you had the time to hear it all, I could not finish before it was the time For heaven to close its doors and for Vesper to Compose the day for rest. We come from Troy … [’] (I. 500-5; p. 18) Aeneas is in Libya, after the great storm, lost, bewildered; he has not slept all night. Venus appears, dressed as a Tyrian maiden out hunting. He thinks the maiden might be a goddess but does not yet know that he is speaking to his mother, the goddess Venus. His weariness and the burden he has undertaken are all in the first line in the passage: ‘if I were able to tell …’. To have to tell the story of their afflictions and to do so without sleep and in the condition of his despair is to have to bear the burden of the story again. He knows that to tell the story to another, to ask her ‘to hear’, is to impose on another human being the weight of that same burden. But the word ‘to’ has a different sort of expressive power, his looking forward desiringly to heaven shutting its gates and his wish for Vesper, the Evening Star, always associated with Venus herself, to put her son safely in his bed. The grammar of the conclusion of the line in question is ‘and for Vesper to …’. In the passion of the metre merely, the word ‘to’ is strongly stressed: ‘-er to’), guaranteeing that the sovereign pentameter rhythm of the line is maintained. As Wordsworth says, there is always a rising intonation or a pause, and in this case the pause is expressively strong. He does not know whether the composing of the day for rest will take place, he only wishes for it. The anticipatory function word ‘to’ – ‘to do what?’ – makes us look forward to what the next line will be. I think there is something movingly infantile in Aeneas’s wish, in his desire to be put to bed by his mother. He begins to tell the story, but Venus tenderly interrupts him – she knows the story well, and in her disguise as a Libyan huntress maiden she says her family taught her to prognosticate, and so she sees or invents in the sky a sign that is like a composing for rest: But here the goddess Venus broke in to say, Preventing him from telling his story further, ‘Whoever you are, I think you are favored by The heavens, since here you are, at the Tyrian city, Alive and breathing. And I can tell you that, Unless the divination my parents taught Is false, and unless the auguries mislead me, Your fellows and their ships are found and well, By changing winds driven to safety intact. For, look! – that joyful line of twice six swans That the bird of Jove was swooping down upon And harrying – they now in order either Settle already or else look down at those Already settled where they will settle too. And just as they, returning, joyfully play, Ruffling their wings, and singing their joyful songs, As they have circled down from the sky in safety, So will, already, some of your ships and comrades Have safely reached the harbor, and others now Under full sail are coming to safety too… . [’] (I. 522-41; pp. 18-19) She says this, and turns away, and reveals that she is his mother, though, being divine, she is different from him, who has in his imagination been wishing for his mother to be like a fully human mother, composing the day for rest: Her step revealed that this was truly the goddess. He knew that she was his mother, and his words Followed her as she fled: ‘Why is it that you, As all the others do, so cruelly mock Your son with images, false images? Why cannot I hold hands with you, my mother, And hear true words and speak true words to you?’ (I. 547-53; p. 19) ‘[T]he time / For heaven to close its doors and for Vesper to / Compose the day for rest’: the ‘to’ is the expression of his hope for rest and for the comfort of his mother the goddess Venus, and just as the line ends with ‘for Vesper to’ and the next begins with ‘Compose the day for rest’, though the word ‘Compose’ is iambic, it would not have the full value of its syllables if the previous line ended with ‘Vesper’ and not ‘Vesper to’. The whole operation of that marvellous word ‘to’ conveys the hope for rest, and in the rest of the line, though he has not yet been given the rest he would take, he speaks as if taking up the labour of telling, and will do so bravely in his telling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath: ‘Compose the day for rest. We come from Troy’. The different meanings of ‘to’, as the passage approaches its end, are an interpretation of his state of mind, his desire for rest, and also his uncertainty about whether or not that desire will be fulfilled. And then, nevertheless, his weary and brave commitment to try to be able to tell the story. It is not surprising that when Aeneas, at the behest of Dido, begins to tell the story of the fall of Troy in the opening lines of Book II, we experience our awareness of the degree to which this is a burden and, in a sense, his desire for the composing of the day for rest is still not fully responded to by the gods: Now dewy night is departing from the sky; The stars as they set are telling us it’s time To go to sleep; but if you desire to know What our calamities were, and the circumstance Of the final agony of Troy, then though My mind is shuddering at the memory, And shrinks away from the story in its grief, I will begin: … (II. 13-20; p. 35) Mr Juster also says: ‘On the other hand, the more iambic lines are often short a foot’.6 This is entirely untrue, and it is not true in this instance, which he offers as an instance: [‘]This is the vesture Priam wore when he Sat in assembly to give out laws and make His proclamations; this is his scepter, and this The diadem, the sacred headdress, woven By Ilium’s daughters.’ (VII. 323-7; p. 214) In the passion of the metric as I have written the line, the fifth foot is powerfully iambic, in the passion of the subject tellingly so. Ilioneus as Aeneas’s spokesman is acknowledging the majesty of Priam’s vesture and, in the stress on ‘he’ at the end of the line, is making felt, in the algebra of the lines, Latinus’s equal majesty. He is bringing gifts to Latinus and he, like Priam, sat in the majesty of royal power in that vesture. His gift is entirely intentioned. But beware of well-intentioned Trojans bearing gifts. We already, reading the poem, have reasons to guess that Latinus, like Priam, will ignominiously lose his throne and its vestures of power and he will lose it at the hands of Aeneas, here represented by his spokesman Ilioneus. The line ‘This is the vesture Priam wore when he’ is emphatically a portentously pentametric line, in the passion of the metre merely and in the passion of the subject. Mr Juster’s objection to ‘dear / Mother’s’ refers to this passage in the Latin: paret Amor dictis carae genetricis et alas exuit et gressu gaudens incedit Iuli (I. 689-90; Virgil, p. 310) In Book I Venus is telling her son Cupid how she will poison Dido with love for Aeneas, and she describes her witchcraft to Cupid and tells him what part he is to play: [‘]You are a boy and, being a boy, you will, For one night only pretend to be this boy, So that when Dido, amid the royal feast And the flow of Bacchic wine, and full of joy, Takes you up, and folds you in her embrace, And kisses you and kisses you, you’ll breathe The secret fire of love into the queen, And bewitch her with its poison.’        Then Cupid divests Himself of his wings, obedient to his dear Mother’s instruction, and joyously walks with the very Gait and manner of Ascanius. But Venus pours gentle sleep over the real Ascanius and nestles him in her arms, And carries him off and up to the high groves Of Idalia where he slumbers fast asleep In the sweet embrace of marjoram flowers and in Their softly breathing fragrant shade. So Cupid Obeys his mother, and, happy to follow Achates, Goes forth to the city, bearing the royal gifts. (I. 935-54; p. 31) ‘Carae’ is not at the end of the Latin line, but there’s no mistaking the intimate affection and gratitude to his dear mother for her offering of what his experience will be, disguised as Ascanius who is himself innocently asleep in Idalia or on Cytherea, while he, on Dido’s lap, like an incubus will be poisoning her with his love potion. Thus it happens:     The queen, her eyes and heart Enamored by the boy, embraces him And takes him upon her lap, and fondles him, And folds him in her arms protectively, Poor Dido, who does not know how great a god Is settled in her lap to bring her grief. And Cupid, to please his Acidalian mother, Begins, little by little, to erase From Dido’s mind the image of Sychaeus, And to substitute a living passion in A heart and soul long unaccustomed to love. (I. 982-92; p. 33) Early in Book IV we see Dido, concupiscent, longing for the body of Aeneas: But the queen has been wounded by love; hour by hour The life-blood in her veins keep nourishing The hidden fire within her; thinking of The glory of the hero race he comes from And how he speaks, and the things he has spoken of – At night her body’s longing cannot rest. (IV. 1-6; p. 103) And a little later And later still, when she finds herself alone, And the light of the moon is gone, and the setting stars Acknowledge that it is the time for sleep, All by herself in the empty hall she mourns, And lies upon the couch that he has left, Hearing him and seeing him, although He is not there; sometimes she holds the boy Ascanius on her lap, embracing him, Entranced with the likeness of him to his father, Mimicking the love she cannot speak of. The towers of the city are left unfinished; Young men no longer practice their martial arms, Nor work to reinforce the gates or ramparts; All the works of building are at a standstill; A crane machine stands high, against the sky It almost reaches up to, looking over The massive, boding, uncompleted walls. (I. 120-36; pp. 106-7) It is beautiful how Wordsworth speaks of the passion of the metre merely. In the writing of the end of the line, the final foot in a poem (or a translation which is a poem), it is crucial how the line is completed in such a way that its metre in its continuous music is guaranteed once again. Finally, Mr Juster’s opposition to ‘for / Their’. Sinon the eloquent Greek liar has managed to get himself into the hands of the Trojans, with the mission of persuading the Trojans that a giant effigy the Greeks have made is an atonement for Diomedes and Ulysses having obscenely and murderously violated the temple of Pallas Athena (Minerva).         [‘] … impious Tydides and Ulysses the contriver Together ravished the sacred shrine of Pallas, And slew the guardians of the citadel, And with their bloody hands seized her holy image, Touching the fillets of the virgin goddess.’ (II. 245-50; p. 42) Sinon’s language is compelling, and the Trojans believe him, and they are persuaded also by the powerful words Sinon quotes the Greek seer Calchas as saying in definitive judgment: hanc pro Palladio moniti, pro numine laeso (II. 183; Virgil, p. 328) In the Latin the words ‘pro’ and ‘pro’ are themselves actions taken, recited in, so to speak, the courtroom, defining the judgment. The repetition dramatises the insistence of the seer on the gravity and seriousness of the occasion of judgment, declared with the high formality appropriate to the seer’s voice. The English translation attempts this high formality, with ‘For’ (pro) the first word in the line and ‘for’ the last word in the line, with its strongly heard fifth foot (‘– for’) and therefore its dramatic pause, followed as in a courtroom assertion of the ground of its judgment: ‘Their disastrous unholy sacrilegious act, / The violation of the Palladium’.     [‘]Thus Calchas reads the omens. Because of Calchas’s admonition the Greeks Have made this giant effigy to atone For the insult to the gods and in penance for Their disastrous unholy sacrilegious act, The violation of the Palladium.[’] (II. 271-6; p. 43) The dignified dramatic seriousness of its language has its effect, and the Trojans, thinking the effigy is a harmless atonement, are fooled into taking the effigy, which is in fact the Trojan Horse, inside their walls, and Troy is done for. Footnotes 1 Virgil, The Æneid, trans. David Ferry (Chicago, 2017). Further references to line and page number are incorporated into the text. 2 A. M. Juster, ‘Power and Rhythm. A New Translation of Virgil’s Epic’, Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2008); <https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/power-and-rhythm> (accessed 5 Nov. 2020). 3 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Early Years 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), p. 434. 4 Juster, ‘Power and Rhythm’. 5 References to the Latin text of the poem are to Eclogues-Georgics-Aeneid I-VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), and are incorporated into the text. 6 Juster, ‘Power and Rhythm’. © The Author(s) [2021]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - On Translating Virgil: A Response
JF - Essays in Criticism
DO - 10.1093/escrit/cgaa027
DA - 2021-02-02
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/on-translating-virgil-a-response-v6GPOgZDno
SP - 1
EP - 19
VL - 71
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -