Thursday, February 25, 2021

An Aeneas divided

'Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer’s new translation of the Aeneid stays true to Vergil while making the epic new again.' Laura Demanski on The Aeneid, by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch, The University of Chicago Magazine.

"Vergilʼs use of dactylic hexameter—a meter with six feet per line containing two or three syllables each—makes the Aeneid 'very fast-moving, dense, exciting,' she explains. ...

"But Vergil 'is, bam, just pure Latin, and never-ending movemen'”—and his is a dense language to begin with. Latin, she writes in the translatorʼs note, 'can say much in few words' compared to English. This poses a challenge that past translators have solved either by using more words and beats per line, or by using additional lines, to catch all the meaning. Both approaches create poetry that feels nothing like the Aeneid in Latin. And the latter, throwing off the line numbers between original and translation, hinders study of the poem in its original Latin.

"So Bartsch-Zimmer set out to write her translation in no more than six feet per line, like Vergil, without adding lines or leaving any meaning out. ..."

See Virgil [alternate spelling], Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 13, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 12.

No comments:

Post a Comment