Thursday, July 15, 2021

Virgil. 'The Aeneid': a new verse translation

John Godwin reviews a recent translation by Len Krisak at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

"Importing rhyme-schemes (which were of course not part of the Latin original) imposes massive demands on the translator and few have even tried: Alice Stallings used rhyming fourteen-syllable couplets for her Lucretius (and five-beat rhyming couplets for her version of Hesiod’s Works and Days), while James Falen’s 1990 verse translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and David Luke’s translation of Goethe’s Faust both manage to reproduce the metre and rhyme scheme of the original. This is a risky game to play: too little adherence to formal features makes the verse read like prose, while too much makes it sound stilted. Krisak may now be added to the short list of people who have trodden this tightrope without falling off on either side."

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

[post corrected and updated -ed.]

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