Flashback 2007: What's old is new: Homer translator takes a whack at Virgil's 'The Aeneid'

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, London, 1654 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The Sun-Times once had a book editor, and an excellent one: Henry Kisor, who not only reviewed books, but wrote them, also excellent. One of my favorite titles of all time is attached to his memoir about growing up with deafness: "What's that Pig Outdoors?" Henry's retired to the Upper Peninsula, but writes in from time to time, and it's always a pleasure to hear from him.

     If a melancholy one. We once had a book editor, heck, we once had an assistant book editor, and an entire book section. All long gone.

     Occasionally, I'd draw a plum assignment — or heck, knowing me, maybe I volunteered, I don't recall — such as reviewing a new translation of "Aeneid." To show you how sincere this review was, I later read it a second time, out loud to my older son. Tomorrow I'll post the sidebar, a review of Virgil's "Georgics," his book about farming and so much more.

Fiction
The Aeneid
By Virgil
Translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, 486 pages, $40

     It takes guts to recast a classic. The rewards are great -- a guaranteed audience, a familiar tale. The perils are also great.
     Sometimes the experiment works: Gregory Maguire's Wicked was a commercial success and ended up on Broadway. Sometimes it doesn't: The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's slave's-eye view of Gone With the Wind, is interesting only for its legal woes.
     Homer's The Iliad, an epic of Achilles and the Trojan War, and The Odyssey, about the homeward agonies of Ulysses, would seem beyond adaptation. Honed by centuries of re-telling, speckled with familiar tropes — the long black ships, the wine dark sea — revisiting it would seem an act of hubris. A challenge nevertheless taken up by Roman poet Publius Virgilius Maro, whose new book, The Aeneid, takes the story of the fall of Troy and tells it from the perspective of a vanquished Trojan, Aeneas, adding moments that Homer left out — the sack of the city, the creation of a giant wooden horse — turning the epic into a tale of the creation of Italy.
     OK, The Aeneid is not a new book —Virgil penned it in the decade before his death in 19 B.C. But its benefits and problems are the same as those of any other adaptation.
     The first question is why anyone who doesn't fear getting his knuckles rapped by nuns would even contemplate reading The Aeneid.
     The answer is because it is newly translated by Princeton scholar Robert Fagles, whose translation of The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996) were surprise bestsellers. Readers who savored those works are eager to see what he does with Virgil.
     How well does Fagles do? Look at the death of Priam, the aged king of Troy who, as the city falls, throws himself at his son's killer and is slain. Here's how John Dryden, the 17th century poet, describes the scene:

Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire,
Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire,
(The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,)
Haul'd from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound,
And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground.
Thus Priam fell ...

     Fagles puffs away the dust:

Now — die!'
That said, he drags the old man
straight to the altar, quaking, slithering on through
slicks of his son's blood, his right hand sweeping forth his sword —
a flash of steel — he buries it hilt-deep in the king's flank
Such was the fate of Priam...

     Fagles loses a strong image — the killer's hand, twisting in the old man's hair — but the passage is a third shorter, and falls more harmoniously on modern ears.
     Despite Fagles' best efforts, Aeneas is not the most appealing hero. Virgil was considered a proto-Christian — that's why Dante chose him as his guide in his Inferno, and there is something very Ned Flanders about Aeneas — he's a heroic goof, not nearly as complex as Achilles, and lacking the ingenuity of Odysseus, not to mention the good plot line.
     Which is the second problem. Rather than returning home after 10 years, Aeneas is leaving it forever, off to found Italy. He does so with such brio that you expect The Aeneid to be underwritten by the Italian Tourist Board, which in a sense it was; Virgil was commissioned to write it by the Roman emperor. It was as if George Bush hired Maya Angelou to rewrite Moby Dick with an eye toward promoting New England tourism.
     So why read The Aeneid? There is no question that reading it is work, if only to keep skipping back to the nearly 1,000-name glossary to find out who Penthesilia is or where Crustumerium might be located. The ancient Romans were haunted by the fear they were merely pale imitators of the Greeks, and to compare Virgil to Homer, you see why.
     The bottom line is, if you're unfamiliar with Fagles' work, yet want to dive into the classics for their poetry, their power, their eternal themes and deathless imagery, then you'd do better starting at his The Iliad and The Odyssey. They're superior works. If you've already read Homer, then you're probably ready for The Aeneid.
     Yes, there are long eat-your-peas stretches to trudge through — you'll never want to read about another unblemished white ox being slaughtered again. But there also are moments of drama and heartbreak — Queen Dido bewailing her doomed love — plus a queasy familiarity as you read about a previous costly, ill-conceived war.
     You'll be reading a book that enthralled the great minds of our culture. The Aeneid inspired Dante to write his masterpiece.
     "It is from you alone that I have taken/The lofty style for which men honor me," Dante gushes when he meets Virgil in The Inferno.
     Shakespeare, too, was a fan of the book, and that is not true of every best seller thumping down upon the tables at Borders this month.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2007