The Aeneid of Virgil

THE AENEID OF VIRGIL

POETRY BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES
THE AENEID OF VIRGIL: A VERSE TRANSLATION THE WIND OF TIME FORBID THY RAVENS THE SUMMER LANDSCAPE OUT OF THE JEWEL THE POET IN NEW YORK (TRANSLATION FROM LORCA) AND SPAIN SINGS (WITH M. J. Benardete) EUROPA, AND OTHER POEMS, AND SONNETS POEMS, COLLECTED AND NEW GREEN ARMOR ON GREEN GROUND

A VERSE TRANSLATION BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, NEW YORK


This translation is dedicated to the memory of my first and best Latin teacher, my father, John Henry Humphries. laus illi debetur et a me gratia maior
VIRGIL’S AENEID IS, of course, a major poem; it is also a great and beautiful one. The scope of an epic requires, in the writing, a designed variety, a calculated unevenness, now and then some easy-going carelessness. So the reader win find, here and there, transitional passages, the stock epithet, the conventional phrase, a few lines of vamping, and, in this or that line, what the Spanish call ripios . Over and above these matters of small detail, in the large panorama the reader will find valleys as well as peaks, dry ravines as well as upland meadows: the landscape is not always the same height above sea level, and its flora and fauna vary more than a little. The epic terrain of the Odyssey differs greatly from that of the Iliad, and both Iliad and Odyssey differ from the Aeneid, but there is nothing obtrusive in Virgil’s relatively studied concern with composition. Less wild and “natural,” the demesnes of the Aeneid have their full measure of more than pleasant countryside, loftiness also, majesty, grandeur.
Virgil, we have been told, wanted to burn the Aeneid; he was not satisfied with it. This attitude, it seems to me, reflects fatigue and exhaustion of spirit rather than considered literary judgment. The last revisions are always the most enervating, and Virgil, one can well believe, having worked on the poem for over a decade, had reached the point where he felt he would rather do anything, including die, than go over the poem one more time. If we had never known the poem was believed incomplete, we would, I think, find it difficult to decide which were the unsatisfactory portions. Who wants an epic poem absolutely perfect, anyway? and how could the Aeneid be improved, really?