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November 6, 2007
A New Virgil
These Colleges hosted a world premiere last night - the first reading from a new translation of Virgil's Aeneid, to be published next week. Why another Aeneid? We always need one - and this translation is superb. Fred Ahl, a classics professor at Cornell, spent 14 years getting Virgil into English dactylic hexameter - and it works!
I was a little surprised - I was raised to believe that hexameter isn't good in English; Fred is very convincing. You can't start a line with an unstressed syllable, which can be tricky (no unstressed articles or first person pronouns, for instance), but it works! It was very listenable. VERY. And he has worked very hard to maintain sound effects - the Laocoon passage was brilliantly hissy (preserving anguis and sanguis from Latin). Ahl says that he has stayed within 5% of the syllable count of the original - one of his goals is that students of Latin be able to use his translation as a reference.
Evidently, about 15 years ago Oxford had a couple of proposal on the table for new translations; they made their decision with a blind competition between the samples that had come in. Fred won. I think we win.
Follow the link and you can hear him read, even!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at November 6, 2007 7:51 AM