Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3795108 in Books
• Published on: 1968-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews

Sweeping, Poignant, Faithful. Forget Fagles.
I have been a student of the classics since I was young. Naturally, I had been exposed to the Aeneid early on in the fashion that most students are: with the revered Robert Fitzgerald translation. Through the years many translations, both good and bad, have been published: Humphries, Lombardo (probably one of the best), and Mandelbaum to name a few of the most popular.

My adoration of the Ruden translation started in the most modest way. I was browsing through volumes in a used book store and came across the Yale University Press publication of the Aeneid, a translation that I had not heard of, from a translator I knew nothing about. I hopped on the internet while in the store and did some research, and came up with almost unanimously positive reviews, so I purchased it after reading a few, impressive passages.

Currently, all the rage is over the Penguin translation by Robert Fagles. To my understanding, his is the translation most widely taught in schools next to Fitzgerald. I am a fan of Fagles. His storytelling is grand and vivid. However, anyone who is versed in Classical Latin and has read the Aeneid in its original language can tell you that Fagles takes far too many liberties, embellishing Vergil's epic very subjectively (and not sparingly). This is problem to those who want a faithful reading of Vergil. Fagle's is far from a faithful translation of Vergil's poetry. Latin is a very compact, concise, and flowing language, with many subtle nuances. It is not grandiose and cumbersome like Fagles.

But Sarah Ruden has done something uncanny here. It is a popular saying that "one cannot translate poetry," which is true. It is inevitable that when translating poetry, much of the vigor and hidden meanings are lost. But Ruden's is the closest to the original one can get in modern English idiom. She avoids the flowery embellishments that Fagles is guilty of, preserves the conciseness of Vergil's Latin, without sacrificing the elegance of her or Vergil's pens (Ruden is, after all, an accomplished poet from what I understand). And, even more laudable, is the fact the Ruden's is practically a line-by-line translation, using the exact same number of lines used by Vergil. She also has a talent for preserving Vergil's meter whenever possible. The Aeneid, to some theorists, was made to be orated and heard. And Ruden's is a translation that is a pleasure hear as well as read.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Ruden's Aeneid, I like to say that Ruden is to Fagles, as Chickering is to Heaney. Ruden's translation might not be as famous as Fagles', but it is more scholarly, more faithful, and elegant in a different, yet more authentic way (just as Chickering's Beowulf may never achieve the status of Heaney's, yet Chickering preserves the spirit of the original in a more convincing way.

Get Ruden's Aeneid! Whether you are a novice to Vergil's Aeneid, a casual reader (it is a relatively quick read), or a full-on Latinist/Classicist, you will not be dissatisfied with this text.

"...one whom Virtue crowned..."
[This review refers to the Dover Thrift verse
edition of the AENEID translated into English
by Charles J. Billson in 1906.]

As incredible as it may seem, I prefer this
Billson verse translation over that of Allen
Mandelbaum (which I also have in the Bantam
Classic edition, 1970). What causes one person
to like one translation, and another to prefer
someone else's? It is a matter of taste, but
also of conditioning through aesthetic experience
and expectation. I have read a great many poems
in a great many forms. To my sense and sensibility
there is something about the Mandelbaum translation
of the AENEID which is too confining...too clipped...
it does not seem, to me, to flow freely. And yet
Billson's translation has archaic word choices --
but the flow of his translation seems more interesting
and "freer" than that of Mandelbaum.
Here is a sample of Mandelbaum:

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of High Ones, for
the savage Juno's unforgetting anger;
and many sufferings were his in war --
[Bantam Classic, 1970.]

And here is Billson in the Dover edition with
the same passage:

Arms and the Man I sing, who first from Troy
A Doom-led exile, on Lavinian shores
Reached Italy; long tossed on sea and land
By Heaven's rude arm, through Juno's brooding
ire,
And war-worn long ere building for his Gods
A Home in Latium: whence [came] the Latin race,
The Lords of Alba, and high-towering Rome.

To my senses, and sensibility, there is something
about Billson's language and flow which seems to
have more august grandeur -- epic style, sound, and
sweep.
Here is an even more telling example -- the famous
scene in which Aeneas plucks the Golden Bough:

[Mandelbaum:] ...just so
the gold leaves seemed against the dark-green
ilex;
so in the gentle wind, the thin gold leaf
was crackling. And at once Aeneas plucks it
and, eager, breaks the hesitating bough
and carries it into the Sibyl's house.

[Billson:] So on that shadowy oak the leafy gold
Glimmered, and tinkled in the rustling air.
Forthwith Aeneas grasped the clinging bough,
And plucked, and bare it toward the Sibyl's
cell.

There seems to me a fineness of poetic sensitivity
there, in Billson, to choose those words just so --
and have the words almost resonate with the sounds
of the objects they are describing.

The Aeneid
This is a great, fresh new translation of this favorite classic by Yale's Dr. Sarah Ruden. I first heard about it on PBS's Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. I am glad I was listening to the radio that afternoon on my one hour drive to work in Boston.

Best Aeneid translation since Alexander Pope's.