A general reader literate enough to want to read the Aeneid will want to read it in verse. I assign my students either Fitzgerald or Mandelbaum they are also what I would suggest to a friend. I myself would not assign either of these prose versions (or any other, for that matter) in my college classes, nor would I recommend one of them to an interested general reader. West’s asks “‘What can your sister do to help you now, Turnus? Much have I endured but nothing now remains for me, and I have no art that could prolong your life.” (p.330). And again, Caldwell’s Juturna asks her doomed brother “‘Turnus, what can your sister do now to help you, what remains of my determination? How can I prolong the light for you?'” (p.227 12.872-73). That is my song, about an exile driven by fate from the shores of Troy.” West’s begins “I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy.” Caldwell’s Aeneas sees some of the blessed in Elysium “picknicking … and singing songs of joy in the laurel-scented grove” (p.110 6.656-58), whereas in West, these are “feasting on the grass … singing in a joyful choir their paean to Apollo all through a grove of fragrant laurels” (p.153). Caldwell’s Aeneid begins “Arms and the man. A few comparisons will illustrate the differences between the two. West aims at the poetic and rhetorical effects which Caldwell eschews, and uses diction from a higher register, but his version is far wordier than Caldwell’s. Like Caldwell, West aspired to “readable English,” but a readable English “which does honour to the richness and sublimity of Virgil’s language” (p.xii). As a prose translation, its obvious competitor is David West’s Penguin (London, 1990). Not only is this version clear and idiomatic, its succinct simplicity lends its English some of the vigor inherent in Latin. Such slips are rare, and are far outweighed by the countless aptly idiomatic turns of phrase. A few lines later, when Turnus drives his chariot through the battle, he is not “shouting insults at the dead” (p.216 hostibus insultans, 339, OLD 3), but he (or rather, his horses) are trampling them ( OLD 3a, where this passage is cited). The Latin phrase quo turbine adacta (320), refers not to a whirlwind ( OLD 2a), but to the whirling motion of a missile in flight ( OLD 4a, where this passage is cited as an illustration). Of the spear-cast that ends the truce in Book 12, “No one knew what hand shot it, what storm drove it” (p.216). Occasionally Caldwell misinterprets Latin diction. Montana may be “Big Sky Country,” but the phrase “high sky” just sounds wrong. Jupiter seals Turnus’ doom by sending a Dira down “from the high sky” (p.227 ab aethere summo, 12.853). When the Sibyl exhorts Aeneas to “boldly go where Fortune leads” (p.98 audentior ito / qua tua te Fortuna sinet, 6.96-97), the Star Trek echo is apt, but when Aeneas mentions earlier heroes who went to the Underworld and then asks “why can’t I?” (p.99 supplied to the Latin at 6.123), he sounds too much like Dorothy in Kansas singing “Over the Rainbow” for my taste. It is not, in fact, a word for word version which preserves Latin syntax and sentence length.Ĭaldwell’s ear for English idiom only rarely fails him. His version would not be as good as it is, if it were as literal as he claims.
By this standard Caldwell has succeeded, but he does himself a disservice by describing it as “a very literal translation” (p.xxii). Fortunately, his “Translator’s Note” makes the straightforward claim that he “almost always … the simpler and more direct rendering rather than the elegant or ‘poetic'” (p.xxii).
I have a difficult time imagining this ideal, to say nothing of evaluating Caldwell’s success in attaining it. In contrast to John Dryden, who endeavored in his translation of the Aeneid“to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age,” 1 Caldwell claims that he has tried to make the Mantuan speak such English as a Roman contemporary of his would have used to translate the work into prose (p.232). It assumes no special background on the reader’s part and therefore supplies a great deal of information in its Introduction and notes, making it suitable for both high school and college students, as well as the general reader. In this Focus Classical Library translation of the Roman national epic, Richard Caldwell has produced a prose version in clear, idiomatic, and readable English, appropriate for anyone who “wants to read the Aeneid but doesn’t know Latin” (p.xxii).