One reason why rhymed couplets are particularly well suited to an English translation of Vergil, I think, is that they convey something of the rigid formality of the Latin hexameter in a way that blank verse cannot. For consider: the hexameter excludes any word containing the sequence long-short-long, or short-short-short; just about every line will have a third-foot caesura; and a good 95% of the lines will end long-short-short-long-long. In English blank verse, by contrast, (or at least that written during and after the time of Shakespeare) there is no word that can't be made to fit, there is no 'official' caesura, and the line may end with an extra unstressed syllable, if the poet wants. By incorporating rhyme, one gets an added degree of constraint and symmmetry to work with (and against); and perhaps one could think of the 'jingle' effect that you get at the end as imitating the 'tunditur unda' rhythm that you find at the end of basically every hexameter.
That said, I prefer the Mandlebaum translation, mostly for its accuracy and concision. Phil Thibodeau ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
