<< message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura >> Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 10:50:25 -0400 From: "Jim O'Hara" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The discussions of the translations of Dido and others are informative and fascinating. But many of the comments seem to depend on a view of "great poetry" that focuses only on the sublimity of the diction, which is said to be the poem's "beauty." Many others might suggest that there has always been a lot more to poetry, including that of Vergil, than just beauty, and so "translators" of Vergil who have been inspired by him to produce a thing of beauty that rather loosely resembles his poem may have done a great and worthy thing, but they err and deceive it calling what they done "Virgil's Aeneid" (instead of doing what, for example, Seamus Heaney does by calling his play "The Cure at Troy") Countless English-speaking readers have read Dryden's poem, and thought they were being exposed not only to the sublimity, but also to the contents, of Vergil's poem, and thus have imbibed Dryden's view of Aeneas, Augustus, Dido, and Turnus when they thought they were getting Vergil's. Many have these have even "trotted" through the Latin text, where either their own or their teachers' exposure (first hand or as a generational heritage) to the Vergil (or Virgil) of translators helped shape their response to the Latin. When I teach Vergil or other Latin poets in English, I never suggest to my students that their experience with the language of the translation could ever remotely approach the experience of reading the Latin. I tell them what I can about the Latin, and that poet X or Y is worth learning Latin for. For translations I just want something that reads smoothly today, and contains as much of the content as possible. Notes would be nice too: I'd like a modern Aeneid translation with modern notes, such as exist for most other Latin poets together (albeit for translations that lovers of English verse would find tedious). Good demonstration of the problems with Dryden and other in Richard Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan reception. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001. Chapters 4 and 5. Hey, new address below. I've just tried to unsubscribe the old one and subscribe under this one. Hope it workeed. -- Jim O´Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 [EMAIL PROTECTED] James J. O´Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
