Volume 56, Number 4 · March 12, 2009
Closer Than Ever to Vergil
By Garry Wills
The Aeneid
by Vergil, translated from the Latin by Sarah Ruden
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $30.00
Just two years ago, Robert Fagles, shortly before his death, set the bar very high for translating Vergil's Aeneid.[1] Yet already the scholar-poet Sarah Ruden has soared over the bar. She does this despite submission to a trying discipline. She decides to translate one-line-per-one-line, and she uses the iambic pentameter. This means not only that she gives herself less space overall (Vergil's own 756 lines for Book One of the poem, for instance, to Fagles's 908), but less space in any single line. She has ten or eleven syllables to a verse, where Vergil and Fagles have up to seventeen syllables. Lines beyond the five beats of iambic pentameter tend to sprawl in English, but Vergil's hexameter is very disciplined. The wonder of his poem is that it has a melancholy melodiousness while retaining a tight aphoristic ring. Fagles often achieved the former, but rarely the latter. Ruden gets both.
Review, 2731 words
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