Virgil aeneid fitzgerald translated summary

Virgil aeneid fitzgerald translated summary how to#

None of this demure, floating in on the half-shell stuff. Having grown up with the Botticellian image fixed in my mind, Virgil's Venus was a pleasant surprise. Aeneas, leader of the Trojans, is Venus's son by a mortal father (these gods are unapologetically polyandrous). Juno, for reasons I am not well-informed about enough to explain, hates the Trojans with a white-hot passion. Jupiter tries very hard to be a good deist-not getting involved unless to answer pleas based on individual merit-except that Juno and Venus are running around getting the rest of the gods involved in their knock-down, drag-out proxy war. It's rather disturbing, frankly.ДЄll of this plays out under the gaze of the Roman pantheon, which is half the fun. Before some poor piker gets his head whacked off, Virgil takes a few moments to tell us who he is, where he came from, what he had for breakfast, and how he loved his mom. With lots of explicit detail, who stabbed who where, and where the blood and guts went. Every element of the modern dramatic style is touched upon at some point: man against man, man against nature, man against god, man against himself you've got romance, adventure, political intrigue. Today it'd be called Aeneas, the miniseries. His analysis of how small dust-ups can lead (or be manipulated) into all-out war resonates well with contemporary geopolitics.ДЄnd there's something for everybody. And like Shakespeare, Virgil is a master of the concrete metaphor and the action verb, as well as being an astute observer of human behavior. Of course, Shakespeare accomplished the same. It convinces me that, indeed, Sam Raimi is the definitive modern interpreter of the Greco-Roman tradition. A strong authorial voice (it helps to read it aloud in your head as you go along) and a galloping pace guaranteed to fill the cheap seats, while sneaking in enough high-brow commentary to keep the intellectuals tuned in. Nevertheless, a good story is a good story, and this is a ripping good yarn.

Virgil aeneid fitzgerald translated summary how to#

Granted, even with that hurdle mostly surmounted, there are still obstacles: lots of names I have no idea how to pronounce, bounteous references to historical incidents and heroic characters I know too little about, portentous foreshadowings such as Hannibal crossing the Alps and Caesar crossing the Rubicon that I missed completely until I read Fitzgerald's commentary at the end. I never could abide the Dryden long enough to get past the first page: all that incessant rhyming! (I don't understand this compunction to rhyme translated verse-haiku, for example-since it means imposing a form on a form already distorted by the translation process.)

If the word 'classics' intimidates you, consider the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid.