Those of us lucky enough to spend significant time with writing of any kind can, if we’re fortunate, trace our sense of ourselves as readers back to moments or scenes in childhood. We might think of ourselves as being readers born at these moments or out of a series of habits or books that become important to us for reasons never to be fully explained. As far as I can tell, it’s pure luck that one has such experiences and retains them. I can’t recall moments when a particular parent dandled me on a knee and read to me (though my parents read to me frequently and my whole family reads voraciously) thus providing the genesis of my own love of literature. I can, however, remember places (the Johnstown Public Library) and books about classical mythology (D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths), which lead me to Homer and Virgil.
For those of us weaned on such literature, the translations of Richard Lattimore and Robert Fagles were sustenance. And with the death of Lattimore some decades ago, Fagles is of the last of the great translators of his generation. His award-winning translations of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey are classics of classical translation. The upcoming publication of a long-awaited and feverishly anticipated rendering of Virgil’s Aeneid (November 2006) sends us all scurrying from the shores of Asia Minor to the heart of Latium where Aeneas finally ends his endless wandering and founds an empire. Anyone too impatient to wait for the November publication can sample Fagles’ efforts in the newest issue of the Kenyon Review.
The selections offer, for the casual reader, some of the greatest hits of The Aeneid from the death of King Priam (who ends up “a corpse without a name”) to the encounter between the sojourning Aeneas and the seduced and abandoned Dido in the underworld where Dido has taken up residence. Aeneas, of course, fails to soothe her, so “she, her eyes fixed on the ground, turned away, / her features no more moved by his pleas.” Aeneas, perennially abandoned by parents who are celestial and barely reveal themselves (such as his mother Venus) or mortal and die (such as his father), encounters his father again in the underworld and tries to hold him: “Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, / three times he embraced nothing.” But Anchises is wise: “Each of us must suffer his own demanding ghost.” If some are to be punished in the underworld, others dwell in the rich fields of Elysium, which Fagles provides his reader in ample measure.