![]() ![]() And I’m here to report that it is magnificent. How could one go about it, keeping a consistent, yet unflagging, tone for hundreds of pages? And if the work is poetry, the task would loom like the spinning of straw into gold, night after horrifying night for years to come.Ī new edition of “The Aeneid,” Virgil’s imperial masterpiece, has arrived just as the whole world is witnessing the stress fractures in our own imperial enterprise. But I have never, and will never, attempt to translate in its entirety a vast masterpiece, one of those monuments more lasting than bronze that form the foundation of a Great Books course. I have tried a few turns at translation, wishing, for instance, to give readers a greater sense of the earthiness of the Bible than its reverend and reverent translators are willing to reveal. Nevertheless, we all need translators to open to us masterpieces written in languages we have not enough lifetime to learn. Robert Frost hit the nail on the head: When asked what poetry is, he said it’s what’s lost in translation. ![]() ![]() The Italians have it right when they insist “traduttore traditore,” for every translator is, of necessity, a traitor to the original text. NOW here’s an unrewarding subject: translation. ![]()
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