The Aeneid of Virgil | Page 2

Professor Gilbert Murray has so well said, 'the Medea and
Jason of the _Argonautica_ are at once more interesting and more
natural than their copies, the Dido and Aeneas of the _Aeneid_. The
wild love of the witch-maiden sits curiously on the queen and organizer
of industrial Carthage; and the two qualities which form an essential
part of Jason--the weakness which makes him a traitor, and the
deliberate gentleness which contrasts him with Medea--seem

incongruous in the father of Rome.' But though Virgil turned to the
Greek epics for the general framework and many of the details of his
poem, he always remains master of his materials, and stamps them with
the impress of his own genius. The spirit which inspires the _Aeneid_
is wholly Roman, and the deep faith in the National Destiny, and stern
sense of duty to which it gives expression, its profoundly religious
character and stately and melodious verse, have always caused it to be
recognized as the loftiest expression of the dignity and greatness of
Rome at her best. But the sympathetic reader will be conscious of a
deeper and more abiding charm in the poetry of Virgil. Even in his
most splendid passages his verses thrill us with a strange pathos, and
his sensitiveness to unseen things--things beautiful and sad--has caused
a great writer, himself a master of English prose, to speak of 'his single
words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance as the voice
of Nature herself to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things,
which is the experience of her children in every age.'
The task of translating such a writer at all adequately may well seem to
be an almost impossible one; and how far any of the numerous attempts
to do so have succeeded, is a difficult question. For not only does the
stated ideal at which the translator should aim, vary with each
generation, but perhaps no two lovers of Virgil would agree at any
period as to what this ideal should be. Two general principles stand out
from the mass of conflicting views on this point. The translation should
read as though it were an original poem, and it should produce on the
modern reader as far as possible the same effect as the original
produced on Virgil's contemporaries. And here we reach the real
difficulty, for the scholar who can alone judge what that effect may
have been, is too intimate with the original to see clearly the merits of a
translation, and the man who can only read the translation can form no
opinion. However, it seems clear that a prose translation can never
really satisfy us, because it must always be wanting in the musical
quality of continuous verse. And our critical experience bears this out,
since even Professor Mackail with all his literary skill and insight has
failed to make his version of the _Aeneid_ more than a very valuable
aid to the student of the original. The meaning of the poet is fully
expressed, but his music has been lost. That oft-quoted line--

'Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt'
haunts us like Tennyson's
'When unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering
square,'
and no prose rendering can hope to convey the poignancy and pathos of
the original. The ideal translation, then, must be in verse, and perhaps
the best way for us to determine which style and metre are most suited
to convey to the modern reader an impression of the charm of Virgil,
will be to take a brief glance at some of the best-known of the verse
translations which have appeared.
The first translation of the _Aeneid_ into English verse was that of
Gawin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld in Scotland, which was published
in 1553. It is a spirited translation, marked by considerable native force
and verisimilitude, and it was certainly unsurpassed until that of
Dryden appeared. In the best passages it renders the tone and feeling of
the original with extreme felicity--indeed, all but perfectly. Take for
instance this passage from the Sixth Book--
'Thai walking furth fa dyrk, oneth thai wyst
Quhidder thai went,
amyd dym schaddowys thar,
Quhar evir is nycht, and nevir lyght dois
repar,
Throwout the waist dongion of Pluto Kyng,
Thai voyd
boundis, and that gowsty ryng:
Siklyke as quha wold throw thik
woddis wend
In obscure licht, quhen moyn may nocht be kenned;

As Jupiter the kyng etheryall,
With erdis skug hydis the hevynnys all

And the myrk nycht, with her vissage gray,
From every thing hes
reft the hew away.'
But in spite of its merits, its dialect wearies the modern reader, and
gives it an air of grotesqueness which is very alien to the spirit of the
Latin. One other sixteenth-century translation deserves notice, as it was
written by one who was himself a distinguished poet; namely, the