Friendly local classicists, for internet values of local.

[mrissa]

Oh, livejournal, fount of a great many opinions, some of them even informed:

What translation of the Aeneid should I read?

We got some not-so-good news about a family member last night and have some really good social things planned for the weekend, so between those two, I am not feeling all that journally and will probably be quietish for awhile. Unless I'm not.

Comments

[katfeete.livejournal.com]

I'm not an expert, but I found the Mandelbaum translation I read quite good. And my professor waxed practically enthusiastic over it, though he did explain that to properly appreciate the Aeneid we needed to all run out, learn Latin, and read it in the original. From this I am guessing that the Mandelbaum follows the original Latin as close as possible, which may or may not be what you're after.

There are no footnotes -- which I find distracting anyhow -- but there is a handy glossary of proper names for when you get confused. In my edition, anyway.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The Mandelbaum is way better than the Penguin Classics, but really, it's just so much better in Latin that you can't really compare.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas, but if I was to go learn another language for the purposes of reading an epic in it, Latin wouldn't even be third on the list.

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

Icelandic and two others? Do tell...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

At the very least, Finnish and Greek.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Robert Fagles have a new translation out? That's what I would read. Not being a classicist.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

When I was a TA for a class in the Western canon (Homer Virgil Dante Plato Milton) we read the Penguin edition, by Knight, but only because the Fagles wasn't out. I liked it more than I thought I would. So there's the vote of a classicist who isn't me!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I'm reading that one right now. I...really can't recommend it.

There's trying to update a classic, and then there's going "Battle stations!" in the middle of pre-Roman Latium.

Just...no.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

We used the Mandelbaum translation in a college class. I remember it being pretty good, both in that it was readable and in that when I went back to check the original text on a couple of passages I was curious about, I wasn't outraged by the choices Mandelbaum had made in rendering it into English.

I remember leafing through the Fagles translation in a bookstore some time back, and it didn't grab me, but I don't remember if I thought it was actively bad, or if I just decided I didn't need another translation of something that I'm theoretically capable of reading in the original.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

This is some kind of a heretical opinion in some quarters, but my indisputable favorite is the Rolfe Humphries. I haven't read anything in Latin for twenty years, but I remember checking some passages (in an Aeneid translation cage match, Humphries vs Fitzgerald) and being amazed and delighted at how well Humphries caught the rhythms.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

HA, I bet the former had the latter for lunch. With mustard.

Oh yeah. In the world of pro wrestling, they'd call that a "squash".

I don't know why his translations fell out of favor. I love 'em.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea. We need truepenny to help with color commentary, maybe.

[aedifica]

I've actually never read the Aeneid, but I think the Mandelbaum mentioned above was the same person who did the really good translation I have of Ovid's Metamorphoses--so I second (third, fourth, whathaveyou) that recommendation.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Dryden's coming back into vogue, actually. At least, the consensus in my department was that it's one of the top two or three translations available.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And that's also essentially what it says in the original, while being words you want to roll around in your mouth, like the original. "The long glories of majestic Rome".

Re: take care of the sounds and the sense will....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Have you read Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau by Marot? The eponymous poem's about as far as you can get from the Aeneid but one of the things the book is, is a long discussion on translating poetry.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Yes, him. I confess I never made it all the way through GEB, but I loooove Le Ton Beau. It is about linguistics, poetry, cognitive science, and translatin. And love.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I second this recommendation, even though it broke my brain so that I sometimes trip over translation issues I would never have noticed before. Still worth it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, there is no definitive translation of the Aeneid-- the Fagles is probably the most readable, but becomes very modern-vernacular at times; the Mandelbaum is beautifully literal, but suffers all the problems that that entails (idioms? what are these?); I took an entire course in college about the problems with the Penguin and Loeb attempts.

My recommendation, therefore, is the Mandelbaum-- and supplement it with looks at Dryden's. Dryden actually is one of the best English translations, it just doesn't count anymore as modern English, since it practically has to be translated itself. So the Mandelbaum will give you the skeleton and the Dryden will give you the tone. I don't recommend Dryden straight because the tone of the Aeneid in Latin is the sort of wild sweeping poetry of Dryden, but without the mad linguistic convolutions and ornamentations that Dryden goes into because that was how you did poetry back then. So it's really the combination you want.

/classics major

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I actually like beautifully literal with the "idioms? what are these?" problem, because I like to puzzle through the times when someone says, "Your sister-in-law will call you wind on the back stairs," and not have some well-meaning translator change it to, "Your sister-in-law will insult you," or, "Your sister-in-law will say that you are useless and annoying."

*gazes adoringly at Frances Peabody Magoun translation of the Kalevala*