Ingentemque fuga secuit sub nubibus arcum. Rumpe moras omnis et turbata arripe castra.’ Quid dubitas? nunc tempus equos, nunc poscere currus. Lydorumque manum, collectos armat agrestis. Nec satis: extremas Corythi penetravit ad urbes 10 ‘Turne, quod optanti divum promittere nemo luco tum forte parentisĪd quem sic roseo Thaumantias ore locuta est: 5 Virgil, Aeneid Book 9 (Latin)Ītque ea diversa penitus dum parte geruntur,Īudacem ad Turnum.
#ET SI FATA DEUM FREE#
The son who turns the starry world replied, “O mother, what is it you’re asking? Should ships made by human hands be free from mortal fate? Should Aeneas sail through enemy danger scot-free? Who can guarantee that? … But – when they’ve reached the end and hold the Ausonian shore, and whichever ships have evaded waves and carried the Trojan chief to Laurentine lands, I’ll snatch away their material form and order them to become goddesses of the seas, like Doto, child of Nereus, and Galatea, who cut the foam with their breasts.” Let the ships be free from danger and rough winds as they dock by our hills.”
These I happily gave to the Trojan youth when he lacked wood for ships. There was a pine forest beloved by me over many years, a grove high on the mountainside where men brought offerings, dark with blackish firs and maples. Tell me: faith is ancient, but its flame eternal.īack when Aeneas first formed his fleet in Phyrgian Ida and prepared to set sail, the mother of gods herself, it’s said, the Berecyntian Queen, spoke to great Jove: “Do what I ask, my son, Master of Olympus. Turnus hurries ahead with 20 handpicked horse
Thus though shame and anger bid them fight If in the meantime anything should come to pass, Wealthy in horse, rich in gold-threaded robes.įlood the gates and fill the battlements. So speaking she whirls about on wings and zips
I’m grateful to Omar Al-Nakib for his amazing images, which also help reflect, I feel, some of these fragmented truths. Instead, I seek to bring across energies, to reflect and respond to some of the fun and humor and movement of the poem, drawing on everything I know and have learned about poetry and this world, the world we inhabit. There are hundreds of translations of Aeneid, and in any event the most “accurate” translation in the world would still fail to capture the rich cultural nuance of a two-thousand-year-old poem. The key, liberating insight for me was that I did not need to worry about literal, linguistic accuracy. I was inspired by postmodernist translation projects, such as Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf, some of Anne Carson’s work, and most recently Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo. In other words, reading Aeneid and rendering it into English became trying to shape those raw, word-for-word lines into something like verse. This project began many years ago as practice and gradually grew into something more.
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