PoetryWhat could they ever be again, those three words, but a loud knock on the door of a fabled poem, with interested readers all ears to learn how a new translator might venture to answer? Arma virumque cano.
Dryden nailed them in 1697 - "Arms and the man I sing" - and set a near-impossible bar for more recent distinguished authors: "I tell about war and the hero" (C Day Lewis, 1952); "I sing of warfare and a man at war" (Robert Fitzgerald, 1961); "I sing of arms and of a man" (Allen Mandelbaum, 1971). (Could there be a much less inviting translation than CH Sisson's "This poem is about battles and the man"? Plod.)
So who is this man, what are the battles, and what of the poem that enshrines them? Aeneas appears, a bit player in the 20th book of Homer's account of the siege of Troy and the showdown between Achilles and Hector, and it is by having already provided riveting translations of both of Homer's epics that Robert Fagles, professor emeritus at Princeton University and author of this most welcome new translation, readied himself for the task at hand and the narrative of Aeneas's travails in the foreground of Virgil's greatest poem: "Wars and a man I sing."
And though this opening note is an echo of and homage to Dryden, Fagles's decision to follow the shift from "the" to "a" makes for a hero who's an Everyman, albeit one of parents who were human (his father Anchises) and divine (his mother Aphrodite, or Venus). The Aeneid involves the story of a destination and a destiny. It begins with its hero, literally, at sea, "an exile driven on by fate" (line 1), a refugee from the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, and a man with a mission: to find in a new-found land a homeland and establish a city of lasting peace.
Twelve books, or chapters, conflate the matter of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and delineate the wanderings of the former and the warfare of the latter. The peregrinations of Aeneas and his comrades take them around the Aegean Sea, to Crete and Actium, across the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, until some "whim of the waves" (1.456) drives them to Carthage where our hero's ill-fated love for Dido plays out in her heartbreak and demise. Then across to Italy again, to Cumae and Lavinium and, "sick of struggling with the sea" (5.681) to landfall at the Tiber's mouth where, at Pallenteum, the prefiguration of Rome itself, they place their "gods of house and home".
Mid-course they pause in Sicily for what are called the funeral games in honour of Anchises, before Aeneas descends into the realm of the dead - the glory of Book Six (and bane of countless students!) - for his encounter with his father's shade.
Wars frame the narrative - the one at the beginning prompting the expedition, others at the end (against Latin tribes and their allies) confirming its conclusion. And it is the pain and loss of war that shadow the poem and illuminate the central, often-asked question of its unfolding: the morality and price of empire.
Mandelbaum composed his version in the Vietnam years when, as he wrote, the "state wrought the abominable", and it's impossible to ignore the unravelling of world events as Fagles shaped this translation for us to read of the clash in Virgil's poem between East and West. We remember William Carlos Williams in Paterson, Book 1: "Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin". Would that we were not forgetting Virgil's injunction in Book Six - "These will be your arts:/ to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,/ to spare the defeated" (6.982-84).
As Homer learned, Virgil knew that suffering is the lot of man: "The world is a world of tears/ and the burdens of mortality touch the heart" (1.558-59); and among the poem's heart-rending images is that of the departure from Troy of dutiful Aeneas, carrying his father, his "mainstay" in every danger and defeat, and holding by the hand his son Ascanius - a tableau of, and for, all the generations.
Robert Fagles succeeds especially in portraying Virgil as a chronicler of a civilisation through the simple devices of a story's and a history's propulsion: "There was an ancient city . . ." (1.14); and - as Dido urges - "Tell us your own story, start to finish - the ambush . . ." (1.904-05). In his enlightening Postscript he cites Pope's observation that "Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers", but he declines the strict distinction between them, acknowledging the writer Virgil's renown as a reciter. One of the triumphs of his translation is the vitality it conveys by the use of a continuous past, matching the urgency of the poem's advance to a plain contemporary idiom. Not for him the habit of Pope's artificial and unrelenting measure. Fagles channels the tidal waves of Latin verse into fluent, cadenced streams of English.
THIS, INCIDENTALLY IS a sumptuous edition - with the bonus of its introduction by Bernard Knox, a long-time collaborator, its map of the Voyages and genealogy of the Houses of Greece and Troy, its compendious notes and glossary.
But why read such a story 2,000 years later? For any number of reasons - from the adventure of its narrative, its insight into history, to the sheer pleasures available through contemplation of artistic treasures of antiquity and, in this case, for the energetic life Fagles imbues it with. In the 11th Book of the Odyssey Alkinoos praises Odysseus for the way he has told his story "as a poet would, a man who knows the world". Virgil's Georgics endures as the most beautiful, perfect poem of its age but Robert Fagles's sprightly, compelling translation reminds us that the Aeneid is that age's greatest single literary achievement: a prism which throws light on a whole world and reveals, reminds us of, and reinforces our sense of the timelessness of human appetite and impulse.
Peter Fallon's The Georgics of Virgil has been reissued by Oxford World's Classics. A new collection of poems, The Company of Horses, will be published in September
Virgil: The Aeneid Translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction by Bernard Knox Penguin Classics, 486pp. £25