| Contents Appendix Virgil’s Life and Times Cast of Characters |
THE
AENEID
OF
VIRGIL
POETRY BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES
THE AENEID OF VIRGIL: A VERSE TRANSLATION
THE WIND OF TIME
FORBID THY RAVENS
THE SUMMER LANDSCAPE
OUT OF THE JEWEL
THE POET IN NEW YORK (TRANSLATION FROM LORCA)
AND SPAIN SINGS (WITH M. J. Benardete)
EUROPA, AND OTHER POEMS, AND SONNETS
POEMS, COLLECTED AND NEW
GREEN ARMOR ON GREEN GROUND
THE
AENEID
OF
VIRGIL
A VERSE
TRANSLATION
BY
ROLFE HUMPHRIES
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, NEW YORK
This translation is dedicated to the memory
of my first and best Latin teacher, my father,
John Henry Humphries.
laus illi debetur et a me gratia maior{vii}{vi}
INTRODUCTION
VIRGIL’S AENEID IS, of course, a major poem; it is also a great andbeautiful one. The scope of an epic requires, in the writing, a designedvariety, a calculated unevenness, now and then some easy-goingcarelessness. So the reader win find, here and there, transitionalpassages, the stock epithet, the conventional phrase, a few lines ofvamping, and, in this or that line, what the Spanish call ripios. Overand above these matters of small detail, in the large panorama thereader will find valleys as well as peaks, dry ravines as well as uplandmeadows: the landscape is not always the same height above sea level,and its flora and fauna vary more than a little. The epic terrain of theOdyssey differs greatly from that of the Iliad, and both Iliad andOdyssey differ from the Aeneid, but there is nothing obtrusive inVirgil’s relatively studied concern with composition. Less wild and“natural,” the demesnes of the Aeneid have their full measure of morethan pleasant countryside, loftiness also, majesty, grandeur.
Virgil, we have been told, wanted to burn the Aeneid; he was notsatisfied with it. This attitude, it seems to{viii} me, reflects fatigue andexhaustion of spirit rather than considered literary judgment. The lastrevisions are always the most enervating, and Virgil, one can wellbelieve, having worked on the poem for over a decade, had reached thepoint where he felt he would rather do anything, including die, than goover the poem one more time. If we had never known the poem was believedincomplete, we would, I think, find it difficult to decide which werethe unsatisfactory portions. Who wants an epic poem absolutely perfect,anyway? and how could the Aeneid be improved, really?
A charge is brought against the Aeneid that it is propaganda. I do notknow when this criticism first came to be brought; I suspect it is