Though he has countless phrases and lines that touch the heart as immediately as any poetry can, Virgil does not possess the first kind of contemporaneity. Donne and GГіngora earlier in the century spoke in this way, until the academy stepped in and reclaimed them. вЂњYes, this is true,вЂќ we say of such writing, вЂњthis is how it is.вЂќ There is a second kind of nowness, timely rather than timeless, whereby an old author reemerges and is found to speak with a contemporary voice to the concerns of a particular generation. The parting of Hector and Andromache in Book 6 of the Iliad asks for no exercise of the historical imagination: the best poetry of Thomas Hardy will not date unless our species changes utterly. It may treat so directly of what is permanent in the human condition that time can get no hold on it. Now at last we have it, FitzgeraldвЂ™s Aeneid, a translation that lets us all come close to this famous poem and decide what, from its troubled past, it may have to say to our troubled present, and whether the old claims, however rephrased, can still be sustained.ДЄ work of the past can possess the quality of вЂњnownessвЂќ in two ways. The finest Greek translator of our age, how would he meet the supreme challenge of VirgilвЂ™s Latin? His enchanting Odyssey showed his command of a narrative style if the Iliad proved less amenable to his genius, his version did suggest that here perhaps was the man uniquely qualified by taste and conviction to tackle the Aeneid. Hence the news some years ago that Robert Fitzgerald was at work on the poem aroused the keenest expectations. This medium, the incomparable language admired even by the poetвЂ™s adversaries, is not represented in either of our classic versions (Gavin Douglas writes, splendidly, a different kind of poetry DrydenвЂ™s Augustan preconceptions are subtly, sometimes grossly, distorting), and has up to now defeated every modern translator. The Aeneid is also a narrative poem and VirgilвЂ™s story is no less, in many ways far more, important, but the narrative action is refracted through a dense linguistic medium which conditions and controls the way we take that action. Tell the story of the Iliad and still more of the Odyssey and a good deal of what Homer has to say comes across. Although fewer and fewer people have the classical languages, Homer and the Greek tragedians are present to the literary consciousness Virgil is not, or not to the same degree, partly no doubt because he survives translation so much less well. Secure in his lofty station for century after century (вЂњthe chastest poet, and royalest, that is to the memory of man known,вЂќ Bacon said), Virgil began to lose ground in the Romantic period and today his position is deeply ambiguous. Let the Mantuan gather dust in his niche. Eliot struck the note when, contrasting TennysonвЂ™s вЂњUlyssesвЂќ with the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, he described the вЂњTennyson-VirgilianismвЂќ of the diction as вЂњtoo poetical in comparison with Dante to be the highest poetry.вЂќ If Virgil has not, like Milton in the Thirties, been вЂњdethroned,вЂќ it is because, a few cantankerous poets apart (Pound, Graves), those who go in for such demolition work have not cared enough one way or the other. So, I think, the common judgment on the Aeneid now runs.

Fitzgerald hides his consummate artistry, effaces his own prodigious labor, until the text speaks to us directly, without foreignness of time or place.A great poem? Yes, of course, but not in the very front rank, not quite in the same class as the Iliad and The Divine Comedy. вЂњThis is translation as interpretation, Virgil filtered through one of the finest poetic sensibilities of our time. be a very insensitive reader if, once launched on AeneasвЂ™ fateful journey with Fitzgerald as guide, does not follow it to the end.вЂќ вЂ“ The New Republic вЂњIn this Aeneid Fitzgerald is at the top of his form.

This is a sustained achievement of beauty and power.вЂќ вЂ“ Boston Globe Fitzgerald has managed, by a sensitive use of faintly archaic vocabulary and a keen ear for sound and rhythm, to suggest the solemnity and the movement of VirgilвЂ™s poetry as no previous translator has done. вЂњA rendering that is both marvelously readable and scrupulously faithful. вЂњFitzgeraldвЂ™s is so decisively the best modern Aeneid that it is unthinkable anyone will want to use any other version for a long time to come.вЂќ вЂ“ New York Review of Books

The aeneid fitzgerald audio