Soar with Fagles?

The NYT drops in on Robert Fagles, who's in the seventh year of his efforts to translate Virgil's Aeneid. (He must have started right around the time the world went gaga for his Odyssey, which led to this 1997 interview, among many others.) Chris Hedges does a great job with this profile.

[Fagles] asked if it would be acceptable for him to read a passage that bedeviled him. He got up, knelt on the carpet in front of h. The passage was one of the most famous in "The Aeneid." In Latin it reads,

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

"One of the most beautiful lines in Latin," he said, "and also one of the most famous. I know the translation police will be looking, as well as good readers." He peered through his wire rim glasses, and read, 


"A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this." He looked at the page for a moment. "It is about loss, about overcoming the worst," he said, "but the word 'perhaps' is important. It may not be a joy to remember. It may be a bloody misery."



Another translation:
John Dryden:

 "An hour will come, with pleasure to relate 

  Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate."



_____________________________________________________________________________

Latin translated beautifully:

Fagles studied under Bernard Knox, who, as it happens, wrote the introduction to Charles Martin's new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. (Actually, it's a 1998 New York Review of Books essay comparing Martin's work, then in progress,favorably to other translations by Ted Hughes, David R. Slavitt, and a group of other poets who tackled individual stories from the epic for an anthology.) Oddly enough, there's another newly published translation by David Raeburn. It's a Penguin Classic in the UK, so chances are we'll see it soon here as well.  Nicholas Lezard warmed up to this version reviewing it for The Guardian, though I'm not entirely convinced. Here's Martin on Diana's transformation of Actaeon into a stag, the reference point used by Knox in his essay:

No further warning:
the brow which she has sprinkled jets the horns
of a lively stag; she elongates his neck,
narrows the tips of his ears to tiny points,
converts his hands to hooves, his arms to legs,
and clothes his body in a spotted pelt.
Lastly the goddess endows him with trembling fear...

It seems to me a lot more gripping than Raeburn's version, and not just because of the use of the present as opposed to the past tense:

The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;
the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;
she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender
forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;
last, she injected panic ...

There's also the Elizabethan-era version credited to Arthur Golding:

She sharpes his eares, she makes his necke both slender, long and lanke.
She turnes his fingers into feete, his armes to spindle shanke.
She wrappes him in a hairie hyde beset with speckled spottes,
And planteth in him fearefulnesse.

Description:

OVID'S EPIC POEM--whose theme of change has resonated throughout the ages--has become one of the most important texts of Western imagination, an inspiration from Dante's time to the present day, when writers such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino have found a living source in Ovid's work. In this new, long-anticipated translation of Metamorphoses, Charles Martin combines a close fidelity to Ovid's text with verse that catches the speed and liveliness of the original. Portions of the translation have already appeared in such publications as Arion, The Formalist, The Tennessee Quarterly, and TriQuarterly. Hailed in Newsweek for his translation of The Poems of Catullus ("Charles Martin is an American poet; he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the streets back into the English Catullus. The effect is electric"), Martin's translation of Metamorphoses will be the translation of choice for contemporary readers.

Source:

http://www.beatrice.com/archives/000328.html

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. For eight years, he published interviews with authors talking about fiction and nonfiction writing—then he switched over to a blog format which allowed for a greater ranger of commentary, recommendations, guest essays, and other types of posts.

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