Of the spear-cast that ends the truce in Book 12, “No one knew what hand shot it, what storm drove it” (p.216). Occasionally Caldwell misinterprets Latin diction. Montana may be “Big Sky Country,” but the phrase “high sky” just sounds wrong. Jupiter seals Turnus’ doom by sending a Dira down “from the high sky” (p.227 ab aethere summo, 12.853). When the Sibyl exhorts Aeneas to “boldly go where Fortune leads” (p.98 audentior ito / qua tua te Fortuna sinet, 6.96-97), the Star Trek echo is apt, but when Aeneas mentions earlier heroes who went to the Underworld and then asks “why can’t I?” (p.99 supplied to the Latin at 6.123), he sounds too much like Dorothy in Kansas singing “Over the Rainbow” for my taste. It is not, in fact, a word for word version which preserves Latin syntax and sentence length.Ĭaldwell’s ear for English idiom only rarely fails him. His version would not be as good as it is, if it were as literal as he claims. By this standard Caldwell has succeeded, but he does himself a disservice by describing it as “a very literal translation” (p.xxii). Fortunately, his “Translator’s Note” makes the straightforward claim that he “almost always … the simpler and more direct rendering rather than the elegant or ‘poetic'” (p.xxii). I have a difficult time imagining this ideal, to say nothing of evaluating Caldwell’s success in attaining it. In contrast to John Dryden, who endeavored in his translation of the Aeneid“to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age,” 1 Caldwell claims that he has tried to make the Mantuan speak such English as a Roman contemporary of his would have used to translate the work into prose (p.232). It assumes no special background on the reader’s part and therefore supplies a great deal of information in its Introduction and notes, making it suitable for both high school and college students, as well as the general reader. In this Focus Classical Library translation of the Roman national epic, Richard Caldwell has produced a prose version in clear, idiomatic, and readable English, appropriate for anyone who “wants to read the Aeneid but doesn’t know Latin” (p.xxii).

The aeneid david west