The Aeneid
By VERGIL
Translated by Shadi Bartsch
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This fresh and faithful translation of Vergil’s Aeneid restores the spare poetry and driving rhythm of the original, allowing us to see one of the cornerstone narratives of Western culture with new eyes.
MY SONG is of war and a man: a refugee by fate,
the first from Troy to Italy’s Lavinian shores,
battered much on land and sea by blows from gods
obliging brutal Juno’s unforgetting rage;
he suffered much in war as well, all to plant
his town and gods in Latium. From here would rise
the Latin race, the Alban lords, and Rome’s high walls.
For two thousand years, the epic tale of Aeneas’ dramatic flight from Troy, his doomed love affair with Dido, his descent into the underworld, and the bloody establishment of Rome has electrified audiences around the world. In Vergil’s telling, Aeneas’ heroic journey not only gave Romans a thrilling origin story, it explored and established many of the fundamental themes of Western life and literature—the role of duty, the good of the many versus the good of the one, the place of love and passion in human life, the relationship between art and violence, the tension between immigrants and natives, and how new foundations are so often built upon the wreckage of those that came before. Throughout the course of Western history, the Aeneid has affirmed our best and worst intentions and forced us to confront our deepest contradictions.
It’s difficult to translate Latin into English without slowing down the pace of the narrative. But Shadi Bartsch, a chaired professor of classics at the University of Chicago, has brilliantly maintained the brisk, exciting pace of Vergil’s Latin even as she gives readers a line-by-line translation. She also offers a fresh take on the text itself by highlighting rather than smoothing out the story’s contradictions. Vergil’s contemporary readers, for instance, would have understood that Aeneas, painted here as a hero, was typically represented as a traitor who had betrayed Troy to the Greeks in order to save his family. Vergil’s choice, then, would have told a story of its own, and it belies our simple understanding of Aeneas as a paragon of duty.
On a larger scale, Bartsch illuminates the epic’s subversive approach to storytelling: Vergil seems to question our tendency to mythologize our heroes and societies, and to point to the stories that get lost in the mythmaking. This groundbreaking translation explores this question in a new introduction and provides a literary and historical context to make the Aeneid resonant for a new generation of readers.
Reviews
“The best version of the Aeneid in modern English: concise, readable, and beautiful, but also as accurate and faithful to Vergil’s Latin as possible. And the ‘Vergil’s Latin’ that she aims to stick close to reflects modern scholars’ realization that Vergil’s Latin is often difficult and strange; here it helps that she is one of the most accomplished Latinists to translate the poem, knows all the latest research, and is willing to wrestle with the most difficult passages. But this is not a translation just for scholars: Bartsch writes clear, vivid, concise lines that read well and read rapidly as she aims for ‘a kind of parallel to the experience of reading Vergil in Latin.’ The introduction and notes are concise, helpful, informative, provocative, and interesting. Readers, teachers, and students will find the kind of translation they need for private reading or a classroom encounter with the poem, and scholars may find that Bartsch has noticed new things in the Latin.”—James J. O’Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Latin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Bartsch walks the tightrope between maintaining the grandeur of the original and making the poem accessible to modern readers. The Aeneid is the great refugee narrative of its own time, and it should be for our time too.”
—Nathalie Haynes, The Guardian
“Pure Vergil . . . alive, fast-paced, and at its best in the drumbeat of blood and re that builds to the final stroke of the steadfast Aeneas.”
—Amy Richlin, Distinguished Professor of Latin, UCLA
“Blending solid scholarship with poetic sensibility, classicist [Shadi] Bartsch delivers a new version of the foundational poem of Imperial Rome. . . . [This translation] gives some sense of the Latin and the tautness of its lines; most other English versions are fully 30 percent or more longer than the original, but not hers. . . . Through seductions, treacheries, murders, deicides, and other episodes, Bartsch—her scholarly notes as vigorous as her verse—produces an excellent companion for students of the poem and of Roman history. A robust, readable, reliable translation of a hallmark of world literature.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A tight, readable translation with a welcome feminist outlook and savvy engagement with the poem’s political and imperial themes and imperialist legacy. Its natural iambic voice, clear language, and faithfulness to the tight, fast-moving pace of Vergil’s original make it a refreshing way for modern audiences to access the Aeneid’s power.”—Ada Palmer, award-winning author of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the Terra Ignota series