C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile ed. by A. T. Reyes (review)

This fragmentary translation of the Aeneid (1.1–756; 2.1–500, 6.264–519) is an artifact of a parlor performance meant primarily for a closed group, perhaps no larger than Lewis’s Oxford circle, the “Inklings.” After heroic service in the Great War, Lewis recognized a special affinity with Virgil. In August 1922, he began a translation that he worked on sporadically until sometime after the appearance of “Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic,” the influential sixth chapter of his Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). Like Virgil, he progressed particulatim and read his ongoing work to friends beginning in 1943; his translation, like the original, lay unfinished at his death, was consigned to the flames, but was saved by a responsible executor (his secretary, Mr. Walter Hooper). It was born out of admiration for the poet but borne out by distaste for the fashionable Modernist poets of Lewis’s day, particularly the most eminent contemporary translator of Virgil, C. Day Lewis (no relation). “Jack” Lewis’s literary and academic interests (fellow at Oxford [1922–1954] first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge [1954–1963]) drew him to William Morris’s 1875 translation, The Aeneids of Virgil, turned out in the ungainly iambic heptameter (“fourteener”) of Thomas Phaer’s translation (1555) and Chapman’s Homer (1598). Starting in the fourteen-syllable French rhymed alexandrines with their strong caesura and rhymed couplets to reflect the regular closure of the hexameter, by 1933 he had settled on a six-beat English alexandrine with its softer caesura. There are some awkward rhymes (at 2.433–34 he rhymes “on” with “on”), but Lewis deftly avoids end-stopped lines and makes a number of narrative passages flow briskly and brightly, particularly his description of the bees at 1.430–440, Venus cleansing Aeneas 1.582–588, the death of Laocoön (2.202–230), and the entry of the horse into Troy (2.235–250).

Lewis believed that much of the greatness of the Aeneid lay in its magnificent language, but his antic diction, vocabulary, and figures mostly imitate Virgil’s imitators Spenser, Milton, and others who seemed to torture English for not being Latin. Thus an affected Latinate syntax twists his Anglo-Saxon diction, as when Aeolus spikes the mountain of the winds at 1.84 “with his mighty lever on one side he thrust / The hollow hill” or at 6.345–6: “Saved from the sea thou shouldst arrive the Ausonian coast / Living” or at 6.464: “no more but this last speaking time our fate allows.” The winds of 1.184 are “airy folk” and serpents “worms” at 2.204 and 6.281. Sixteenth-century vocabulary abounds: viscera (1.211) are “numbles,” segnities (2.374) is “sluggardise,” casus (1.754) are “strange haps;” at 1.427 “docks are digged” and at 6.366, si qua via est becomes “if thou canst the way.” At 6.474 “love’s perverse event” requires our understanding “event” as “outcome” and when Venus wraps Aeneas in a cloud she is said to be “shedding invisibility,” that is, giving it, not losing it. Lines made significant by the Romantics are tossed off: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent (1.462) is divested from the Carthaginians and made a humdrum homily: “Life has its tears and men’s mortality its sting.” Laocoön’s climactic timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (2.49) is rendered limply, “the gifts o’ the Greeks are still to fear.” The meetings with Dido and Deiphobus in book 6 are as colorless as the Shades themselves.

Nor is eccentric language the only museum-quality aspect of this work. Modern readers will blink twice at the long-dismissed four-line “Ille ego, qui quondam . . .” preface leading off; Morris began his translation with it, and so cantankerously does Lewis. Those adept at image-spotting will find Lewis...