The Aeneid (review)

Given, Sartre said, that ours is an age of "Aeneases with their Anchiseses mounted on their backs," it stands to reason that Aeneas would be our least favorite hero. After the Great War, modernists mostly turned to Odysseus (though Joyce called him Ulysses, which is what Aeneas had called him) for a hopeful model of return and recovery. After the Greatest War, however, the idea of recovery seemed almost a blasphemy, even while, with the past on its back, European culture was, in effect, recovering. Reflecting on Sartre's insight, I had occasion, once, to add this gloss: "Our century has been blessed with the wrong epic. The image of Aeneas—counting his dead, declining to credit the pleadings of Providence—is a more apt emblem than Odysseus of postwar pathology. . . . Virgil's poem is the logical model for a postmodern epic. But who," I asked rhetorically, "will write it?"

Robert Fagles has now written it—of course, one might say, considering his ambition, his prior accomplishments. But Fagles is no belletrist or careerist: the list of his translations is exclusive—exclusionary—and has been, until now, paleomodernist in principle. By 1996, when his Odyssey appeared, Fagles had brought the supremes of Nietzsche's canon into English verse, and Fagles's verse itself belongs to a Nietzschean strain of which Pound and Yeats are the modernist classics. No Greek text of which Nietzsche disapproved—not so much as one play by Euripides—has appeared in a Fagles version. As for Roman literature: it did not take until Nietzsche's putsch to eject it from the canon. Many, conceivably most, Hellenists since the late eighteenth century have condescended to Roman art as emulative and pallid. So it is an event—I mean, an event in cultural history—when the executor, as it were, of Nietzsche's literary estate readmits a Latin poem, the Latin poem, to the canon. "That priest," Yeats called Aeneas, and the snarl reflects a loathing, shared by other Nietzscheans (including Freud), of repression and every champion of repression.

Reviews of Fagles's translation of the Aeneid have focused, given the contemporary relevance, on it as a poem about the costs of empire. But not even empires are about empire. Virgil's epic, self-consciously generic, is about tragedy, hence its interest for Fagles, whose Oresteia is the outstanding translation of Greek tragedy into English. Aeneas's task is like that of Orestes, and for that matter like Virgil's: to abandon (with the anguish of a child being abandoned) one's own nature and do what responsibility commands—whether seize Italy by force, murder one's mother, or pen a twelve-thousand-line celebration of imperialism. In each instance, it is a sensitive soul (the most vulnerable of the three being Aeneas) who is called on by abhorrent gods (in Aeneas's case, it is his mother) to "get out there," "lead," and "make a difference." No translation of the Aeneid until now has enabled the Latinless reader to hear the sound of Aeneas moaning No. We are one hundred lines into the poem before Virgil introduces him; meanwhile, the reader is set up for a heroic entrance. "Bolt on bolt" blaze "across the heavens—death, everywhere / men facing instant death" . . . and then the ancestor of Julius Caesar (and, incidentally, the half-brother of Cupid) goes "limp in the chill of fear, / groans and lifting both his palms toward the stars" (where his mother Venus lives) "cries out: 'Three, four times blest, my comrades / lucky to die beneath the soaring walls of Troy—/ before their parents' eyes! If only I'd gone down. . . . '"

Paleomoderns thought that "yes I said yes I will Yes" would be the last word and epiphany of the classical tradition—and Fagles has for a quarter century been writing lines for mortals living by their wits and skills affirmatively, and in heroic degree. Aeneas, however, is a Man for No Seasons. He feels pain to the nth degree and calls it pain—wants to make nothing...