Recent Translations of Latin Poetry

There are many different approaches to translating a work from the ancient world, especially poetry. Each has its merits, but the utility of a translation for a particular purpose depends in large part on the goals of the translator, and how literal or free he or she intends the result to be. Sometimes this is not signalled clearly enough, and one of the jobs of the reviewer is to suggest how a translation can be best used. Under consideration here are three recent translations of Latin poetry, each presenting a different approach to the issue of balancing accuracy with faithfulness to metrical form and poetic merit. All are useful contributions to the field, and each basically achieves its stated purpose.

Anne and Peter Wiseman’s translation of Ovid’s Fasti prioritizes a close translation of the Latin over poetic style: “The guiding principle of our work has been faithfulness to Ovid’s language and manner” (xxxiii). For this reason, they have chosen to render the elegiac metre into prose. They realize that this in itself makes it hard to be completely faithful to Ovid’s manner, but write that “we have sacrificed the metre to gain precision: a prose translation allows us to focus on what Ovid says and how he says it” (xxxiii).

The Wisemans have succeeded well in achieving their aim; the translation is accurate but also readable and lively, and as clear as it can be given the frequent obscurity of Ovid’s allusions and elliptical references. Ovid’s text is intentionally dense and filled with references that were meant to be obscure even to his contemporaries, and are sometimes quite simply opaque to us because of our distance from ordinary Roman life. This makes the text hard to read in places, in spite of the good translation. The authors do offer useful explanatory notes, but they are collected at the end of the text, which means that the reader spends a lot of time flipping back and forth. The prevalence of word-play and etymological aitiology in the work also makes translation difficult, and is perhaps another argument for having footnotes rather than end-notes, so that the original Latin pun or etymology would be immediately visible as one reads along. In Book 4, for example, on the 15^th of April, there is an explanation of the term forda for a cow: “When the third light has dawned after Venus’s Ides, make a sacrifice, priests, with a forda cow. A forda cow is a cow that is carrying, and called fertile from that fact; they think the foetus too has its name from this” (78). The note explains: “the Latin for ‘to carry’ is ferre, whence ‘fertile’ and ‘foetus’ (fecunda, fetus)” (139). It is impossible to capture the word and sound play of the original: “forda ferens bos est fecundaque, dicta ferendo: / hinc etiam fetus nomen habere putant” (4.631–632), although the Wisemans make an effort with “cow that is carrying” and “fertile from that fact”. It would be easier to see the point of the etymology if the note about it were on the same page and could be compared to the English directly.

As the Wisemans themselves note, the biggest distinction between their volume and two other fairly recent translations, by Boyle and Woodward (2000) and Nagle (1995), respectively, is that this new translation is in prose, and is the most faithful to the Latin. Their introduction is brief but gives appropriate background information; the glossary and index are useful and comparable to those of the earlier translations. The explanatory notes are more full than those of Nagle’s translation, but not as detailed as Boyle and Woodward’s, which give more cross...