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  • The Streets of Rome:The Classical Dylan
  • Richard F. Thomas (bio)

Taming the proud: the case of Virgil

For those of us—and there are a few of us in my neck of the woods—interested in the Roman poet Virgil and in the art of Bob Dylan, the strange days that followed September 11, 2001 were particularly memorable. Dylan's two-year stint in the Hibbing High Latin Club was at that point unknown to me. In the summer of 2005 a trip to the Seattle Music Experience revealed his early interest, set out on the page of the Hibbing High School yearbook, the Hematite, as it is called. The page is also featured in Scorsese's No Direction Home. But even on the first time through Love and Theft, even before we had noted the quotes around the title that drew attention to the theft of Eric Lott's title, before we had been handed the snippets of Confessions of a Yakuza, transformed into Appalachian and other vignettes, there was Virgil, loud and clear, in the tenth verse of "Lonesome Day Blues" (itself a Blind Willie McTell title):

I'm gonna spare the defeated, I'm gonna speak to the crowd / I'm gonna spare the defeated, boys, I'm going to speak to the crowd / I am goin' to teach peace to the conquered / I'm gonna tame the proud // ("Lonesome Day Blues")

But yours will be the rulership of nations, / remember Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud //

(Virgil, Aeneid 6.851-53, [trans. Mandelbaum])

Teaching peace, sparing the defeated, and taming the proud. Too much precision there for accident, even without the album's title or Junichi Saga's presence. Now Virgil's Latin is close to the translation I give, but Latin it is, with the three Roman arts spread over a line and a half: [End Page 30]

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

The Latin in fact has four Roman qualities: "to rule over people with empire, to institute law in addition to peace, to spare the subjected, and to war down the proud." If I had given that translation, and it is more "faithful" to the Latin though less poetically put, there might be doubt as to whether Dylan was alluding to Virgil's Aeneid at all. But that is the point: Dylan's intertext is not created from the Latin of Virgil—though Hibbing High's Robert Zimmerman may possibly have gotten far enough in his Latin to have read some Virgil back then. Rather, Dylan read, as I have given it, the English translation of Allen Mandelbaum,1 the best contemporary translation until 2005, when Stanley Lombardo's excellent new version arrived on the field.2

The cover of Lombardo's Aeneid translation shows a section of the Vietnam wall, including fragments of names of those killed in the war. This reflects recent readings of Virgil's poem that see it as, among other things, a questioning of the worth of the imperial enterprise. Already, however, Mandelbaum's 1971 preface let the wrongs of that war into the Roman world of the Virgil he was translating (xiv):

And place, which for me at least had always been the last mode through which I heard a poet, after twelve years lived in the landscapes of Virgil, finally began, even as I was leaving Italy, to reinforce the voice of Virgil. That happened to me at a time of much personal discontent. I had long contemned any use of the poetic word for purposes of consolation. But pride lessens with the years, and Virgil consoled. The years of my work on this translation have widened that personal discontent; this state (no longer, with the Vietnam war, that innocuous word "society") has wrought the unthinkable, the abominable. Virgil is not free of the taint of the proconsular; but he speaks from a time of peace achieved, and no man ever felt more deeply the part of the defeated and the lost.

Mandelbaum's preface...

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