One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Spring 2018 on Apby Kelly.Poetry is innately related to theft. Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2018 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. In Ferry’s version, there’s a notable balance of an eloquent sensibility and a narrative simplicity-both of which Virgil’s epic demands, often simultaneously. Passages both of warfare and human suffering abound in The Aeneid, as they do in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or trying to go nor can we get there where-Įver where might be, and who knows who it is Won’t tell wherever we are nor where we’re going Our languid eyelids close and in their dream It’s as in sleep, in the quiet of the night, The tone of his work feels carefully accomplished, as when he describes the bewilderment of Turnus as he is pursued by Aeneas to his death:

Through the aloof moon’s friendly stillnessesįerry’s “under the silent / Stillness of the moon,” by contrast, falls a bit short in phrasing the total beauty of Virgil’s “per amica silentia lunae,” but his translation often has a measured eloquence that can be full of feeling:Īurora rose, spreading her pitying light,Īnd with it bringing back to sight the laborsĪnd what has been done to them and what they must doįerry’s version gains by its simplicity of language, especially as The Aeneid offers “a quick succession of events.” Where another prominent Virgil translator, Robert Fagles, gives us “One hope saves the defeated: they know they can’t be saved” in his 2006 version, Ferry conveys thoughtfully and simply that the defeated are “clarified by despair.” In Book II’s recounting of the fall of Troy, the merit of Ferry’s simplicity is palpable the narration flows but retains a literary quality. During passages of warfare, Virgil even tends to be exquisitely delicate, as can be seen in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation: The tone of Virgil’s poem is frequently elegiac. Every new translation holds its mirror up to the original, so we might ask: by what features might a reader in English come to know Virgil in Ferry’s version? In a poem in his 2012 collection Bewilderment, David Ferry works with a letter in which Goethe says, “To live / Long is to outlive many.” Ferry’s poem is about “The death that lives in the intention of things / To have a meaning of some sort or other.” The imagery of loss and yearning in the work of this mature master suggests how suited he is to appreciate that same profoundly mournful quality in Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid.

The aeneid david ferry