alexander bril
Thu, 01 Jan 2004 23:35:17 -0800
This is a poem that I know rather well, and I have been writing about the reception of the Aeneid for several years. Over the course of the last five years, I have taught the poem four times, and will do so again in about a month. I confess, however, that I am consistently dissatisfied with what happens when I bring this book into the classroom. Lately I have been teaching the poem in translation, alongside of the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Lord of the Rings. The Aeneid is the second book we read, and it always feels like a struggle.
[alexander wrote this:]W. Anderson in his *Art of the Aeneid* wrote: 'It is the common experience of teachers dealing with humanities courses or courses in Greek and Roman literature that the Aeneid fails to impress the average student, to a large degree because of the inadequacy of all translations... Vergil placed insuperable problems in the way of translators: his style, an essential aspect of the total epic, has not been, and probably cannot be translated. Unlike Homer, Vergil did not produce a poem which would be a "good story" in itself. Anyone can enjoy the Odyssey, for example, whether presented in Victorian prose or in racy modern verse; its power does not depend so heavily on the techniques of oral composition. When Vergil wrote the Aeneid, the different times and his own special talents demanded a thoroughly conscious exploitation of every relevant stylistic technique. The art of the Aeneid, therefore, involves many technical skills which Vergil, starting from the experiments of his predecessors, developed to near-perfection...'There is much food for thought in these words. If one accepts them, how is one to escape the feeling that teaching Vergilian epic in translation is rather a waste of time? Granted that teaching any text in translation inevitably leads to a certain degree of dissatisfaction on the part of both teacher and students, how much more is this the case with the Aeneid, which, as Anderson argues, depends little on the story for its claim to greatness?But if one MUST teach the Aeneid in translation, I think the only way to go about doing this is to concentrate on a few parts only -- preferably the more dramatic parts. I suggest that it will help students to appreciate something of the Aeneid's greatness if one can by means of these few selected sections illustrate -- along the lines set out by the great Vergilian scholar Heinze -- some of the salient features of Vergil's consummate epic technique, especially his handling of the mythological and literary traditions of his predecessors, his judicious composition (unity, sequence of scenes, organisation etc.), his subtle exploitation of dramatic and emotive elements, his intellectualisation of simplistic traditional characters and plot situations etc. Much of this illustration can be done with little or no reference to language and style, the two stumbling blocks for many Latin-less students which stand in the way of their more profound appreciation of the text. Like Heinze, one can easily show how Vergil's accounts, for the purposes of epic, far surpass analogous accounts in Quintus, Apollodorus, Tryphiodorus etc.This method also has the virtue of circumventing the need to give crash courses on ancient geography and history, the benefit of which must be weighed against the time constraints imposed on the text-in-translation course.Only a detailed study of a few selected passages (given the time constraints of teaching a course within one year in which other texts are also studied) can, in my view, leave students with something approaching true appreciation of the Aeneid's greatness. Anything more rapid or superficial, will only result in something like those idiotic 2 week pan-European tours for the culturally-illiterate epicurean swine brigade. Those who've been on them, can say they've been there (to Europe) and they've seen the sights, but none of them can tell you anything really significant about what they've seen and (should) have experienced.alexanderperth, australia
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