In accordance with the customs of their countries. The bodies of their dead were brought and placed there,

Wooden funeral pyres constructed, and to which Upon the curving shore, caused there to be You can read the rest of April Bernard’s review at the New York Review of Books website but for a little illustrative example of the “inevitable force” of Ferry’s writing the following is a passage selected by the translator himself from the introduction – according to Ferry the opening lines “ for us how we are to experience the telling of this heartbreaking scene … … the definitive declaration of how to read the whole continuing enterprise of the poem, the accounting of what men have done and what has been done to them and what they must do to mourn, here and in every episode of the work.”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 do It is as if he were writing not in our still-Romantic (even if post-Romantic) personal vein, but altogether in another mode: a classical, fatalistic one, to be sure, but also one in which emotion and achievement matter communally. Throughout, Ferry maintains a coolness even amid the most terrible drama. The advantages of Ferry’s version seem obvious to me: regularity of meter, clarity of image, simplicity of language, understatement of the horrific. The whole accumulates into a stately, inevitable force. Ferry’s blank verse is as understatedly traditional, and unflashy, as his diction.

She goes on to comment on Ferry’s stylistic choices for his translation and their particular suitability to Virgil’s epic:Ī marvel throughout. This kind of translation almost needs a new name, to distinguish it from all the other worthy efforts to bring the ancient poets to life: it is an iteration, another version, but also-perhaps, almost-the thing itself. Especially when reading the Eclogues, one hears a new-old voice, as if Virgil had miraculously learned English and decided it might do as well as Latin. And as April Bernard (also an accomplished poet in her own right and currently a Professor of English at Skidmore) writes for the New York Review of Books, Ferry’s Aeneid has captured the essence of Virgil’s original like no other English edition available today:įerry’s previous outings with Virgil, in his matchless Eclogues and Georgics, had already convinced me that he has some sort of uncanny connection to the great poet. Now, at nearly twice the age of the author when The Aeneid was first drafted, the nonagenarian poet has now completed his translations of Virgil’s major works. And with much-praised translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics among his expansive oeuvre of translated works, his specific talent for channeling the world’s most revered Roman poet has been well documented.

Poet David Ferry has long been known as one of the foremost translators of classical literature from the Latin.

The aeneid david ferry