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 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
LORNA HARDWICK JAMES I. PORTER
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the
present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the
centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old
and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts,
theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Virgil and His
Translators

EDITED BY

Susanna Braund and

Zara Martirosova Torlone

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Susanna Braund, Zara Martirosova Torlone, and OUP 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank numerous scholars and friends for their assistance in
bringing this volume into being. The genesis of the volume lay in three workshops
and conferences, held in Vancouver (2012), in Paris (2014), and at Cuma near Naples
(2014). All three were inspiring events and we express our deep gratitude to all the
participants, many of whose papers appear in this book. Our co-organizers, Craig
Kallendorf at Naples and Siobhán McElduff at Paris, were crucial collaborators and
interlocutors to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude.
Two key scholars at the Vancouver event who are not present in the volume were
Stuart Gillespie and Stephen Harrison: we thank them profoundly for their insights
and encouragement. The level of discourse at all three events was exceptional and
exemplary; we recommend strongly the model we adopted, of precirculating the
papers, and we thank all participants for honouring our desire to maximize engaged
discussion at the events.
The conferences that generated this volume would not have been possible without
funding from several sources. The award, to Susanna Braund, of a Standard Research
Grant by SSHRC, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, funded the
Vancouver conference. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University
of British Columbia supported the Wall Colloquium Abroad at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris with a generous award; we acknowledge with gratitude the warm
hospitality of the Institut and its director. The Villa Vergiliana and the Vergilian Society
provided Zara Torlone with the venue for the Naples/Cuma conference. The final stages
of editorial work on the volume have been funded by Susanna Braund’s Canada
Research Chair funds, which happily were finally released to her by the University of
British Columbia.
Translations from French and Italian were undertaken by Liza Bolen, Gillian
Glass, and Jelena Todorovic; we thank Marco Romani Mistretta for additional help
with Italian idioms. We thank Einaudi for permission to print an English translation
of pages from the introduction to Alessandro Fo’s Italian translation of the Aeneid.
Some additional acknowledgements of permissions to reproduce selected material
follow below:
• Josephine Balmer’s ‘Lost’ and ‘Let Go’ have been reproduced from her collection
Letting Go: Thirty Mourning Sonnets and Two Poems (Agenda Editions,
Mayfield, 2017), and ‘Creusa’ has been reproduced from her collection Chasing
Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, 2004) by kind permission of the author.
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon have been
reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press
(www.gallerypress.com).
• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968–1978 (Faber & Faber, London, 1980), The Cure at Troy (Faber & Faber,
London, 2002), and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ and ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ from Electric
Light (Faber & Faber, London, 2001) have been reproduced with kind permis-
sion of Faber & Faber Ltd.
• The lines from ‘The Great Hunger’ and the poem ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh in
Chapter 27 are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn
(Allen Lane, London, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of
the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
For their dedicated hard work we thank Jake Beard for editorial assistance, Emma
Hilliard for devising the index, and Graham Butler for completing it. Brian North
worked wonders with a challenging set of proofs and we are most grateful. We
especially thank the general editors of the series and the readers for their extremely
thoughtful and constructive criticisms and guidance on the shape of the volume. No
volume of collected essays is perfect, but we believe that, thanks to the support we
have received, we have produced a balanced and polished book, which will stimulate
many future conversations on the important topic of the translations of Virgil.
Finally, we thank our immediate support networks, who provided calmness and
sanity when the volume was threatening to become unruly: Susanna thanks her
wonderful husband Adam Morton and her many old dogs; Zara thanks her husband
Mark Torlone, her two daughters Christina and Francesca, and her parents,
Dr Sergey Martirosov and Samvelina Pogosova, for their love and support. We
have both loved this collaboration with each other: we are always, it seems, on the
same page, and that has been affirming and encouraging throughout the project.
Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

The publisher and the editors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list.
If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Contents

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version 1

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Part 1. Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital

1. Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation 23
Craig Kallendorf
2. Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de
Villena’s Eneida of 1428 36
Richard H. Armstrong
3. Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia 51
Stephen Rupp
4. Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English
(from Caxton until Today) 63
Alison Keith
5. The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 80
Gordon Braden
6. An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 97
Fiona Cox
7. Virgil after Vietnam 107
Susanna Braund
8. Translations of Virgil into Esperanto 124
Geoffrey Greatrex
9. Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek 136
Michael Paschalis
10. Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid 151
Sophia Papaioannou
11. Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian
Reception of Virgil 166
Marko Marinčič
viii CONTENTS

12. Reviving Virgil in Turkish 183

Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken
13. Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues
and the Politics of Language 195
Mathilde Skoie
14. The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between
Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret 209
Séverine Clément-Tarantino
15. Virgil in Chinese 224
Jinyu Liu

Part 2. Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition,

Appropriation, and Identification
16. Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies 239
Richard F. Thomas
17. Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? 260
Hélène Gautier
18. Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis 275
Stephen Scully
19. Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques
de Virgile 289
Marco Romani Mistretta
20. ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2
by Giacomo Leopardi 305
Giampiero Scafoglio
21. Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition
of English Translations of Virgil 318
Philip Hardie
22. Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian
Translations of the Aeneid 331
Zara Martirosova Torlone
23. Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century 345
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos
24. Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 355
Ulrich Eigler
 CONTENTS ix

25. Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the

Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol 368
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
26. Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian
Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 385
Ulrich Eigler
27. Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics 399
Cillian O’Hogan
28. Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid 412
Alessandro Fo
Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils 422
Josephine Balmer

Bibliography 431
Notes on Contributors 473
Index Locorum 481
General Index 496
 Introduction: The Translation
History of Virgil
The Elevator Version

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid, have been translated many times since long
before the advent of printing; and they continue to be translated to the present day.
As early as the mid-first century CE, Polybius, Seneca’s freedman, is said to have
translated Virgil into Greek. The Middle Irish Imtheachta Aeniasa (Wanderings of
Aeneas), written between the tenth century and the twelfth, can lay claim to being the
first extant vernacular translation, yet is best regarded as an adaptation, because of
how it recasts the Latin poem into the Irish tradition of heroic prose narrative.
Likewise, the mid-twelfth century Old French Roman d’Énéas is an important text,
but it, too, rejigs the material to reflect contemporary concerns. Italy produced
fourteenth-century prose translations of the Aeneid, while the first verse translation
is that of Tommaso Cambiatore (1430). At the same time, in Spain, Enrique de
Villena was writing in Castilian prose his own version, divided into 366 chapters.
The earliest printed Aeneid ‘translation’ (really a loose adaptation in the medieval
mode) appeared in Italian in 1476¹ and was subsequently translated into French in
1483 and into English in 1490, by William Caxton, as The Eneydos of Vyrgyl. More
rigorous translations quickly followed, as Renaissance humanism took off: into
French in 1500 (Octovien de Saint-Gelais, published in 1509), into mid-Scots in 1513
(Gavin Douglas, published 1553), into German in 1515 (Thomas Murner), into Italian
1534 (Niccolò Liburnio), into English in the 1540s (Henry Howard, Books 2 and 4,
published in 1554 and 1557) and into Spanish in 1555 (Gregorio Hernández de
Velasco). The first complete Aeneid in English is that of Thomas Phaer and Thomas
Twyne, published over the period 1558–84. Candidates for the major European Aeneid
translations include those of Joachim du Bellay (Books 4 and 6) in 1562 and 1560,
Annibale Caro in 1581, and John Dryden in 1697. Production of Aeneid translations

¹ Just eight years after the editio princeps of the Latin text, which appeared in 1469.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

continues apace; and similar (though not identical) narratives apply to the Eclogues
and the Georgics, which, because of their subject matter, move in and out of favour
more dramatically.
The history of the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in particular is closely bound up
with the emerging phenomenon of nationalism from the Renaissance onwards,
whether or not it is avant la lettre to call it that. As nations sought to establish and
develop their own national literatures and to articulate their sovereign or imperialist
agendas, they turned to translating the poem that was at the apex of European culture
and that had been at the centre of the school curriculum since it was first published,
in 19 BCE. They did this deliberately, seeking to yoke the language and the heroic
patriotic story to their own histories, helped in no small degree by claims made by the
aristocratic families of descent from Aeneas’s Trojans.² The process continued in
countries and cultures further from the seat of Renaissance humanism, like ripples
expanding from a pebble dropped into a pond. Thus Russia’s first Aeneid translation
does not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, while the first attempt in
Hebrew dates from the nineteenth century. The process continues into the twentieth
century, as demonstrated by the case of Esperanto, which boasts three Aeneid trans-
lations since the language was invented in 1887.
Translations, just like other interpretations, are always framed and freighted ideo-
logically. Theodore Ziolkowski’s (1993) book Virgil and the Moderns did an exemplary
job of identifying the malleability of Virgil’s poems during the years 1914 to 1945, when
American and European interpreters found in Virgil mirrors of their own very different
concerns, whether to do with populism or elitism, fascism or democracy, commitment
or escapism. This ideological hermeneutics is readily extrapolated and applied to trans-
lations just as much as to adaptations and to the other forms of reception discussed by
Ziolkowski. That is what makes our volume important.

* * *
There are literally thousands of translations of the works of Virgil, complete or
selective, in dozens of languages.³ And yet there is no book dedicated to the study
of translations of Virgil as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon.
There are of course books, instigated especially by Charles Martindale,⁴ that investigate
the reception of Virgil; and there are studies of specific aspects of that reception,
whether by time period,⁵ by location,⁶ by genre,⁷ by interpretation,⁸ or by combinations

² See Waswo 1995, Federico 2003, some of the essays in Shepard and Powell 2004, and Hardie 2014.
³ Kallendorf 2012 is an absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in this topic.
⁴ In Martindale 1984 and Martindale 1997, the latter of which deliberately starts with reception. Three
notable recent contributions are Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008, Farrell and Putnam 2010, and Hardie 2014.
⁵ For example, Wilson-Okamura 2010, Ziolkowski 1993, and Atherton 2006.
⁶ For example, Kallendorf 1989, 1999, and Torlone 2014.
⁷ For example, Patterson 1987a.
⁸ For example, Thomas 2001b and Kallendorf 2007a (on ‘pessimistic’ readings).
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

of those categories.⁹ In understanding translation as a special case of reception, the work

of Lorna Hardwick and Stuart Gillespie has been key, especially the latter’s English
Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary Theory (Gillespie 2011).
There are a few studies that specifically discuss Virgil’s English translation history,
but these are limited chronologically or unable to delve deep: the two important articles
by Tony Harrison,¹⁰ Colin Burrow’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,¹¹
Tanya Caldwell’s (2008) Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority, Robin
Sowerby’s (2010) Early Augustan Virgil: Translations by Denham, Godolphin, and
Waller, and Sheldon Brammall’s (2015) The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil,
1555–1646. But there is nothing yet that attempts to open up the truly big picture. One
of the editors, Susanna Braund, is at work on a major study, titled A Cultural History
of Translations of Virgil: From the Twelfth Century to the Present, which will attempt
a synthetic vision. In the meantime, this volume is designed to get the conversation
moving.
In this introduction we first describe the broad landscape of Virgilian translation
from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. We then explain the genesis
of the volume and indicate how the individual chapters, each of which is summarized,
illuminate the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries
and across the world. We then indicate points of connection between the chapters, in
order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We are acutely aware that
a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies;
therefore we understand the importance of extrapolating larger phenomena from
the specifics presented here.¹² We conclude by suggesting ways in which other
scholars can build on this material.
This volume, then, is intended as a landmark publication devoted to the complex
role that translations of Virgil’s poetry have played in world literature and culture
from the early modern period down to the present day. The majority of the chapters
collected here focus, perhaps inevitably, on European translations of the Aeneid.
‘Perhaps inevitably’, we say, because the Aeneid provided a paradigm for what was
called in medieval times translatio imperii et studii (‘the transmission of power and
learning’).¹³ The significance of Virgil to our collective literary tradition can scarcely
be overemphasized: there is not a single Western poetic tradition unaffected by
his poetry. His influence extends beyond the literary sphere into public discourse,
education, morality, kingship theory, and imperial justifications. Beyond Europe,
his work is still gaining ground, and there is growing interest in translating Virgil
in non-European traditions—including into Asian languages and, so it is said, into

⁹ For example, Cox 1999. ¹⁰ Harrison 1967 and 1969. ¹¹ Burrow 1997.
¹² We acknowledge with gratitude the stimulating seminar ‘Beyond the Case Study: Theorizing Classical
Reception’, organized by Rosa Andujar and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos at the Society for Classical Studies
meeting in January 2016.
¹³ Explored eloquently by Waswo in his essential 1997 book.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Arabic. Although most of the essays in this book relate to the dominant cultures of
Renaissance and modern-day Europe, we are delighted to be able to include studies
from more ‘peripheral’ cultures as well as non-European traditions, including Brazilian
Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Chinese, alongside
Esperanto. All of these give important glimpses of what Virgil translation might
look like in its infancy, instead of groaning under the weight of a tradition five
centuries long. Of course we could not achieve comprehensiveness in our scope,
but this volume does address a broad spectrum of theories that defined Virgilian
translations across time and space. Our contribution will by no means be the last
word. Rather, it will be the (we hope) highly significant first word in a discussion that
is long overdue.

* * *
The field of translation studies has been growing now for several decades and
occupies a privileged space between comparative literature, reception studies, her-
meneutics, cultural studies, book history, creative writing, and, to some degree, even
philosophy. Because of the complicated interdisciplinary nature of translation stud-
ies, any theoretical concept proposed in analysis of a specific translation practice
has to take into account the disciplinary background from which that analysis arose.
At the same time, there is clearly a tension between the case study approach and
overarching theoretical approaches. Top-down and bottom-up: we propose that both
types of approach are essential to understanding a canonical author such as Virgil
and that ideally a dialogue between them can be achieved.
The influence of Michel Foucault and the New Historicists is more or less ubiquitous
in this volume:¹⁴ the significance of translations extends beyond the aesthetic sphere
into the social, political, moral, and even economic spheres. Collectively the essays
here make a major contribution to illuminating the cultural and ideological work
done by translations of the poetry of the most esteemed Latin poet. Likewise, the
influence of the ideas of Walter Benjamin is pervasive, if unacknowledged; the focus
of many of the contributions here is upon ‘that element in a translation which does
not lend itself to translation’.¹⁵
The language of translation theory generally works in binaries. It distinguishes
the ‘source’ text from the ‘target’ language. It constructs dichotomies between
‘literal’ and ‘free’, ‘formalist’ and ‘functionalist’, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’
translation strategies.¹⁶ It analyses the role of the translator in terms of ‘visibility’ or

¹⁴ Most obviously, Foucault 1991; for further bibliography, see Chapter 1, n. 1.

¹⁵ Benjamin 1968, p. 75.
¹⁶ Venuti’s brief overview ‘What Is a Translation Theory?’ (Venuti 2000, pp. 4–6) is a good starting-
point. His articulation of the domestication/foreignization binary is of course a development of Schleier-
macher’s early nineteenth-century construct of the translator as either moving the reader towards the
author or vice versa.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

‘invisibility’.¹⁷ It distinguishes between use of the language of translation in the

‘instrumental’ or the ‘hermeneutic’ senses,¹⁸ in which the ‘instrumental’ approach
privileges the idea of language as communication, while the hermeneutic approach
privileges the idea of language as interpretation and thus sanctions variations in
form and effects from the source text.¹⁹ As we write, these ‘simple’ binaries are
increasingly being problematized by translation studies scholars. Likewise, the
common metaphors deployed as rhetorical strategies to describe translation, such
as appropriation, recovery, conversion, and transplantation, all emphasize the gap
between the original and the translation, at a moment when translation studies
scholars are expressing unhappiness with the concept of ‘gaps’ and with the idea of
‘bridging’ gaps, and are applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ to
translation studies.²⁰ Whether such a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory will be
productive for the study of the Urtext of European colonialism remains to be seen;
however, thinking of translation as an activity that produces hybrids and oscilla-
tions between worlds does strike us as valuable.²¹
Among the approaches mentioned above, the metaphor of domestication/foreign-
ization is particularly useful in the case of Virgil: the vast majority of translators set
out to ‘domesticate’ his poems, appropriating them to their own national literary
conventions for a mixture of aesthetic, moral, ideological, and patriotic reasons and
often obscuring the quintessentially Roman features of the original. A few translators,
preferring the foreignizing approach, have been brave enough to make their trans-
lations difficult in order to remind readers that they are engaging with literature
produced by an alien culture; but, for the majority, the cultural capital gained from
appropriating Virgil outweighs any such considerations, as this volume will repeat-
edly demonstrate.

* * *
The chapters in this volume were mostly produced for three colloquia on translations
of Virgil held during the years 2012 and 2014; a few more were commissioned for
the volume, to achieve balance and breadth. The first event took place in Vancouver,
in September 2012; the second in Paris, at the Institut d’Études Avancées, in June
2014; and the third at the Symposium Cumanum at the Villa Vergiliana, near Naples,
also in June 2014, with funding primarily from the University of British Columbia
(UBC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Miami
University, Ohio. Funding from the Canada Council to support Susanna Braund’s
Canada Research Chair, formerly withheld by UBC but finally passed along, has

¹⁷ See Venuti 1995. ¹⁸ See Kelly 1979, ch. 1.

¹⁹ The theory of ‘compensation’ developed by du Bellay in his 1549 Deffence et illustration de la langue
Françoyse is a prime example of this approach, whereby literalistic translation is eschewed in favour of
techniques that reproduce the effects of the original, but not necessarily in the same sequence or form.
²⁰ Bhabha 2004. ²¹ See Ette 2016. Thanks to Patricia Milewski for this reference.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

made it possible to bring the editorial work to completion. The two co-editors were
the co-organizers of these three colloquia, alongside Siobhán McElduff (Paris) and
Craig Kallendorf (Naples), to whom we extend our deep thanks for their vision
and collaboration. The contributors include scholars at all stages of their careers—
retired and veteran full professors, mid-career scholars, postdoctoral and graduate
students—from Athens, Boston, Brazil, Cambridge, Crete, Exeter, Harvard, Houston,
Istanbul, Lille, Ljubljana, Nice, Ohio, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris Sorbonne, Shanghai, Siena,
Texas A&M, Toronto, Virginia, Zurich, and UBC; one contribution—that of Fo
(Chapter 28)—is by a recent translator of the Aeneid. Their combined expertise
embraces Castilian, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, (Homeric) Greek,
Hiberno-English, Italian, Norwegian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and
Turkish translation traditions. We were lucky enough to persuade the poet Josephine
Balmer, who has recently turned her hand to translating Virgil, to write an Afterword
that looks forward to future translations of Virgil.
In terms of historical scope, the volume extends from the period of transition between
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy and fifteenth-century
Spain all the way down to twenty-first-century translations in English, French, and
Italian. Some of the translation traditions discussed stretch across many centuries, for
example the English, the French, and the Italian ones, while other traditions, such as the
Norwegian, Slovenian, Esperanto, Turkish, and Chinese, are relatively young and allow
us a glimpse into the sometimes highly contingent factors that affect the development of
a translation tradition.

* * *
In organizing these twenty-eight essays we could have adopted a geographical
formula or a strictly chronological sequence. We rejected those approaches in favour
of creating two broad categories: one uses the rubric of Virgilian translation as
cultural capital, which permits some useful juxtapositions, and the other groups
together the numerous translations written by poets, sometimes preeminent ones
in their own cultures. That said, the two parts of the volume are closely interwoven
and contain numerous overlaps, both cultural and theoretical. We use this introduc-
tion to indicate valuable cross-fertilizations within the volume; and we have inserted
footnotes in the chapters themselves, to direct readers to comparable or dialogic
material elsewhere in the volume. After our summaries of the chapters we will make
specific connections between individual papers, so that readers can pursue their
particular interests most easily.
We also want to explain that we have developed a novel form of interlinear
translation for this project that we have applied as consistently as possible throughout
the volume. We insert this interlinear translation in the translations from Esperanto,
French, German and so on in order to indicate the word order and syntax used by each
translator. We use hyphens to reflect where a single word in the receiving language
should be translated by more than one word in English; for example, we represent
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

French du and Spanish del by ‘of-the’. We have followed OUP conventions in using
[ ] to indicate matter added and < > to indicate matter excluded. These interlinear
translations often look very clunky in English, but we hope that they will facilitate
greater understanding of the translations discussed in the volume.
The volume is accordingly divided into two parts—‘Virgil Translation as Cultural
and Ideological Capital’, comprising Chapters 1–15, and ‘Poets as Translators of
Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification’, comprising the
remaining thirteen chapters (16–28)—followed by an Afterword. Part 1 explicitly
examines the role of Virgilian translations in a range of different national cultures.
In organizing the essays for this section we took into account the broader theoretical
issues that often drive the translation of classical texts with canonical status; and we
have juxtaposed essays that raise specific questions. The resulting sequence follows
broadly, but not exactly, a chronological progression. Several chapters offer dia-
chronic perspectives on numerous Virgil translations within one particular culture,
for example Chapter 1 on French translations, Chapters 4 and 5 on English transla-
tions, and Chapter 7 on American translations. Others make fruitful cross-cultural
connections, for example the study of the influence of Italian vernacular literature on
Spanish translation (Chapter 2), or that of the eighteenth-century Homeric Greek
translation of the Aeneid in its Russian context (Chapter 10). Chapters 3 and 6 each
spotlight one particular translator and his/her context, while Chapter 8 throws light
on the recent phenomenon of Virgil’s translation in Esperanto and Chapter 9 tracks
the much older phenomenon of Greek translations of Virgil. Other chapters explore
territory that is less familiar to anglophone readers: they analyse the theory and
practice of Virgil translation at or beyond the periphery of our conventional Euro-
pean scope. Thus Chapter 11 is devoted to Slovenian translations, Chapter 12 to
Turkish, Chapter 13 to Norwegian, and Chapter 15 to the relatively recent Chinese
translations. Chapters 1 and 14 take pairs of translations from French culture
to offer contrastive insights into the range of theory and practice that can inform
translation activity. These very varied essays raise issues central to and familiar
from wider translation theory—for example claims to authority and legitimacy within
and beyond Europe, the process of developing a literary vernacular by means of
translation, and the significance of understanding the political, social, and linguistic
discourses of the moment. All of these essays to some degree challenge any literary
complacency when it comes to translation practice in general; specifically in the case
of Virgil, they offer a kaleidoscope of patterns, some of which recur while others
are unique.
There was no contest for initial position in this volume. Craig Kallendorf ’s
wide-ranging discussion entitled ‘Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation’
(Chapter 1) starts with essential statistics that represent the fruit of several decades
of painstaking research. It is a sobering thought to realize that ‘Virgil’s poetry . . .
was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and
German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones,
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times’ (p. 25).
Kallendorf ’s figures relate to printed translations from incunabula down to 1850;
translations that never made it into print and translations published since 1850 take
those figures much higher, of course. Against this backdrop, Kallendorf proceeds to
select three pairs of pre-1850 Virgilian translations into French, which represent
the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, under the rubric of successes and
failures in Virgilian translation. He thus brings back from obscurity the translations of
Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cynyngham (whose translation of the Georgics was never
published), Marot and Gresset and, without offering any aesthetic judgements, considers
the immediate and subsequent career success of these translators. Explicitly using a New
Historicist framework, he identifies political and religious ideologies as crucial
factors in the sometimes surprising outcomes and emphasizes that translations can
never be ranked only in terms of failure or success, because each one has elements of
both and contributes to future translation attempts. In this way Kallendorf provides
an important historical framework for the different directions of Virgilian translations
in Europe and beyond.
Richard Armstrong’s ‘Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and
Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428’ (Chapter 2) uses a similar approach to raise
a complementary set of fundamental questions about the role of translation as
reception in vernacular literatures. He uses another little-known translation as his
focus. According to Armstrong, the Eneida of Enrique de Villena (1384–1434),
in Castilian prose, is arguably ‘the first full scholarly translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
into a modern language’ (p. 38). It can be seen as a transitional point between
medieval and modern translational practices and as marking the beginning of
the ‘vernacularization’ of translation, which was designed to make it more
accessible to the target audience. He argues for ‘Dante’s influence on Virgil’ in that
the Divine Comedy’s configuration of Virgil as a figure of authority in effect ‘“author-
izes” the epic genre even in the vernacular’ (p. 50). In his analysis, Armstrong
contemplates the philological conscience of the translator who ‘chose to present
a prosaic, dissected, logocentric Virgil’ (p. 50) rather than a Dantesque Virgil in
terza rima.
We stay with early Spanish translations of the Aeneid in Stephen Rupp’s ‘Epic
and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2
and Cervantes’s Numancia’ (Chapter 3). Rupp’s discussion of the Eneyda de Virgilio
traducida en verso castellano (1555) provides an understanding of the role that
translations of ancient epics played in the Renaissance. Writing poetry about war
raised ethical questions about the justification of wars of conquest and expansion, as
weighed against individual emotions. In that context, the translation of Virgil moves
beyond literary relevance and into the realm of philosophical inquiry. For Velasco,
his translation of the Aeneid serves as a means of moral instruction, because he
casts Aeneas as an exemplar of Stoic virtue and examines the importance of control
over intense emotional states.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

Next comes a pair of essays that examine the English Aeneid with a tighter focus
on particular books: the much studied Book 4 and the much less studied Book 7.
These two essays focus upon the representations of Dido and Lavinia. Alison
Keith’s ‘Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (From Caxton until
Today)’ (Chapter 4), which follows on neatly from Rupp’s analysis of the represen-
tation of warfare in translation, looks at English renditions of Aeneid 7 that appear
in translations of the complete poem. She explores the relationship drawn by Virgil’s
English translators between ‘arms’ and a ‘woman’ and shows how these representations
help us to understand how the translators shaped Virgil’s Italian war narrative—
beginning with Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation and ending with Sarah Ruden’s
(2008) and Patricia A. Johnston’s (2012).
In contrast with the chronological breadth of Keith’s chapter, which runs from
Caxton in 1490 to the twenty-first century, Gordon Braden’s ‘The Passion of Dido:
Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700’ (Chapter 5) puts an intense spotlight on
translations of Book 4 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when
England and the English language were becoming prominent on the European and
global scene. He highlights the consistent self-consciousness of this effort to use
Virgil both as a vehicle for translatio imperii and as a medium in the search for an
English metre and idiom that could adequately convey the gravity of ancient epic
poetry. Braden resists the teleological reading of Aeneid translations of this era as
mere precursors to the achievement of Dryden in 1697 and instead analyses the
handling of three key passages from Book 4 by translators across the two centuries.
We now turn from women as the object of translation to discussion of one of
the few women translators featured in this volume in Fiona Cox’s ‘An Amazon in
the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2’ (Chapter 6).
Cox observes that, while de Gournay’s 1626 translation is marked by imprecisions,
it also conveys a sense of pride in breaching the stronghold of men, as she places
herself in the lineage of French translators of Virgil. De Gournay uses her transla-
tion as part of her struggle for sexual equality, a struggle intensified by her
loneliness and sense of alienation from her own times.
The isolation of the female translator is also addressed by Susanna Braund in ‘Virgil
after Vietnam’ (Chapter 7), a discussion of the major American verse translations
published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s
attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance in relation to the
war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s,
and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and
previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, she offers a provocative gender
perspective by juxtaposing the male translators, who as professors were all influenced
by the scholarly debates, with Sarah Ruden, who as a woman and as a professional
translator carries out her task away from the margins of academic controversies
and hence provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced
perspective.
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