A fresh but faithful translation of Vergil's Aeneid, by Guggenheim Laureate and award-winning classics professor Shadi Bartsch, the first woman Latinist to bring her perspective bear on an epic that has mirrored and informed western culture for the past two thousand years.
For two thousand years, this epic tale of Aeneas's dramatic flight from Troy, his doomed love affair with Dido, his descent into the underworld, and the bloody establishment of Rome has electrified audiences around the world. In Vergil's telling, Aeneas' heroic journey not only gave Romans a thrilling origin story, it explored and established many of the fundamental themes of western life and literature--the role of duty, the good of the many versus the good of the one, the place of love and passion in human life, the tension between art and violence, the paradoxical nature of immigration and new foundations that are so often built upon the wreckage of those that came before. Throughout the course of Western history, the Aeneid has both affirmed our worst intentions and forced us to confront our deepest contradictions.
The Aeneid will always be topical. The legacy of war, the question of immigration, the struggle between love and duty, and the will to build an empire all come together in this story. A chair professor of classics at the University of Chicago, Shadi Bartsch, the first woman Latin scholar to translate the Aeneid, maintains the simple poetry of Vergil's Latin even as she offers readers a line-by-line translation. She offers a fresh take on the text itself by highlighting rather than smoothing out the story's contradictions. Only Vergil's contemporary readers at the turn of the millennium would have known that Aeneas was typically represented as a traitor, not a hero. In some versions he betrayed Troy to the Greeks in order to save his family, which complicates his legendary commitment to duty. Book two and three of the Aeneid are spoken by Aeneas himself, who tells the story of his wanderings after Troy's fall to Queen Dido. Much of what he says, again, does not fit the extant tradition about his wanderings--is he lying to Dido? The Aeneid even seems to contain two different traditions, as when Vergil depicts Aeneis as having lost everything at sea, yet later shows him gifting Queen Dido with items from the Trojan King Priam's personal household.
A new translation of a foundational text always has the potential to modify the culture it has shaped. Vergil has been seen as the savior of Christianity, or a voice for "civilized values," or a depressed commentator on the violent acts of empire foundation. Bartsch's translation illuminates the question of myth creation at a societal level. What does it mean to create a national myth? Bartsch's brief introduction frames this question and puts the story in a literary and historical context that will make it resonant for a new generation of readers.
