Earlier this week I got a big kick out of Charles McGrath’s Times piece about Robert Fagles, translator of ancient epics. Fagles has just completed his classical trifecta, adding the Aeneid to his celebrated Iliad and Odyssey.
The other challenge was to keep the whole thing going for 12 books and some 12,000 lines. “You can’t let it sag,” Mr. Fagles said. “Cadence is everything, and that takes a lot of lung, a lot of nerve, a lot of luck.”
Cadence is everything, indeed! That’s a sentence spoken by someone who has so long been shaping the form of language to match the content that the two just spring forth entwined.
Another gem:
“Some days are very Iliadic,” he said. “You’re in a war. And some days it’s all about getting home; you’re like Odysseus. It all depends on what side of the bed you get up on.”
[tags]homer, vergil, iliad, odyssey, robert fagles, aeneid[/tags]
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