In addition (and probably in origin), however, the Latin also has connotations of infertility. Infelix, for example, is broadly equivalent to the English ‘unlucky’, describing either the victim or the bringer of bad luck. Some of this is a result of Virgil’s genius for exploiting complexities in the meanings of Latin words. Many of the poem’s themes, concerns, delights and conundrums are as readily accessible in an English version as in the Latin other aspects are harder to retain in translation. It represents a reaction to – and, perhaps, an attempt to shape – the newly emergent political structures of rule by emperor, when the skeletons of the old republican system persisted as much in deference to nostalgia as out of any spirit of compromise and reconciliation. Said to have been commissioned by the emperor Augustus (although it’s debatable quite what that ‘commission’ entailed), the poem was written in the aftermath of a series of devastating civil wars. P ublished after Virgil’s death in 19 BCE, the Aeneid is a poem of paradox: a foundation epic which never directly describes the foundation of Rome a divinely inspired song in the mould of the Iliad and Odyssey that is self-consciously, densely literate a paean to empire and a lament for empire’s victims.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |