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Vergil: The Aeneid

Vergil: The Aeneid

Richard Caldwell

University of Southern California

2004 • 1-58510-077-3 • paper • 284 pages • 6 x 9 • $12.95

An exciting new prose translation of the great Roman epic, illustrated by Merle Mianelli Poulton. Like all Focus titles, this translation is unique in that it is designed for the intelligent general reader and student.

|  About the Author  |  Contents  |  Introduction  |

 Description                                             

• Notes throughout the text provide help in following the narrative framework of the epic.

• Mythology and mythological references are noted throughout the book and an extensive glossary of names helps the reader follow the complicated genealogies.

• A comprehensive introduction provides comparison of the poem with the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as a general framework for the epic to help the student follow the narrative flow of the work.

• Unlike a poetic translation, Caldwell's work focuses on the story, the myth and the literary context, making this modern new translation on that is easy for the average student to follow and maximum help in understanding.

 Author                                                   

Richard Caldwell is emeritus of Classics at the University of Southern California. His PhD is from the University of Texas and he specializes in both the Classics and psychoanalysis. He is the translator of the popular translation of Hesiod's Theogony, published by Focus.

 Table of Contents                                     

Introduction
    The Aeneid and the Homeric Poems
        The Life of Vergil
         Names in the Aeneid
         Translator‘s Note xxi
THE AENEID
Appendix A: Gods, People, and Places
Appendix B: Further Readings
Glossary 

 From the Introduction                               

     I have tried to place as little as possible between Vergil and the reader. This has meant eliminating the poetry and, inescapably, much of the beauty of the poem. A poetic translation may convey the idea that the Aeneid is a poem, but the translation itself would be another poem with another author (this may work with Lattimore‘s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey or other early Greek epic, but it doesn‘t work at all with Vergil). I have used staightforward language, almost always choosing the simpler and more direct rendering rather than the elegant or “poetic.“ In short, this is a very literal translation.

     The audience I wrote for is anyone who wants to read the Aeneid but doesn‘t know Latin. I assume no preparation or expertise on the part of the reader. It‘s a magnificent story, for readers of all ages.

     I last looked at the Aeneid almost fifty years ago. When I was asked to do this translation, I did my best to recall rusty Latin and simply wrote down what Vergil said, as I understood it. I have not kept up with Vergilian scholarship and I consulted only a few commentaries and one translation, Frank Copley‘s admirable verse version (which is not at all what I was trying to do). The edition of the Aeneid on which I based my translation was that of R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford 1969). A second appendix (“Further Readings“, p. 232) deals with these matters.