Six Translations of the Aeneid

In the last few days, Twitter has been occupied with debating the value of different translations of the Odyssey, and in particular the merits or demerits of Emily Wilson’s recent translation which sought to strip the text of what she considered to be undue narrative aggrandisement of aggression. I have nothing to say on that debate which has not already been said, but by coincidence I recently collected a set of translations of the most famous passage from the greatest Latin epic, Virgil’s Aeneid.

The Aeneid tells the story of a group of Trojans who survived the siege and fled across the seas, eventually settling in Italy and becoming the ancestors - of course - of the Romans. In particular the narrative follows their leader Aeneas, a relatively minor character in the Iliad who fights bravely but persistently loses duels before being rescued by divine intervention. In book four he falls in love with the Carthaginian queen Dido but is compelled by the Gods to abandon her, leading to Dido’s suicide and the eternal emnity of the Roman and Carthaginian peoples. The single most famous passage, however, comes from book six in which he visits the underworld in order to seek the advice of his deceased father Anchises. In the words which Virgil originally recited before the emperor Augustus:

facilis descensus Auerno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

This was quoted in Ridley Scott’s recent film Gladiator II, albeit using the rhymed translation of England’s first poet laureate John Dryden (1631-1700):

The gates of hell are open night and day;

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:

But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

In this the task and mighty labour lies.

Another translation which has appeared in popular culture - in this case, the strategy game Sid Meier’s Civilization V - is that of Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985):

It is easy to go down into Hell;

night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide;

but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air -

there’s the rub, the task.

The other translation likely to be familiar to the average man in the street is of course that of Robert Fagles (1933-2008), who also provided popular translations of the Iliad and Odyssey:

The descent to the Underworld is easy.

Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,

but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air

there the struggle, there the labor lies.

One of, if not the most recent translations is that of Shadi Bartsch (1966-present). Bartsch is, like Wilson, something of a revisionist in interpretation of poetry, arguing that contrary to the traditional image of the Aeneid as glorifying Roman imperialism, Virgil quite consciously presented a contradictory story to expose the gaps and contradictions in the Roman self-image. This does not obviously influence her translation of these particular words (with thanks to Peter McLaughlin for digging them out):

He grasped the altar, praying, and the Sibyl spoke.
"Anchises' Trojan son, born of divine blood,
it's easy to descend into Avernus.
Night and day the door of dusky Dis lies open.
To trace your steps and see the light again:
here's the toil and effort. A few, justly loved
by Jove, whom blazing courage carried to the sky,
succeeded—sons of gods.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is best-known for his poems about digging potatoes but also found time to produce translations of Beowulf and of book six of the Aeneid. I am informed that his version of Beowulf, despite its charismatic prose, takes considerable liberties with the text. His rendering of these lines from the Aeneid is hard to distinguish from others, however:

It is easy to descent into Avernus.

Death’s dark door stands open day and night.

But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

That is the task, that is the undertaking.

Finally, the translation produced by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969):

By night, by day, the portals of dark Dis

Stand open: it is easy, the descending

Down to Avernus. But to climb again,

To trace the footsteps back to the air above,

There lies the task, the toil.

Does this shed any light on the debate over translations? The most striking thing about these translations is, with the exception of Dryden’s (and to a much lesser extent, that of Humphries) how similar they all are. Perhaps this is because Latin is much more comprehensible to an English-language audience, and it’s harder to abstract away from the most obvious interpretations of the words. Dryden’s is obviously the least “faithful” translation here, but it’s also by a long way the most memorable. When I first read the Aeneid (in the Humphries translation), I skated through this passage without any recognition of it - despite having surely read it a few times in my numerous games of Civ V.

That said, the reason I chose the Humphries translation was - aside from it being freely and easily available online - that I found the literal text a lot less intimidating than Dryden. Compare the opening lines of the two side by side:

Perhaps this is my personal idiosyncracy, but I find the text on the right considerably more approachable. If I’m going to spend six hours in the company of a poet, I’d prefer him to say clearly and precisely what he means rather than shoe-horning in rhymes.

I won’t draw any further conclusions, not least since my Latin is essentially non-existent. Here, for anyone who finds it useful, are all six versions of the quote from Book VI in one image for easy virality: