Aeneid fitzgerald translation pdf
Page, however, did a great job in the narration. The plot is lackluster, the rhyming in the translation distracts from the story, and it's hard to listen to 13 hours of rhyming verses. I can't really give The Aeneid, or at least Dryden's translation of it, an endorsement. After listening him perform an entire work, I've added him to my list of preferred audio book narrators. I first heard Page reading the role of John Seward in Brilliance Audio's 1994 production of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I enjoyed him in that. He has a great voice and does as good a job as anyone could in keeping the 13 unabridged hours of rhyming listenable. I listened to Tantor Unabridged Classics' 2010 production, read by Michael Page. There were many instances of great lines, but ones like the above just killed the flow for me. The line break "He said"s are frequent, and just seemed like a lazy way to keep the pace of the written rhyme, without any thought given to how it actually sounded to the ear. But when you listen to it, it comes across as "blah blah blah vain blah blah blah plain HE SAID blah blah threw blah blah blah flew. Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, He said then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw Not one of those my hand shall toss in vainĪgainst our foes, on this contended plain." There were a lot of instances of jarringly contorted rhymes like: It also seemed that Dryden made his translation to look good on a page, more than sound good being read. I just think it's a hard format to write in while also keeping the story in focus, as the poet or translator has to make a lot of contortions to keep the rhyming going. The reader (who I'll get to in a moment) was great, so I don't blame him. I kept getting caught up in the rhymes, and wondering ten minutes later what had just happened. However, it was very hard for me to listen to the reading and focus on the story. Virgil wrote the poem in rhyming couplets, which Dryden's translation mirrors.
This was probably a mistake, and I probably would have been better off with a prose translation. Virgil, however, seems much more focused on showing that Aeneas is awesome (which, given that the poem was produced for Augustus Caesar, who claimed decent from Aeneas, makes sense), and instead it just falls flat.Īs mentioned, I listened to John Dryden's 1697 translation. In The Odyssey, Homer manages to make you care about Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, and others. None of the characters are anyone I can really care about.
It should be a good story, but it just doesn't click with me. The basic plot is that Trojan hero Aeneas sails the Mediterranean, stops off in Carthage where he hooks up with Queen Dido, then he dumps her, sails to Italy, kills a bunch of people, and becomes founder of Rome. Part of it was the book itself, and part of it was likely the translation I listened to, John Dryden's 1697 verse translation. While The Odyssey is a huge favorite of mine, I just couldn't get into The Aeneid.
Alas, Virgil's 19 BC epic poem just doesn't work for me as well. The Aeneid is a classic of Western literature, so after re-reading The Odyssey again a few months ago, I decided to tackle The Aeneid, which I had read in college and had thought was okay at the time, again.