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Hail Robert Fagles

There is a new translation of Virgil's Aeneid:

There are twin Gates of Sleep.
One, they say, is called the Gate of Horn
and it offers easy passage to all true shades,
The other glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless,
but through it the dead send false dreams up toward the sky.
And here Anchises, his vision told in full, escorts
his son and Sibly both and shows them out now
through the Ivory Gate.

Aeneas cuts his way
to the waiting ships to see his crews again,
then sets a course straight on to Caieta's harbor.
Anchors run from prows, the sterns line the shore.

I don't know all of the Aeneid translations, but I prefer this to Mandelbaum (my previous first choice), West, or Fitzgerald.  The overall approach strikes me as a more accurate Fitzgerald.  Highly recommended.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 7, 2006 at 06:19 PM in Books, History | Permalink

Comments

Hm. Seems more congenial than the one I was reading yesterday. Can you comment on your reasons for preferring the various translations? I'm not very familiar with them (until this week I think I'd read more of it in Latin than English ;).

Posted by: Andromeda at Nov 8, 2006 5:38:19 PM

A friend in need is a friend indeed... Osmund

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